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No bombshell

Andrew Lam
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0
No bombshell

arts@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Small-screen hero

Andrew Lam
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0
Small-screen hero

arts@sfbg.com

FILM While he’s always kept a fairly low profile doing it, probably no director who calls the Bay Area home has balanced our penchant for documentary work and independence with a successful commercial (meaning Hollywood) career as gracefully, or as long, as John Korty. Now 75, the Marin resident is in the midst of a major retrospective — incredibly, his first — at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, which runs through December 4.

You’ve already missed his first feature (whimsical 1966 indie The Crazy-Quilt), his latest (veteran rock ‘n’ roller portrait John Allair Digs In!), and one of the most popular broadcast documentaries ever: 1977’s Who Are The DeBolts (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?), about a Piedmont, Calif. couple and their huge clan of mostly adopted children, many disabled war orphans. But there’s still plenty left that conveys the diversity of Korty’s output, even if it just scratches the surface of his nearly 50-year career — which began auspiciously enough with an Oscar nomination for 1964’s short anti-smoking satire Breaking the Habit.

That same year the native Hoosier moved with his Bolex to Stinson Beach. Filled with the era’s infinite youthful ambition, he made three features in fast succession, though despite all awards and admiring reviews, they took much longer actually getting released at a time when art house meant foreign films. The Crazy-Quilt mixed Chaplin-esque pathos with the antic and existential in its charting a dedicated cynic and a “girl who believed in everything” from meet-cute to shared grumpy old age. Likewise shot all over SF and Marin, 1967’s Funnyman had influential improv group the Committee member (and future sitcom staple) Peter Bonerz as a gifted comedian who’s a petulant boy-man offstage. Barely theatrically released in 1971, four years after its festival debut, its Rafael showing was probably its first local appearance in decades.

Korty had resisted Hollywood overtures since Crazy-Quilt, though he did work for Francis Ford Coppola’s then-fledgling American Zoetrope for a couple of years. In 1972, however, he commenced a prolific 26-year run of major-network TV movies, starting on a high note with odd utopian sci-fi fantasy The People (in which William Shatner restrains himself) and permanently-scarring teen cautionary tale Go Ask Alice.

Sometimes the material was a little schlocky (like 1991’s Suzanne Somers autobiographical dramatization Keeping Secrets, not to mention a little thing from 1984 called The Ewok Adventure), but more often his sights were set unusually high, with results sometimes among the very finest in the much disparaged telepic genre. Certainly considered such were two landmark films the Rafael shows for free over the next couple weeks: 1974’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, with Cicely Tyson as the ex-slave whose 100 years take her all the way to a 1960s civil rights march; and 1976’s Farewell to Manzanar, depicting America’s internment camps for Japanese-heritage citizens during World War II.

Once he’d crossed into broadcast, Korty had relatively few big-screen opportunities; the drippy 1978 Love Story sequel Oliver’s Story probably made him wish for even fewer. Getting a very rare revival at the Rafael is the more indie-sensibility ’76 Alex and the Gypsy, an offbeat if uneven comic romance between delightful Geneviève Bujold’s Roma woman and Jack Lemmon (basically playing Jack Lemmon) as her bail bondsman.

Korty’s longtime animation jones has rarely won much attention, despite its scattered presence in his filmography (like Funnyman‘s brief cartoon interludes). But it found full expression in 1983’s feature Twice Upon a Time, which closes the Rafael series. Regrettably underseen even by professed animation fanatics, a theatrical nonstarter, and DVD (let alone Blu-ray) holdout, it utilizes cut-out techniques Korty devised himself to follow “all purpose animal” Lorenzo, his sidekick Mum (who “speaks” in foley effects), and their fight to prevent evil Synonamess Botch from dropping “nightmare bombs” into the subconscious minds of sleepers worldwide. It’s a charming odyssey that recalls 1968’s Yellow Submarine in applying adult wit and design imagination to child-friendly ‘toonery.

As if all this weren’t rangy enough, a November 27 shorts program traverses ground from a 1961 documentary (The Language of Faces, chronicling a Quaker peace vigil at the Pentagon) to brief Sesame Street animations and 1974’s The Music School, a half-hour John Updike miniature from PBS’ American Short Stories series. *

“THE FILMS OF JOHN KORTY”

Through Dec. 4, $6.75–<\d>$10.25

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

(415) 454-1222

www.cafilm.org

 

Standing room only

Andrew Lam
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0
Standing room only

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE We go to dance performances to be entranced, or at least intrigued, by well-physicalized movement ideas. But it helps if choreographers work with collaborators who not only enhance basic concepts but also bring their own perspectives to the dance-making process. Two programs last weekend, Liss Fain Dance’s playfully evocative The False and True Are One and LEVYdance’s delicious ROMP, showed just how successful the result of that kind of cooperation can be. Interestingly, Liss Fain and Benjamin Levy also contributed to the recent trend of abandoning the proscenium theater — too expensive? Too hierarchical? Too restrictive? — in favor of “installations” in which audiences move around the performance space.

Choreographers seem to feel that nudging audiences out of their seats will engage them more actively because they can choose when they want to focus on something. Personally, I am not convinced that this process involves a viewer more intently. However, the format’s informality, its sense of being invited in, suggests a welcoming atmosphere that can make dance watching, at least for a time, a lot of fun.

Perhaps the greatest gain that the installation format offers is the closeness it offers between audience and dancers. To observe muscles stretching less than a foot away, to hear the breathing that accompanies a strenuous lift, and to see a tiny adjustment to balance and gravity that a dancer makes is a gift that a traditional theater cannot provide. What you loose in overall perspective is compensated for by the intimacy between observer and performer.

For that to happen, choreographers need designers who can create the appropriate environment. False and True‘s Matthew Antaky and ROMP‘s Jack Beuttler chose the square as a basic format. Both modulated the idea to support the choreography to excellent effect.

Antaky’s transparent fiberglass panels made for muted perspectives on the four squares within the bigger square that the dancers inhabited. The design looked a little like a board game and was airy enough to allow for a number of pathways for the dancers. Into the absolute center he placed a slightly raised podium — suggesting a private writing and thinking space — for narrator Nancy Shelby, whose reading of Lydia Davis’ musings set False and True‘s tone. Fain’s controlled yet free-flowing choreography for nine dancers — the uneven number was most refreshing given Antaky’s strict geometry — constantly shifted between all the available spaces and groupings. Dancers picked up and modified sequences in a game of unstated rules, but they also became part of the audience, watching their colleagues or listening intently to Shelby.

Beuttler’s square for the rambunctious ROMP at first suggested a town plaza in which people, i.e. the audience, had pulled chairs around into an informal café setting. In the latter part of the work, tables around the periphery reseated the audience banquet-style; they both framed a central performing area and then became the platform for a moving menu of passing delicacies as dancers slithered, cavorted, and leapt in close-up. The audience ate it up, laughing, talking, and taking pictures. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had tried tip the artists.

Levy’s fast-paced and exuberant choreography for himself, Mélodie Casta, and Scott Marlowe pulled in a group of nine auxiliary dancers — some of them still students — who raced and dove between the seated audience without a single misstep. Their energy was that of kids released at the end of the school year, but their discipline and exactitude was that of professionals. An intricately structured trio for Levy’s own dancers highlighted their eccentric individuality but gradually deepened into cheek-to-cheek slow dancing.

As for that audience participation that both choreographers wanted, Levy’s public lustily participated. But a funny thing happened during False and True. Despite the exhortation to move around, the audience mostly stood and sat. Seeing those dancers be so vigorous and intent and yet so quiet — Dan Wool’s score was a modicum of discreteness — cast a spell that you didn’t want to break.

A pitch and a swing

Andrew Lam
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1

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We went to see Moneyball. You know: We have soft spots in our hearts for baseball. Additionally, Hedgehog has a wet spot in her panties for Brad Pitt; and I in mine, truth be told, for Jonah Hill.

Before he lost the weight, mind you — although he’s pretty funny after, too.

Anyway, it was a good movie, and Jonah Hill was fat, and the popcorn was quite good, but still I had a nervous breakdown afterwards. No idea why. I think it had something to do with a shot near the end of the movie. Brad Pitt, as Billy Beane, driving on I-880 I believe, and through his window the stacks and stacks of cargo containers down the harbor. Maybe the familiarity was too familiar for comfort (I once had a panic attack on that exact stretch of freeway) or the bounce of the frame or the camera angle. Something. Something took the fight right out of me.

I tried to compose myself in the ladies room after. “I exist, therefore I am,” I wrote, on toilet paper. “Now,” I continued, plagiarizing shamelessly: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life …”

No. I composed and composed. I stole, I borrowed, I begged, I vandalized, I unraveled and unraveled, but could not find the little bouncy rubber ball at the center of things. Not even for the life of me. So, after a fairly normal amount of time had passed, I flushed and washed and walked back out into the lobby, all dry-eyed and dignified-like. Hedgehog smiled. We rode down the escalator together.

Nervous breakdowns are hard to explain.

“Sushi, or ramen?” she said. (We were after all in Japantown.)

I would have jumped at either, normally. I love the sushi. I love the ramen. But to give me a choice, at a time like this, was cruel and unusual. Or would have been, if she only knew what I was going through.

Nevertheless, I thought I would have something by the time we reached the bottom. If not an answer, a word. A question. A rubber ball. A look. Anything. But I could not, would not, Sam-I-Am. I was nothing but fear . . . of absolutely nothing. So paralyzed, so empty, that I could not lift my feet and was sucked like a stick-figured cutout into the machinery of it all, the gear and grind, sending me back up, undersided and undecided, crinkle, fold, and rip.

Hedgehog does not have patience for indecision, let alone cartoonery. “Ramen?” she said. “Or sushi.” As if changing the order of things would fix it for me.

I managed to say something. We were standing at the foot of the escalator, by the door. “I’m having a panic attack,” I said.

And — for those of you who can relate, so you know, there is something about calling your panic attack a panic attack, out loud and in the middle of it, that kind of diffuses the situation. Try it.

I was still scared and empty, but I could step again, at least, and think, and imagine food.

“Ramen,” I said. And say.

And we walked very slowly to Suzu. Probably for the best, we had to sit outside, which doesn’t mean outside outside. It means out in Japantown Center, instead of in the small, cozy, bustling restaurant. But at least we could sit right away and have a glass of water.

I had of course warned Hedgehog that anxiety and panic were possible parts of the package, although neither had really attacked me, as such, in a year or two. Now, while we waited on our spicy ramen (me) and Tokyo ramen (her), I tried to gauge whether she still loved me or not, or the same. And all the while I still wasn’t totally convinced that I wasn’t about to drop dead, either.

Love and life notwithstanding, what we learned that day was that, yo, we kinda needed each other. My ramen was so insanely spicy, and hers so ridiculously bland, that the only way either one of us could be quite satisfactorily nourished was to mix the two together.

And as we did, spoon by spoon, we relished the weirdness of eating outside of an indoor restaurant, in a mall, and gradually my heart beat, breathing, and dimensionality came back to me.

New favorite restaurant:

SUZU NOODLE HOUSE

Daily: 11:30 a.m.- 9 p.m

1825 Post St., SF.

(415) 346-5083

MC/V

Beer & wine

 

Tradition!

Andrew Lam
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3
Tradition!

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Row after row of sentimental — sometimes kitschy, sometimes renowned — vinyl albums are lining pristine white walls in a small storefront, waiting for the opening of a record store that will exist for just one month.

Quite possibly the world’s first Jewish pop-up record shop, it’s in San Francisco on the edge of Mission and Bernal, in rotating art-music space, Queens Nails.

Like flashes of nostalgic dreams, each cardboard cover at the shop is its own piece of art: there’s the colorful impressionist style square enclosing Fred Katz’s trippy 1958 klezmer-meets-folk record Folk Songs for Far Out Folk, the shelf above holds Johnny Mathis’ breathtaking Kol Nidre, along with the campy Mickey Katz album, Mish Mosh — the cover of which depicts the artist as a (hopefully kosher) butcher posing with both meat-links and brass instruments.

There also are brand new copies of the recently released Songs for the Jewish American Jet Set, a compilation of wildly varying tracks (surf rock from the Sabras, deep soul Morrocan-born singer Jo Amar doing “Ani Ladodi”) culled from the archives of now-defunct Tikva Records, a Jewish label that was around from 1950 through 1973.

The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation released Songs for the Jewish American Jet Set, and is hosting the pop-up store, also dubbed Tikva Records. The group, whose mission focuses on preserving the 20th century Jewish experience through recorded sound, also has put out a number of reissues and hosted live music events in the past — this store will encompass both.

“When we initially did the reissues, we went out and found a lot of the artists on these records and we realized we really wanted to tell the stories of the music,” explains David Katznelson, the music biz veteran behind Birdman Records, president of the San Francisco Appreciation Society, and one of four Idelsohn Society co-founders.

So, in addition to selling vintage records and reissues, the store also will play host to a series of Jewish and Hebraic-themed live acts. Beginning Dec. 1 with the official opening party, artists will drop by for free, by donation performances: on Dec. 2, founding Los Lobos member Steve Berlin will original score a silent film, Los Angeles band Fool’s Gold will celebrate the release of its second LP with an in-store performance Dec. 7, classic duo the Burton Sisters will perform live for only the second time in the past five decades on Dec. 8, members of Dengue Fever will play live Dec. 10. And plenty more follow.

The Chanukah candle lighting ceremonies will begin with a performance by Zach Rogue — the leader of Oakland’s Rogue Wave who recently released Come Back To Us under the name Release the Sunbird. While some of the others acts were a natural fit in the Tikva lineup, Rogue was one that surprised me — his music has always seemed rather secular to me, so I asked him about it. Turns out, it will be his first time playing a Chanukah event. So will he play Rogue Waves songs, Release the Sunbird jams, or traditional Chanukah melodies? “I’m trying to figure that out now. I wouldn’t say that Chanukah songs are necessarily the top my repertoire.”

He explained his reasoning for participating in the event, “When I think back in terms of what got me into wanting to play the guitar, my parents raised me on psychedelic, ’60s British invasion stuff, but in terms of the actual acoustic guitar, a lot of it was Jewish summer camp — Camp Swig in Saratoga,” adding, “I was fascinated with the song leaders and the cadence of Jewish folk songs and Eastern European sound.”

Weaving around the ’50s epoch furniture (solid hand carved shelves and credenzas that look like wet bars, record players) of the newly constructed pop-up shop with “Tikva Records” in red lettering on the window front, I got a sense of a cozy, hangout for record lovers, Jewish or not, which lead me to again question: what exactly makes music Jewish?

