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Just chill

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Just chill

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Four years ago, in the waning days of the aughts, the befuddling adlib term “chillwave” forged in the throes of the blogosphere, accompanied nearly every story about acts like Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro Y Moi. For the uninitiated, chillwave is a cheap, slap-on label used to describe grainy, dancey, lo-fi, 1980s inspired music, and most importantly is a disservice to any band associated with it. Luckily for music writers and listeners alike, this term has died a relatively swift death.

Toro Y Moi, the one-man bedroom project of Chaz Bundick, has exponentially progressed since the chillwave era, in addition to his relocation to Berkeley in August 2011. Bundick is currently on a sold-out tour with his live band and will headline two sold-out Noise Pop shows at the Independent this weekend.

His latest LP, Anything In Return, which came out last month on Carpark Records and was recorded in full in the Bay Area, is a fruitful expansion beyond his earlier albums Causers of This and Underneath the Pine, and a shining foray into experimental styles and sounds.

Anything In Return marks an ambitious departure from anything Bundick has done in the past; Bundick describes it to me as a “bigger sounding album, more accessible and poppy.” The result is a fluent and delicate fabrication of funk grooviness, R&B introspection, and swirling pop melodies. The success — and more importantly, the ethos of the effort — is highly indebted to the late sacrosanct hip-hop producer J Dilla. If Anything in Return signifies a reinvention of Toro Y Moi, then J Dilla and his “try anything, do anything” mantra are its guiding light.

Such a transformation can be daunting to some, but as Bundick notes during our phone call, Dilla “makes everything seem like it’s alright to try.” One of the few Dilla tributes outside of the Paid Dues and Rock the Bells festivals.

Though maturation and cheer remain central themes in terms of sound side of things, Anything in Return is loaded with confessions about Bundick grappling with his relationship and the strain the life of a touring musician has placed on it. The gripes are most poignant on tracks like “Cola” and “Say That,” where he laments the state of flux his and his girlfriend’s different lives have placed on their relationship and the resulting insecurities that arise from such limbo.

His new life in the Bay Area — he moved out here from his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina because his girlfriend enrolled in a grad program at Cal — is expectedly represented in Anything in Return‘s character and aural makeup. One of the first and last things heard on the opening track “Harm in Change” is the crisp noise of a BART train accelerating as it leaves a station — most likely one of the three Berkeley stations.

So far Bundick has fluidly adjusted to life in Berkeley and in the Bay Area in general and signals his health as the biggest benefactor of his relocation. Coming from BBQ-laden South Carolina, the recent vegetarian convert is grateful for the Bay Area’s wealth of veggie options; in a recent interview with SFStation, he listed the revered Berkeley institution Cheese Board Pizza as his favorite food joint. And like pretty much anyone who moves here, he’s been biking, busing, and BARTing more and more.

 

TORO Y MOI

With Sikane, Dog Bite, DRMS (Fri.), James and Evander (Sat)

Fri/1-Sat/2, 8pm, sold out

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

The unheard music

Andrew Lam
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The unheard music

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART “Silence,” the large new thematic show at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, might have been titled in the plural, since it approaches silence from various angles phenomenological, political, and cultural. Co-curated by BAM/PFA and the Menil Collection, “Silence” takes its inspiration from one of the most famous 20th-century artworks in any medium, John Cage’s 4’33” (1952).

As you almost certainly already know, Cage’s 4’33” entails having the audience listen to ambient and accidental sounds of the auditorium while a pianist closes and opens a piano keyboard cover three times at set intervals but without touching the keys, both performing the difference between silence and quiet, and demonstrating the omnipresence of music wherever attentiveness is present. Cage’s work anchors the tone and scope of the show, and so from all possible kinds of silences, the exhibition limits to works by some 30 artists wherein silences are productive, pregnant, or impossible. Cage here is represented by scores for the performance as well as by several works that served as inspirations, descendants and tangents of his work.

Most directly, the show includes Robert Rauschenberg’s monochrome White Painting (Two Panel) (1951), which Cage cited as partial inspiration for 4’33” next to Ad Reinhardt’s all-black Abstract Painting (1965). If you know a bit of art history, then you get the curatorial statement here: aside from standing in for all sorts of minimalist silences, the yin and yang of Rauschenberg’s pregnant meditation juxtaposed with Reinhardt’s zero-degree absolutism are the boundaries for the gamut of representational possibilities that Cage and subsequent modernists have been sifting through. Of all Cage’s descendents, nobody gets that as well as Steve Roden, represented here by several conceptual and generative works based on 4’33”. Roden, who lives in Pasadena, crosses freely between sound and visual art in works that map, translate, and draw attention to the structures of sounds and the activity of listening. Alongside paintings and sculptures that take their generative cues from the text that accompanies the Cage piece, Roden is also exhibiting 365 x 433, (2011) three books of text that document and reflect on his daily performance of 4’33” over the course of a year.

