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Bad dads, hella docs, and more new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Bad dads, hella docs, and more new movies!

One theme this week is “father figures” — some terrible (see Dennis Harvey’s review of Blue Caprice here, and review of You Will Be My Son below), some frantic (Prisoners), some ass-kicking (Ip Man: The Final Fight).

Elsewhere, check out Jem Cohen’s moving narrative (but also kinda doc-like) Museum Hours (my chat with Cohen here). More short reviews below!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOSd-kX1oo

Battle of the Year That’s “battle” as in “dance battle.” And yes, it’s in 3D. (1:49)

C.O.G. The first feature adapted from David Sedaris’ writing, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s film captures his acerbic autobiographical comedy while eventually revealing the misfit pain hidden behind that wit. Tightly wound David (Jonathan Groff), on the run from problematic family relations and his sexual identity, takes the bus from East Coast grad school to rural Oregon — his uninhibited fellow passengers providing the first of many mortifications here en route. Having decided that seasonal work as an apple picker will somehow be liberating, he’s viewed with suspicion by mostly Mexican co-workers and his crabby boss (Dean Stockwell). More fateful kinda-sorta friendships are forged with a sexy forklift operator (Corey Stoll) and a born-again war vet (Denis O’Hare). Under the latter’s volatile tutelage, David briefly becomes a C.O.G. — meaning “child of God.” Balancing the caustic, absurd, and bittersweet, gradually making us care about an amusingly dislikable, prickly protagonist, this is a refreshingly offbeat narrative that pulls off a lot of tricky, ambivalent mood shifts. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5vctLV_W7k

Herb and Dorothy 50X50 Building upon her 2008 doc Herb and Dorothy, Megumi Sasaki revisits elderly Manhattan couple Herb and Dorothy Vogel, art-world legends for amassing a jaw-dropping collection of contemporary art despite holding modest jobs and living an otherwise low-key lifestyle. (Out of necessity, they favored smaller works on paper — and whatever they bought had to fit into their one-bedroom apartment.) Remarkably, in 1992, they donated the majority of their highly valuable collection to the National Gallery of Art, but it was so vast that most of it was put into storage rather than displayed. Sasaki’s camera picks back up with the couple (Herb now in a wheelchair, with Dorothy doing most of the talking) as they work with the National Gallery to select 50 museums nationwide, each of which will receive 50 pieces of the collection. Though the film chats with some of the Vogels’ favorite artists (Richard Tuttle, notably, was initially angered by the idea of the collection being broken up), its most compelling segments are those that focus on Vogel exhibitions in relatively far-flung places, Hawaii and North Dakota included. Of particular interest: scenes in which museums without modern-art traditions help skeptical patrons engage with the art — a towering challenge since much of it appears to be of the deceptively simple, “I-could-have-done-that” variety. (1:25) (Cheryl Eddy)

Ip Man: The Final Fight Yep, it’s yet another take on kung-fu icon Ip Man, whose real-life legacy as Wing Chun’s greatest ambassador (tl;dr, he taught Bruce Lee) has translated into pop-culture stardom, most recently with Donnie Yen’s Ip Man series and Wong Kar-wai’s still-in-theaters The Grandmaster. Final Fight is directed by the prolific Herman Yau, and though it lacks the slickness of Ip Man or the high-art trappings of The Grandmaster, it does have one heavy weapon: Hong Kong superstar Anthony Wong. A less-charismatic actor might get lost in Yau’s hectic take on Ip’s later years; it’s chockablock with plot threads (union strikes, police corruption, health woes, romantic drama, brawls with rival martial-arts schools, scar-faced gangsters …) that battle for supremacy. But that’s not a problem for Wong, who calmly rises above the chaos, infusing even corny one-liners (“You can’t buy kung fu like a bowl of rice!”) with gravitas. (1:42) (Cheryl Eddy)

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

Mademoiselle C Fabien Constant’s portrait of French fashion editor-professional muse-stylish person Carine Roitfeld may be unabashedly fawning, but it does offer the rest of us slobs a peek into the glamorous life. The film begins as Roitfeld leaves her job at Vogue Paris; there’s passing mention of her subsequent feud with Condé Nast as she readies her own luxury magazine start-up, CR Fashion Book, but the only conflicts the film lingers on are 1) when a model cancels last-minute and 2) when Roitfeld goes double over budget on her first issue. (Looking at the lavish photo shoots in action, with big-name photogs and supermodels aplenty, it’s not hard to see why.) Mostly, though this is a fun ride-along with Roitfeld in action: hanging with “Karl” (Lagerfeld) and “Tom” (Ford); swooning over her first grandchild; sneaking a little cell phone footage inside the Met Ball; allowing celebs like Sarah Jessica Parker and designer Joseph Altuzarra to suck up to her, etc. There’s also a funny moment when her art-dealer son, Vladimir, recalls that he was never allowed to wear sweatpants as a kid — and her daughter, fashion-person Julia, remembers her mother’s horror when she dared to wear Doc Martens. (1:30) (Cheryl Eddy)

My Lucky Star Aspiring cartoonist Sophie (Ziyi Zhang) puts her romantic fantasies into her artwork — the bright spot in an otherwise dull life working in a Beijing call center and being hassled about her perma-single status by her mother and catty friends. As luck would have it, Sophie wins a trip to Singapore right when dreamy secret agent David (Leehom Wang) is dispatched there to recover the stolen “Lucky Star Diamond;” it doesn’t take long before our klutzy goofball stumbles into exactly the kind of adventure she’s been dreaming about. Romancing the Stone (1984) this ain’t, but Zhang, so often cast in brooding parts, is adorable, and occasional animated sequences add further enhancement to the silly James Bond/Charlie’s Angels-lite action. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWhS0xN3C0g

Prisoners Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2010’s Incendies) guides a big-name cast through this thriller about a father (Hugh Jackman) frantically searching for his missing daughter with the help of a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal). (2:33)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_zcPBcXeo4

Salinger Documentary about the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye. (2:00)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcr66k-gAM

Thanks for Sharing Mark Ruffalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tim Robbins star in this comedy about sex addicts from the co-writer of 2010’s The Kids Are All Right.  (1:52)

Wadjda The first-ever feature directed by a female Saudi Arabian follows a young Saudi girl who dreams of buying a bicycle. (1:37)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QmBzl5RBik

You Will Be My Son Set at a Bordeaux vineyard that’s been in the same family for generations, Gilles Legrand’s drama hides delightfully trashy drama beneath its highbrow exterior. Patriarch Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup of 2009’s A Prophet) treats his only son, Martin (Lorànt Deutsch) with utter contempt — think the relationship between Tywin and Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones, only with even more petty digs and insults. Still hopeful that he’ll inherit the estate someday, despite Papa Jackass’ loud proclamations about his “lack of palate,” Martin sees his future prospects crumble when dapper Philippe (Nicolas Bridet) blows into town, having left his California gig as “Coppola’s head winemaker” to care for his dying father, Paul’s longtime second-in-command François (Patrick Chesnais). Things go from terrible to utterly shitty when Paul decides Philippe is the answer to his prayers (see: title). Melodrama is the only recourse here, and the film’s over-the-top last act delivers some gasp-inducing (or guffaw-inducing, your choice) twists. Heading up a classy cast, Arestrup manages to make what could’ve been a one-note character into a villain with seemingly endless layers, each more vile than the last. (1:41) (Cheryl Eddy)

TIFF diary #2: dead cheerleaders + Tsai, Hong, and Breillat

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF diary #2: dead cheerleaders + Tsai, Hong, and Breillat

Check out the first entry in Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ Toronto International Film Festival diary here, and stay tuned for more tomorrow!

All Cheerleaders Die (USA) is the follow up to Lucky McKee’s attention-grabbing The Woman (2011), which stunned Sundance audiences with both its subversive take on gender issues and its violent brutality.

Taking a much lighter tone with co-director Chris Sivertson, Cheerleaders (an expanded remake of his 2001 short by the same name) nicely echoes the ironic horror-comedy vibe of Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods (2012) while still managing to deliver a genre entry for text-crazed teenyboppers. Goths, jocks, some faux feminism, and a bevy of ass and crotch shots should make fans of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers quite satisfied.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMf-BBVRj9Q

In the 1990s, Tsai Ming-liang’s films were often mentioned alongside works by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Hou Hsiao-hsien. But two decades later, only Tsai has stayed the determined course of creating pure, contemplative cinema. Presenting his tenth feature (and showcasing yet again his alter ego, actor Lee Kang-sheng), Stray Dogs (Taiwan) is a breathtaking meditation on a homeless Taiwanese family, who are quietly doing what they can to get by.

With this film, Tsai has almost abandoned story completely, instead favoring long, drawn-out, surreal, one-shot sequences — next-level abstractness that will either send you running for the hills or leave you unblinkingly glued to the screen. Someone should program Stray Dogs with his 2012 short Sleepwalk, which followed a monk as he slowly walked through city streets. (Whether that would equal absolute transcendence or absolute boredom depends on the viewer, of course.)

While Hong Sang-soo’s Our Sunhi (South Korea) is not as monumentally enjoyable as last year’s In Another Country (2012), his new film does represent another solid entry for the director. I admire Hong’s ability to stay consistent with his philosophy on life: give a small group of people a lot of alcohol and let them share their innermost uncouth and irresponsible feelings. Of course, you could argue that he is just making the same film over and over. But if you take the time to notice the structural differences — as well as wonderful choices with his actors (Jung Yu-mi is quite enjoyable in this) — you’ll realize why critics love to favorably compare Hong to Woody Allen.

Watching director Catherine Breillat take the stage at TIFF to present her latest, Abuse of Weakness (France), was as powerful and moving as watching the film itself. After her 2004 stroke (and subsequent personal issues), Breillat decided to make an autobiographical narrative, casting the great Isabelle Huppert to interpret Breillat’s own confused choices.

Abuse of Weakness is perhaps one of the most interesting films about the life of an artist I have ever seen. As the Q&A was concluding, Breillat dropped a bottle of water that was given to her and explained “Even after all these years, you forget that you can’t feel anything in your arm.” And suddenly it was if you were right back in the film again.

TIFF diary: standouts from France, Nepal, and Japan

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF diary: standouts from France, Nepal, and Japan

After 33 feature films at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, I can safely say that I am ecstatic about where cinema is heading this decade.

While many of the following films might not receive major releases, I have compiled a spoiler-free overview of films — presented here as a series of blog posts — to keep your eyes and ears out for in the coming months (and perhaps years) at your local theaters and online resources.  

Stephanie Pray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (USA/Nepal) is produced by the team who delivered last year’s Leviathan and 2009’s Sweetgrass. So right away, you should know that you are watching a documentary that utilizes “direct cinema” (aka shot fly-on-the-wall style) to its fullest extent. This exquisite exercise, which follows 11 cable car rides (each an unedited 11 minutes long) through the mountains to a small village in Nepal, is easily one of the most breathtaking films of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dysc8Fo0A

Manakamana‘s structure allows audience members to either watch the intricacies of each rider, or to let their attention wander to the passing environment beyond. Like Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat (2006), the combination of both the personal and the external perspectives left me emotionally stunned. See this on a big screen at all costs.

Yet again, François Ozon has created a haunting thriller that should not be dismissed easily. Young and Beautiful (France) follows a 17-year-old girl in what sounds like an Eric Rohmer-esque portrait: four seasons, four songs. But while the rampant sexual excursions may get overlooked due to another French film this year (more on that in a later post), this tense tingler is much more diabolical than I was prepared for. It’s darkly reminiscent of Brian De Palma and David Lynch — so, in other words, don’t make any assumptions until the last frame is finished. Newcomer Marine Vacth delivers a fearless performance, but veteran Charlotte Rampling may have stolen the show with a role that calls to mind Under the Sand (2000) and Swimming Pool (2003).

Hirokazu Kore-eda deservedly won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his heartbreaking Like Father, Like Son (Japan). Its exploration of how two sets of parents teach and motivate their offspring brought me to tears in Toronto. Director Kore-eda continues his streak of masterful, intimate, occasionally brutal studies of families: see also Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). Avoid any plot overviews — Like Father‘s dramatic shifts are best experienced without any prior knowledge of them. J-Pop star Masaharu Fukuyama leads an outstanding cast.

Check back soon for more from Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ TIFF diary.

The Performant: Vancouver Fringe-mania

Sue Vaughan
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The Performant: Vancouver Fringe-mania

Well, it’s been another fringe-ferrific whirlwind here at the Vancouver Fringe, but like all good things, it too has come to an end. The Boulder Fringe is still poised to begin this afternoon despite the flooding, but the East to West Coast circuit is now complete, and many career-fringe artists headed home, wherever that may be, to count their successes and tally their losses (often both).

For Naked Empire Bouffon Company the rewards of its five-week tour appear to be both tangible (a Critic’s Choice nomination and a “Talk of the Fringe” award in Vancouver, quotable reviews, and some modest profit), and ephemeral (connecting with other Fringe artists, experiencing new frontiers of audience reaction, generating excitement and controversy). But it’s been a lot of work to get that: months of rehearsal time, many long days of flyering in costume, hustling for audience and some small portion of recognition. But it’s the shows themselves that Fringe artists and audiences come together to experience, and it’s the shows that will hopefully stay with us long after the bone-wearying nature of the hustle fades from memory. Here’s a shortlist of some of the stand-outs from my second week at the Vancouver Fringe. Catch them elsewhere if you can.