Vibrant, and clearly enamored with these albums, Katznelson was on hand with some helpful thoughts. “I think, like all music, it’s open to interpretation. What we do is use this music to look at Jewish history — it’s beyond Jewish music, it’s music that has affected the Jewish experience.”

Jewlia Eisenberg, leader of SF group Charming Hostess, was also previewing the store — it was her first time taking a peek around too, and she seemed ecstatic, slipping records out of the shelves and commenting, “oh my god, look at this one!” Along with the help of a few volunteers, Eisenberg will be running the shop during the month of December.

Katznelson and Eisenberg pulled out records to examine, including the classic Fiddler on the Roof, but more so albums that recently came back to light, like the Latin-tinged Bagels and Bongos — another album the Idelsohn Society reissued. Says Katznelson, “Hybrids happened, and it created new sounds — so what are those new sounds called?”

An example of the modern Jewish hybrid: Jeremiah Lockwood, New York-based bandleader of the Sway Machinery and grandson of legendary cantor Jacob Konigsberg, who will light the final two nights of Chanukah candles at the store, and perform live.

During his second appearance, Ethan Miller of Howling Rain and Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi All Stars will join Lockwood in performance. He met Dickinson back in 1998 when they worked on a friend’s album together. Says Lockwood. “It was my first trip to the South after spending my adolescence obsessed with country blues and it made a big impression on me.”

The rest of his performances will be a mixed bag, reflecting decades of the Jewish — and American — music experience. “I’m most comfortable playing blues-oriented material when I play solo, but I definitely plan to hit some tunes from the new Sway Machinery album,” he says, “I will certainly dig out some of my family’s Chanukah standards…very beautiful bits of Jewish folklore I grew up on and that were a part of the family Chanukah lighting ceremony.”

And just like that, after a month of record-selling and live performances culminating with holiday revelry, the pop-up will end, and it’ll be on to the next great idea for the Idelsohn Society. Like it was all some nostalgic, far-out folk dream. 

TIKVA JEWISH POP-UP RECORD STORE

Dec. 1-Dec. 28, times vary, free (donations suggested)

3191 Mission, SF

www.idelsohnsociety.com/tikvastore

www.tikvarecords.eventbrite.com

 

Lessons of the Avalos campaign

Andrew Lam
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157

By N’Tanya Lee

It’s the middle of the night. His two kids and wife are home in bed. Supervisor John Avalos, candidate for mayor, heads downtown in his beat-up family car. He parks and walks over to 101 Market Street, and casually starts talking to members of OccupySF. He’s a city official, but folks camped out are appreciative when they see he’s there to stand with them, to try to stop the cops from harassing them, even though its 1 a.m. and he should be in bed.

John Avalos was the first elected official to personally visit Occupy SF. It wasn’t a publicity stunt — his campaign staff didn’t even know he was going until it was over. He arrived and left without an entourage or TV cameras. This kind of moment — defined by John’s personal integrity and the strength of his personal convictions — was repeated week after week, and provides a much-needed model of progressive political leadership in the city.

John Avalos is more than “a progressive standard bearer,” as the Chronicle likes to call him. He’s also a Spanish-speaking progressive Latino, rooted in community and labor organizing, with a racial justice analysis and real relationships with hundreds of organizers and everyday people outside of City Hall. He’s demonstrated an authentic accountability to the disenfranchised of the city, to communities of color and working people, and he knows that ultimately the future of the city is in our hands.

Some accomplishments of John’s campaign for mayor are already clear: He consolidated the progressive-left with 19%, or nearly 40,000, first-place votes, despite the confusion of a crowded field; he came in a strong second to incumbent Ed Lee despite being considered a long shot even weeks before the election; after RCV tallies, he finished with an incredible 40% of the vote, demonstrating a much wider base of support across the city than he began with, and much broader than former frontrunners Leland Yee and David Chiu, who outspent him 3-1. He won the Castro, placed third in Chinatown (ahead of Yee), and actually won the election-day citywide vote. Not bad. In fact, remarkable, for a progressive Latino from a working class district in the southern part of town, running in his first citywide race.

I believe John Avalos demonstrated what can be accomplished with a new kind of progressive leadership — and suggests the elements of a new progressive coalition that can be created to win races in 2012, and again, in 2015.

It’s Monday afternoon, 1:35pm, time for our weekly Campaign Board meeting. John rushes in, after a dozen appointments already that day. The rest of us file into the ‘cave’ — the one private room in Campaign headquarters, with no windows, a makeshift wall and furniture that looks to be third-hand. The board makes the key strategy, message, and financial decisions. There are no high paid political consultants here. Most of us are, or have been, organizers. Today, we need to approve the campaign platform. Finally. We’ve decided to get people excited about our ideas, an agenda for change. We leave the meeting excited and nervous, wondering if anyone will get excited about the city creating its own Municipal Bank.

We were an unlikely crew to lead a candidate campaign — even a progressive one in San Francisco. We come from membership based community and labor organizations, and share a critique of white progressive political players and electeds who spend too few resources on building power through organizing and operate without accountability to any base. We are policy and politics nerds, but we hate traditional politics. Seventy percent of us are people of color — Black, Filipina, Latino, and Chinese. We are all women except John, the candidate, and nearly half of us are balancing politics with parenting.

The campaign board — including John himself—shared a vision for building progressive power. The campaign plan was explicit and specific about achieving outcomes that included winning room 200 but went beyond that central goal. We set out to strengthen progressive forces, to build towards the 2012 Supervisor races, and increase the capacity of the community-based progressive electoral infrastructure so we can keep building our collective power year-round, for the long-term.

We hope these victories will shape progressive strategy moving forward:

1. In just a few months, Team Avalos consolidated a new and unique progressive bloc. We brought together people and organizations who’d never worked together before — white bike riders and Latino anti-gentrification organizers, queer activists and African American advocates for Local Hire. The Avalos coalition was largely community forces: SF Rising’s base in working class Black, Latino, Filipino and Chinese communities; the Bike Coalition’s growing base of mostly white bike riders; affinity groups like Filipinos, Queers, Latinos and Arabs for Avalos; progressive Democrats; social networks of creative, young progressive activists affiliated with the League of Young Voters; and loyal families and neighborhood leaders from John’s own District 11. The campaign prioritized communicating to voters in four languages, and according to the Chinese press, John Avalos was the only non-Chinese candidate with a significant Chinese outreach program. There were stalwarts from progressive labor unions (most notably SEIU 1021 and USWW) who threw down — but overall, labor played it safe and invested resources in other guys. And then, in the great surprise development of the race, supporters of the new national occupy movement came to be a strong part of the Team Avalos base because the campaign was so well positioned to resonate with the call to take on the one percent.

2) Team Avalos built popular support for key progressive ideas. We used the campaign to build popular support for a citywide progressive agenda. Instead of leading with our candidate we led with bold, distinctive issues that provided a positive alternative vision to the economic crisis: Progressive taxation, municipal banking, and corporate accountability for living wage jobs instead of corporate tax breaks. By the end of the campaign, at least three other candidates came to support the creation of a city-owned bank, and the idea had enough traction that even the San Francisco Business Times was forced to take a position against it.

3) Team Avalos built the electoral capacity of grassroots organizations whose members have the most at stake if progressives gain or lose power in SF: poor and working-class communities of color. We developed the electoral organizing skills of a large new cohort of grassroots leaders and organizers of color with no previous leadership experience in a candidate campaign. They are ready for the next election.

For the last few months, I had the privilege of working with an unusual but extraordinary Avalos campaign team, who were exactly the right people for the right moment in history, to lead a long shot campaign to an unlikely, remarkable and inspiring outcome. Let’s build on these gains. In the coming weeks and months, we must be thorough in our analysis of this election, engage and expand the Avalos coalition base, and build unity around one or more collective demands of Mayor Lee from the left. And in time, we will have a progressive voting majority and a governing bloc in City Hall. We will win, with the mass base necessary to defend gains, hold our own electeds accountable, and truly take on the city’s one percent.

NTanya Lee was the Executive Director of Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth, and served as a volunteer chair of the Avalos for Mayor campaign board. You can find her now at USF or working on her new project about a long-term vision for left governance called Project 2040.

 

The one percent on the waterfront

Andrew Lam
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10

EDITORIAL While Mayor Ed Lee struggles with the OccupySF encampment, another, very different group has its eyes on the city’s waterfront. On the edges of the ground where protesters are talking about the one percent of Americans that control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth, two major development projects aimed entirely at that very wealthy sliver are starting to move forward.

At 8 Washington and 75 Howard, developers want to build a total of 365 condominiums aimed at people with incomes that place them in the top sliver of the richest Americans. It will be a key test for the Ed Lee administration: Will he evict the Occupy protesters and allow the One Percent to claim choice property on the waterfront?

The 8 Washington project calls for 165 of what developer Simon Snellgrove says will be the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. The 12-story building, sitting on the edge of the Embarcadero, would include units selling for as much as $10 million, and even the low-end places would go for $2.5 million or more.

At 75 Howard, the Paramount Group and Morgan Stanley want to demolish a parking garage and erect a 284-foot tower with units that the San Francisco Business Times predicts would sell for at least $1,000 a square foot.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, a $2.5 million condo, according to real estate experts, would require that a buyer have $625,000 cash to put down and an income of more than $450,000 a year. Either that or millions in spare cash to plunk down.

That, needless to say, is not the majority of the working people in San Francisco.

There’s no conceivable planning or housing-policy rationale for either of these projects. They offer nothing that the city needs; there is absolutely no shortage of housing for people with that kind of income. In fact, allowing these two projects to proceed would directly violate the city’s own General Plan and every regional planning proposal for San Francisco’s housing mix. The General Plan states that some 60 percent of all the new housing built in San Francisco should be below market rate. Environmental sanity suggests that the city ought to be building housing for people who work here — high housing costs have driven thousands of local workers to live in the East Bay or further out, leading to long, energy-intensive commutes. And the more of this ultra-luxury housing the city builds, the more the housing balance gets disrupted — and the more rapidly San Francisco becomes a city of, by and for the One Percent.

The two projects have powerful support — among other things, Lee’s friend and ally Rose Pak is promoting 8 Washington, as is lobbyist Marcia Smolens. If Lee has any scrap of independence he’ll make it clear that both of these projects are dead on arrival.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

alerts@sfbg.com

 

THURSDAY 24

“Indigenous Peoples Sunrise Ceremony”

Honor indigenous peoples for a sunrise ceremony on Alcatraz Island on Un-Thanksgiving Day. Held annually since 1975, the Alcatraz ceremony honors the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement’s occupation of the island in 1969. The ceremony will feature Aztec Dancers, Pomo Dancers, live performances, and speakers. Hosted by the International Indian Treaty Council and American Indian Contemporary Arts. Ferry tickets go on sale at 4:15 a.m. Boats leave Pier 33 from 4:45 a.m. until 6 a.m.

6 a.m., free (plus $14 ferry ticket)

Alcatraz Island, SF

www.treatycouncil.org

 

SATURDAY 26

“Guardianas de la Vida (Guardians of Life)”

Observe the United Nation’s annual International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women with music, poetry, and art. The event opens with an interactive sewing piece, followed by a show at 7:30 featuring poetry by Judy Grahn, Genny Lim and Nina Serrano; Latin music by Bay Area singer-songwriters Maria Loreto, MamaKoatl and Marta Sevilla; theater by Circulo Cultural; and dance by Maria Luna, Maica Folch and Paloma Parra.

6 p.m., $10 donation

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

dancemission.com


TUESDAY 29

“David Barsamian on Journalism, Academia, and Censorship”

David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio. He has co-authored books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, and other leading intellectuals. He was deported from India this past September, and his talk is titled Stories from Kashmir and California. Sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library and the San Jose Peace and Justice Center.

6 – 8 p.m., free

San Francisco Public Library

Koret Auditorium 100 Larkin St., SF

alternativeradio.org


 

WEDNESDAY 30

“The History of the Future”

Ponder utopias and dystopias, imagination and revolution, and the power of social movements and propaganda to shape the future with Starhawk, Megan Prelinger, and Chris Carlsson. Prelinger is the author of “Another Science Fiction,” offering a whimsical look at corporate representations of the Space Race. Starhawk’s “The Fifth Sacred Thing” and Chris Carlsson’s “After The Deluge” both present alternative utopian futures for San Francisco a century or more in the future. Join the conversation with these three authors.

7:30 p.m., free

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.shapingsf.org

 

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I don’t want to grow up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
I don’t want to grow up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychic Dream Astrology

Andrew Lam
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0

Nov. 16-22

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Respect the fine line between covering all the details and tripping balls, Aries. You are meant to start something new this week, and there are some imperfections that you’ll just have to tolerate. Take responsibility for what you want to see done, making space for your inevitable learning curve.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

You cannot please everyone, but you have to at least try to make your own self happy. This week you may struggle with disappointing others as your needs may divert from theirs. Make sure that you are kind and generous of spirit as you forge a path that works for you.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

You are in the uncomfortable position of having to wait and see where the chips will fall, Gemini. There is no rushing the journey of your heart, even though that’d be awesome right now. Be patient and lean on the people and places that bring you happiness until you can give it to your own self.