Several other artists make explicit reference to silence and its relationship to listening, especially in social context. Brooklyn artist Jennie C. Jones uses materials commonly found in recording studios to make paintings that absorb and quench sounds in the spaces where they hang. Sustained Black with Broken Time and Undertone (2011) wraps around the corner on two walls of the gallery space, drawing attention to silence’s active relationship to architecture. Kurt Mueller’s Cenotaph (2011–13), a 100-CD jukebox filled with recordings of moments of silence called for by public figures, lays bare the thorny absurdity of state-imposed silence as ritual. On one jukebox panel, for example, you can choose between playing the moments of silence called for (from top to bottom) trapped miners, Michael Jackson, Corey Haim, or Ted Kennedy. Represented here by letters and photographs, Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978–1979 (1979) casts silence as a form of cultural askesis. In that performance Hsieh locked himself in a cell inside his New York City loft for a year without talking, reading, writing, or entertainment.

Overlapping existential and cultural silences, the first gallery in the exhibition features several of Andy Warhol’s electric chair silkscreens (1965 and 1967), interspersed with Christian Marclay’s Silence paintings (all 2006), which appropriate a cropping from Warhol’s source photographs of the execution chamber and the “Silence” sign above the door that illuminated to alert attendees that the execution was about to take place. Also shown are extensive sketches from Marclay, showing his ongoing interest in these particular Warhols. As a framing device for the show, the pairing of Warhol and Marclay helps illustrate the pregnant potentials within Warhol’s bleak, lovely fascination with death imagery, and inverts the pairing of Rauschenberg and Reinhardt. Warhol’s particular silence, the attenuation and emptying of visual meanings through repetition, is taken up again by Marclay as productive fodder for an entire body of investigations.

Throughout February, film screenings addressing various kinds of cinematic and personal silences accompany the show. February 27, short experimental works that incorporate complications on sound and silence will include Darrin Martin’s Monograph in Stereo (2005), which addresses silence via hearing loss. *

SILENCE

Through April 28

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

Sort of and last

Andrew Lam
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Sort of and last

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In a deceptively low-key but major theatrical event, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last weekend presented the local debuts of both the Wooster Group and the New York City Players, in their collaborative take on three of Eugene O’Neill’s seafaring “Glencairn plays.”

It’s striking and not a little frustrating that San Francisco has never before been a port of call for either of these two world-famous and globetrotting experimental theater companies. Moreover, because this was a first-time collaboration between the two influential groups, Early Plays (as the O’Neill program is titled) was not really representative of either one of them. Rather, it was an intriguing, at times euphoric, at times baffling exploration fusing actors from both companies with relatively bare-bones Wooster design elements — all under the signature directorial style of NYC Players’ playwright-director, Richard Maxwell. Even so, it was a stimulating evening in which the attentive, open curiosity of the audience was palpable.

The triplet of early O’Neill one-acts — all written between 1913 and 1916 and featuring polyglot crew members of the British tramp steamer Glencairn —included, in order of presentation, The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home. In these short and atmospheric plays, O’Neill explores the hard, often brutal lives of sailors and other working-class people swept along by the winds of trade. But in paying attention to their distinct cadences, relationships, and dreams, the playwright also points to the lyrical nature of their lonely yet social lives, as well as flickering moments of transcendent experience amid coarse routines and unruly bursts of energy.

In this sense, they are not all that different from (and nearly as contemporary as) Maxwell’s own plays (like House, Burger King, Boxing 2000, or People Without History), which often delve into the mundane musicality of ordinary, inconsequential lives sideswiped by half-understood forces, churned by bumptious pretentions and bumpy social interactions, bewildered by quiet epiphanies. Indeed, Maxwell’s work comes shaded by his own original songs in which the banal takes unexpected flight.

But whatever their resonances, their plays remain a fat century apart in theatrical worldviews. O’Neill, learning from Europe and especially Stindberg, was inventing an American theatrical vocabulary still not entirely free of a certain melodramatic tradition. Maxwell and the New York City Players, on the other hand, represent a distinct and sustained attack on the stifling affects of the theatrical artifice that has accrued since then. And the Wooster Group has maintained a visionary re-imagining of the stage, its strengths and capacities, for nearly four decades (a project whose power and scope was clearly visible even on video in the three-weekend series of Wooster Group work screened at YBCA in the lead-up to the Early Plays premiere).