Preacher Man Jesse LaVercombe’s solo show only lasts 25 minutes, and he’s confined to a chair the entire time, but there’s nothing static about his character Marcus, a convicted killer awaiting execution. “Do you know what it’s like to live a fulfilled life?” he taunts the oddience knowingly. “Probably not, because if you were living a fulfilled life you probably wouldn’t be attending funerals.” As his story unfolds, it’s a sad one of abuse and befuddlement, but Marcus still manages somehow to convince us he’s the happiest man in the room. LaVercombe also played an equally intense though much less “fulfilled” killer in the full-length Model Wanted, by Step Taylor, but it’s the charismatic Marcus who will haunt me for longer.

Eyes of the Enemy Speaking of haunting, this unsettling show gives its viewers what basically amounts to a crash course in “enhanced interrogation techniques” including stress positions, sleep deprivation, fingernail-removal, psychological manipulation, and finally waterboarding, as Chris W. Cook relentlessly torments Evan Hall, attempting, he claims, to stop a terrorist attack. Cook and Hall literally don’t pull punches in this harrowing reenactment of the grim realities of modern-day “information gathering,” and the message that this sort of treatment is not atypical is one that can’t be ignored.

6 Guitars Florida-native Chase Padgett looks like any ordinary guy with a guitar until he begins to seamlessly switch between six different musical styles — and the musicians who play them. There’s Tyrone, the bluesman who once tried to follow the Blind Lemon Jefferson formula by renaming himself Syphilis Mango Taft, and Wes the effete jazz player who states we probably don’t understand his music before grudgingly admitting that the best listeners of jazz can be those who don’t speak its language. Some of his characters are better developed than others, but it’s Padgett’s guitar playing that really stands out, connecting each disparate character and genre into a cohesive musical experience.

Threads Portland, Ore.’s Tonya Jone Miller reenacts the fall of Saigon with just a pair of suitcases and the power of her performance to convince us. She primarily portrays her mother, who traveled to Vietnam as an English teacher during a period of time when most Americans were trying to stay away far from it, as well as a slew of supporting characters who are part of her story — her students, her love interest, the doctors at the orphanage she volunteers at. Like all the best solo performers, Miller has a powerful charisma that keeps one riveted despite the bare stage and minimal tech, and her vivid story is lush with detail and energy.

San Francisco Homebrewers Guild Q&A: A mashing good time

Tony Robles
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For this week’s cover story, I profiled one particular homebrewer — my husband — on his quest to DIY kegerator glory. But there’s more to this story — hundreds more, in fact. And the homebrewers of San Francisco congregate in the virtual San Francisco Homebrewers Guild (cute motto: “A mashing good time!). I chatted with the friendly and knowledgeable Kevin Inglin, who is the group’s VP (Chris Cohen is the group founder and president) about rising membership, local homebrewing trends, and helping people brew better beer:

SF Bay Guardian How many active members are there in the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild?

Kevin Inglin We have about 140 dues-paying members in the SFHG ($45 annual membership gets them into monthly meetings for free — $5 for non-members — and allows them to enter our quarterly competitions for free, attend members-only events, and gets them discounts at local homebrew supply shops).

Our emailing list and Meetup group numbers are nearing 500. We have more than 130 people who are regularly “active” on our Meetup page (meaning they access the page for information at least bi-weekly), and we usually have 40-80 members who attend our monthly meetings and events.

SFBG How long has the group/guild been active? It combined with another group late last year, correct?

KI That’s correct. The current formation of the SFHG is really a combination of two groups. In October 2012 I took over as organizer of a Meetup group (of which I had been a member for about a year) called the SF Homebrew Club, which had formed online in December 2010. Chris Cohen started the SFHG in February 2012 and had held a couple of events throughout 2012. Upon taking over the Meetup group, I was pondering what type of homebrew club I thought we needed to be what my role would be as organizer and I came across what Chris was doing with SFHG.

I thought we had a lot of similar goals with regard to uniting and promoting the homebrewing community in the city, so I reached out to him and very quickly thereafter cross-promoted the November 2012 “SFHG Presidential Honey Ale Competition” — an event he already had in the works — to members of the Meetup group. In December of that same year, Chris then cross-promoted a Meetup group event — a North Bay Craft Brewery Tour I had been working on – to the members of the SFHG.

After those two very successful joint endeavors, we made it official in January 2013 when we merged the two groups, changed the Meetup group name to SFHG to ensure common branding, began having our regular monthly meetings, and proceeded to carry out numerous events throughout the year. We haven’t looked back since!

SFBG Any common homebrewing trends you’ve noticed among the group lately? Any ongoing trends or common issues that always arise among members?

KI I think the common trend in the homebrewing community is that every homebrewer at one time or another secretly desires to “go pro” — if they say they haven’t after someone has told them “that’s really great beer!” they’re probably lying!

Joking aside, I think the trend among homebrewers is creativity and reviving often “forgotten” styles or bringing a new twist to old classics. This creativity inevitably then emerges in the craft brewing scene as many craft brewers do indeed have homebrewing roots. People new to homebrewing then see what is happening in the craft brewing world and work to replicate those beers, so it’s somewhat of a circuitous path, but the two communities (homebrewing and craft brewing) tend to feed off one another.

In the past several years, we’ve seen the craft beer scene follow the homebrewing lead of running through big, high-alcohol “extreme” beers (e.g., big stouts and barleywines), and who can make the hoppiest IPA known to man. Now we see sour beers trending quite a bit in the craft brewing industry, which is at least in part due, in my opinion, to a trend of homebrewers seeking to make these challenging and very tasty beers for the past several years.

Our club is about to embark on a sour beer project with GigaYeast, a local, up-and-coming yeast provider that is gaining an increased market presence – we’re very excited about helping them gather data to tweak their sour yeasts and agents they’ll ultimately bring to market for use by other home and craft brewers.

SFBG Are most members brewing all-grain or extract? What is the experience level of most of the members?

KI We really run the gamut. We have several brewers who have been at it for a decade or more and a large group of people new to the hobby. With that mix of experience level, we have a corresponding mix of brewers who are all-grain and those using extracts. Being in an urban environment, some of our brewers are challenged with space and continue to use extracts for this reason, others have found ways to move to all-grain, but do so on a much smaller scale (1 to 3 gallon batches) than is most-often found in the hobby, where brewing 5 gallons at a time is the most common volume.

SFBG Have you noticed any uptick in membership in the past six months-few years?

KI Absolutely! Before we merged the SF Homebrew Club with SFHG, there were 287 members in the Meetup group, of which, just more than 30 were “active” members regularly using the site to gather and share information. We now have more than 460 members in the Meetup group, of which more than 130 are regularly “active” so that has definitely been very positive and consistent growth for the group over the past 11 months.

With the merger of the Meetup group into the SFHG proper, we’ve also seen a significant increase in paid memberships for SFHG (nearly double from last year), which has been essentially to the vitality of the group and allowing us to host so many events for members in the past year.

SFBG When did you personally start homebrewing?

KI I started in 1996 with an equipment and ingredient kit I bought from a display set up in the corner of a German bar. I had no group or resources to really tell me what to do, so I just read what I could and went for it. Those first batches weren’t too great, but I’d like to think now after all these years I’m able to produce beers a bit more palatable!

SFBG Anything else you would like to add about yourself or the group?

KI Running the SFHG has been a truly rewarding experience – it’s always great to help someone “get it” and see their joy when they make a beer far better than they ever thought they could based on information and tips they gathered from other club members. Having struggled somewhat on my own when I got started, it’s very enjoyable to help others avoid that isolation and be able to improve their brewing much more quickly based on the help and advice from others. That’s really the crux of our existence — help people brew better beer!

As for me personally, as an Army officer, I’ve moved around quite a bit over the years and homebrewed in Tennessee, Alabama (not realizing it wasn’t legal there at the time – thankfully it is now!), Hawaii, Virginia, Texas, Germany, and of course here in California.

It’s been a very enjoyable hobby and now that I’m set to retire from the Army in 2014, my wife and I have indeed decided to venture into the ranks of the professionals and open our own Nano Brewery here in the city. I’ll be attending a professional brewing course next year to augment my homebrewing experience and we’re in the throws of getting the business off the ground in the coming months. Wish us luck!

Ki-ki-ki-ah-ah-ah: new movies for Friday the 13th

Sue Vaughan
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0
Ki-ki-ki-ah-ah-ah: new movies for Friday the 13th

Naturally, there’s at least one horror movie, Insidious: Chapter 2,  opening in honor of Friday the 13th — two if you count Our Nixon — as well as a new series paying tribute to the singular Pier Paolo Pasolini (check out Dennis Harvey’s round-up here). Read on for more new reviews and one special holiday recommendation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNk1YL9G2QA

And While We Were Here This second collaboration between writer-director Kat Coiro and actor Kate Bosworth is a far cry from 2011’s oops-a-baby comedy Life Happens — owing, perhaps, to that film’s co-scripter and co-star, Krysten Ritter. There’s no snarky, raunchy Ritter-ness in And While We Were Here, a drama about a brittle woman named Jane (Bosworth) whose marriage to a workaholic viola player (Iddo Goldberg) is more polite than passionate; their relationship has baggage that he’d prefer not to work through, despite the expanding tension between them. On a trip to Naples, Jane meets a free-spirited 19-year-old (Jamie Blackley) who sparks her interest; before long, it’s groove-reclaiming time. Alas, sun-dappled scenery can’t offset a familiar story — with themes heavily underlined by a subplot that has Jane listening to tapes of her grandmother (richly voiced by Claire Bloom) reminiscing about love and loss during wartime. Jane’s too self-centered to be particularly likable (to her husband, mid-argument: “You’re not curious about me!”), but Here deserves some backhanded props for gender-bending a tired plot device. Ready or not, the manic pixie dream boy has arrived. (1:23) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMFan9K243w

The Family It’s hard to begrudge an acting monolith like Robert De Niro from cashing out in his golden years and essentially going gently into that good night amid a volley of mildish yuks. And when his mobster-in-witness-protection Giovanni Manzoni takes a film-club stage in his Normandy hideout to hold forth on the veracity of Goodfellas (1990), you yearn to be right there in the fictional audience, watching De Niro’s Brooklyn gangster take on his cinematic past. That’s the most memorable moment of this comedy about an organized criminal on the lam with his violent, conniving family unit. Director-cowriter Luc Besson aims to lightly demonstrate that you can extract a family from the mob but you can’t expunge the mob from the family. There’s a $20 million bounty on Giovanni’s head, and it’s up to his keeper Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) to keep him and his kin quiet and undercover. But the latter has his hands full with Gio penning his memoirs, wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) blowing up the local supermarket, daughter Belle (Dianna Agron, wrapped in bows like a soft-focus fantasy nymphet) given to punishing schoolyard transgressors with severe beatings, and son Warren (John D’Leo) working all the angles in class. Besson plays the Manzoni family’s violence for chuckles, while painting the mob family’s mayhem with more ominous colors, making for a tonal clash that’s as jarring as some of his edits. The pleasure here comes with watching the actors at play: much like his character, De Niro is on the run from his career-making albeit punishing past, though if he keeps finding refuge in subpar fare, one wonders if his “meh” fellas will eventually outweigh the Goodfellas. (1:51) (Kimberly Chun)

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

Insidious: Chapter 2 Hot off this summer’s The Conjuring, horror director James Wan turns in a sequel to his 2011 hit, also about a family with big-time paranormal problems. (1:30)

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

Our Nixon Cobbled together from previously unseen footage shot by some of Richard Nixon’s closest aides — the destined-for-infamy trio of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin — Penny Lane’s doc, which also uses Oval Office recordings and additional archival material (not to mention the best-ever use of Tracey Ullman’s 1983 pop confection “They Don’t Know”), offers a new perspective on Tricky Dick and White House life during his tumultuous reign. But while Our Nixon brings fresh perspective to notable moments like Nixon’s visit to China and Tricia Nixon’s lavish wedding, and peeks behind the public façade to reveal the “real” Nixon (hardly a spoiler: he’s shown to be biogoted and behind the times), the POTUS is just one of many figures in this inventive collage. The home movies themselves are the real stars here, filled with unguarded moments and shot for no reason other than personal documentation; as a result, and even taking Lane’s editing choices into account, Our Nixon feels thrillingly authentic. (1:25) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

Populaire Perhaps if it weren’t set in the 1950s, this would be the fluorescent-lit story of a soul-sucking data entry job and the office drone who supplements it with a moonlighting gig. But it is the ’50s — a cheery, upbeat version of the era — and director Régis Roinsard’s Populaire reflects its shiny glamour onto the transformation of small-town girl Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) from an incompetent but feisty secretary with mad hunting-and-pecking skills into a celebrated and adored speed-typing champion. Her daffy boss, Louis Échard (Romain Duris), is a handsome young insurance salesman who bullies her (very charmingly) into competing against a vast secretarial pool in a series of hectic, nail-biting tourneys, which treat typing as a sporting event for perhaps the first time in cinematic history. (See also: scenes of Rose cranking up her physical endurance with daily jogs and cross-training at the piano.) The glamour slips a touch when Populaire starts to delve into psychological motivations to rationalize some of Louis’s more caddish maneuvers. But meanwhile, back in the arena, bets are made, words-per-minute stats are quoted by screaming, tearful fans in the bleachers, hearts are won and bruised, a jazz band performs that classic tune “Les Secrétaires Cha Cha Cha,” and we find ourselves rooting passionately for Rose to best the reigning champ’s 512(!)-wpm record. (1:51) (Lynn Rapoport)

And in honor of Friday the 13th, here’s Crispin Glover rocking out in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, aka “the one with Corey Feldman,” the fourth (and despite the title, by no means final) entry in the series. RELAX, JIMBO!