CANCER

JUNE 22-JULY 22

Feeling vulnerable sucks. Cultivate strength this week by being able to tolerate necessary pains and pangs as you move through some pretty steep emo terrain. You are totally capable; the only question is how patient you are willing to be. Anything rushed will just have to be re-done, pal.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

The only thing that you really need to do is clarify your needs and limits in that sweet noggin of yours. The best way to get your needs met is if you are clear about what your needs are. Don’t wait for that stuff to figure itself out, get to work on making decisions and setting goals now.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

If you are struggling through uncertainties the best thing you can do is focus on finite and fer sure things, no matter how small or random they are. By dealing with the stuff you are confident about, you can gain confidence to deal with whatever you feel twisted up about.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

You have got to let go of the people in your past in order to let new ones in. This week is a demanding one, because there’s lots of potential for interpersonal messiness. Be clear about your intentions so you can avoid letting the issues of your last relationships bleed into your current ones, pal.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Things are moving right in the direction that you want them to be, but that’s not stopping your fears from working in overdrive. Put out what you want to get in return, Scorpio, and stop expecting things to just be handed to you. Work hard and satisfying results will follow.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

There’s no rush to buy a house or nothing, but you do need to decide what neighborhood you want to live in and how much you’re willing to pay. Understand the basics of what you need so you are able to make decisions when the time is right. Cultivate vision this week, Sag.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

If you live in a hidey-hole and don’t feel your hopes you won’t get anywhere you wanna be, Cap. The time has come to put yourself out there and try to make your dreamiest goals come true. You may need to shed some tears for what was, but that’s OK as long as you invest in what you want there to be.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

This week the more direct and honest you are the better. You have the opportunity to achieve wholeness in some area of your life that needs it. Your personal satisfaction is the glue that holds your happiness together. Take risks that promote outer and inner life, Aquarius.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Take care of your most practical needs this week, Pisces. No matter how much you love your puppy, if you don’t take him on regular walks, she won’t stay healthy. Actions speak louder than words, and words back up your actions. TCB, pal.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 17 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com

 

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam
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0

Schedules are for Wed/16-Tues/22 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $5-10. “Periwinkle Queer Cinema: Food!,” adults-only shorts program, Wed, 8. “Beautiful Moving Images,” shorts program, Thurs, 8. SF Cinematheque presents: “Once It Started It Could Not End: Cut-Ups and Collage by Sears, Cox, Kennedy, and Rosentrater,” Fri, 7:30. “Other Cinema:” works about place and the sensibility it informs by Angela Reginato, Greg Berger, and others, Sat, 8:30.

BALBOA 3630 Balboa, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $17.50-20. “Opera and Ballet at the Balboa Theatre:” Adriana Lecouvreur, performed by the Royal Opera House, London, Wed, 7:30; Esmeralda, performed by the Bolshoi Ballet, Sat-Sun, 10am; Tues, 7:30.

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 Eighth St, SF; www.cca.edu. Free. “Cinema Visionaries: An Evening with Barry Jenkins,” short film screening and discussion, Tues, 7.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. “Woody Wednesdays:” •Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, 1989), Wed, 3, 7, and Deconstructing Harry (Allen, 1997), Wed, 5, 9. “Greta Garbo Double Feature:” •Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939), Thurs, 2:45, 7, and Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932), Thurs, 4:45, 9:05. Dark Country in 3D (Jane, 2009), Fri, 7:30. With director-star Thomas Jane in person. “Harry Potter Marathon:” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Columbus, 2001), Sat, noon; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002), Sat, 2:50; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004), Sat, 6; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005), Sat, 8:35; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007), Sun, noon; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009), Sun, 2:30; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 (Yates, 2010), Sun, 5:30; Part 2 (2011), Sun, 8:10. Thirty-minute break between Secrets and Prisoner on Sat and Prince and Hallows — Part 1 on Sun; $12 each day for all four films.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-10.25. Le Havre (Kaurismäki, 2011), Wed-Thurs, call for times. The Help (Taylor, 2011), Thurs, 6:30. With filmmakers and stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in person; tickets, $20. Melancholia (von Trier, 2011), Nov 18-24, call for times. M*A*S*H* (Altman, 1970), Sun, 2. With Elliot Gould in conversation with Norman Solomon. “The Films of John Korty:” Funnyman (Korty, 1967), Sun, 7. “A Century Ago: The Films of 1911,” hosted by Randy Haberkamp with piano accompaniment by Michael Mortilla, Mon, 7.

EMBARCADERO CENTER CINEMA One Embarcadero Center, SF; www.sffs.org. $12-20. “New Italian Cinema:” The Jewel (Molaioli, 2011), Wed, 6:30 and Fri, 1; This World Is for You (Falaschi, 2011), Wed, 9:15 and Sun, 3:30; The Father and the Foreigner (Tognazzi, 2010), Thurs, 6:30 and Sun, 12:30; Some Say No (Avellino, 2011), Thurs, 9:15 and Sat, 9:30; A Quiet Life (Cupellini, 2010), Fri, 6:30; 20 Cigarettes (Amadei, 2010), Fri, 9:30; One Life, Maybe Two (Aronadio, 2010), Sat, 4; The First Assignment (Cecere, 2010), Sat, 6:30; Habemus Papam (Moretti, 2011), Sun, 6:30, 9:15.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; lntsf.com/chinese_american_film_festival_2011. $5. “Chinese American Film Festival,” new films from China and Hong Kong, Nov 16-22.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Alternative Visions:” “Space is the Place: Recent Avant-Garde Shorts,” Wed, 7:30. “Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema: Phil Tippett, Special Effects Master:” Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, 1997), Thurs, 7; The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (Jurad, 1958), Fri, 7. With Tippett in person. “Southern (Dis)Comfort: The American South in Film:” The Story of Temple Drake (Roberts, 1933), Fri, 9:10; Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz, 1960), Sat, 8:15. “Abbas Kiarostami: The Fragility of Life:” Through the Olive Trees (1994), Sat, 6; A Taste of Cherry (1997), Sun, 4:30. “Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov:” Three Songs of Lenin (1935/38), Sun, 2.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. N.A.S.A.: The Spirit of Apollo (Garon and Spiegel, 2011), Wed, 7:30, 9:30. X: The Unheard Music (Morgan, 1986), Thurs, 7, 9:30. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (Star, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 6:45. Gainsbourg: The Man Who Loved Women (Forneri, 2011), Wed-Thurs, 9:15. Dragonslayer (Patterson, 2011), Nov 18-24, call for times. The Woodmans (Willis, 2010), Nov 18-24, 7, 9 (also Sat-Sun, 3, 5).

SFFS | NEW PEOPLE CINEMA 1746 Post, SF. Pipe Dreams (Iwerks, 2011), Wed, 7. Benefit for the San Francisco Green Film Festival. Contact info for this event www.sfgreenfilmfest.org; tickets $15-25. California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown (Rice and Armstrong, 2011), Thurs, 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30. Contact info for this event www.sffs.org; tickets $10-11.

VICTORIA 2961 16th St, SF. Yogawoman (Clere, 2011), Thurs, 7. Contact info for this event yogawoman.eventbrite.com; tickets $15. “Fall 2011 San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival:” “Act One,” Sat, 7:30; “Act Two: After Dark,” Sat, 10:30. Contact info for this event www.peacheschrist.com; tickets $15-20.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984), Thurs, 7:30; Sun, 2.

Thoughtful hooligans

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Thoughtful hooligans

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC A somber organ chord rings out on the opening track of WU LYF’s Go Tell Fire To The Mountain, “L Y F.” As the distant clash of cymbals grows louder, a wailing guitar lures you in like a siren song. Then Ellery Roberts unleashes a desperate, hellish growl, and you realize that WU LYF is unlike any band you’ve ever heard.

Characterized by Roberts’ guttural snarl and a rich, grandiose sound the band refers to as heavy pop, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain is a cathartic masterpiece born from the restless adolescence of four young Mancunians. WU LYF (an acronym for World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation) came together through a firm resistance to a conventional transition into adulthood.

“I didn’t want to go to university,” says Roberts. “I felt like it was kind of the only option I had.” On the phone, Roberts is a far cry from the gravel-throated animal on WU LYF’s debut. The 20-year-old is thoughtful, reserved, and exudes a remarkable intelligence.

Roberts and bandmates Tom McClung, Joe Manning, and Evans Kati were in their mid teens when they began playing together in their native Manchester, England. “When we wrote [the single] ‘Heavy Pop,’ that was the moment,” Roberts says. “It didn’t feel like we were trying to sound like anyone else.”

Sure, Roberts’ vocals easily draw comparisons to Tom Waits, and the band’s epic sound is reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions In The Sky. In an era of rampant imitation and recycling, however, WU LYF has stumbled upon a sound that’s refreshingly unusual.

Expecting “Heavy Pop” to reach only a handful of friends, the group posted the track online. Media outlets caught hold of the song and began speculating wildly about the mystery band from Manchester. Rather than sign a record deal, WU LYF set up a website with vague, anti-authoritarian musings where fans could join the Lucifer Youth Foundation. For a small entry fee, members received the band’s single and a white “bandit flag of allegiance.” This worldwide alignment of hoodlums funded WU LYF’s full length debut.

If “Heavy Pop” marked the genesis of WU LYF, the abandoned church where Go Tell Fire To The Mountain was recorded is the mother that nurtured the beast. The group abstained from working in a studio, which Roberts says “seemed like a mathematic way of making music.” Instead, the foursome went out in search of big, empty spaces.

“We were walking around this old, industrial part and we just came across this church in the middle of a maze of factories,” he says. “It added so much to the record. None of us were really controlling the sound.”

Though Roberts’ impassioned vocals render his words nearly incomprehensible, a quick look at his lyrics reveals a literary astuteness. Go Tell Fire To The Mountain‘s narrative structure was inspired by a screenplay Roberts wrote at the age of 17, and the cinematic album explores themes of camaraderie, mortality, and ambiguous religion.

“We put a lot of ourselves into it,” says Roberts. Although the record’s only been out for a few months, WU LYF has achieved a cult like following that Roberts calls “pretty amazing, but strange.” In the wake of the monstrous reaction to Go Tell Fire To The Mountain, WU LYF is embarking on its most extensive tour thus far.

The band’s been in the US for a few days when we speak so I ask Roberts if he’s spotted any LYF members in the audience. “We’ve seen a couple,” he responds. “It’s always nice to see when you come on stage, [the] fans that have their white flags. You know you’ve got your friends out there.”

WU LYF With Crystal Antlers

Mon/21, 8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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tredmond@sfbg.com

Occupy Oakland has been very good at exposing one local problem — police brutality. The first raids, and the tear gas and rubber bullets that flew afterward — showed the world how poorly trained the Oakland cops are and how unprepared they were for a largely peaceful demonstration.

But overall, the Occupy movement has been about national issues — or rather, The National Issue, which is income inequality. Nothing else going on in the United States compares. On an economic level, I could argue that nothing else matters — until we resolve the wealth and income gap, the recession will never end, the deficit will never improve, the unemployment rate won’t stabilize, the nation will grow weaker and weaker and more and more unstable … basically, we’re doomed.

But while there have been marches on local banks and corporations, not a lot of Occupy attention has gone to local inequality — to what the folks at San Francisco City Hall, and Oakland City Hall are doing to make the one percent in our own backyards pay its fair share for the services that most impact many of our lives. Mayor Jean Quan got booed for calling in the riot cops, but Mayor Ed Lee isn’t getting booed for corporate tax breaks.

The OccupySF people came out in force to a Board of Supervisors hearing to demand that their camp be left alone. But they aren’t out in force to demand, say, a local fee on bank foreclosures.

That’s not a criticism of a movement that continues to inspire me every day; it’s just a statement about tactics and strategy. And it’s one we all ought to be thinking about.

In a brilliant opinion piece this week, Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley Debug, notes:

“In San Jose, the city that used to promote itself as the capitol of Silicon Valley, city budget cuts have either eliminated or dramatically slashed hours for youth sanctuaries like libraries and community centers. … For us, the one percent are just up the street -– the 101 to be precise. Those tech giants exist in the same Silicon Valley that cannot even keep its library doors open. Why have they not given? Why have we not demanded?”

Good question.

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

A Tale of Two Genres SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Previews Thurs/17, 8pm. Opens Fri/18, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat and Dec 20-21, 8pm (no show Sat/19 or Nov 24; additional shows Sat, 3pm). Through Dec 21. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents an improvised musical inspired by Charles Dickens.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; (415) 992-8168, www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Schedule varies, through Dec 29. Not Quite Opera Productions presents Anne Nygren Doherty’s musical about San Francisco, with five characters all portrayed by Mary Gibboney.

Almost Nothing, Day of Absence Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; (415) 474-8800, www.lhtsf.org. $43-53. Wed/16-Sat/19, 8pm (also Sat/19, 2pm); Sun/20, 2pm. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre christens its grand new home near Union Square with two well-acted one-act plays under sharp direction by artistic director Steven Anthony Jones. Almost Nothing by Brazilian playwright Marcos Barbosa marks the North American premiere of an intriguing and shrewdly crafted Pinteresque drama, wherein a middle-class couple (Rhonnie Washington and Kathryn Tkel) returns home from an unexpected encounter at a stop light that leaves them jittery and distracted. As an eerie wind blows outside (in David Molina’s atmospheric sound design), their conversation circles around the event as if fearing to name it outright. When a poor woman (Wilma Bonet) arrives claiming to have seen everything, the couple abandons rationalization for a practical emergency and a moral morass dictated by poverty and class advantage — negotiated on their behalf by a black market professional (Rudy Guerrero). Next comes a spirited revival of Douglas Turner Ward’s Civil Rights–era Day of Absence (1965), a broad satire of Southern race relations that posits a day when all the “Neegras” mysteriously disappear, leaving white society helpless and desperate. The cast (in white face) excel at the high-energy comedy, and in staging the text director Jones makes a convincing parallel with today’s anti-immigrant laws and rhetoric. But if the play remains topical in one way, its too-blunt agitprop mode makes the message plain immediately and interest accordingly pales rapidly. (Avila)

Annapurna Magic Theatre, Bldg D, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Showtimes vary, through Dec 4. Magic Theatre performs Sharr White’s world premiere drama about love’s longevity.

Fela! Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $31-200. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm; no show Nov 24); Sun, 2pm (also Nov 27, 7:30pm). Through Dec 11. The life and music of Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti is captured in this show with choreography by Bill T. Jones.

Forgetting the Details Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.nicolemaxali.com. $20. Thurs/17-Sat/19, 8pm. In one memorable scene of performer Nicole Maxali’s solo show Forgetting the Details, her artist father, Max Villanueva, takes her to see a Precita Eyes mural he’s been helping to paint. After pointing out the tree he painted, and describing the minute detail he imbued it with, he has her stand away from the mural to observe how quickly the details vanish, but not the integrity of the piece. It’s an instructive life lesson, and also the perfect approach to appreciating Maxali’s show. Ostensibly about her relationship with her grandmother, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Forgetting the Details winds up delving deeply into Maxali’s complicated relationship with her freewheeling, artistic dad, whose unexpected death in the summer of 2011 gives her show an unexpected trajectory as her grandmother’s slow decline gradually takes a backseat to the more immediate trauma of her father’s untimely passing. Maxali’s efforts to draw parallels between her grandmother’s in-the-moment mentality with her father’s artistic sensibilities and her own artistic journey are not always seamless, but the emotional content rings with a sincerity and depth often lacking from similarly-constructed solo performances. Just like a mural viewed from a distance, the play’s integrity lies not in the details, but rather in the vitality of the whole. (Gluckstern) How to Love Garage, 975 Howard, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $15. Fri/18-Sat/19, 8pm; Sun/20, 2pm. Three demigod-like personalities at the center of the earth are charged with answering life’s mysteries, big and small, but find themselves stymied by their latest task, namely, explaining “how to love.” They have only a week to do it, for some reason, or humanity will be consigned to everlasting consternation, or something like that — coherence is not a priority here — anyway: stakes are high. Their boss, the Magistrate (Geo Epsilanty), has them present their findings each day, but each of them — the Very Sexy One (Jessica Schroeder in sassy lingerie), the Stern One (Gloria MacDonald in girl-school uniform), and the Young One (Brian Martin in caped crusader outfit) — comes up with bupkus. Finally, the Young One gets the inspiration to kidnap a surface-dwelling earthling (Valerie Fachman) to help them figure it all out. Local playwright Megan Cohen’s mumbling comedy, directed with robust attention to blocking and movement by Scott Baker for Performers Under Stress, is far too skit-like a conceit to merit its two plodding acts. More to the point, its humor is very silly but generally dim. Despite being set at the center of the earth, this is too shallow and glancing an investigation of love to intrigue or tickle the genuinely curious. (Avila)

The Importance of Being Earnest Notre Dame Senior Plaza, Community Room, 347 Dolores, SF; (650) 952-3021. Free. Fri/18, 7:30pm; Sat/19-Sun/20, 3pm. 16th Street Players perform the Oscar Wilde classic.

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 18. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Language Rooms Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show Nov 24); Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 4. Golden Thread Productions and Asian American Theater Company present the West Coast premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s dark comedy.

Making Porn Box Car Theatre Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-50. Thurs, 8pm; Thurs, 8pm; Fri-Sat, 9pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Nov 27. Ronnie Larsen brings back his crowd-pleasing comedy about the gay porn industry.

*”Master Harold” … and the Boys Phoenix Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 601, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $18-40. Thurs/17-Sat/19, 8pm. Based loosely on personal history, Athol Fugard’s drama explores institutionalized racism in South Africa’s apartheid era ensconced in the seemingly innocuous world of a Port Elizabeth tea room. The play opens during a rainy afternoon with no customers, leaving the Black African help, Willie (Anthony Rollins-Mullens) and Sam (LaMont Ridgell), with little to do but rehearse ballroom dance steps for a big competition coming up in a couple of weeks. When Hally (Adam Simpson), the owner’s son, arrives from school, the atmosphere remains convivial at first then increasingly strained, as events happening outside the tea room conspire to tear apart their fragile camaraderie. The greatest burdens of the play are carried by Sam, who fills a range of roles for the increasingly pessimistic and emotionally-stunted Hally — teacher, student, surrogate father, confidante, and servant — all the while completely aware that their mutual love is almost certainly doomed to not survive past Hally’s adolescence, and possibly not past the afternoon. Ridgell rises greatly to the challenges of his character, ably flanked by Rollins-Mullens, and Simpson; he embodies the depth of Sam’s humanity, from his wisdom of experience, to his admiration for beauty, to his capacity to bear and finally to forgive Hally’s need to lash out at him. It is a moving and memorable rendering. (Gluckstern)

More Human Than Human Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission, SF; (415) 401-7987, www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Thurs/17-Sat/19, 8pm. B. Duke’s dystopian drama is inspired by Philip K. Dick.

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through Dec 17. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

*The Odyssey Aboard Alma, Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, SF; www.weplayers.org. $160. Fri/18, 12:30pm. Heralding their hugely ambitious Spring 2012 production of The Odyssey, which will take place all over Angel Island, the WE Players are tackling the work on a slightly smaller scale by staging it on the historic scow schooner Alma, which is part of the Maritime National Historical Park fleet docked at the end of Hyde Street Pier. Using both boat and Bay as setting, the essential chapters of the ten-year voyage — encounters with the Cyclops, Circe, the Underworld, the Sirens, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Calypso — are enacted through an intriguing mash-up of narration, choreography, sea chanteys, salty dog stories (like shaggy dog stories, but more water-logged), breathtaking views, and a few death-defying stunts the likes of which you won’t see on many conventional stages. High points include the casual swapping of roles (every actor gets to play Odysseus, however briefly), Ross Travis’ masked and flatulent Prometheus and sure-footed Hermes, Ava Roy’s hot pants-clad Circe, Charlie Gurke’s steady musical direction and multi-instrumental abilities, and the sail itself, an experiential bonus. Landlubbers beware, so much time facing the back of the boat where much of the action takes place can result in mild quease, even on a calm day. Take advantage of the downtime between scenes to walk around and face forward now and again. You’ll want to anyway. (Gluckstern)

Oh, Kay! Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; (415) 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $20-50. Wed/16, 7pm; Thurs/17-Fri/18, 8pm; Sat/19, 6pm; Sun/20, 3pm. 42nd Street Moon performs George and Ira Gershwin’s Prohibition-set comedy.

*On the Air Pier 29 on the Embarcadero (at Battery), SF; (415) 438-2668, love.zinzanni.org. $117 and up (includes dinner). Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Dec 31. Teatro ZinZanni’s final production at its longtime nest on Pier 29 is a nostalgia-infused banquet of bits structured around an old-time radio variety show, featuring headliners Geoff Hoyle (Geezer) and blues singer Duffy Bishop. If you haven’t seen juggling on the radio, for instance, it’s pretty awesome, especially with a performer like Bernard Hazens, whose footing atop a precarious tower of tubes and cubes is already cringingly extraordinary. But all the performers are dependably first-rate, including Andrea Conway’s comic chandelier lunacy, aerialist and enchanting space alien Elena Gatilova’s gorgeous “circeaux” act, graceful hand-balancer Christopher Phi, class-act tapper Wayne Doba, and radio MC Mat Plendl’s raucously tweeny hula-hooping. Add some sultry blues numbers by raunchy belter Bishop, Hoyle’s masterful characterizations (including some wonderful shtick-within-a-shtick as one-liner maestro “Red Bottoms”), a few classic commercials, and a healthy dose of audience participation and you start to feel nicely satiated and ready for a good cigar. Smoothly helmed by ZinZanni creative director Norm Langill, On the Air signals off-the-air for the popular dinner circus — until it can secure a new patch of local real estate for its antique spiegeltent — so tune in while you may. (Avila)

*Pellas and Melisande Cutting Ball Theater, Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Thurs, 7:30; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 27. The Frog Prince, Rapunzel, the Swan Maiden: shimmering strands of each timeless tale twist through the melancholy tapestry of the Maurice Maeterlinck play Pelleas and Melisande, which opens Cutting Ball Theater’s 12th season. Receiving a lushly atmospheric treatment by director and translator Rob Melrose, this ill-fated Symbolist drama stars Joshua Schell and Caitlyn Louchard as the doomed lovers. Trapped in the claustrophobic environs of an isolated castle at the edge of a forbidding forest and equally trapped in an inadvertent love triangle with the hale and hearty elder prince Golaud (Derek Fischer), Pelleas’ brother and Melisande’s husband, the desperate, unconsummated passion that builds between the two youngsters rivals that of Romeo and Juliet’s, and leads to an ending even more tragic — lacking the bittersweet reconciliation of rival families that subverts the pure melodrama of the Shakespearean classic. Presented on a spare, wooden traverse stage (designed by Michael Locher), and accompanied by a smoothly-flowing score by Cliff Caruthers, the action is enhanced by Laura Arrington’s haunting choreography, a silent contortionism which grips each character as they try desperately to convey the conflicting emotions which grip them without benefit of dialogue. Though described by Melrose as a “fairy tale world for adults,” the dreamy gauze of Pelleas and Melisande peels away quickly enough to reveal a flinty and unsentimental heart. (Gluckstern)

Savage in Limbo Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 3. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs John Patrick Shanley’s edgy comedy.

SexRev: The José Sarria Experience CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; (415) 552-4100, www.therhino.org. $10-25. Previews Thurs/17-Fri/18, 8pm. Opens Sat/19, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 10:30pm; no show Nov 24); Sun, 3pm. Through Nov 27. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s musical celebration of America’s first queer activist — a hit for the company in 2010.

“Shocktoberfest 12: Fear Over Frisco” Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; (415) 377-4202, www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Thurs/17-Sat/19, 8pm. In its annual season-scented horror bid, Thrillpeddlers joins forces with SF’s Czar of Noir, writer-director Eddie Muller, for a sharply penned triplet of plays that resurrect lurid San Francisco lore as flesh-and-blood action. In the slightly sluggish but intriguing Grand Inquisitor, a solitary young woman modeling herself on Louise Brooks in Lulu (an alluringly Lulu-like Bonni Suval) believes she has located the Zodiac killer’s widow (a sweet but cagey Mary Gibboney) — a scenario that just can’t end well for somebody, yet manages to defy expectations. An Obvious Explanation turns on an amnesiac (Daniel Bakken) whose brother (Flynn de Marco) explains the female corpse in the rollaway (Zelda Koznofski) before asking bro where he hid a certain pile of money. Enter a brash doctor (Suval) with a new drug and ambitions of her own vis-à-vis the hapless head case. Russell Blackwood directs The Drug, which adapts a Grand Guignol classic to the hoity-toity milieu of the Van Nesses and seedy Chinatown opium dens, where a rough-playing attorney (an ever persuasive Eric Tyson Wertz) determines to turn a gruesome case involving the duplicitous Mrs. Van Ness (an equally sure, sultry Kära Emry) to his own advantage. The evening also offers a blackout spook show and some smoothly atmospheric musical numbers, including Muller’s rousing “Fear Over Frisco” (music composed by Scrumbly Koldewyn; accompaniment by Steve Bolinger and Birdie-Bob Watt) and an aptly low-down Irving Berlin number — both winningly performed by the entire company. (Avila)

Shoot O’Malley Twice StageWerx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.viragotheatre.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show Nov 24). Through Nov 26. Virago Theater Company performs Jon Brooks’ world-premiere existential comedy.

Sticky Time Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.vanguardianproductions.com. $15-40. Wed/16-Fri/18, 8pm. Crowded Fire and Vanguardian Productions present playwright-director Marilee Talkington’s multimedia science fiction about a woman running out of time in the worst way. The prolix and histrionic story is the real sticking point, however, in this otherwise imaginatively staged piece, which places its audience on swivel chairs in the center of Brava’s upstairs studio theater, transformed by designer Andrew Lu’s raised stage and white video screens running the length of the walls into an enveloping aural (moody minimalistic score by Chao-Jan Chang) and visual landscape. Thea (Rami Margron) heads a three-person crew of celestial plumbers managing a sea of time “threads,” an undulating web of crisscrossing lines (in the impressive video animation by Rebecca Longworth). The structure is plagued by a mysterious wave of “time quakes” that Tim (Lawrence Radecker) thinks he may have figured out. Coworker Emit (Michele Leavy), meanwhile, goofing around like a hyperactive child, spots some sort of beast at work in the ether. When Thea gets stuck by a loose thread, she becomes something of a time junky, desperate to relive the color-suffused world of love and family lost somewhere in space-time as reality starts to unravel (with a dramatic assist from cinematographer Lloyd Vance) and the crew seeks help from a wise figure in a tattered gown (Mollena Williams). A little like a frenetic, stagy version of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), the story gets credit for dramatizing some confounding facts about time and space at the particle level but might have benefited from less dialogue and more mystery — just as the audio-visual experience works best when the house lights are low. (Avila)

The Temperamentals New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Marans’ drama about gay rights during the McCarthy era.

Totem Grand Chapiteau, AT&T Park, Parking Lot A, 74 Mission Rock, SF; cirquedusoleil.com/totem. $58-248.50. Tues-Sun, schedule varies. Extended through Dec 18. Cirque Du Soleil returns with its latest big-top production.

Two Dead Clowns Box Car Theatre Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 7pm. Through Nov 26. Ronnie Larsen’s new play explores the lives of Divine and John Wayne Gacy.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 26. Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man) presents a workshop production of his new solo show.

*Working for the Mouse Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $22. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no performances Nov 24-26). Through Dec 17. It might not come as a surprise to hear that even “the happiest place on earth” has a dark side, but hearing Trevor Allen describe it during this reprise of 2002’s Working for the Mouse will put a smile on your face as big as Mickey’s. With a burst of youthful energy, Allen bounds onto the tiny stage of Impact Theatre to confess his one-time aspiration to never grow up — a desire which made auditioning for the role of Peter Pan at Disneyland a sensible career move. But in order to break into the big time of “charactering,” one must pay some heavy, plush-covered dues. As Allen creeps up the costumed hierarchy one iconic cartoon figure at a time, he finds himself unwittingly enmeshed in a world full of backroom politics, union-busting, drug addled surfer dudes with peaches-and-cream complexions, sexual tension, showboating, job suspension, Make-A-Wish Foundation heartbreak, hash brownies, rabbit vomit, and accidental decapitation. Smoothly paced and astutely crafted, Mouse will either shatter your blissful ignorance or confirm your worst suspicions about the corporate Disney machine, but either way, it will probably make you treat any “Casual Seasonal Pageant Helpers” you see running around in their sweaty character suits with a whole lot more empathy. (Note: review from the show’s recent run at La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley.) (Gluckstern)

BAY AREA

Annie Berkeley Playhouse, Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College, Berk; (510) 845-8542, www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-35. Thurs-Sat, 7pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through Dec 4. Berkeley Playhouse performs the classic musical.

Doubt: A Parable Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Fri/18-Sat/19, 8pm. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley performs John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning drama.