Self service: SF Fringe Festival tells it like it is

Sue Vaughan
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1
Self service: SF Fringe Festival tells it like it is

Note: this is an extended version of an article that appears in this week’s print version.

Sitting in the Exit Café with a can of Guinness and the San Francisco Fringe Festival program is one of life’s modest but absorbing pleasures. For those without much inside knowledge on the lineup (currently encompassing 36 companies and 158 performances), it’s a little like taking a vacation by pitching darts at a wall map. There were several immediate sub-themes to choose from for 2013. I could have picked shows with bananas in the title, for instance. But for whatever reason, I dived into the service and servitude sector.

Of course, the Fringe, now in its 22nd year, is a lottery-based operation, so it is fate’s fingers that pluck these patterns from the cultural whirl. At the same time, you don’t need the I Ching to know that serving the rich is about all that’s left of the economy for most of us, making it hardly surprising to find so many stories of bartenders, wait staff, sex workers, and mermaids-who-are-also-sex-workers floating in the pool.

Things began on a high note with Jill Vice’s witty and deft solo, The Tipped & the Tipsy, which brings the querulous regulars of a skid-row bar to life vividly and with real (quasi-Depression era) charm. Without set or costume changes, Vice (who developed the piece with Dave Dennison and David Ford) proves a protean physical performer, seamlessly inhabiting the oddball outcasts lined up before bartender Candy every day at Happy’s — names as loaded as the clientele.

After some hilarious expert summarizing of the dos and don’ts of bar culture, a story unfolds around a battered former boxer and his avuncular relationship with Candy, who tries to cut off his bar service in fear of his deteriorating health, much to the consternation and even greater fear of his barfly associates and the self-aggrandizing sleazeball owner, Rocco. With a love of the underdog and strong writing and acting at its core, Tipsy breezes by, leaving a superlative buzz.

This was largely squandered a half hour later in Sandra Brunell Neace’s Parly Girl, an uneven and unpersuasive testimonial by a New York City waitress with a bad attitude and a traumatic back story. Neace, whose incidental characters are weakly written and delivered, is best in fleeting moments of genuine reflection. But these are few, and the piece flags early on, only to be at best partially redeemed in a hasty turnaround of a conclusion.

Service work gives way to involuntary servitude, and the horrifying reality of child sex trafficking, in writer-performer and activist Regina Y. Evans’ 52 Letters (co-directed with Louel Senores). More than a global scourge, this is a local story, and Evans delivers it with burning compassion in a poetical voice ringing with the resiliency and freighted history of the African American spiritual. The emotional register varies little, which can weaken somewhat the force it justly means to convey. Nevertheless, Evans and her urgent message as a modern-day abolitionist leave one impressed and unsettled.

O Best Beloved isn’t about service work, but the theme still crops up in the opening story — “How the Camel Got Her Hump” — an unburdened beast (played by Sam Jackson) whose relaxed work ethic draws negative attention. It’s one of three scheduled children’s tales by Rudyard Kipling (adapted by actor Joan Howard and director Rebecca Longworth), delivered by a rowdy six-person cast of storytellers. This playful piece is somewhat hectic and a bit garbled (in speech that can get lost in the reverberations of the Exit’s main stage). But it’s colorfully worked up (in costuming and properties as well as performances) and no doubt ideal for families or those happy to revel in light insouciance and unyielding silliness.

Sean Andries and Siouxsie Q’s Fish-Girl, meanwhile, has limited charm as a carny fable of doomed love between a nerdy young man (Andries, who also directed) and the freak-show beauty (Q, in sequined tail and half-shell bra) he’s hooked on. Co-creator Siouxsie Q hosts “The Whorecast” podcast showcasing the voices of American sex workers, and the mermaid’s plight takes on literal and metaphoric overtones of sex work. But the bland love story at the center keeps things bathtub shallow, albeit buoyed by a few decent songs belted out by poised songwriter Siouxsie Q to her own accompaniment on the ukulele — that spinet of the well-bred mermaid.

Hard on Fish-Girl‘s floppy heel came The Women of Tu-Na House, completing the evening’s sub-sub-theme of the aquatic erotic. (For cross-referencing purposes, another bartender’s tale, with fish tails too, stood out in the program but was not seen in time for review: Alexa Fitzpatrick’s sushi-restaurant confessional, Serving Bait to Rich People.) Nancy Eng’s solo is a smart, sassy, and blushingly frank account of the workers at an Asian massage parlor. Although Eng’s characters are not always readily distinct, she marshals an unexpected angle and winning élan in bringing this worthwhile story to life.

Not every show in the Fringe need conform to a surface or sub theme. Dark Porch Theatre’s StormStressLenz brings its own thematic taxonomy with it, in director Martin Schwartz’s uneven but intriguing, vivacious remixing of the work of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), the Baltic German author of the proto-Romantic, anti-rational Sturm und Drang school of literature.

Schwartz’s Lenz remix comes across as an alternately cool and hyperactive investigation of the essence of melodrama, employing a fast-changing four-person ensemble (Nathan Tucker, Margery Fairchild, Ryan Hayes, Meg Hurtado) in a series of scenes shorn of their immediate context and aggregated under various section headings (“Love,” “Tricks,” “Sorrow,” etc.) The subheads are called out by Schwartz, seated at a table to the left of the stage calmly scrutinizing the action, asking the lighting booth for the odd musical interlude (MC5 one minute, Brahms the next), and bouncing his palm lightly on a desk bell to trigger the beginning and the end of each scene. These range widely and wildly, making for a raucous but tonally patchy hour. The broadest and subtlest range of characters comes from Tucker and Fairchild, who between them suggest some of the darker elements otherwise left out of a largely comic romp. But if the show leaves one wanting more complexity and shading, its eccentric enterprise is still worth a stab, as they say.

Finally, San Francisco dancer and performance maker Cara Rose DeFabio’s admirable solo strikes its own idiosyncratic tone, or rather many of them, in another intriguing investigation, this time of the online afterlife to which we are all increasingly subject — whether willingly or not. After the Tone is a smart and provoking exploration of the intersections of grief, technology, memory, ideology, and individuality that uses DeFabio’s sly narrative persona, movement, video, and audio pastiche, and interactive audience participation (via those celebrated and hated cellphones) to productively turn over a subject too close to most of us to be clearly grasped otherwise.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL
Through Sept. 21, $12.99 or less
Exit Theatreplex
156 Eddy, SF
www.sffringe.org

The Performant: Mean Streets and Matchsticks at the Vancouver Fringe

Sue Vaughan
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The Performant: Mean Streets and Matchsticks at the Vancouver Fringe

Here in Vancouver, the Fringe Festival has been in full swing since Sept. 5, and its early bustle has come as something of a welcome surprise. Shows have been selling out right and left, including those by the five-woman sketch comedy team Strapless, and the manic SNAFU Dance Theatre‘s survivalist romp Kitt & Jane. The buzz hangs as heavy in the air as the morning humidity. It’s interesting to compare the rowdy carnival atmosphere of the Edmonton Fringe, complete with sideshow attractions, tireless street performers, and mountains of cheap fried food and the people who eat it, with Vancouver’s more refined approach and oddience. The Vancouver Fringe is the biggest theater festival in town, I’m told, and therefore attracts a fairly large percentage of mainstream theater-goers.

But despite the fact that each show begins with an overly complicated spiel about sponsorship opportunities, the shows themselves have run the usual fringe-y gamut of content from heartfelt to hilarious, edgy to educational. Here are some of the standouts I’ve seen so far.

One of the bravest shows of the 2012 San Francisco Fringe was not actually a theatre piece at all, but an educational talk entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Circumcised, complete with video footage of infant (male) circumcisions that was decidedly not for the faint of heart. I see a lot of similarity in Tasha Diamant’s equally brave The Human Body Project, because when she takes the stage, naked and unscripted, the audience is immediately forced to examine their own reactions and assumptions around the act, the artist, and the body in general, leading to a tangibly cathartic yet thought-provoking collective experience.

Speaking of San Francisco Fringe, homegrown clown Summer Shapiro, whose Legs and All charmed at the festival in 2009, is here in Vancouver with a fun, interactive work, In the Boudoir; it’s a mostly silent comedy of a first date gone terribly awkward. In the same venue, the wry magic of Travis Barnhardt astounds in his mentalist routine Unpossible, during which he confesses several times that he hasn’t quite mastered the art before revealing that he clearly has.

Canadian storyteller Andrew Bailey, whose show Limbo I enjoyed in Edmonton, knocks one out of the metaphorical ballpark with his smart, compelling The Adversary. Matchstick, a two-person musical centered around a troubled, International love affair with political implications, impresses with its quick wit, inventive staging, and dynamic duo, despite some silly lyrics. Solo clown show Butt Kapinski follows a diminutive, speech-challenged “Pwivate Eye” down the mean streets and aisles of the small theater space, filled with cruel tenements, corrupt cops, and a bevy of working girls and murder victims (all unsuspecting oddience members), while the aforementioned Kitt & Jane wows with its energetic portrayals of a pair of angsty high school misfits who have one hour to save the world from itself.

Still looking forward to so much more, including Little Pussy, Model Wanted, Preacher Man, Kuwaiti Moonshine, Radio:30, The Cruelest Phone Book in the World, Against Gravity, Fools for Love, and 6 Guitars so I’d better get cracking. So little time. So many shows.

Action franchise junkie Vin Diesel returns … and more new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Action franchise junkie Vin Diesel returns … and more new movies!

Who dares to challenge the box-office supremacy of Vin Diesel, who returns yet again to play the titular night vision-gifted (but really socially awkward) escaped con in sci-fi actioner Riddick?

For masochists, there’s Brian De Palma’s latest, Passion, which checks in for a brief Castro run (Dennis Harvey gets bored talking about it here); there are also a couple of docs, a MILF drama, and a South Korean disaster-by-numbers flick about a disease that, shockingly, doesn’t spawn zombies, just bloody coughs and rapid death. Read on for our short takes (and take note of your best-bet new flick: “charming seriocomedy” Afternoon Delight).http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWyEbmKHsY

Adore This glossy soap opera from director Anne Fontaine (2009’s Coco Before Chanel) and scenarist Christopher Hampton, adapted from a Doris Lessing novella, has had its title changed from Two Mothers — perhaps because under that name it was pretty much the most howled-at movie at Sundance this year. Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) are lifelong best friends whose hunky surfer sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) are likewise best mates. Widow Lil runs a gallery and Roz has a husband (Ben Mendelsohn), but mostly the two women seem to lay around sipping wine on the decks of their adjacent oceanfront homes in Western Australia’s Perth, watching their sinewy offspring frolic in the waves. This upscale-lifestyle-magazine vision of having it all — complete with middle-aged female protagonists who look spectacularly youthful without any apparent effort — finds trouble in paradise when the ladies realize that something, in fact, is missing. That something turns out to be each other’s sons, in their beds. After very little hand-wringing this is accepted as the way things are meant to be — a MILF fantasy viewed through the distaff eyes — despite some trouble down the road. This outlandish basic concept might have worked for Lessing, but Fontaine’s solemn, gauzily romantic take only slightly muffles its inherent absurdity. (Imagine how creepy this ersatz women-finding-fulfillment-at-midlife saga would be if it were two older men boning each others’ daughters.) Lord knows it isn’t often that mainstream movies (this hardly plays as “art house”) focus on women over 40, and the actors give it their all. But you’ll wish they’d given it to a better vehicle instead. (1:50) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQpXyke3VC4

Afternoon Delight It takes about five seconds to suss that Kathryn Hahn is going to give a spectacular performance in Jill Soloway’s charming seriocomedy. Figuring to re-ignite husband Jeff’s (Josh Radnor) flagging libido by taking them both to a strip club, Rachel (Hahn) decides to take on as a home- and moral-improvement project big-haired, barely-adult stripper McKenna (Juno Temple). When the latter’s car slash-home is towed, bored Silver Lake housewife and mother Rachel invites the street child into their home. Eventually she’s restless enough to start accompanying McKenna on the latter’s professional “dates.” Afternoon Delight is a better movie than you’d expect — not so much a typical raunchy comedy as a depthed dramedy with a raunchy hook. It’s a notable representation of no-shame sex workerdom. It’s also funny, cute, and eventually very touching. Especially memorable: a ladies’ round-table discussion about abortion that drifts every which way. (1:42) (Dennis Harvey)

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

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story Fairy tales really do come true — even when they’re as strange as the one lived by Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning illustrator, writer, and activist Tomi Ungerer. As a child, he was torn between Nazi Germany and occupied France, growing up in the Alsace region; as an artist, Ungerer possesses a creative fire fueled by the trauma of war and a bisected identity — his native Strasbourg, as he paints it with archetypal vivid colors, “is the sphincter of France. When France has indigestion, we’re the first to feel it.” In keeping with that free spirit, director Brad Bernstein playfully, beautifully captures Ungerer’s early years, from the artist’s preteen renderings of Nazi horrors, to his formative artistic inspirations, to the outpouring that followed during NYC’s golden age of illustration. In Big Apple, children’s classics like Crictor (1958), Adelaide (1959), and The Three Robbers (1961) inspired colleagues like Maurice Sendak (here in one of his last interviews) and Jules Feiffer. No niche branding and self-censorship for Ungerer, who happily fed the midcentury’s appetite for his drawings; imbued his kids tales with absurdity, fear, and his lifelong fascination with death; and created powerful anti-war posters and iconic illustrations reflecting the struggles of the ‘60s (and very adult “Fornicon” erotica as well). The latter finally ushered in a kind of closing chapter to Ungerer’s American success story, when word spread that the “kidso” favorite also did porno and his children’s books were blacklisted from libraries. Bernstein generally hastens through the decades of “exile” that followed — staying so far from some of Ungerer’s personal particulars that we never even get the name of his wife (or is it wives?) — but the time he takes to give the viewer a sense of the witty, quirk-riddled artist’s personality keeps a viewer riveted. (1:38) (Kimberly Chun)