How to Write a New Book for the Bible Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Wed/16 and Sun/20, 7pm (also Sun/20, 2pm); Thurs/17 and Sat/19, 2 and 8pm. An aspiring writer who later becomes a priest, Bill (Tyler Pierce) is the caregiver for his aging mother (Linda Gehringer) during her long bout with cancer. His father (Leo Marks), though already dead, still inhabits his mother’s flickering concept of reality, made all the more dreamlike by her necessary dependence on pain medication. His brother (Aaron Blakely), meanwhile, has returned from Vietnam with survivor guilt but lands a meaningful career as a schoolteacher in the South. The latest from playwright Bill Cain (Equivocation, 9 Circles) is a humor-filled but sentimental and long-winded autobiographical reflection on family from the vantage of his mother’s long illness. It gets a strong production from Berkeley Rep, with a slick cast under agile direction by Kent Nicholson, but it plays as if narrator Bill mistakenly believes he’s stepped out of an Arthur Miller play, when in fact there’s little here of dramatic interest and far too much jerking of tears. (Avila)

*The Internationalist Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.justtheater.org. $15-30. Thurs/17-Sat/19, 8pm; Sun/20, 5pm. Lowell (Nick Sholley, as rumpled everyman) is the American fish out of water at the center of playwright Anne Wasburn’s smartly written and very funny comedy, now receiving a terrific West Coast premiere courtesy of Just Theater and director Jonathan Spector. Arriving for a business trip in some unnamed but vaguely Eastern European country with a funny-sounding language he hasn’t had time to study, Lowell is met at the airport by Sara (a persuasive Alexandra Creighton), a beautiful colleague who takes him to dinner, then takes him home. Next day in the office, the increasingly exhausted American meets his friendly counterparts, and discovers Sara is at the bottom of the office totem pole, where the filing happens. All the characters speak English with varying levels of proficiency when making with the usual small talk — “I’m always curious about what Americans know and what they don’t know,” says one po-faced innocent (Kalli Jonsson) with reference to the American Indian genocide — but revert to rapid-flowing gibberish whenever they tire of catering to the foreigner. Things get slowly weirder over the next couple of days, however, as the dynamics of this catty office (filled out wonderfully by Michael Barrett Austin, Lauren Bloom, and Harold Pierce) lead to a bewildering implosion that leaves Lowell sightseeing, and maybe seeing things, with a case of jet lag as big as the zeitgeist. (Avila)

Rambo: The Missing Years Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 7pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Dec 10. Howard “Hanoi Howie” Petrick presents his solo show about being an anti-war demonstrator — while also serving in the Army.

Sam’s Enchanted Evening TheaterStage at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Nov 26. The Residents wrote the script and did the musical arrangements for this musical, featuring singer Randy Rose and pianist Joshua Raoul Brody.

The Soldier’s Tale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Previews Wed/16, 8pm. Opens Thurs/17, 8pm. Runs Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 18. Aurora Theatre presents a re-imagined version of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 musical by Tom Ross and Muriel Maffre.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun and Nov 25-26 and Dec 26-30, 11am (no show Dec 25). Through Dec 31. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bare Bones Butoh Presents: Showcase #23!” Studio 210, 3435 Cesar Chavez, SF; bobwebb20@hotmail.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm. $5-20. Butoh performance featuring new and in-progress works by local, national, and international artists.

“BrokeBACH Mountain” Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission, SF; www.lgcsf.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm. $15-30. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco opens its 32nd season with a mix of modern and classical hits, inspired in part by Brokeback Mountain.

“Club Chuckles” Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri, 8pm. $20. Comedy with Neil Hamburger, Natasha Leggero, Tim Heidecker, Duncan Trussell, and “The Kenny ‘K-Strass’ Strasser Yo-Yo Extravaganza.”

“Fox and Jewel” Dance Mission, 3316 24th St, SF; www.genryuarts.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. $20-25. Gen Ryu arts presents Melody Takata’s interdisciplinary work that uses a Japanese myth to address current concerns about arts and culture in Japantown as the neighborhood redevelops.

“From Wallflower Order to Dance Brigade: A 35-Year Retrospective Celebration” Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; (415) 273-4633, www.dancebrigade.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Free. Krissy Keefer marks 35 years of Dance Brigade with The Great Liberation Upon Hearing and other works.

“I’d Eat Them Both” Purple Onion, 140 Columbus, SF; kellymccarron.eventbrite.com. Fri, 7 and 9pm. Comedian Kelly McCarron performs for a recording of her first comedy album.

LEVYdance Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; 1-800-838-3006; www.levydance.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. $18-23. The company presents its Fall 2011 Home Season, featuring the world premiere of ROMP.

Liss Fain Dance Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.lissfaindance.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 9:30pm); Sun, 5pm. $12.50-25. The company presents performance installation The False and True Are One.

San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; (415) 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Program A: Fri, 8pm; Sat, 9:30pm. Program B: Sat-Sun, 6pm. $40 (two shows, $75). The 13th annual festival, produced by Micaya, welcomes 19 companies from places as diverse as Oakland, San Francisco, Paris, Brooklyn, and London.

“10 Women Campaign: Who Is Tending the City?” ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; (415) 863-9834, www.flyawayproductions.com. Thurs, 7:30pm. $25 ($50 to include reception at 6:30pm). Flyaway Productions honors ten community leaders with a performance and ceremony.

XX hardcore

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
XX hardcore

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC When Blatz, a political punk band connected to all-ages Berkeley music venue 924 Gilman Street Project (the Gilman), was looking for a girl singer to join the act in 1990, it wound up with two new additions.

Annie Lalania and Anna Joy Springer were separately asked to audition, but the band didn’t realize they were already friends. When the women arrived, they decided they didn’t want to leave, and so they both joined the band, which made for chaotic, memorable live shows with massive pits in crowd and sometimes double of every instrument on stage. It was like “a silly American version of Crass,” says Springer.

Now a published author and professor of creative writing at U.C. San Diego, Springer recounts this story and other anecdotes, laced with humor and debauchery, about maneuvering through the ’90s Bay Area punk scene as a feminist queer woman in the new documentary, From the Back of the Room.

Directed by D.C.-based filmmaker Amy Oden, the documentary — which screens at the Center for Sex and Culture this week — follows the trail of women in punk, hardcore, riot grrrl, and other DIY music scenes beginning in the 1980s. Its clusters of interviews span generations, scenes, and states, with vintage and contemporary footage of live shows sprinkled throughout.

Via phone, on an eight-hour road trip during a Southern tour with the film, Oden tells me she hopes the documentary will start a dialogue on the issues faced by women, adding “My other big hope is that if younger women see it, they feel they can be a part of this community, or whatever community they want to be a part of.”

Following initial introductions and clips, From the Back of the Room is segmented into sections discussing different aspects of sexual politics — categories such as violence in the scene, and later, motherhood, arise and are addressed by female musicians, roadies, bookers, graphic designers, and house show providers.

“I started coming up with people whose bands I’d always admired, or listened to a lot,” explains Oden, also a musician. “It was bands I’d listened to growing up. [The film] was half that, and half people being like, ‘oh you should talk to this person’ or ‘have you met this person?’

The end result is a film that includes Leora from NYC hardcore act Thulsa Doom, Slade Bellum from San Francisco’s Tribe 8, Laura Pleasants from current sludge act Kylesa, hard-rocking twin sisters Janine Enriquez and Nicole Enriquez from Witch Hunt, Jen Thorpe from experimental Canadian punk band Submission Hold, and Allison Wolfe from seminal riot grrrl act Bratmobile, among dozens of other interviewees.

Riot grrrl is likely the most consistently recognized form of female punkdom, thanks to the media frenzy in the early ’90s surrounding Wolfe’s band and acts like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney.

“It was overwhelming,” Wolfe says of the hype during a phone call from her home in Los Angeles. “At first you’re flattered…but what it ends up feeling like is that your community is being taken from you and served up in a really watered-down way. The message was heavily edited — declawed and defanged.”

Wolfe, who now plays in the band Cool Moms, says riot grrrl was very much a part of third-wave feminism, adding, “I don’t feel riot grrl is super current, I think it does exist in a certain time and place, but it’s part of a [feminist] continuum.”

And therein lies another issue Oden addresses in her documentary — while riot grrrl is no longer contemporary, or at least, no longer hounded by media, there are still plenty of females in the punk scene that deserve recognition — and many more that came before it.

“I definitely think riot grrrl did some amazing things,” says Oden, “But I think that often times the other side of that story gets left out, the women that were active contributors to the punk scene before riot grrrl, during riot grrrl, and since riot grrrl.”

Clearly, women in punk did not die off in the ’90s. This week, there’s a show in San Francisco at Public Works with T.I.T.S, Grass Widow, and experimental punk act Erase Errata — the continuing torch bearers of the DIY punk movement, the Bay Area band formed in 1999 that toured with electro post-Bikini Kill act, Le Tigre.

From the Back of the Room explores longevity, but also contradictions — punk is not a cohesive scene, and it’s not void of the usual trappings of mainstream society. It’s a many-layered, impassioned, conflicting, world. Lyrics screamed about equality do not always match actions.

Springer of Blatz and later, Gr’ups, knows well the disconnect. Just last year, on a reunion tour with Gr’ups, she played with anachro-punks Subhumans and the old power struggle with the audience was alive and well. She tells me, “We were on a stage and there were all these people shouting the words to old Subhumans songs, all these amazing lyrics about freedom and equanimity.” Then, some “no shirt-wearing pseudo skinhead looking guy” in the crowd yelled “shut up and show us your tits.”

Says Thorpe from Submission Hold in the trailer for From the Back of the Room,”A lot of people come into the punk scene thinking it’s an ideal world where they’re not going to come across sexism, racism, homophobia — all the isms — but that’s not true, it exists there as well, and it needs to be addressed there as well.”

“FROM THE BACK OF THE ROOM”

Sat/19, 8-11 p.m., $5–$7 sliding scale.

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

(415) 902-2071

www.sexandculture.org

 

Unaffiliated yet tangentially related show this week:

T.I.T.S, GRASS WIDOW, ERASE ERRATA

Thurs/17, 9pm, $8

Public Works

161 Eerie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicworks.com

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown It’s arguably still the late Pat Brown’s California — we’re just living in it. This up-close documentary — put together with care and passion by his granddaughters Sascha Rice and Hilary Armstrong — looks at history that often gets neglected for its close proximity to the present. The moviemakers go back to the politician’s beginnings, on the heels of the 1906 earthquake, amid the subsequent rebuilding of San Francisco, and the growing sense of optimism. Viewed through the lens of news footage, photographs, and interviews with close observers including Dianne Feinstein, Tom Hayden, and Jerry Brown (Pat’s son), Pat Brown was there, putting his weight behind some of the state’s most significant legislation, from the passing of the fair housing act to the building of the California Aqueduct. Despite their evident love and respect for their subject — the filmmakers refer to their subject as “grandpa” — Rice and Armstrong don’t duck from the disappointments Pat Brown may have suffered in his failure to enter a national political stage and the pressures of living in a clan that, as daughter Barbara Brown Casey says, considered politics “the family business.” (1:30) SFFS New People Cinema. (Chun)

Curling This spare drama from Quebec writer-director Denis Côté centers on Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), a 40-ish small towner who works as janitor-handyman at both the local bowling alley and motel. He keeps 12-year-old daughter Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) at home, not letting her attend school and rarely letting her see other people out of a misguided over-protectiveness that Côté chooses to leave unexplained. Just like he leaves unexplained the dead bodies Julyvonne finds in a nearby forest, the dying boy Jean-Francois finds on a roadside one night, or the bloody motel room he’s instructed to clean up without calling police. You might think from the above that Curling is an elliptical thriller, but no — it’s just elliptical, and induces a big “So what?” once we realize this is simply a tale about a father and daughter enduring modest strain, then getting past it. Why there are so many red herrings scattered around a narrative otherwise as chilly, flat and bleak as the wintry landscapes here is anyone’s guess. (1:36) SFFS New People Cinema. (Harvey)

*The Descendants See “Blue Hawaii.” (1:55)

Dragonslayer See “Let’s Get Lost.” (1:14) Roxie.

Happy Feet Two The dancing penguins are back, with Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, and Hank Azaria among the celebrity vocalists. (1:40) Four Star, Presidio.

The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch The title is a mouthful; the billionaire-heir-fights-to-save-his-corporation plot a little out of step with the times. But The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch — based on a wildly popular Belgian comic book series that’s already spawned a TV series, a video game, and a sequel to this 2008 film — is a serviceable, multilingual thriller in the James Bond mode, with a little bit of Mr. Deeds (Adam Sandler version) tossed in. When megarich businessman Nerio Winch (Miki Manojlovic) dies on his Hong Kong yacht, his second-in-command (Kristin Scott Thomas, rocking an ice-queen Anna Wintour ‘do) takes control — until word gets out about Largo Winch, secretly adopted as an infant and groomed since youth to inherit Nerio’s wealth and position. A power struggle ensues, and since Largo (Tomer Sisley) is a rakishly handsome, ne’er-do-well adventurer type, the action includes chase scenes in multiple countries, bad guys shooting out of helicopters, documents stashed in secret locations, a femme fatale, disguises, back-stabbing (sometimes literally), etc. Why no part here for Jean-Claude Van Damme? He’s Belgian — and he perfected this international B-movie formula decades ago. (1:48) Balboa. (Eddy)

The Other F Word See “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” (1:38) Lumiere, Shattuck.

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview Is this a quickie cash-in following the tidal wave of appreciation following the death of Steve Jobs? Interviewer Robert Cringely made Triumph of the Nerds, a PBS miniseries about the birth of the personal computer industry, in 1995, and much of this lengthy talk with Jobs (his former employer) didn’t ultimately make the cut, although the Apple co-founder’s critique of Microsoft as lacking taste went down in history. The master tapes of this discussion were thought to be lost until the series editor unearthed an unedited copy of the entire interview in his London garage. This rush production isn’t quite unedited (at points Cringely steps in to contextualize) — and it was done more than 15 years ago, before Jobs sold NeXT to Apple and returned to the firm to shake the firmament with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad — but the interview and the answers Cringely fields are nevertheless fascinating, from the potentially silly question “are you a hippie or a nerd?” (“If I had to pick one of those two, I’m clearly a hippie,” Jobs responds with a sly look in his eye, “and all the people I worked with were clearly in that category, too”) to Jobs’ prophesies about the impact of the Web to musings like “I think everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think.” (1:00) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part One The one with the wedding. (1:57) Marina, SF Center.