The Flu As a shipping crate stuffed with illegal immigrants creeps into a ritzy Seoul suburb, one poor soul within stifles a cough; before long, everyone’s dead — save a crusty-eyed youth who’s apparently resistant to the disease yet still capable of kick-starting a devastating epidemic. Can the headstrong doctor (Soo Ae) save her sassy tot (Park Min-ha) from certain, blood-spewing death? Will the cocky EMT (Jang Hyuk) be able to help her, and win her heart in the process? Will the muckety-mucks in power get their shit together in time to prevent mass panic and a global outbreak? Zzzzz. Save some gnarly third-act visuals (you won’t believe what the government does with the bodies of the afflicted), this disaster movie from writer-director Kim Sung-su fails to innovate on the template laid down by films like 2011’s Contagion or 1995’s Outbreak. Also, for all the gory drama, the central storyline (re: the sick kid and the nascent couple) is completely devoid of tension, trudging for two hours toward the most predictable ending imaginable. (2:00) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od8DhL1hyfw

I Give It a Year This glossy feature writing-directing debut from longtime Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator Dan Mazer has been called the best British comedy in some time — but it turns out that statement must’ve been made by people who think the Hangover movies are what comedy should be like world-wide. Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall play mismatched newlyweds (she’s stiff-upper-lippy advertising executive, he’s a manboy prankster novelist) who worry their marriage won’t last, in part because everyone tells them so — including such authorities as her bitchy sister (Minnie Driver), his obnoxious best friend (Stephen Merchant), and their incredibly crass marriage counselor (Olivia Colman). Also, they’re each being distracted by more suitable partners: she by a suave visiting American CEO (Simon Baker), he by the ex-girlfriend he never formally broke up with (Anna Faris). This is one of those movies in which you’re supposed to root for a couple who in fact really don’t belong together, and most supporting characters are supposed to be funny because they’re hateful or rude. There’s plenty of the usual strained sexual humor, plus the now-de rigueur turn toward earnest schmaltz, and the inevitable soundtrack stuffed with innocuous covers of golden oldies. Some wince-inducing moments aside, it all goes down painlessly enough — and Mazer deserves major props for straying from convention at the end. Still, one hopes the future of British comedy isn’t more movies that might just as well have starred Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTw4OHsh9so

Riddick This is David Twohy’s third flick starring Vin Diesel as the titular misunderstood supercriminal. Aesthetically, it’s probably the most interesting of the lot, with a stylistic weirdness that evokes ’70s Eurocomix in the best way — a pleasing backdrop to what is essentially Diesel playing out the latest in a series of Dungeons & Dragons scenarios where he offers his wisecracking sci-fi take on Conan. Gone are the scares and stakes of Pitch Black (2000) or the cheeseball epic scale of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); this is a no-nonsense action movie built on the premise that Riddick just can’t catch a break. He’s on the run again, targeted by two bands of ruthless mercenaries, on a planet threatened by an oncoming storm rather than Pitch Black’s planet-wide night. One unfortunate element leaves a bitter taste: the lone female character in the movie, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), is an underdeveloped cliché “Strong Female Character,” a violent, macho lesbian caricature who is the object of vile sexual aggression (sometimes played for laughs) from several other characters, including Riddick. (1:59) (Sam Stander)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbSUyYXH8hs

Spark: A Burning Man Story A few months after kicking off DocFest — and mere days after the flames of Burning Man ’13 were extinguished — doc Spark: A Burning Man Story opens for a theatrical run. With surprisingly open access to Burning Man’s inner-circle organizers, San Francisco filmmakers Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter chronicle the organization’s tumultuous 2012 season, a time when the group was forced to confront concerns both practical (a stressful ticket-sale snafu) and philosophical (why are they selling tickets in the first place?) Spark doesn’t shy away from showing the less-graceful aspects of Burning Man’s exponential growth and transformation, but at its core it’s a fairly starry-eyed celebration of the event’s allure, reinforced by subplots that focus on artists who view “the playa” as their muse. (1:30) (Cheryl Eddy)

Hormone replacement therapy and video games: Anna Anthropy talks Dy5phoria

Erica Hanna
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Hormone replacement therapy and video games: Anna Anthropy talks Dy5phoria

Video games go to alien worlds all the time, but rarely have they explored a transgender person’s identity until Dys4ia. The 2012 Adobe Flash game traced designer Anna Anthropy’s hormone replacement therapy journey, guiding the player through trying on women’s clothing for the first time, dealing with the agony of shaving, and correcting all the people who call you “sir” instead of “ma’am.”

Anthropy was kind enough to let the Guardian interview her in her Oakland home, dodge her energetic cats, and record an audio interview where she walks us through her new game, Dy5phoria, the new chapter and pseudo-sequel to Dys4ia. You can also read a selection from the audio interview below. 

SF Bay Guardian How do you pronounce the new title? 

Anna Anthropy I’ve been calling it Dys-five-ia out loud, but it’s spelled like Dys4ia with a 5 instead of an S. 

SFBG You’re hitting steam now with added content, can you tell us what’s new?

AA Dys4ia is made up of four chapters which represent different times in my life when I was starting to go on hormone replacement therapy. Dy5phoria which will come with Dys4ia is a fifth chapter that follows what’s happened in my life since the place Dys4ia ended.

SFBG Not quite a sequel but downloadable content?

AA Like a fifth chapter, if you will. 

Listen to the full 26 minute interview in the Sound Cloud file above.

SFBG Can you talk about what seperated it from mainstream games?

AA Oh god I’m so sick of talking about Dys4ia, but I will! It’s essentially a collection of short fast scenes, kind of like Wario Ware, that represents the different facets of what happened to me in this part of my life. The frustrations of dealing with gatekeepers and being misgendered. It’s also about the moments of beauty and hope that reassure me that things maybe are getting closer to how I want them to be in my life.

SFBG What were those moments of hope?

AA One of the things that happens to me in Dys4ia is my tits get bigger, and that was nice.

One of the things in Dy5phoria that has changed is the ways I’ve externalized my femininity more and felt prettier and better about being a girl. It was important that mixed in the bullshit I put in the reasons about why this is important to me.

SFBG Can you talk about how Dy5phoria is different than what came before it?

AA In Dys4ia the avatars in the scenes are really inconsistent. Depending on the context I might be a blobby stick figure, or a shield, a razor, a little munchy thing depending on the experience. My body was going through flux at the time, it made sense for the game to represent that by not having a consistent avatar. In Dy5phoria all the levels have a consistent avatar that look like me and who I’ve become comfortable being.

There’s a different motif in the game, there’s some consistency now, some sort of permanence.

SFBG There’s an 8-bit retro style right? It’s like an NES game.

AA Kind of. I don’t want it to be Nintendo retro because I think thats twee and bad, I think that’s overused.

SFBG Omni retro?

AA Sure.

SFBG Tell me where you are in development and what you’re doing today.

AA My process for this game is that every day I sit down and do a single scene. The one I’m working on today is about painting my nails, and the ways I’ve found to externalize my femininity more. The level is just that: a hand with a nail polish brush. Its just that.You paint my nails, and then its over.

Nails painted in screenshot of Dy5phoria

SFBG Well thats the power of videogames right? You carry out the narrative act, as opposed to simply watching it. You mentioned the TSA level earlier. What happened to you and what’s the problem making that read well?

AA There’s a level in Dy5phoria when I was groped by the TSA at the airport. The way that big horrible scanning thing works is there’s a button with a female and a male button. I’ve had it go either way. This particular time I got scanned as male. On the screen parts of me came up as suspicious areas, and there on the screen there were squares around my tits.

My tits came up as an anomaly, and this guy (security) was obliged to grope my breasts. I’m attempting to translate this to a scene in Dy5phoria. I don’t think it’s reading as well as it could because it’s a bit too complicated. 

SFBG Do you think your game designer chops have improved since you did Dys4ia?

AA It’s more like my interests have changed. I’m a lot less interested in making digital games than I used to be. I’ve sort of been envisioning what a fifth chapter of Dys4ia would look like, but when the opportunity came I’m actually more interested in board games than sitting down and coding a game. This is the last game I want to code myself, but I kind of have to because Dys4ia is all mine, all my project. This is kind of a closing of the book for me, in a lot of ways. 

SFBG So you’ll never do digital games again?

AA It’s not that I won’t do digital games again, I’m actually announcing a new game at Indiecade. I just don’t want to do the programming myself. I’ve always learned the coding I needed to do, a mish mash. That’s why I work on Twine games because I don’t have to do any coding. Dy5phoria will be the last project I’ll code myself but it won’t be my last digital game.

SFBG You mentioned you’re sick of talking about Dys4ia, but when I was at GaymerX I met this gal who recently transitioned her gender and was working at your workshop there. She has so completely totally inspired by you. You should have seen her face.

AA I did in fact see her face, she came up to my autograph session, and told me the game was meaningful. Those comments make me feel really good. I’m sick of answering questions about Dys4ia but I’m not sick of hearing it means something to people. That’s why I do anything, I want to make things that will actually connect with people. She told me and other people have told me Dys4ia gave her the confidence to make the decision to start going on hormones.

Hormones have been positioned as the central experience of being trans, which I don’t think is good, because there are trans people who don’t go on hormones. But for those people that are thinking of going on hormones is I hoped Dys4ia would give some sense about what that would be like an the challenges and really really nice things of being on hormones would be like. If it has done that for people I feel accomplished in that regard. 

SFBG And it seems sometimes you’re at the center to this kind of very indie, very LGBT conscious, very different game movement that seems to be happening a lot here in the Bay Area and other places as well. Can you talk about what’s bringing the rise of that about?

AA I think what’s important to outsiders of the mainstream game industry that the industry is mostly pitching to straight cis males. I think what’s making it possible for people to participate are tools like Twine, a hypertext tool where only recently people started realizing they could use it to make games.

Because the tool is so simple if you’re capable of writing you’re capable of making a game with Twine. You can make almost journal style, personal games. There are a lot more autobiographical games coming out with this tool.

The industry is spending millions to make games, they don’t have the liberty to make something risky and personal and weird. If something takes a few hours to make or a few days or a week, you can make what you want.

These avenues of gaming that are barred to queer and marginalized people, people who are barred from making games in this sexist, cisnormative tech culture have found an avenue in making games in Twine and other free game tools. There are avenues for making games for people who the industry don’t think are its mainstream. 

D5phoria is due out on Steam in the fall. You can play the first in the series, Dys4ia, here. 

The Performant: Fringe 101, an essential lexicon revisited.

Sue Vaughan
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The Performant: Fringe 101, an essential lexicon revisited.

With the frenzy of the Edmonton Fringe Festival finally subsided, and Vancouver’s about to begin, myself and the Naked Empire Bouffons are ready for action. We have posters to plaster, our venue to scope out, and fellow artists to schmooze before the festival opens on the fifth, but in the interim I have time to let my attentions wander back momentarily to San Francisco, whose Fringe Festival also opens this week.

Did you know that we boast the second oldest Fringe Festival in the United States (the first being Orlando’s)? And that, along with Vancouver, we represent the final leg of the CAFF (Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals) circuit for touring Fringe artists, despite the small complication of not actually being Canadian? Admittedly our festival is smaller than the Vancouver event (36 shows, as compared to 91 and counting), but it’s still a veritable bacchanal of drama, dance, and comedic derring-do packed into 14 days.

For the frequent fringer and the newcomer to the fold alike, the biggest challenge can be narrowing down the field of options to a manageable handful, and while I always advocate the time-honored tradition of asking other people who have already seen a particular show their opinion of it, I’ve also become rather adept at translating some of the more commonly-used descriptors in program blurbs, which does help with the initial elimination process (note: you should always be willing to change your mind about something you’ve eliminated if the buzz it’s generating is suitably favorable). Since it never hurts to be prepared, here is my personal Fringe Festival program guide glossary, reprinted from its 2011 debut, to help you locate the Fringe experience you’re looking for, whether it be a farce, a fantasy, or a free-for-all.

Bare Bones: We’ve never heard of Kickstarter
Cheese: Neo-surrealists in the house
Classic: We don’t need the rights to present this work
Dark: At least one of the characters dies
Disturbing: If you don’t like fart jokes
Dynamic: Theater Arts undergrads
Edgy: Guaranteed to offend at least one minority group
Erotic: For inexplicable reasons, won’t include nudity
Existential: At least half of the characters die
Experiential: Audience participation required
Experimental: We decided not to bother writing a script
Fresh Take: You’ve seen this play 100 times before
Hilarious: If you like fart jokes
Inspirational: Overcoming the effects of an upper middle-class upbringing
Interactive: Don’t sit in the front row
Internationally-acclaimed: Also performed at the Winnipeg Fringe
Multi-media: If our projector breaks we’re screwed
New Translation: We worked way harder on this show than you can imagine
Noir: Will be wearing great hats
Noirish: Couldn’t afford great hats
Poignant: There will be at least one monologue about innocence lost
Provocative: Will include violence and nudity
Quotes from famous people: Assistant Director used to walk their dogs
Quotes from previous runs: We have had a chance to rehearse this
Reimagined: We don’t actually have the rights to present this work
Sensitive: Over-wrought
Site-Specific: Wear layers
Riveting: The stage manager’s mother-in-law said so
Thought-provoking: Will include either violence or nudity
Uncompromising: Guaranteed to offend pretty much everyone
Unforgettable: No matter how hard you try
Universal: Fart jokes
Visceral: Don’t sit in the front row
Wacky: A kazoo will definitely make an appearance at some point
With a twist: You can see it coming
World Premiere: We haven’t had a chance to rehearse this

Wanna Fringe vicariously through us? Follow @enkohl and @NakdEmprBouffon on the twit-thing for updates and gossip.

Fall films to look forward too … and new movies to see tonight!

Sue Vaughan
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Fall films to look forward too … and new movies to see tonight!

Click this way for my Fall Film Preview, presented as part of this weeks Fall Arts spectacular. With bonus photo of Bradley Cooper’s Brady perm!

Read on for this week’s openings, including one of the best indie films of the year, the latest from Wong Kar-Wai, and, uh…the One Direction movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH5oaGgYb-Y

Closed Circuit British thriller about a pair of lawyers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) drawn into a possible government cover-up while investigating a London explosion. (1:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YYMY4PcmT4

Drinking Buddies Mumblecore grows up in this latest from actor-writer-director Joe Swanberg (currently starring in You’re Next), about brewery co-workers Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), BFFs who’d obviously be the perfect couple if they weren’t already hooked up with significant others. At least, they are at the start of Drinking Buddies; the tension between them grows ever-more loaded when the messy, chaotic Kate is dumped by older boyfriend Chris (Ron Livingston) — a pairing we know is bound to fail when we spot him chiding her for neglecting to use a coaster. Luke’s long-term coupling with the slightly younger but way-more-mature Jill (Anna Kendrick) is more complicated; all signs indicate how lucky he is to have her. But the fact that they can only meander around marriage talk indicates that Luke isn’t ready to settle down — and though Jill may not realize it, Luke’s feelings for Kate are a big reason why. Working from a script outline but largely improvising all dialogue, Swanberg’s actors rise to the challenge, conveying the intricate shades of modern relationships. Their characters aren’t always likable, but they’re always believable. Also, fair warning: this movie will make you want to drink many, many beers. (1:30) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1w6CWtykK0

Getaway Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez team up in a high-speed, high-stakes race to save Hawke’s kidnapped wife. Jon Voight co-stars as “Mysterious Voice,” so there’s that. (1:29)

The Grandmaster The Grandmaster is dramatic auteur Wong Kar-Wai’s take on the life of kung-fu legend Ip Man — famously Bruce Lee’s teacher, and already the subject of a series  of Donnie Yen actioners. This episodic treatment is punctuated by great fights and great tragedies, depicting Ip’s life and the Second Sino-Japanese War in broad strokes of martial arts tradition and personal conviction. Wong’s angsty, hyper stylized visuals lend an unusual focus to the Yuen Woo-Ping-choreographed fight scenes, but a listless lack of narrative momentum prevents the dramatic segments from being truly engaging. Abrupt editing in this shorter American cut suggests some connective tissue may be missing from certain sequences. Tony Leung’s performance is quietly powerful, but also a familiar caricature from other Wong films; this time, instead of a frustrated writer, he is a frustrated martial artist. Ziyi Zhang’s turn as the driven, devastated child of the Northern Chinese Grandmaster provides a worthy counterpoint. Another Wong cliché: the two end up sadly reminiscing in dark bars, far from the rhythm and poetry of their martial pursuits. (1:48) (Sam Stander)

Instructions Not Included Mexican superstar Eugenio Derbez stars in this comedy about a ladies’ man who finds redemption when he’s suddenly tasked with being a single parent to his young daughter. (1:55)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55wi0RlBIPU

One Direction: This is Us Take them home? The girls shrieking at the opening minutes of One Direction: This Is Us are certainly raring to — though by the closing credits, they might feel as let down as a Zayn Malik fanatic who was convinced that he was definitely future husband material. Purporting to show us the real 1D, in 3D, no less, This Is Us instead vacillates like a boy band in search of critical credibility, playing at an “authorized” look behind the scenes while really preferring the safety of choreographed onstage moves by the self-confessed worst dancers in pop. So we get endless shots of Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson horsing around, hiding in trash bins, punking the road crew, jetting around the world, and accepting the adulation of innumerable screaming girls outside — interspersed with concert footage of the lads pouring their all into the poised and polished pop that has made them the greatest success story to come out of The X Factor. Too bad the music — including “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Live While We’re Young” — will bore anyone who’s not already a fan, while the 1D members’ well-filtered, featureless, and thoroughly innocuous on-screen personalities do little to dispel those yawns. Director Morgan Spurlock (2004’s Super Size Me) adds just a dollop of his own personality, in the way he fixates on the tearful fan response: he trots out an expert to talk about the chemical reaction coursing through the excitable listener’s system, and uses bits of animation to slightly puff up the boy’s live show. But generally as a co-producer, along with 1D mastermind Simon Cowell, Spurlock goes along with the pop whitewashing, sidestepping the touchy, newsy paths this biopic could have sallied down — for instance, Malik’s thoughts on being the only Muslim member of the biggest boy band in the world — and instead doing his best undermine that also-oh-so-hyped 3D format and make One Direction as tidily one dimensional as possible. (1:32) (Kimberly Chun)

The Patience Stone “You’re the one that’s wounded, yet I’m the one that’s suffering,” complains the good Afghan wife in this theatrical yet charged adaptation of Atiq Rahimi’s best-selling novel, directed by the Kabul native himself. As The Patience Stone opens, a beautiful, nameless young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) is fighting to not only keep alive her comatose husband, a onetime Jihadist with a bullet lodged in his neck, but also simply survive on her own with little money and two small daughters and a war going off all around her. In a surprising turn, her once-heedless husband becomes her solace — her silent confidante and her so-called patience stone — as she talks about her fears, secrets, memories, and desires, the latter sparked by a meeting with a young soldier. Despite the mostly stagy treatment of the action, mainly isolated to a single room or house (although the guerilla-shot scenes on Kabul streets are rife with a feeling of real jeopardy), The Patience Stone achieves lift-off, thanks to the power of a once-silenced woman’s story and a heart-rending performance by Farahani, once a star and now banned in her native Iran. (1:42) (Kimberly Chun)

Short Term 12 A favorite at multiple 2013 festivals (particularly SXSW, where it won multiple awards), Short Term 12 proves worthy of the hype, offering a gripping look at twentysomethings (led by Brie Larson, in a moving yet unshowy performance) who work with at-risk teens housed in a foster-care facility, where they’re cared for by a system that doesn’t always act with their best interests in mind. Though she’s a master of conflict resolution and tough love when it comes to her young chargers, Grace (Larson) hasn’t overcome her deeply troubled past, to the frustration of her devoted boyfriend and co-worker (John Gallagher, Jr.). The crazy everyday drama — kids mouthing off, attempting escape, etc. — is manageable enough, but two cases cut deep: Marcus (Keith Stanfield), an aspiring musician who grows increasingly anxious as his 18th birthday, when he’ll age out of foster care, approaches; and 16-year-old Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), whose sullen attitude masks a dark home life that echoes Grace’s own experiences. Expanding his acclaimed 2008 short of the same name, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s wrenchingly realistic tale achieves levels of emotional honesty not often captured by narrative cinema. He joins Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler as one of the year’s most exciting indie discoveries. (1:36) (Cheryl Eddy)

Thérèse Both Emma Bovary and Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly relate to this increasingly bored and twisted French woman of privilege stuck in the sticks in the ’20s, as rendered by novelist Francois Mauriac and compellingly translated to the screen by the late director Claude Miller. Forbiddingly cerebral and bookish yet also strangely passive and affectless, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) looks like she has it all from a distance — she’s married to her best friend’s coarse, hunting-obsessed brother (Gilles Lellouche) though envious of her chum’s affair with a handsome and free-thinking Jewish student. Turns out she’s as trapped and close to death as the birds her spouse snares in their forest, and the suffocatingly provincial ways of family she’s married into lead her to undertake a dire course of action. Lellouche adds nuance to his rich lunk, but you can’t tear your eyes from Tautou. Turning her pinched frown right side up and hardening those unblinking button eyes, she plays well against type as a well-heeled, sleepwalking, possibly sociopathic sour grape, effectively conveying the mute unhappiness of a too-well-bred woman born too early and too blinkered to understand that she’s desperate for a new century’s freedoms. (1:50) (Kimberly Chun)

The Performant: Fringe Dwellers

Sue Vaughan
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2

It’s hard to believe, but the 32nd annual Edmonton Fringe is already over and touring companies like Naked Empire Bouffon are packing their bags to move on to the next festival, while artists who have finished their runs head for home — whether that’s Australia, the UK, or just North of the High Level Bridge. As at every Fringe, my goal has been to see just as many shows as I can, and in between stage-managing Naked Empire’s run and feverishly making deadlines, I saw 35, which ranged in content and execution from the merely mundane to the inarguably sublime. Here’s a roundup of my personal favorites and companies I recommend watching out for should they make over to San Francisco.

1) Best Interpretation of “…the rest is silence:” Grim and Fischer, by the Wonderheads. Haunting, heartfelt, and humorous, Grim and Fischer unfolds on the stage like beautiful French animation, with nary a spoken word passing between the three meticulously-masked characters: the sepulchral Grim, the feisty Mrs. Fischer, and the frustrated Nurse Doug. A classic struggle against the inevitability of death told in movement, allusion, and fart jokes, to a soundtrack of Mozart and Survivor, the impact of the imagery lingers long after the show is over.

2) Best Surrealist Ensemble: The Tenant Haimowitz, by Zygota Theatre. Penned by Israeli playwright Ariel Bronz, this abstract journey through the purgatory of one poet’s worldview is both complex and confounding, but absolutely mesmerizing. Bullied into renting a cheap flat only to discover five unexpected roommates after he signs on the dotted line, Daniel Haimovitz is sucked into a whirlpool of situational farce, at one moment being literally wrapped in bureaucratic red tape, at another forced to play a word association game the rules of which seem not to apply equally to all the participants as the tight-knit, highly-kinetic ensemble alternately defies gravity and gravitas.

3) Best Lo-Budget, Hi-Voltage Costume Concept: Moby Alpha, by Charles Comedy. The staging of this quirky mashup between science-fiction serial drama and Herman Melville is pure fringe, with the two actors (Charlie Stockman and Chuck Armstrong) illuminated only by their inventive space helmets, with switches that allow them to change colors for each character and transporter sequence, while they float through the vastness of space, represented by the otherwise dark stage.

4) Best Canada-centric History Lesson: Jake’s Gift, by Juno Productions. Unless you travel to Canada, chances are you won’t get a chance to see this show about a Canadian WWII vet returning to Juno Beach for the first time in 60 years. While somewhat predictably staged, in a manner most likely to inspire unabashed sniffling from the audience, the script reveals an interesting chapter in Canadian military history, one completely subsumed in the states by our own.

5) Best Whimsical Literary Reimaginings: Poe and Mathews, by Grumble Productions, Innocent When You Dream, by Zeb L. West. What if Edgar Allan Poe was washed up on a deserted island with the now-forgotten author Cornelius Mathews with only a rock to keep them company and a sandwich to stave off the hunger? What if the bulk of the action of Moby Dick took place inside the whale including a long diversion in the guise of Don Quixote? Physical comedy, puppetry, and ukulele tunes take us down those quirky rabbit holes.

6) Best Unscripted Fringe Experiences: Late Night Cabaret, Truth or Dare With Strangers, “The Zackie Awards.” Sorry improv groups, the best unscripted performances are almost always those tackled by the unsuspecting in moments of nervous anticipation and heightened awareness. I loved the randomness of the Late Night Cabaret once the “Wheel of Desire” was spun and whoever the night’s special guests were had to perform the action dictated by random chance; the sweet-natured experiment of Tasha Hickie’s “Truth or Dare With Strangers” where, for two Canadian dollars, you could huddle in a tent with people you’d never met and reveal yourself without inhibition; and the slap-happy hilarity of the performer-centric Zackies after a long hard Fringe.

Next stop, Vanvouver. Stay tuned.

Wanna Fringe vicariously through us? Follow @enkohl and @NakdEmprBouffon on the twit-thing for updates and gossip.

The robot apocalypse, Mr. Darcy, outlaws, and revolutionaries: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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The robot apocalypse, Mr. Darcy, outlaws, and revolutionaries: new movies!

Let’s Boo-Boo! Edgar Wright’s latest bromance-in-genre-clothing, The World’s End, opens today, and it’s a riot. Elsewhere, there’s a rom-com about Jane Austen obsessives, Hollywood’s latest supernatural-teen fantasy, and an indie horror flick critic Dennis Harvey calls “a very bloody good ride.” (Check out those reviews below).