Tyrannosaur Apparently unemployed and estranged from any family, middle-class Leeds Joseph (Peter Mullan) is fueled by enough rageahol (Homer Simpson: “I’m a rageaholic! Addicted to rageahol!”) to commit three violent acts in the first three scenes of actor Paddy Considine’s debut feature as writer-director. Volunteering at a Christian charity thrift shop in his bleak hood by day, our other protagonist Hannah (Olivia Colman) spends nights in the “nice” part of town. Behind one of its doors, she endures considerable abuse as punching bag (and occasional urinal) for violently mood-swinging spouse James (Eddie Marsan, making one pine for the comparative harmlessness of his horrible driver’s ed teacher in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky). A slice of British miserabilist pie with a razor in it, Tyrannosaur throws these characters in various extremis together with almost no backstory but a real zeal to rub our noses in it — whatever “it” is. Strong content and strong performances make this as hard to turn away from as it is sometimes hard to watch. Yet there’s something a little underdeveloped and contrived about the load of angry angst Considine makes his story bear. The result is worthy, but not as genuinely shocking as say, Tim Roth’s 1999 The War Zone, nor as insightful about dole-ful lower-class English life as 2009’s Fish Tank, to name a couple comparable features. (1:31) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Woodmans Francesca Woodman jumped off a building in 1981 when she was 22, despondent over the fact that her photographs hadn’t found a niche in New York’s competitive art world. She was no stranger to competition — she’d grown up with a parents who placed art-making above all other obligations. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Francesca remains the most-acclaimed Woodman; her haunting black-and-white photos, often featuring the artist’s nude figure, have proven hugely influential in the realms of both fine art and fashion. She was, as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website says (an exhibit of her work opens Nov. 5), “ahead of her time.” Scott Willis’ documentary features extensive interviews with her parents, George and Betty, and to a lesser extent Francesca’s brother, Charles (also an artist); the film is both Woodman bio and incisive exploration of the family’s complex dynamics. Most fascinating is Charles, who remarks of his daughter’s posthumous success, “It’s frustrating when tragedy overshadows work.” But after her death, he took up photography, making images that resemble those Francesca left behind. (1:22) Roxie. (Eddy)

Young Goethe in Love You might be suspect North Face (2008) director Philipp Stölzl’s take on Germany’s most renowned writer is biting off of 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, but the filmmaker manages to rise above facile comparisons to deliver his own unique stab at re-creating the life and love of the 23-year-old polymath, long before he became an influential poet and cultural force. Stölzl and co-writers Christoph Müller and Alexander Dydyna spin off the autobiographical nature of what some consider the world’s first best-seller, 1774’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, though there were few sorrows at first for the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) — a perpetually raging, playful party animal rather than the brooding forerunner of romanticism. Unable to move forward in his law studies and believed a wretched failure by his father (Henry Hübchen), Goethe is exiled to a job in a small-town court, beneath the thumb of the fiercely bourgeois court councilor Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). Embodying the charms of provincial life: Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein), the bright-eyed, artistic eldest daughter of a struggling widower. Naturally Goethe and Lotte end up caught in each other’s orbits, although rivals for affection and attention lie around each corner, as does a certain inevitable sense of despair. Charismatic lead actors and attention to period details — as well as an infectious joie de vivre — are certain to animate fans of historical romance. (1:42) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Chun)

ONGOING

Anonymous Hark, what bosom through yonder bodice heaves? If you like your Shakespearean capers OTT and chock-full of fleshy drama, political intrigue, and groundling sensation, then Anonymous will enthrall (and if the lurid storyline doesn’t hold, the acting should). Writer John Orloff spins his story off one popular theory of Shakespeare authorship — that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true pen behind the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Our modern-day narrator (Derek Jacobi) foregrounds the fictitious nature of the proceedings, pulling back the curtain on Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) staging his unruly comedies for the mob, much to the amusement of a mysterious aging dandy of a visitor: the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). Hungry for the glory that has always slipped through his pretty fingers, the Earl yearns to have his works staged for audiences beyond those in court, where Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave as the elder regent, daughter Joely Richardson as the lusty young royal) dotes on them, and out of the reach of his puritan father-in-law Robert Cecil (David Thewlis), Elizabeth’s close advisor, and he devises a plan for Jonson to stage them under his own name. But much more is triggered by the productions, uncovering secret trysts, hunchback stratagems, and more royal bastards than you can shake a scepter at. Director Roland Emmerich invests the production with the requisite high drama — and camp — to match the material, as well as pleasing layers of grime and toxic-looking Elizabethan makeup for both the ladies and the dudes who look like ladies (the crowd-surfing, however, strikes the off-key grunge-era note). And if the inherent elitism of the tale — could only a nobleman have written those remarkable plays and sonnets? — offends, fortunately the cast members are more than mere players. Ifans invests his decadent Earl with the jaded gaze and smudgy guyliner of a fading rock star, and Redgrave plays her Elizabeth like a deranged, gulled grotesque. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*El Bulli: Cooking in Progress Oh to be a fly on the wall of El Bulli — back in 2008 and 2009, when director Gereon Wetzel turned his lens on the Spanish landmark, it was considered the best restaurant in the world. This elegantly wrought documentary, covering a year at the culinary destination (now closed), allows you to do just that. Wetzel opens on chef-owner Ferran Adrià shutting down his remarkable eatery for the winter and then drifting in and out of his staff’s Barcelona lab as they develop dishes for the forthcoming season. Head chef Oriol Castro and other trusted staffers treat ingredients with the detached methodicalness of scientists — a champignon mushroom, say, might be liquefied from its fried, raw, sous-vide-cooked states — and the mindful intuition of artists, taking notes on both MacBooks and paper, accompanied by drawings and much photo-snapping. Fortunately the respectful Wetzel doesn’t shy away from depicting the humdrum mechanics of running a restaurant, as Adrià is perpetually interrupted by his phone, must wrangle with fishmongers reluctant to disclose “secret” seasonal schedules, and slowly goes through the process of creating an oil cocktail and conceptualizing a ravioli whose pasta disappears when it hits the tongue, tasting everything as he goes. Energized by an alternately snappy and meditative percussive score, this look into the most influential avant-garde restaurant in the world is a lot like the concluding photographs of the many menu items we glimpse at their inception — a memorable, sublimely rendered document that leaves you hungry for more. (1:48) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) Lumiere. (Chun)

50/50 This is nothing but a mainstream rom-com-dramedy wrapped in indie sheep’s clothes. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns he has cancer, he undergoes the requisite denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance like a formality. Aided by his bird-brained but lovable best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan), lovable klutz of a counselor Katherine (Anna Kendrick), and panicky mother (Anjelica Huston), Adam gets a new lease on life. This comes in the form of one-night-stands, furious revelations in parked cars, and a prescribed dose of wacky tobaccy. If 50/50 all sounds like the setup for a pseudo-insightful, kooky feel-goodery, it is. The film doesn’t have the brains or spleen to get down to the bone of cancer. Instead, director Jonathan Levine (2008’s The Wackness) and screenwriter Will Reiser favor highfalutin’ monologues, wooden characters, and a Hollywood ending (with just the right amount of ambiguity). Still, Gordon-Levitt is the most gorgeous cancer patient you will ever see, bald head and all. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life Far from perfect, yet imbued with all the playful, artful qualities of the maestro himself, writer-director Joann Sfar goes out of his way to tell singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg’s tale the way that he sees it, as that of an artist, and in the process creates a wonderland of cartoonish perversity from the cradle to the grave. The remainder of A Heroic Life is almost eclipsed by the film’s earliest interludes, which trail the already too-clever-for-his-own-good young musician and painter, born Lucien Ginsburg, as he proudly claims his gold star from the Nazis. With echoes of 400 Blows (1959) resounding with every wayward step, the brash young Lucien lives by his active imagination, dreaming up a fat, spiderlike plaything from the monstrous Jew depicted in Nazi propaganda and conjuring an imaginary alter-ego he dubs his ugly Mug. Though Heroic Life‘s adult Serge is seamlessly embodied by Eric Elmosnino, few of the moments from the grown lothario’s life rival those initial scenes, with the exception of his exuberant love affair with Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and the fantastic music that came out of it. Still, it’s a joy to hear his music, even in short snatches, with subtitles that clearly spell out Gainsbourg’s talents as a stunning, uniquely talented lyricist. (2:02) Roxie. (Chun)

*Gainsbourg: The Man Who Loved Women Those hungry for more of the real Serge Gainsbourg — after being tantalized and teased by Joann Sfar’s whimsical comic book-inspired feature — will want to catch this documentary by Pascal Forneri for many of the details that didn’t fit or were skimmed over, here, in the very words and image of the songwriter and the many iconic women in his life. Much of the chanson master’s photographic or video history seems to be here — from his blunt-force on-camera proposition of Whitney Houston to multiple, insightful interviews with the love of his life, Jane Birkin, as well as the many women who won his heart for just a little while, such as Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. Gainsbourg may be marred by its somewhat choppy, mystifying structure, at times chronological, at times organized according to creative periods, but overriding all are the actual footage and photographs loosely, louchely assembled and collaged by Forneri; delightful pre-music-videos Scopitones of everyone from France Gall to Anna Karina; and the gemlike, oh-so-quotable interviews with the mercurial, admirably honest musical genius and eternally subversive provocateur. Quibble as you might with the short shrift given his later career—in addition to major ’70s LPs like Histoire de Melody Nelson and L’Homme à tête de chou (Cabbage-Head Man) — this is a must-see for fans both casual and seriously seduced. (1:45) Roxie. (Chun)

Le Havre Aki Kaurismäki’s second French-language film (following 1992’s La Vie de Boheme) offers commentary on modern immigration issues wrapped in the gauze of a feel good fairy tale and cozy French provincialism a la Marcel Pagnol. Worried about the health of his hospitalized wife (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), veteran layabout and sometime shoe shiner Marcel (Andre Wilms) gets some welcome distraction in coming to the aid of Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young African illegally trying to make way to his mother in London while eluding the gendarmes. Marcel’s whole neighborhood of port-town busybodies and industrious émigrés eventually join in the cause, turning Le Havre into a sort of old-folks caper comedy with an incongruously sunny take on a rising European multiculturalism in which there are no real racist xenophobes, just grumps deserving comeuppance. Incongruous because Kaurismäki is, of course, the king of sardonically funny Finnish miserabilism — and while it’s charmed many on the festival circuit, this combination of his usual poker-faced style and feel-good storytelling formula may strike others as an oil-and-water mismatch. (1:43) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Ides of March Battling it out in the Ohio primaries are two leading Democratic presidential candidates. Filling the role of idealistic upstart new to the national stage — even his poster looks like you-know-who’s Hope one — is Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), who’s running neck-and-neck in the polls with his rival thanks to veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and ambitious young press secretary Steven (Ryan Gosling). The latter is so tipped for success that he’s wooed to switch teams by a rival politico’s campaign chief (Paul Giamatti). While he declines, even meeting with a representative from the opposing camp is a dangerous move for Steven, who’s already juggling complex loyalties to various folk including New York Times reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei) and campaign intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who happens to be the daughter of the Democratic National Party chairman. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s acclaimed play Farragut North, Clooney’s fourth directorial feature is assured, expertly played, and full of sharp insider dialogue. (Willimon worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the White House.) It’s all thoroughly engaging — yet what evolves into a thriller of sorts involving blackmail and revenge ultimately seems rather beside the point, as it turns upon an old-school personal morals quandary rather than diving seriously into the corporate, religious, and other special interests that really determine (or at least spin) the issues in today’s political landscape. Though stuffed with up-to-the-moment references, Ides already feels curiously dated. (1:51) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Immortals Arrow time (comin’ at ya, in 3D), blood lust, fascinating fascinators, and endless seemingly-CGI-chiseled chests mark this rework of the Theseus myth. Tarsem Singh flattens out the original tale of crazy-busy hero who founded Athens yet seems determined to outdo the Lord of the Rings series with his striking art direction (so chic that at times you feel like you’re in a perfume ad rather than King Hyperion’s torture chamber). As you might expect from the man who made the dreamy, horse-slicing Cell (2000), Immortals is all sensation rather than sense. The proto-superhero here is a peasant (Henry Cavill), trained in secret by Zeus (John Hurt and Luke Evans) and toting a titanic chip on his shoulder when he runs into the power-mad Cretan King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, struggling to gnash the sleek scenery beneath fleshy bulk and Red Lobster headgear). Hyperion aims to obtain the Epirus Bow — a bit like a magical, preindustrial rocket launcher — to free the Titans, set off a war between the gods, and destroy humanity (contrary to mythology, Hyperion is not a Titan — just another heavyweight grudge holder). To capture the bow, he must find the virgin oracle Phaedra (Freida Pinto), massacring his way through Theseus’ village and setting his worst weapon, the Beast, a.k.a. the Minotaur, on the hero. Saving graces amid the gory bluster, which still pays clear tribute to 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, is the vein-bulging passion that Singh invests in the ordinarily perfunctory kill scenes, the avant-garde headdresses and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and the occasional edits that turn on visual rhymes, such as the moment when the intricate mask of a felled minion melts into a seagoing vessel, which are liable to make the audience gasp, or laugh, out loud. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

In Time Justin Timberlake moves from romantic comedy to social commentary to play Will Salas, a young man from the ghetto living one day at a time. Many 12-steppers may make this claim, but Salas literally is, because in his world, time actually is money and people pay, say, four minutes for a cup of coffee, a couple hours for a bus ride home from work, and years to travel into a time zone where people don’t run from place to place to stay ahead of death. In writer-director Andrew Niccol’s latest piece of speculative cinema, humans are born with a digitized timepiece installed in their forearm and a default sell-by date of 25 years, with one to grow on — though most end up selling theirs off fairly quickly while struggling to pay rent and put food on the table. Time zones have replaced area codes in defining social stature and signaling material wealth, alongside those pesky devices that give the phrase “internal clock” an ominous literality. Niccol also wrote and directed Gattaca (1997) and wrote The Truman Show (1998), two other films in which technological advances have facilitated a merciless, menacing brand of social engineering. In all three, what is most alarming is the through line between a dystopian society and our own, and what is most hopeful is the embattled protagonist’s promises that we don’t have to go down that road. Amanda Seyfried proves convincible as a bored heiress to eons, her father (Vincent Kartheiser) less amenable to Robin Hood-style time banditry. (1:55) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life How remarkable is it that, some 50-plus features along, filmmaker Werner Herzog would become the closest thing to a cinema’s conscience? This time the abyss is much closer to home than the Amazon rainforest or the Kuwaiti oil fields — it lies in the heart of Rick Perry country. What begins as an examination of capital punishment, introduced with an interview with Reverend Richard Lopez, who has accompanied Texas death row inmates to their end, becomes a seeming labyrinth of human tragedy. Coming into focus is the execution of Michael Perry, convicted as a teenager of the murder of a Conroe, Tex., woman, her son, and his friend — all for sake of a red Camaro. Herzog obtains an insightful interview with the inmate, just days before his execution, as well as his cohort Jason Burkett, police, an executioner, and the victims’ family members, in this haunting examination of crime, punishment, and a small town in Texas where so many appear to have gone wrong. So wrong that one might see Into the Abyss as more related to 1977’s Stroszek and its critical albeit compassionate take on American life, than Herzog’s last tone poem about the mysterious artists of 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (and it’s also obviously directly connected to next year’s TV documentary, Death Row). The layered tragedies and the strata of destroyed lives stays with you, as do the documentary’s difficult questions, Herzog’s gentle humanity as an interviewer, and the fascinating characters that don’t quite fit into a more traditional narrative — the Conroe bystander once stabbed with a screwdriver who learned to read in prison, and the dreamy woman impregnated by a killer whose entire doomed family appears to be incarcerated. (1:46) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Chun)