Longer features this week include my interview with director David Lowery about his neo-Western Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Harvey’s take on artist-couple doc Cutie and the Boxer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHr8YyjSlg

Austenland Jane (Keri Russell) is a Jane Austen fanatic who finds real-life modern romance highly lacking as compared to the fictive Regency Era variety — though having a life-sized cutout of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in her bedroom surely didn’t help recent relationships. After yet another breakup, she decides to live her fantasy by flying to England to vacation at the titular theme park-fantasy role play establishment, where guests and staff meticulously act out Austen-like scenarios of well-dressed upper class leisure and chaste courtship. Upon arriving, however, Jane discovers she’s very much a second-class citizen here, not having been able to afford the “platinum premium” package purchased by fellow guests. Thus cast by imperious proprietor Mrs. Wattlesbrook (Jane Seymour) as the unmarriageable “poor relation,” she gets more flirtatious vibes from the actor cast as sexy stable boy (Bret McKenzie) than the one playing a quasi-Darcy (JJ Feild), at least initially. Adapting Shannon Hale’s novel, Jerusha Hess (making her directorial bow after several collaborations with husband Jared Hess, of 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite) has delightfully kitsch set and costume designs and a generally sweet-natured tone somewhat let down by the very broad, uninspired humor. Even wonderful Jennifer Coolidge can’t much elevate the routine writing as a cheerfully vulgar Yank visitor. The rich potential to cleverly satirize all things Austen is missed. Still, the actors are charming and the progress lively enough to make Austenland harmless if flyweight fun. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)

Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal Or, almost everything you ever wanted to know about the guy who inspired all those “Free Mumia” rallies, though Abu-Jamal’s status as a cause célèbre has become somewhat less urgent since his death sentence — for killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981 — was commuted to life without parole in 2012. Stephen Vittoria’s doc assembles an array of heavy hitters (Alice Walker, Giancarlo Esposito, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Emory Douglas) to discuss Abu-Jamal’s life, from his childhood in Philly’s housing projects, to his teenage political awakening with the Black Panthers, to his career as a popular radio journalist — aided equally by his passion for reporting and his mellifluous voice. Now, of course, he’s best-known for the influential, eloquent books he’s penned since his 1982 incarceration, and for the worldwide activists who’re either convinced of his innocence or believe he didn’t receive a fair trial (or both). All worthy of further investigation, but Long Distance Revolutionary is overlong, fawning, and relentlessly one-sided — ultimately, a tiresome combination. (2:00) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones Adapted from the first volume of Cassandra Clare’s bestselling YA urban fantasy series, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones follows young Clary Fray (Lily Collins) through her mother’s disappearance, the traumatic discovery of her supernatural  heritage, and her induction into the violent demon-slaying world of Shadowhunters.  This franchise-launching venture is unlikely to win any new converts with its flimsy acting, stilted humor, and clichéd action. It will probably also disappoint diehard fans, since it plays fast and loose with the mythology and plot of the novel, with crucial details and logical progressions left by the wayside for no clear reason. It’s never particularly awful — except for a few plot twists that fall wincingly, hilariously flat — but it’s hard to care about the perfectly coiffed, emotionally clueless protagonists. Fantastic character actors Jared Harris, Lena Headey, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers are all dismally underused, though at least Harris gets to exercise a bit of his vaguely irksome British charm. (2:00) (Sam Stander)

The World’s End The final film in Edgar Wright’s “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy” finally arrives, and the TL:DR version is that while it’s not as good as 2004’s sublime zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead, it’s better than 2007’s cops vs. serial killers yarn Hot Fuzz. That said, it’s still funnier than anything else in theaters lately. Simon Pegg returns to star and co-write (with Wright); this time, the script’s sinister bugaboo is an invasion of body snatchers — though (as usual) the conflict is really about the perils of refusing to actually become an adult, the even-greater perils of becoming a boring adult, and the importance of male friendships. Pegg plays rumpled fuck-up Gary, determined to reunite with the best friends he’s long since alienated for one more crack at their hometown’s “alcoholic mile,” a pub crawl that ends at the titular beer joint. The easy chemistry between Pegg and the rest of the cast (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan) elevates what’s essentially a predictable “one crazy night” tale, with a killer soundtrack of 1990s tunes, slang you’ll adopt for your own posse (“Let’s Boo-Boo!”), and enough hilarious fight scenes to challenge This is the End to a bro-down of apocalyptic proportions. (1:49) (Cheryl Eddy)

You’re Next The hit of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival’s midnight section — and one that’s taken its sweet time getting to theaters — indie horror specialist (2010’s A Horrible Way to Die, 2007’s Pop Skull, 2012’s V/H/S) Adam Wingard’s feature isn’t really much more than a gussied-up slasher. But it’s got vigor, and violence, to spare. An already uncomfortable anniversary reunion for the wealthy Davison clan plus their children’s spouses gets a lot more so when dinner is interrupted by an arrow that sails through a window, right into someone’s flesh. Immediately a full on siege commences, with family members reacting with various degrees of panic, selfishness. and ingenuity, while an unknown number of animal-masked assailants prowl outside (and sometimes inside). Clearly fun for its all-star cast and crew of mumblecore-indie horror staples, yet preferring gallows’ humor to wink-wink camp, it’s a (very) bloody good ride. (1:36) (Dennis Harvey)

Sublime nonsense: extended interview with Wet the Hippo’s John Gilkey

Sue Vaughan
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5
Sublime nonsense: extended interview with Wet the Hippo’s John Gilkey

Note: this is an extended version of an interview that appears in this week’s paper.
 
The sets are gone, and the costumes, and that giant blue-and-yellow tent. Master clown and performance maker John Gilkey has ended his fourth stint with Cirque du Soleil since 1996. But if the wiry, often wild-haired Gilkey and his Muppet-like mug are no strangers to the big time, they move just as ferociously through a bare stage in a small venue wearing not much more than, these days, a bushy beard.
 
It’s been three years since Gilkey last performed in San Francisco — flanked by comedians Alec Jones-Trujillo and Donny Divanian, the deadpan naïfs of his avant-comedy trio, We Are Nudes. Just as the very funny yet vaguely unnerving, off-center style of Nudes occupied some indeterminate territory between sketch comedy and Dadaist destruction, Gilkey’s latest venture — the Los Angeles–based eight-member improvisational ensemble known as Wet the Hippo — takes its audience beyond the usual endpoints of improv.


Born out of his Idiot Workshop classes in clown, Wet the Hippo is a big brand new baby of a beast, only four months old but charging forward with gusto — and an edgy, searching brilliance Gilkey is clearly thrilled with. He is frankly in love with his cast members, with whom Gilkey interacts as director, prodding them from onstage and off. Ahead of their first tentative tour (a three-stop zero-budget swing through Arcata, Placerville, and San Francisco), Gilkey picked up the phone from his LA roost to talk Hippo-thetically.
 
SF Bay Guardian Wet the Hippo is quite a change from Cirque du Soleil, more low-to-the-ground, very much autonomous.
 
John Gilkey Yeah, what we’re doing now — there’s eight of us, there’s no budget. Yeah. Low-to-the-ground is a good way to put it.
 
SFBG It’s a big contrast, but maybe there are similarities?
 
JG One way I describe the show: I’m taking everything I learned from Cirque about the creation process they have — although I should be clear about that: The creation process changed after Franco [Dragone] left. But when Franco was still there. And also when I was on Franco’s creative team for [his independent Las Vegas spectacular] Le Rêve — I’ve taken that process and I’ve applied that to this ten-dollar-a-ticket show with eight people. It’s an amazing contrast. And in some ways it’s quite similar. When I’m working with the performers, I work with them similarly to Franco in that he’s trying really to get to the nut of the person. His number one question is, “Who are you?” He’s trying to figure out what is it about this person that’s interesting. Their strengths, their weaknesses, their physicality, their voice, all this stuff — how can we magnify this person into an interesting stage presence?

I do that with my little cast here. It’s why I’ll do things like try to play with the juxtapositions — surreal qualities that Franco looks for, taking things that don’t belong together and squishing them together, layering the mise-en-scène, so you’ve got different things going on. Things that if you don’t hit it just right they conflict or distract. But if you get it just right, in the pocket, somehow they’ll come together into a holistic focus.
 
SFBG It’s an improvised show, but it’s clearly not the Harold — or other improv forms we’re familiar with.
 
JG It’s something new that we’re trying to do, so we’re learning about it, discovering it as we go forward, as we search. It’s an evolving process. But what I’m looking for as the director, both offstage and onstage — or the conductor/director when I’m onstage — is to try to get everybody buzzing, ringing, in tune, and then see how they harmonize. I think when we hit, it is music. It’s on a level you can’t quite put into words. This is when we succeed. We don’t always succeed. Part of the show is us searching for that, which is also fun. We play a lot with success and failure. When we’re failing we try to really make sure that we acknowledge it and somehow use it to our advantage.
 
SFBG How can failure work to your advantage?
 
JG One thing we’re discovering is that the highs aren’t as high if the lows aren’t as low. So that’s one reason to fail. And I tell people when we’re rehearsing or in the classes that I teach (all of this came out of these classes): This is the spirit of clown. You’re always looking to get yourself into danger. You want to be in danger. That’s where the drama really comes. Instead of pretending, we try to really get into danger.
 
SFBG It seems that really good clown toys with disaster, really, or death, ultimately. It’s horror and laughter at once in the face of mortal truth.
 
JG Yeah, absolutely death. There’s this beautiful book, I don’t know if you ever read it, The Death and Resurrection Show. It’s out of print. You sometimes can get it online for like 200 bucks. Rogan Taylor. Anyway, his thought is that all modern entertainment can be traced back to early shamanism, to healers, and that even many modern performers have gone through something like the shaman’s journey. In fact, it’s the same as the hero’s journey — you get taken away from the place you know, you get torn asunder, you go through this process of learning how to put yourself back together, then you go back to this place that you’re originally from, and you share what you’ve learned. You learn about Charlie Chaplin growing up poor and unhealthy and having to survive that kind of childhood, and then anything that he creates is infused with those lessons he learned.

So death is always a part of it. We talk about dying onstage, when we’re doing comedy. It’s super visceral. We want to touch people on as many levels as we can.
 
SFBG In the show, you’re onstage and off as the director-conductor, prodding people. Where has that come from? Your work with Franco? Your work in the Idiot Workshop?
 
JG Yes, exactly. It’s inspired by my work with Franco and how Franco worked with the performers in Cirque. In turn, I think Franco got a lot of inspiration from working with guys like Philippe Gaulier, who was originally a teacher at the [École Jacques Lecoq] in Paris, and eventually went off on his own. He and Lecoq and this guy Pierre Byland were all credited with developing the modern clown form. So to be fair, Franco was heavily influenced by that. We, influenced by Franco, were in class and in rehearsals really trying to push the performers into the place where they don’t want to be — again, getting back to this danger and death idea. It’s that that’s where they become vulnerable, and that’s when you really see who they are.

So in rehearsals we often talked about am I going to be part of it, or do we get rid of me before we go onstage? As things developed, we [found] that with me there we could get into more danger — because I could help us get out of it. And I could push the performers into danger by being onstage. Also it just added a weird, wild element that was hard to define for the public. It kept the questions going, which felt engaged. There’s no fourth wall, so we want the public always to be engaged. When they’re not, that’s when we’re done.

In fact, all of the performers, except for the musician, have a fair amount of improv experience. And they’ve all felt limited by improv, because despite what it sounds like, there’s a lot of structure in improv. In terms of rules, but there’s also an imposed structure in terms of how you play as an actor, what’s accepted and what’s not. If you go too far, you freak out your fellow performers. So you have to stay in a particular window of commitment. There are certain emotional colors that you can share, and certain colors that you can’t, because otherwise you just freak people out and they don’t know how to follow you.

But we push to real extremes. I think that’s one of the things that makes us kind of special, that there’s this trust among us. We can go super far and the other [actor] can match us, no matter how far we go. We challenge each other with that.
 
SFBG This reminds me of a solo piece of yours, the one where you’re running in slow motion to a swelling score and you get shot down, and you get back up and get shot down again, and it goes on and on and on. It’s hilarious, at first, and then it’s something else, something more. You pass through the laughter to a mixture of horror and beauty.
 
JG Right. And that’s our goal. We want to find those moments. And we realize that to do that we have to push super far. It’s like when sense becomes nonsense, but somehow makes more sense. Earlier, in the beginning of the conversation, we were saying it becomes musical when we’re hitting. That musical quality is the sublime, another way to say it. It’s resonating on so many levels that we’re not quite sure; we’re not accustomed to processing it emotionally.
 
SFBG This is an exploration that goes beyond the usual endpoints — something riskier, unknown?
 
JG In standard improv, in standard comedy, you’re going for the laugh, always. I believe there’s something that is greater than the laugh. Maybe the easiest way to say it is that it’s the sublime. And the way to get to the sublime is to ask an actor to play at their most genius level—either absolute smartest or absolute stupidest. It’s not a linear progression from stupid to genius; it’s circular. It’s where they meet. It’s where the genius in you meets the idiot in you that you become so beautiful that you hit sublime. It’s beyond laughter. It’s the moment where you get your mind blown.
 
WET THE HIPPO

Mon/26-Tue/27, 7:30pm, $10 (advance tickets here)

Venue TBD (“Look for the skinny violinist at 22nd St and Valencia at 7:30pm; you will be escorted to the venue from there”), SF

www.wetthehippo.com

The Performant: Surrender to Dorothy

Sue Vaughan
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2

San Francisco’s invasion of Canada has begun

On my first day in Alberta, Canada I am greeted by gracious Edmontonians bearing platters of smoked meats, a local tradition perhaps, and upon joining my reconnaissance troop, the small but mighty Naked Empire Bouffon Company, who I’m stage-managing for their one-month Fringe Festival tour, we head down to the 32nd Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival headquarters to discover what we can about the territory. The Edmonton Fringe is the second largest in the world after Edinburgh (the original), attracting over a half-million people to the festival site, and hosting over 200 performing companies over the course of 11 days. Mixed in with the vast throng of performers from around the world, a small regiment of infiltrators from the Bay Area have scattered themselves throughout the festival grounds and venues, a quiet invasion of quirky monologists and seasoned storytellers.