J. Edgar The usual polished, sober understatement of Clint Eastwood’s directing style and the highlights-compiling CliffsNotes nature of Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay turn out to be interestingly wrong choices for this biopic about one of the last American century’s most divisive figures. Interesting in that they’re perhaps among the very few who would now dare viewing the late, longtime FBI chief with so much admiration tempered by awareness of his faults — rather than the other way around. After all, Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) strengthened his bureau in ways that, yes, often protected citizens and state, but at what cost? The D.C. native eventually took to frequently “bending” the law, witch-hunting dubious national enemies (he thought the Civil Rights movement our worst threat since the bomb-planting Bolshevik anarchists of half a century earlier), blackmailing personal ones, weakening individual rights against surveillance, hoarding power (he resented the White House’s superior authority), lying publicly, and doing just about anything to heighten his own fame. A movie that internalized and communicated his rising paranoid megalomania (ironically Hoover died during the presidency of Nixon, his equal in that regard) might have stood some chance of making us understand this contradiction-riddled cipher. But J. Edgar is doggedly neutral, almost colorless (literally so, in near-monochrome visual presentation), its weird appreciation of the subject’s perfectionism and stick-to-it-iveness shutting out almost any penetrating insight. (Plus there’s Eastwood’s own by-now-de rigueur soundtrack of quasi-jazz noodling to make what is vivid here seem more dull and polite.) The love that dare not speak its name — or, evidently, risk more than a rare peck on the cheek — between Hoover and right-hand-man/life companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, very good if poorly served by his old-age makeup) becomes both the most compelling and borderline-silly thing here, fueled by a nervous discretion that seems equal parts Black’s interest and Eastwood’s discomfort. While you might think the directors polar opposites in many ways, the movie J. Edgar ultimately recalls most is Oliver Stone’s 1995 Nixon: both ambitiously, rather sympathetically grapple with still-warm dead gorgons and lose, filmmaker and lead performance alike laboring admirably to intelligent yet curiously stilted effect. (2:17) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Jack and Jill (1:39) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Like Crazy Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet near the end of college; after a magical date, they’re ferociously hooked on each other. Trouble is, she’s in Los Angeles on a soon-to-expire student visa — and when she impulsively overstays, then jets home to London for a visit months later, her re-entry to America is stopped cold at LAX. (True love’s no match for homeland security.) An on-and-off long-distance romance ensues, and becomes increasingly strained, even as their respective careers (he makes furniture, she’s a magazine staffer) flourish. Director and co-writer Drake Doremus (2010’s Douchebag) achieves a rare midpoint between gritty mumblecore and shiny Hollywood romance; the characters feel very real and the script ably captures the frustration that settles in when idealized fantasies give way to the messy workings of everyday life. There are some contrivances here — Anna’s love-token gift from Jacob, a bracelet engraved “Patience,” breaks when she’s with another guy — but for the most part, Like Crazy offers an honest portrait of heartbreak. (1:29) California, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Love Crime Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance about what sleazy things could potentially be done to this neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller. No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures. Ludivine Sagnier plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. Though it’s no masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his Corneau’s career Corneau (he died at age 67 last August) not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. (1:46) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Margin Call Think of Margin Call as a Mamet-like, fictitious insider jab at the financial crisis, a novelistic rejoinder to Oscar-winning doc Inside Job (2010). First-time feature director and writer J.C. Chandor shows a deft hand with complex, writerly material, creating a darting dance of smart dialogue and well-etched characters as he sidesteps the hazards of overtheatricality, a.k.a. the crushing, overbearing proscenium. The film opens on a familiar Great Recession scene: lay-off day at an investment bank, marked by HR functionaries calling workers one by one into fishbowl conference rooms. The first victim is the most critical — Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a risk-management staffer who has stumbled on an investment miscalculation that could potentially trigger a Wall Street collapse. On his way out, he passes a drive with his findings to one of his young protégés, Peter (Zachary Quinto), setting off a flash storm over the next 24 hours that will entangle his boss Sam (Kevin Spacey), who’s agonizing over his dying dog while putting up a go-big-or-go-home front; cynical trading manager Will (Paul Bettany); and the firm’s intimidating head (Jeremy Irons), who gets to utter the lines, “Explain to me as you would to a child. Or a Golden Retriever.” Such top-notch players get to really flex their skills here, equipped with Chandor’s spot-on script, which manages to convey the big issues, infuse the numbers with drama and the money managers with humanity, and never talk down to the audience. (1:45) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Martha Marcy May Marlene If Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence was the breakout ingénue of 2010, look for Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s Elizabeth Olsen to take the 2011 title. Both films are backwoodsy and harrowing and offer juicy roles for their leading starlets — not to mention a pair of sinister supporting roles for the great John Harkes. Here, he’s a Manson-y figure who retains disturbing control over Olsen’s character even after the multi-monikered girl flees his back-to-the-land cult. Writer-director Sean Durkin goes for unflashy realism and mounds on the dread as the hollow-eyed Martha attempts to resume normal life, to the initial delight of her estranged, guilt-ridden older sister (Sarah Paulson). Soon, however, it becomes clear that Things Are Not Ok. You’d be forgiven for pooh-poohing Olsen from the get-go; lavish Sundance buzz and the fact that she’s Mary-Kate and Ashley’s sis have already landed her mountains of pre-release publicity. But her performance is unforgettable, and absolutely fearless. (1:41) Bridge, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Melancholia Lars von Trier is a filmmaker so fond of courting controversy it’s like he does it in spite of himself — his rambling comments about Hitler (“I’m a Nazi”) were enough to get him banned from the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where Melancholia had its debut (and star Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress). Oops. Maybe after the (here’s that word again) controversy that accompanied 2009’s Antichrist, von Trier felt like he needed a shocking context for his more mellow latest. Pity that, for Melancholia is one of his strongest, most thoughtful works to date. Split into two parts, the film follows first the opulent, disastrous, never-ending wedding reception of Justine (Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), held at a lavish estate owned by John (Kiefer Sutherland), the tweedy husband of Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Amid the turmoil of arguments (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as Justine and Claire’s divorced parents), pushy guests (Stellan Skarsgard as Justine’s boss), livid wedding planner (Udo Kier, amazing), and hurt feelings (Michael is the least-wanted groom since Kris Humphries), it’s clear that something is wrong with Justine beyond just marital jitters. The film’s second half begins an unspecified amount of time later, as Claire talks her severely depressed, near-catatonic sister into moving into John’s mansion. As Justine mopes, it’s revealed that a small planet, Melancholia — glimpsed in Melancholia‘s Wagner-scored opening overture — is set to pass perilously close to Earth. John, an amateur astronomer, is thrilled; Claire, fearful for her young son’s future and goaded into high anxiety by internet doomsayers, is convinced the planets will collide, no matter what John says. Since Justine (apparently von Trier’s stand-in for himself) is convinced that the world’s an irredeemably evil place, she takes the news with a shrug. Von Trier’s vision of the apocalypse is somber and surprisingly poetic; Dunst and Gainsbourg do outstanding work as polar-opposite sisters whose very different reactions to impending disaster are equally extreme. (2:15) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity 3 A prequel to a prequel, this third installment in the faux-home-movie horror series is as good as one could reasonably hope for: considerably better than 2010’s part two, even if inevitably it can’t replicate the relatively fresh impact of the 2007 original. After a brief introductory sequence we’re in 1988, with the grown-up sisters of the first two films now children (Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown) living with a recently separated mom (Lauren Bitter) and her nice new boyfriend (Christopher Smith). His wedding-video business provides the excuse for many a surveillance cam to be set up in their home once things start going bump in the night (and sometimes day). Which indeed they do, pretty quickly. Brown’s little Kristi has an invisible friend called Toby she says is “real,” though of course everyone else trusts he’s a normal, harmless imaginary pal. Needless to say, they are wrong. Written by Christopher Landon (Paranormal Activity 2, 2007’s Disturbia) and directed by the guys (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman) who made interesting nonfiction feature Catfish (2010), this quickly made follow-up does a good job piling on more scares without getting shameless or ludicrous about it, extends the series’ mythology in ways that easily pave way toward future chapters, and maintains the found-footage illusion well enough. (Excellent child performances and creepy camcorder “pans” atop an oscillating fan motor prove a great help; try to forget that video quality just wasn’t this good in ’88.) Not great, but thoroughly decent, and worth seeing in a theater — this remains one chiller concept whose effectiveness can only be diminished to the point of near-uselessness on the small screen. (1:24) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

Puss in Boots (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

The Rum Diary Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has been adapted twice before into feature form. Truly execrable Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) suggested his style was unfilmable, but Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) duly captured a “gonzo” mindset filtered through quantities of drugs and alcohol that might kill the ordinary mortal — a hallucinatory excess whose unpleasant effectiveness was underlined by the loathing Fear won in most quarters. Now between those two extremes there’s the curiously mild third point of this Johnny Depp pet project, translating an early, autobiographical novel unpublished until late in the author’s life. Failed fiction writer Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) thinks things are looking up when he’s hired to an English-language San Juan newspaper circa 1960 — though it turns out he was the only applicant. A gruff editor (Richard Jenkins), genially reckless photographer flatmate (Michael Rispoli) and trainwreck vision of his future self (Giovanni Ribisi) introduce him to the thanklessness of writing puff pieces for the gringo community of tourists and robber barons. One of the latter (Aaron Eckhart as Sanderson) introduces him to the spoils to be had exploiting this tax-shelter island “paradise” without sharing one cent with its angrily cast-aside, impoverished natives. Sanderson also introduces Kemp to blonde wild child Chenault (Amber Heard), who’s just the stock Girl here. Presumably hired for his Withnail & I (1987) cred, Bruce Robinson brings little of that 1987’s cult classic’s subversive cheek to his first writing-directing assignment in two decades. Handsomely illustrating without inhabiting its era, toying with matters of narrative and thematic import (American colonialism, Kemp-slash-Thompson finding his writing “voice,” etc.) that never develop, this slack quasi-caper comedy ambles nowhere in particular pleasantly enough. But the point, let alone the rage and outrageousness one expects from Thompson, is missing. On the plus side, there’s some succulent dialogue, as when Ribisi asks Depp for an amateur STD evaluation: “Is it clap?” “A standing ovation.” (2:00) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Skin I Live In I’d like to think that Pedro Almodóvar is too far along in his frequently-celebrated career to be having a midlife crisis, but all the classic signs are on display in his flashy, disjointed new thriller. Still mourning the death of his burn victim wife and removed from his psychologically disturbed daughter, brilliant-but-ethically compromised plastic surgeon Robert (played with smoldering creepiness by former Almodóvar heartthrob Antonio Banderas) throws himself into developing a new injury-resistant form of prosthetic skin, testing it on his mysterious live-in guinea pig, Vera (the gorgeous Elena Anaya, whose every curve is on view thanks to an après-ski-ready body suit). Eventually, all hell breaks loose, as does Vera, whose back story, as we find out, owes equally to 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and perhaps one of the Saw films. And that’s not even the half of it — to fully recount every sharp turn, digression and MacGuffin thrown at us would take the entirety of this review. That’s not news for Almodóvar, though. Much like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar’s métier is melodrama, as refracted through a gay cinephile’s recuperative affections. His strength as a filmmaker is to keep us emotionally tethered to the story he’s telling, amidst all the allusions, sex changes and plot twists torn straight from a telenovela. The real shame of The Skin I Live In is that so much happens that you don’t actually have time to care much about any of it. Although its many surfaces are beautiful to behold (thanks largely to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine), The Skin I Live In ultimately lacks a key muscle: a heart. (1:57) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*Sutro’s: The Palace at Land’s End Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch (2008’s Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong and 2009’s Remembering Playland) explores the unique and fascinating history behind San Francisco’s Sutro Baths in his latest project, an enjoyable documentary that covers the stories behind Adolph Sutro, the construction of his swimming pools, and the amazingly diverse, and somewhat strange collection of other attractions that entertained generations of locals that came to Land’s End for amusement. Told through interviews with local historians and residents, the narrative is illustrated with a host of rarely-seen historic photographs, archival film footage, contemporary video, and images of old documents, advertisements and newspapers. The film should appeal not only to older viewers who fondly remember going to Sutro’s as children, and sadly recall it burning down in 1966, but also younger audiences who have wandered through the ruins below the Cliff House and wondered what once stood there. (1:24) Balboa. (Sean McCourt)