And Naked Empire of course, whose confrontational buffooning offers an entirely different definition of Fringe theatre.

Once briefed, we spread out into the Old Strathcona neighborhood to make ourselves known. Old Strathcona is one of those sweetly-preserved old town areas filled with historic wood and brick buildings, cute vintage boutiques, head shops, pubs with names like “Filthy McNasty’s” and “The Tilted Kilt,” as well as many of the city’s theaters and clubs. But what catches our eyes most immediately are the community signposts and storefront windows already covered with Fringe show posters and flyers, although the festival won’t open for another three days. We’re lucky we’re so early, there’re still a few empty spots we can claim as our own with a stack of posters and reams of packing tape. The Naked Empire conquest of Canada has officially begun.

Over the next few days I keep an eye out for evidence of our Bay Area comrades. Some shows are familiar to me, such as David Caggiano’s Jurassic Ark, which won a “Best Of” award at the 2011 San Francisco Fringe, and Annette Roman’s Hitler’s Li’l Abomination, which plays the same venue as Naked Empire — the Yardbird Suite, a volunteer-run Jazz Club during the year. Others are performers I’ve seen in previous shows, such as Pi Clowns, here with a stripped-down, three-person venture entitled De(tour), and Randy Rutherford with Walk Like a Man, a low-key, heartfelt solo show combining folk music and reminiscence. Still others are performers I haven’t yet seen in the Bay Area, so it was fun to catch them across the border instead: Howard Petrick on riding the rails in Never Own Anything You Have to Paint or Feed, and Barbara Selfridge in Zero Tolerance: Sex, Math, and Seizures.

Out of all of us, Rutherford is the performer who’s most seasoned on the Canadian Fringe, a linked circuit of 22 individual festivals with staggered starting dates stretching across the continent, making it possible for a Fringe artist to start touring in June in Montreal (or May, in Orlando, Florida), and travel west all summer long, hitting multiple festivals along on the way. Performing his solo shows on the circuit since the late 1990s, Rutherford has won 21 “Best Of Fringe” awards, and is one of the rare performers from the United States to really tap into the potential rewards the Canadian Fringe has to offer. The irony, of course, is that he’s much better known in Canada than in his own hometown, as are many of the Fringe famous.

As for Naked Empire, our second show is today, so it’s still early to tell whether or not we’ll be joining those ranks or not, but stay tuned. The Edmonton Fringe is just beginning and there are dozens of stories yet to tell.

Wanna Fringe vicariously through us? Follow @enkohl and @NakdEmprBouffon on the twit-thing for updates and gossip.

Celebrating food (and the food biz) at La Cocina’s Food and Entrepreneurship Conference

Sue Vaughan
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La Cocina — known for its ability to break down cultural barriers through food and for aiding low-income food entrepreneurs in their journey to sustainability — drew many fresh faces to its fourth annual Food and Entrepreneurship Conference Sun/18. The conference wrapped up a busy weekend for the organization, which also hosted the fifth annual San Francisco Street Food Festival Sat/17.

The all-day conference, held at SOMArts Cultural Center, was a mixing bowl of talented women cooks, curious food-business pioneers, new volunteers, and delicious food. Needless to say, the atmosphere was buzzing.

The theme was centered around work, women, and food. Three panels throughout the day featured business owners, food writers, and urban food-access coordinators, who discussed their inspirations for cooking, how to catch a food writer’s attention, and how to provide affordable food to urban landscapes, among other topics.

Carlos Rivera, director of Radio Laser Los Angeles, a family-centered Latino radio station based in Los Angeles, said he came to soak up La Cocina’s mission and hopes to spread it in the LA area.

“We’re discovering what they’re doing here. The most important thing is culture,” he said, adding that the LA area would benefit tremendously from La Cocina’s services. “There is a division of culture. We [Los Angeles] will need three or four La Cocinas. Thousands of people come to these seminars, but only a few catch the idea — culinary culture with fresh, healthy foods.”

The sharing of cultures is one goal that La Cocina and the businesses within it hit dead-on. It’s certainly true of Chiefo Chukwudebe, chef and owner of Chiefo’s Kitchen, with wares available at La Cocina’s Ferry Building kiosk, among other locations.

Chukwudebe spoke at the event about her culinary journey and her inspirations. She specializes in home-cooked Nigerian dishes like grilled suya chicken (“marinated in fresh ginger garlic and roasted peanut sauce and coated with West African peanut pepper spice rub,” according to the Chiefo’s Kitchen website). Another customer favorite is her take on Scotch eggs.

“Not a lot of people know about Nigerian food,” said Chukwudebe, who’s been with La Cocina for three years. “Most of what they know [about Nigeria] is from the news. But the best way to get to know a culture is through food. My goal is to bring the best of West Africa to the Bay Area. I want people to taste Africa, to taste the sunshine. There’s more to food than what’s on the plate.”

She is glad to be a part of La Cocina and said the business brings the issues of food to the forefront, and above all, provides her with a network of fellow cooks and owners.

“Most important to me is the community of women business owners providing support,” she said. “It’s hard work, but I wouldn’t change it.”

The event drew in people who are new to the food business and others who hope to jump in soon, including an Oakland resident who preferred not to give her name for professional reasons. She hopes to quit her job and start a community food space, kitchen, and market place in Oakland later this year, and she’s enjoyed drawing up ambitious plans for her future sustainable food business.

“It’s been fun connecting with people who are excited about making it happen,” she said, noting that she was inspired by the food owner speakers at the event. “People are doing pieces of what I want to do.”

Throughout the day, between panels and during coffee breaks, there was lots of upbeat chatter and excited conversations. Anna Rakoczy, a new business owner and founder of Homemade, an organization that holds weekly healthy cooking meet ups for sustainable weight loss, was especially enthused about the event. La Cocina, she noted, “helps entrepreneurs who are cooking real food with real ingredients.”

To the fit Stanford graduate, helping others become healthy is not just a job. “For me, to actually show people how easy it is to achieve weight loss and a sustainable lifestyle just by eating delicious, healthy, natural, real food … that, for me, is so inspiring and exciting,” said Rakoczy.

Luis Gonzales, a Treasure Island resident who volunteered at the event, aptly captured the spirit of La Cocina, and its small food businesses. “People look for homemade food and the public helps them [small food businesses] survive,” he said. “It’s like a symbiotic relationship.”

Never enough hours in the weekend to see all these NEW MOVIES

Sue Vaughan
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Quite a few openings this week, although it seems like 10-plus new movies is becoming the norm these days. (At least there’s no big film festival to distract you from the regular ol’ cinema at the moment.) In the spirit of efficiency I did a combo-platter review of sci-fi chiller Europa Report; Johnnie To’s latest, Drug War; Tenebre, a 1982 Dario Argento giallo that’s screening at the Roxie tonight; and doc Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector, which plays the Balboa. Also at length, Dennis Harvey takes a look at Shirley Clarke’s freshly restored 1967 doc Portrait of Jason, also screening at the Roxie.

Ain’t enough for you? Read on for Kick-Ass 2, Jobs, and more on the week’s fresh crop of flicks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7MdQjqRjyw

The Artist and the Model The horror of the blank page, the raw sensuality of marble, and the fresh-meat attraction of a new model — just a few of the starting points for this thoughtful narrative about an elderly sculptor finding and shaping his possibly finest and final muse. Bedraggled and homeless beauty Mercè (Aida Folch) washes up in a small French town in the waning days of World War II and is taken in by a kindly woman (Claudia Cardinale), who seems intent on pleasantly pimping her out as a nude model to her artist husband (Jean Rochefort). As his former model, she knows Mercè has the type of body he likes — and that she’s capable of restoring his powers, in more ways than one, if you know what I mean. Yet this film by Fernando Trueba (1992’s Belle Époque) isn’t that kind of movie, with those kinds of models, especially when Mercè turns out to have more on her mind than mere pleasure. Done up in a lustrous, sunlit black and white that recalls 1957’s Wild Strawberries, The Artist and the Model instead offers a steady, respectful, and loving peek into a process, and unique relationship, with just a touch of poetry. (1:41) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O7b4nTRy2A

Blue Exorcist: The Movie Though it’s spawned from Kazue Kato’s manga-turned-TV-series, familiarity with the source material is not necessary to enjoy Blue Exorcist: The Movie‘s supernatural charms. Set in True Cross Academy Town — named for the Hogwarts-ish school of exorcism at its center — the film opens with a folk tale about an adorable demon that wrecked an entire town by turning all of its inhabitants into lazy slackers. The creature was eventually captured, but nobody knows where it’s been hiding — until boyish exorcist-in-training Rin, half-demon himself, encounters a suspiciously adorable critter while chasing yet another demon, this one huge and prone to damaging city blocks (and cracking open things that should remain sealed in the process). Trouble ahead! Blue Exorcist does contain some yep-this-is-anime moments (there’s a powerful female exorcist … who wears a tiny bikini top that barely contains her enormous bazongas), but it’s mostly fun fantasy, with a sly sense of humor (“Let’s put a beatdown on these Tokyo demons!”) and some endearingly flawed heroes. (1:28) Four Star. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpFNTvA93iY

In a World… Lake Bell (Childrens Hospital, How to Make It in America) writes, directs, and stars in this comedy about a women who sets her sights on a career in movie-trailer voiceovers. (1:33)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDHH1eXKmA

Jobs With the upcoming Aaron Sorkin adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography nipping at its heels, Jobs feels like a quickie — true to Silicon Valley form, someone realized that the first to ship can end up defining the market. But as this independent biopic goes for each easy cliché and facile cinematic device, you can practically hear Steve Jobs himself spinning in the ether somewhere. Ashton Kutcher as Jobs lectures us over and over again about the virtues of quality product, but little seemed to have penetrated director Joshua Michael Stern as he distracts with a schmaltzy score (he should have stuck to Bob Dylan, Joe Walsh, and era-defining AOR), and relies on corny slow-motion to dramatize the passing of a circuit board. The fact that Kutcher might be the best thing here — he clearly throws himself into impersonating the Apple icon, from his intense, upward-glancing glare to his hand gestures — says a bit about the film itself, as it coasts on its self-made man-captain of enterprise narrative arc. Dispensing with much about the man Jobs became outside of Apple, apart from a few nods to his unsavory neglect of friends and offspring, and simply never acknowledging his work at, say, Pixar, Jobs, in the end, comes off as a lengthy infomercial for the Cupertino heavyweight. (2:02) (Kimberly Chun)

Kick-Ass 2 Even an ass-kicking subversive take on superherodom runs the risk of getting its rump tested, toasted, roasted — and found wanting. Too bad the exhilaratingly smarty-pants, somewhat mean-spirited Kick-Ass (2010), the brighter spot in a year of superhero-questioning flicks (see also: Super), has gotten sucker-punched in all the most predictable ways in its latest incarnation. Dave, aka Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Mindy, otherwise known as Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), are only half-heartedly attempting to live normal lives: they’re training on the sly, mostly because Mindy’s new guardian, Detective Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), is determined to restore her childhood. Little does he realize that Mindy only comes alive when she pretends she’s battling ninjas at cheerleader tryouts — or is giving her skills a workout by unhanding, literally and gleefully, a robber. Kick-Ass is a little unnerved by her semi-psychotic enthusiasm for crushing bad guys, but he’s crushing, too, on Mindy, until Marcus catches her in the Hit-Girl act and grounds her in real life, where she has to deal with some really nasty characters: the most popular girls in school. So Kick-Ass hooks up with a motley team of would-be heroes inspired by his example, led Colonel Stars and Stripes (an almost unrecognizable Jim Carrey), while old frenemy Chris, aka Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) begins to find his real calling — as a supervillain he dubs the Motherfucker — and starts to assemble his own gang of baddies. Unlike the first movie, which passed the whip-smart wisecracks around equally, Mintz-Plasse and enabler-bodyguard Javier (John Leguizamo) get most of the choice lines here. Otherwise, the vigilante action gets pretty grimly routine, in a roof-battling, punch-’em-up kind of way. A romance seems to be budding between our two young superfriends, but let’s skip part three — I’d rather read about it in the funny pages. (1:43) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uBXH_DLxsU

Lee Daniels’ The Butler Forest Whitaker stars as the White House’s longtime butler in this based-on-a-true-story tale, with the added bonus of some creative POTUS casting (John Cusack as Richard Nixon; Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan; Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower). (1:53)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-mO5AMZDMo

Paranoia A young go-getter (Liam Hemsworth) gets drawn into the world of corporate espionage thanks to a feud between evil tech billionaires (Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman). (1:46)

Final Burning Man ticket sale brings total to 61,000 sold for $23 mil

Sasha Cuttler
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11

With the final official Burning Man ticket sale going off without a hitch yesterday, Bay Area burners are now in mad preparation mode, with DPW setup crews arriving on the playa this week, early art crews heading out next week, and everyone else anxiously awaiting the official start of the annual Nevada desert bacchanal in 27 days.

With the US Bureau of Land Management recently awarded the event a permit and population cap of 68,000 — a big jump from last year’s 60,000 cap — Black Rock City LLC decided to bump up yesterday’s “OMG! Sale” ticket offering from the initially planned 1,000 up to 4,000.

“The sales yesterday went breathtakingly smoothly,” event spokesperson Jim Graham tells the Guardian.

Yesterday’s ticket sales brings the total number of tickets sold up to 61,000. Accounting for the expensive early sale tickets (3,000 at $650 each), low-income tickets (4,000 at $190), and 54,000 at this year’s standard $380 price, that brings the LLC’s gross revenue from ticket sales (not counting fees) to $23.23 million. The LLC also gives away thousands of tickets each year to volunteers, art crews, and VIPs.

No wonder this ambitious organization could afford to hire Graham as yet another official spokeperson, joining Megan Miller (US Sen. Barbara Boxer’s former flak) and longtime spokesperson Marian Goodell, an LLC board member.  

After last year’s stressful scramble for tickets, availability seems to be pretty good this year. Craigslist has lots of tickets still available for face value, and while Stubhub is still listing 223 tickets starting at $550 each (burners consider it bad form to charge more than face value), anecdotal evidence suggests that’s just wishful thinking by scalpers still hoping for a big score.

My advice: don’t pay more than face value, and if you’re willing to wait until the very last minute, you’ll probably get one for even cheaper than that.

Or as Graham told us, “Everybody who wants to get to the event will certainly get a ticket.”

The Performant: The Stiltwalkers Union

Sue Vaughan
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In an iconic sequence from Winsor McCay’s eccentrically beautiful Little Nemo in Slumberland, Nemo’s bed sprouts elongated legs and strolls through the city as Nemo and his cantankerous friend Flip cling to the bedsheets and try not to fall out. Whenever I see performers on stilts, the exaggerated limbs of that unexpectedly animated furniture are one of the first things that spring to my mind, their death-defying acrobatics furthering the resemblance to an unnerving dream sequence.

Tapping into both the whimsical and the deeply unsettling nature of stiltwalking as art form, San Francisco’s Carpetbag Brigade and Nemcatacoa Teatro from Colombia performed their unique brand of physical theater in tandem over the weekend, along with Tucson, AZ’s VerboBala and Hojarasca Andina from Colombia, as part of their transcontinental “Bi-Cultural Road Show.”

At Dance Mission, Carpetbag Brigade’s Callings featured a quintet of stiltwalkers, suggesting the virtually alien clime of the deep sea with nothing more than a few rowboat paddles and a soundtrack heavy on implication. A trio of overall-clad performers with impossibly long legs moved in and out of the center point of the stage, paddles aloft, menacingly brandished as weapons, then put to more utilitarian purpose as propellers. A single performer clad all in white held another aloft like a seagull skimming the surface of the waves. Performers recreated the motion of rolling waves and tempestuous storms in synchronized group groundwork and intense, contact improv-style duets.

An innocuous wooden swing on a sturdy rope lost all innocence, serving both as life preserver and obstacle to the performers as they grasped for it from the “sea” and became entangled in it, singly and in pairs, as the pre-recorded music shifted from darkly ominous underwater electronica to sprightly accordion tunes to dramatic strings and clattering percussion in the style of Cirque de Soleil.

Meanwhile, outside the 24th Street BART station, Nemcatacoa Teatro was embarking on a site-specific exploration of the area as part of its “Landscape Re-Invention Society” series. Like reanimated Diggers or extraterrestrial visitors, the troupe turned the mundane into occasion for wonder. Painted black-and-white and clad all in fluttering white garments (streaked, perhaps inadvertently, by their body paint), the stiltwalking group towered above the crowd and many of the familiar landmarks of the area: the metal fences surrounding the station entrances, the busses pulling up to the stop outside El Farolito, the looming McDonalds across the street.

Followed by Hojarasca Andina, a trio of enigmatic musicians with pan pipes, the intrepid bunch felt their way boldly from corner to corner, gazing in puzzlement through windows, hugging trees, tumbling across pavement, and lounging along the BART station walls (the latter segment inadvertently bringing to mind the recent tragic breakdown of Colombian acrobat Yeiner Perez though fortunately for all, the mood is strictly playful, not aggressive), until at last they came to rest, posed flat against the vibrantly-painted mural outside Dance Mission.

Sorry you missed the spectacle? Watch all four companies (Carpetbag Brigade, Nemcatacoa Teatro, VerboBala, and Hojarasca Andina) in their collaborative piece Dios de la Adrenalina at Union Square Sun/11 at 2 p.m., and Yerba Buena Gardens on August 17 at 2:30 p.m.

(Don’t panic! The Performant will be on hiatus for one week as she packs her bags for the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit. Check out her tweets for up-to-the-minute dispatches from the Great North @enkohl)

Buuuurrrrp! Comedy Central’s “Drunk History” stumbles through San Francisco

Sue Vaughan
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1
Buuuurrrrp! Comedy Central’s “Drunk History” stumbles through San Francisco

Calling all boozehounds! Tomorrow night, Comedy Central’s popular Drunk History series takes on the great, liquid courage-infused city of San Francisco.

Host Derek Waters — a veteran guest of the San Francisco International Film Festival, with this past year’s “Inside the Drunken Mind of Derek Waters” and 2010’s “A Drunken Evening with Derek Waters” (sense the theme?) — guides this weekly stumble through history, which features sloshed, slurring storytellers narrating re-enactments of great (or not-so-great) moments in time.

For the San Francisco theme, we get the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant (played by Lisa Bonet), popularly known as “the Mother of Human Rights in California,” or — as storyteller Artemis Pebdani of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia calls her — “the head bitch in charge.” Later, Pebdani confuses Godfather of Soul James Brown with abolitionist John Brown, and tries to blame sudden fart noises on the chair she’s sitting in.

Moving on, actor Derrick Beckles spins the tale of Mark Twain (played by Eastbound & Down’s Steve Little), “master provocateur,” whose inflammatory San Francisco newspaper articles made him “straight-up America’s Most Wanted.” We learn how Twain came to write his breakthrough story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (apparently there was a laptop involved), with an assist from Waters playing a drunk as narrated by a drunk. Meta!

Finally, comedian Natasha Leggero breaks down the Patty Hearst saga, with the infamous heiress-kidnap victim-bank robber played by Kristen Wiig in a series of, uh, wigs. (Terry Crews cameos as a beefy SLA member. “Symbionese isn’t a word,” Leggero informs us. “They made it up.”) It’s a rambling tale, maybe the most rambling here, punctuated by a party scene where Waters does his first Jell-O shot, and a tequila-chugging Leggero drifts into her final thought: “[Patty Hearst] was really…attractive. [Long pause.] I have to get some water.”

Drunk History airs Tuesdays at 10pm on Comedy Central.

Can’t-miss treats at the upcoming SF Street Food Fest

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The smells of deliciousness were overwhelming. Where do we start?!

As Sam Love and I wandered around the La Cocina media preview for August 17’s San Francisco Street Food Festival, everywhere we looked there were delightful taste treats, colorful, fresh and also deep fried. I’ll take four of each, thank you.

We made the rounds, chatting with fantastic chefs who are living their dreams, whipping up flavors from around the world. We tried everything and, while we enjoyed it all, becoming clean plate champions many times over, there were three highlights that made our short list. If you don’t have the stomach to make it to all the vendors at the Street Food Festival, we’d recommend trying these first:

Chiefo’s Kitchen
Chiefo served plantain and chocolate bread pudding that was soft and heavenly, but also punched back with a sinful slap of rum. Chiefo’s Kitchen West African flavors are not to miss. Check her out at the Night Market!

Azalina’s Malaysian
I live for Azalina’s smile. She could hand me a slice of cold leftover pizza, and with that smile, it would taste like the most exquisite dish. The fact is, Azalina cooks with tremendous love and care, and eating her food is therapy for the soul. She is an amazing chef, from a long family line of street vendors from Penang, and her food explodes with the island’s spices, but also takes advantage of our freshest local California produce. She prepared sweet potato dumplings, decorated with colorful fruit and veggie bonnets. So yum!

Hella Vegan Eats
Two words: doughnut burger. Wait — it’s not what you’re thinking! It’s a doughnut sandwich stuffed with a beet and kamut patty, topped with kale, pickled red onions and dill weed, and squirted with secret sauce. It’s pretty much the cutest thing ever, perfectly balancing the most unhealthy and healthy food items in a few giant bites, and worth unhinging your jaw for. Vegan can definitely be bad-ass.

Photos by Bowerbird Photography

Woody does SF in “Blue Jasmine” … plus more new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Woody does SF in “Blue Jasmine” … plus more new movies!

Remember that brief, exciting period last year when Woody Allen sightings were being breathlessly reported on ’round town, particularly in the Mission? Here’s your chance to see Allen’s take on San Francisco (it ain’t exactly glossy) in Blue Jasmine, which boasts a stellar performance by likely Oscar nominee Cate Blanchett as someone you would not want to have as a houseguest. Dennis Harvey’s take on the film here.

Also opening today: a doc about Napster, a so-so biopic of political theorist Hannah “Banality of Evil” Arendt, an action flick for Denzel Washington completists, and likely Oscar nominee (um…) Smurfs 2. What can I say…if you’re not a Woody Allen fan, it’s kind of a slower week. Read on for short reviews.

Downloaded The startlingly fast rise and even more abrupt demise of Napster is chronicled in this entertaining documentary by Alex Winter (yes, of Bill & Ted fame). Shawn Fanning dropped out of college in 1999 to work on an idea of greatly improving the then-tortuous downloading and sharing of MP3 files, soon moving to the Bay Area and drawing other friends (including co-founder Sean Parker) to launch Napster for real. When the program launched in mid-1999, it quickly took the world of music fans by storm, allowing any user to post or access any song for free — rapidly building a massive library that won tens of millions of fervent participants. But what the company saw as a “community building” global-record-swapping-party was viewed by an ill-prepared and appalled record industry itself as blatant copyright infringement. Artists themselves were sharply divided, with some (like Seal here) thinking Napster brought “true democracy back into the music business” while others, most notably Metallica and Dr. Dre (who both sued, as did various labels) loudly proclaimed that it was blatant theft of their work. (It’s worth noting that these were among the comparatively few acts who’ve gotten rich rather than screwed by the biz.) The somewhat one-sided thesis in this doc (on which Fanning is an executive producer) supports the founders’ continued plaint that “sharing” wasn’t “piracy” and that they always intended to integrate themselves with the established industry as legitimate fee-charing digital distributors — though each side says the other wouldn’t negotiate. In any case, after little more than two years, Napster was shut down by court decisions — though file sharing continues, and the industry’s poor adjustment to new technologies has seen it in fiscal freefall ever since. Napster staff, musicians, executives, and others offer their two cents here, with DJ Spooky providing an original score. (1:46) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIUbQR9b1P8

Hannah Arendt New German Cinema’s Margarethe von Trotta (1975’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1986’s Rosa Luxemburg) delivers this surprisingly dull biopic about the great German-Jewish political theorist and the heated controversy around her New Yorker article (and subsequent book) about Israel’s 1961 trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann. Played with dignified, slightly vulnerable countenance by the inimitable Barbara Sukowa, Arendt travels from her teaching job and cozy expat circles in New York to Jerusalem for the trial. There she comes face to face with the “banality of evil” in Eichmann, the petty careerist of the Holocaust, forcing her to “try and reconcile the shocking mediocrity of the man with his staggering deeds.” This led her to further insights into the nature of modern society, and triggered a storm of outrage and vitriol — in particular from the Commentary crowd of future neocons — all of which is clearly of relevance today, and the impetus for von Trotta’s revisiting this famous episode. But the film is too mannered, too slick, too formulaic —burdened by a television-friendly combination of posture and didacticism, and bon mots from famous and about famous figures in intellectual and literary history to avoid being leaden and tedious. A mainstream film, in other words, for a very unconventional personality and dissident intellectual. While not exactly evil, there’s something dispiriting in so much banality. (1:49) (Robert Avila)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQbSGLaVJ5c

The Smurfs 2 Look at it this way: any enterprise that employs Neil Patrick Harris can’t be all bad. (1:45)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyruH2JikwM

2 Guns Rob a bank of cartel cash, invade a naval base, and then throw down against government heavies — you gotta expect to find a few bullet-hole-sized gaps in the play-by-play of 2 Guns. The action flick is riddled with fun-sized pleasures — usually centered on the playful banter and effortless chemistry between stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg — and the clever knot of a narrative throws a twist or two in, before director Baltasar Kormákur (last year’s Wahlberg vehicle Contraband) simply surrenders to the tidal pull of action. After visiting Mexican mafia kingpin Papi (Edward James Olmos) and finding the head of their contact in a bag, Bobby (Washington) and Stig (Wahlberg) decide to hit Papi where he’ll feel it: the small border bank where his men have been making drops to safe deposit boxes. Much like Bobby and Stig’s breakfast-time diner gab fest, which seems to pick up where Vincent and Jules left off in Pulp Fiction (1994), as they trade barbs, truisms, and tells, there’s more going on than simply bank robbery foreplay. Both involved for different reasons: Bobby is an undercover DEA agent, and Stig is a masquerading navy officer. When the payout is 10 times the expected size, not only do Papi, Bobby’s contact Deb (Paula Patton), and Stig’s superior Quince (James Marsden) come calling, but so does mystery man Earl (Bill Paxton), who seems to be obsessed with following the money. We know, sort of, what’s in it for Bobby — all fully identifiable charm, as befits Washington, who makes it rain charisma with the lightest of touches. But Stig? The others? The lure of a major payday is supposed to sweep away all other loyalties, except a little bromantic bonding between two rogue sharp shooters, saddled, unfortunately, with not the sharpest of story lines. (1:49) (Kimberly Chun)

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