Tower Heist The mildest of mysteries drift around the edges of Tower Heist — like, how plausible is Ben Stiller as the blue-collar manager of a tony uptown NYC residence? How is that Eddie Murphy’s face has grown smoother and more seamless with age? And how much heavy lifting goes into an audience member’s suspension of disbelief concerning a certain key theft, dangling umpteen floors above Thanksgiving parade, in the finale? Yet those questions might not to deter those eager to escape into this determinedly undemanding, faintly entertaining Robin Hood-style comedy-thriller. Josh Kovacs (Stiller) is the wildly competent manager of an upscale residence — toadying smoothly and making life run perfectly for his entitled employers — till Bernie Madoff-like penthouse dweller Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is arrested for big-time financial fraud, catching the pension fund of Josh’s staffers in his vortex. After a showy standoff gets the upstanding Josh fired, he assembles a crew of ex-employees Enrique (Michael Peña) and Charlie (Casey Affleck), maid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and foreclosed former resident Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), as well as childhood friend, neighbor, and thief Slide (Murphy). Murphy gets to slink effortlessly through supposed comeback role — is he vital here? Not really. Nevertheless, a few twists and a good-hearted feel for the working-class 99 percent who got screwed by the financial sector make this likely the most likable movie Brett Ratner has made since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand — provided you can get over those dangles over the yawning gaps in logic. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas Delivery of a mystery package to the crash pad Kumar (Kal Penn) no longer shares with now-married, successfully yuppiefied Harold (John Cho) forces the former to visit the latter in suburbia after a couple years’ bromantic lapse. Unfortunately Kumar’s unreconstructed stonerdom once again wreaks havoc with Harold’s well-laid plans, necessitating another serpentine quest, this time aimed toward an all-important replacement Xmas tree but continually waylaid by random stuff. Which this time includes pot (of course), an unidentified hallucinogen, ecstasy, a baby accidentally dosed on all the aforementioned, claymation, Ukrainian mobsters, several penises in peril, a “Wafflebot,” and a Radio City Music Hall-type stage holiday musical extravaganza starring who else but Neil Patrick Harris. Only in it for ten minutes or so, NPH manages to make his iffy material seem golden. But despite all CGI wrapping and self-aware 3D gratuitousness, this third Harold and Kumar adventure is by far the weakest. While the prior installments were hit/miss but anarchic, occasionally subversive, and always good-natured, Christmas substitutes actual race jokes for jokes about racism, amongst numerous errors on the side of simple crassness. There are some laughs, but you know creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are losing interest when the majority of their gags would work as well for Adam Sandler. Cho and Penn remain very likeable; this time, however, their movie isn’t. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Weekend In post-World War II Britain, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, and calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores.” Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes. The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Albert Finney kicked against the pricks in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night. The landscape has changed, but is still nondescript; the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) wakes up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend‘s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple. Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Woman on the Sixth Floor There is a particular strain of populist European comedy in which stuffy northerners are loosened up by liberating exposure to those sensual, passionate, loud, all-embracing simple folk from the sunny south. The line between multicultural inclusion and condescension is a thin one these movies not infrequently cross. Set in 1960, Philippe Le Guay’s film has a bourgeoisie Paris couple hiring a new maid in the person of attractive young Maria (Natalia Verbeke). She joins a large group of Spanish women toiling for snobbish French gentry in the same building. Her presence has a leavening effect on investment counselor employer Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), to the point where he actually troubles to improve the poorly housed maids’ lot. (Hitherto no one has cared that their shared toilet is broken.) But he also takes an inappropriate and (initially) unwanted romantic interest in this woman, lending a creepy edge to what’s intended as a feel-good romp. (For the record, Verbeke is about a quarter-century younger than Luchini — a difference one can’t imagine the film would ignore so completely if the genders were reversed.) Le Guay’s screenplay trades in easy stereotypes — the Spanish “help” are all big-hearted lovers of life, the Gallic upper-crusters (including Sandrine Kiberlain as J-L’s shallow, insecure wife) emotionally constipated, xenophobic boors — predictable conflicts and pat resolutions. As formulaic crowd-pleasers go, it could be worse. But don’t be fooled — if this were in English, there’d be no fawning mainstream reviews. In fact, it has been in English, more or less. And that ugly moment in cinematic history was called Spanglish (2004). (1:44) Albany, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Some joy in Mudville

Andrew Lam
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Some joy in Mudville

caitlin@sfbg.com

“I like the way you trim it/I got to bag it/Bag it up.” A ganja-fied version of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was playing over the speakers the night of Saturday, November 12 at 847 Lounge, an event space above the SoMa dispensary Green Door. The party’s mood was — yes — high as patients awaited the announcement of the winners in three categories of cannabis products at the Patient’s Choice awards ceremony, conversation with the activists and patients assembled in the room veered towards the serious.

Medical marijuana activist Mellody Gannon enjoyed the scene from a table in the center of the room: “As a patient, it’s really important right now that things like this are going on,” she said. Amid puzzling federal crackdowns, the future of her medicine is smoky. Recent pressure from the Department of Justice on landlords and banks has caused many dispensaries to consider shutting their doors (see “Feds crack down,” 10/12/11).

Which is why she was heartened to see cannabis connoisseurs coming together to celebrate the best of what California cannabis producers have to offer.

This year’s Patient’s Choice event was a much more intimate affair. Attendance was open to the public in 2010, but this year was limited to dispensary staff, activists, and the patients who had paid the $350 for a judge’s testing package. Judges had to sample over 30 strains (not to mention other products) in the 10 days leading up to Friday, when their votes were tallied and winners announced to stoned elation.

The event, sponsored by many of the city’s best-known dispensaries, was a fundraiser for Americans for Safe Access (ASA), an organization that promotes secure and available ways for prescribed patients to access medical marijuana.

Gannon, a patient since 1996, said that ASA’s advocacy is important — many times her doctors have turned up their nose at the medical efficacy of her marijuana prescription. “They tell you that you’re crazy or just a pothead,” she said.

After breaking a host of bones in a car accident, she relies on cannabis to mitigate chronic pain. “If they start closing these clubs, where are you going to go?” she asked.

Lynette Shaw sat nearby, smoking a strain home-grown buds she’s named Bonanza Jellybean. Shaw founded the Marin Alliance dispensary in Fairfax in 1997 after working on the Proposition 215 campaign the year before. She obtained special zoning from the city for the dispensary and insisted “we’ve done everything they told us to, even when the rules changed. We’re completely regulated to the satisfaction of the community.”

Nonetheless, one of the Department of Justice’s cease-and-desist letters landed in the mailbox of her landlord. Now unless something changes, Shaw’s dispensary — located in a county with one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the nation — will be out on the streets. Her landlord was threatened with 40 years in prison for renting to an illegal drug trafficker.

While others have pegged the Obama administration’s about-face on the tolerance of medical cannabis to election year grandstanding, Shaw thinks the persecution of state-legal marijuana operations like her own is a harbinger of much more dire civil rights violations.

“They’re trying to break the Constitution over marijuana. That’s why it’s important that we fight back now,” she said.

It was clear from the crowd at 847 Lounge that the medical marijuana movement wasn’t going to lose their meds without a fight. Perhaps strangely, the family producers that proudly hoisted their glass, Stanley Cup-looking trophies for best strain and other products still had an air of winning about them.

Playlist

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

CASS MCCOMBS

HUMOR RISK

(DOMINO)

Cass McCombs’ Wit’s End, released in the spring, was as elegant and somber as a candle-lit church. It was consistent, too, both sonically and thematically. In contrast, Humor Risk, the singer songwriter’s second LP this year, is eclectic, brighter, and less restrained. “Robin Egg Blue” is a breezy, nod your head side-to-side number, and “Mystery Mail” is crunchy hard rock. However, Humor Risk is hardly all smiles. After all, it’s Cass McCombs. “The Same Thing” is upbeat, but the lyrics are chilling. And “To Everyman His Chimera” (a female monster that breathes fire) sounds like a sequel to Wit’s End‘s “County Line”— it’s stripped down and fraught with tension. On the whole, Humor Risk is as infectious as pop but so substantive that it resists being called it. (James H. Miller)

 

 

 

THE MUSICAL ART QUINTET

NUEVO CHAMBER

(CLASSICAL REVOLUTION RECORDS)

This lively local string quintet formed at Sunday jam sessions at Revolution Cafe (homebase of its label) with the purpose of fusing classical to Argentine, Cuban, African, and electronic dance rhythms. Not a novel concept, but main composer-bassist Sascha Jacobsen’s concoctions hop nimbly through a world of styles while impressing with ear-catching intricacy and handsome technique. (“Turtle Island String Quartet high on Ástor Piazzolla” springs to mind.) Occasionally the project errs slightly in its earnestness — the jazzy positivity of “Life is Beautiful” is a bit relentless, although little kids will dig it — but indelible tracks like “Milonga de San Francisco” and Afrobeat-inflected “Fela Feliz” are spirited treats that will have you twirling across the floor. Musical Art Quintet performs Fri/18, 8 p.m., $10/$20 at the Collins Theater, 1055 Ellis, SF. www.musicalartquintet.com. (Marke B.)

 

 

 

AYSHAY

WARN-U

(TRIANGLE)

It’s nice when a record begins and immediately you feel as if you are being summoned into a secret ceremony. Raised in Kuwait and born in Senegal, Ayshay (Fatimi Al Quadiri) translates traditional Islamic songs into haunting and hypnotic spells on Warn-U. These tracks creep way under your skin, layered and looped vocal chants, alongside witchy electronics that bridge the gap between Grouper, Zola Jesus, Dead Can Dance, and Ofra Haza. There is something refreshing and rewarding about a debut that understands its scope. These four songs, coming in at 20 minutes, illuminate a singular vision and new voice that we’re sure to hear a lot from in years to come. Simultaneously sensual and creepy. (Irwin Swirnoff)

 

 

 

ATLAS SOUND

PARALLAX (4AD)

The incomparable Bradford Cox’s genius lies in his ability to mate transcendent lightness with cumbersome human vulnerability. His third release as Atlas Sound, Parallax, is the most refined example of this skill thus far. Shimmering harmonic tones blossom throughout Cox’s celestial pop songs, but his stream-of-consciousness vocal musings are forever steeped in melancholy. “When you’re down, you’re always down,” Cox cries over twinkling harpsichord loops on “Te Amo.” “My Angel Is Broken” is an anthem for the downhearted driven by summery surf guitar riffs. Featuring piano and backing vocals from MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden, “Mona Lisa” is a jangly cosmic joyride. The album’s closing track, “Lightworks,” floats off into oblivion like a lost balloon in the night sky. (Frances Capell)

 

 

WAX IDOLS

NO FUTURE

(HOZAC RECORDS) It’s unnerving when you realize you’ve been subconsciously waiting for something. Wax Idols’ No Future, is the record that filled an unknown void in my music collection, the slim crack between 1980s sleaze and modern post-punk. On the album, the Bay Area trio offers a sweet taste of the past without dipping its dirty fingernails too deeply into the punk classics pie. While songs like “Hotel Room” have the paranoid drums of the Germs, and snarling female vocals of Lydia Lunch, tracks such as “Nothing At All” lean more toward a shoegazy, garage-y Pretenders. The disaffected mood throughout is set by titles like “Uneasy,” and “Bad Future,” and yet, No Future sounds to me like the future of punk. (Emily Savage)

Bling and the kingdom

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bling and the kingdom

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL “Why curate an exhibition focused on a single country in an age of disappearing boundaries?” is one of the questions posed by the curatorial text at the start of “The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art from India,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ survey of recent photography, sculpture, and video from the subcontinent.

One obvious answer is, “Why not?” The recent historic record gives plenty of reason enough. Despite all those “disappearing boundaries” and the wider circulation of art and ideas and artists around the globe, there is the fact that, perhaps with the exception of Chinese art, comprehensive displays of contemporary art from non-Western countries are proportionally much rarer in major Western institutions, especially those in the US.

There is also the issue of timeliness. Although India’s transformation into a leading global economic player is not news, the impact that growth has had on the arts and the art market still is. An Artinfo.com headline asked only last week, “Is India Becoming the World’s Hub for Internet Art Commerce?” (with the related article on the blue chip, Internet-based art fair, India Art Collective, making a persuasive case for “yes”).

But the most compelling reasons for The Matter Within are offered by the art itself. Alternately playful and reflective, packing visual pop and demanding of deeper consideration, the exhibit’s pieces are as densely-packed with ideas, portraits, and questions about what and who comprises as complex an entity as “India,” and also what India’s future might look like when reflected in its past and present, as YBCA’s galleries are chock-a-block with things to look at.

This breadth is both “The Matter Within”‘s greatest curatorial strength and the source of some of its practical weak spots, particular in regards to how it is installed. There is simply more art here than YBCA can comfortably accommodate, as well as intriguing omissions (why no paintings?). Different series by the same artist are spread across the space’s two main galleries, something not explicitly stated in the wall didactics, which often address both bodies of work but are positioned alongside only one of them.

This is all the more frustrating since not everything in the show necessarily deserves inclusion. Sunil Gupta’s photo-story Sun City, which recasts the heterosexual relationship at the center of Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction film La Jetee as a trans-national homosexual one played out against the backdrop of AIDS rather than nuclear annihilation, is a moving engagement with both the film it references and the shifting valences of minoritarian sexuality and desirability across borders.

His large-scale, multi-portrait narratives focusing on gender-ambiguous couples in the next room over, however, is less compelling and lacks the directness with which Tejal Shah documents the female masculinity of her transsexual and transgender subjects in the photo series and digital slide show, “I Am.” Shah’s portraits would’ve made for a smart counterpoint to Pushpamala N.’s “Native Types” series — in which the photographer appears as various Indian female archetypes culled from art history, pop culture, and religion— that instead are hung across from Nikhil Chopra’s equally costume and prop-heavy, yet less conceptually tight, photos and video in the show’s entry gallery.

Similarly, Rina Banerjee’s Frankensteinian sculptures of colonial-era antiquities and costly animal remnants, although rich with historical allusion, simply look busy compared to Siddartha Karawall’s giant send-up of a horse and rider statue Hangover Man, made from wax-covered T-shirts that had originally been donated to poor communities in India by an American charity but got re-routed to the open market. The rider in question is the former Maharaja after whom Karwall’s art school was named, who now appears as a Don Quixote-like wraith representative of the gulf between Western goodwill and the Indian “ground truth” of need and impoverishment it is supposedly addressing.

A different sort of disconnect haunts the Asian Art Museum’s “Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts,” the other major exhibit in town currently devoted to India. Maharaja means “great king” or “high king” in Sanskrit, a status expressed in the breathtaking level of sumptuousness and luxury of the material items through which Indian rulers displayed their power.

Light on historical context and heavy on the baubles, Maharaja offers up a seemingly endless parade of such items: extravagantly embroidered textiles, magnificent ceremonial accouterments, and enough serious bling to outshine the borrowed sparkles of any contemporary red carpet. The effect is strangely flattening. Monarchy is the golden goose that produces marvelous things rather than a larger institution, the spoils of which only tell one part of a more complex and usually bloody story.

Thus, what Maharaja leaves largely unaddressed are questions of power and history, as well as the politics of display. For example, what was the cost in human labor (and perhaps lives) to spin and weave the silk necessary to make the stunning 18th Century bridal gown in the second gallery? Or to mine the diamonds, rubies, and emeralds that emblazon so many of the items displayed?

The fact that the majority of the artifacts come from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum –an official co-presenter of the exhibit— speaks more to the legacy of British colonial rule than the brief gloss the Raj and its aftermath receive in the show’s third gallery, which crams in most of Maharaja’s history lessons. And judging from the case of various Cartier commissions from the 1920s and ’30s, and the gorgeous modern furniture commissioned by Yeshwant Rao Holkar II (a jazz age jetsetter and friend of Man Ray’s who is the exhibit’s breakout star), India’s deposed royals did pretty well for themselves, even as the times changed around them.

But then again, that the already powerful would continue being high rollers is not really news. As Mel Brooks pointed out long ago, it’s good to be the king.

THE MATTER WITHIN: NEW CONTEMPORARY OF INDIA

Through January 15

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF.

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

MAHARAJA: THE SPLENDOR OF INDIA’S ROYAL COURTS

Through April 8

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF.

(415) 581-3500

www.asianart.org

 

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