And so, what audiences encountered last weekend was a purposively monotone rendering of O’Neill’s rather overwrought dialogue, laden with a variety of archaic-sounding dialects that the actors dutifully articulated as written but, for the most part, without further embellishment or affectation. The action, meanwhile, unfolded with a deliberately subdued, knowing amateurishness on a Wooster-like set (designed by Jim Clayburgh and Wooster leader Elizabeth LeCompte) whose exposed gray-planed design featured a floating stage floor, supported by thin vertical cables, on which a skeletal framework of piping, bulging light bulbs, ropes, and pulleys combined in vaguely nautical abstraction.

Not that theatricality per se was absent: three of Maxwell’s workmanlike yet stirring ditties, for example, stitch together the O’Neill plays with simple, poignant, uninflected harmonies and rhythms as the actors smoothly reconfigure the stage. During Bound East for Cardiff, moreover, the stage was plunged into semi-darkness, sculpted by the warm glow of a few lantern lamps and the looming, slowly dissipating clouds blasted at intervals from a smoke machine, as main characters Yank and Driscoll (played respectively by NYC Players’ Brian Mendes and Wooster veteran Ari Fliakos) conferred at the former’s deathbed in a recessed, beautifully haunted corner of the stage. And in The Long Voyage Home, NYC Players stalwart Jim Fletcher (a riveting presence who is perhaps the quintessence of Maxwell’s forthright aesthetic, deflating and commanding at once) donned a too-tight barman’s vest and a toupee that looked like an animal roosting rump-forward on his head; while beside him Wooster’s luminous Kate Valk burst into and out of tears with a kind of blank perfection.

But it was precisely the melding of the clumsy and the graceful — and the volatile tension that arose between the purposely anti-theatrical and the inescapable pull of the plays themselves — that marked the production’s dissonant, quasi-Brechtian approach. In eschewing the usual cohesion, the production gave itself over to an admittedly not entirely successful but fascinating pursuit of what is much more rare: a sense of raw immediacy and authenticity, and a poetic capacity for unexpected instants of reflection. It’s an approach that wrestled with itself as much as the material or the audience, but it led to a refreshing sense of possibility and inquiry, and in it too there were moments when the lyrical and transcendent were given new life.

Scare tactics

Andrew Lam
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Scare tactics

arts@sfbg.com

GAMER There aren’t a lot of great horror games on the console market. Even old stalwart Resident Evil gradually dropped anything resembling spooky game play, hoping to conjure the success of Western-developed shooters like Gears of War by incorporating cooperative play and action-packed, cover-based shooting. Good horror is about being alone, outnumbered and outgunned. So when Dead Space 3 was revealed at last year’s E3, fans were appropriately nervous when told the franchise’s new focus would be on cooperative play and cover-based shooting. It was Resident Evil all over again. The horror!

Now that it’s here, perhaps our concerns were misplaced. Dead Space 3 (Visceral Games/Electronic Arts; PS3, Xbox 360, PC) features everything fans were apprehensive about — and some unannounced and sour-tasting micro-transactions — but at its core beats the heart of a classic survival horror experience.

Dead Space‘s formula consists of traversing old spaceships, zero-gravity space, and desolate planets, unloading bullets into undead creepy-crawlies. Picking up shortly after the events of Dead Space 2, in which spaceship engineer Isaac Clarke battled zombies brought to life by alien artifacts called “markers,” Clarke once again is thrust into combat — this time to save ex-girlfriend Ellie and stop religious zealots from activating more markers on the ice planet Tau Volantis.

Dead Space 3 has a wonderful sense of location and atmosphere — hallmarks of any horror game. Rickety, malfunctioning hallways of long-abandoned spaceships fire sparks, creak and sway as you walk through, and enemies have a nasty way of sneaking up behind you with bloodcurdling screams. Although you won’t see the icy surface of Tau Volantis until maybe a third of the way through the game, the planet’s harsh winds and ivory cliffs are a welcome change of scenery. Some gamers will scoff at the “monster closets,” but Dead Space owns the artifice and builds upon it in interesting ways, making firefights consistently tense.

As for the co-op, cover-based shooting and micro-transactions, they are only as unpleasant as you allow them to be. While wholly different from the solitary feel of single-player, co-op is seamless and presents new approaches to combat and puzzle-solving. Being offered downloadable content each time you approach a work bench or spacesuit kiosk breaks the atmosphere of the game, but the weapon customization system is fun to play around with and cover-based shooting is encouraged only a handful of times.

That Dead Space 3 remains a solid traditional horror game in spite of distracting “broad appeal” additions is a dubious accomplishment, but perhaps it’s one fans can live with for the time being. The marketplace’s lack of quality horror games allows some leeway for a series that gets it mostly right. Let’s not get caught up in worrying how these lesser features might expand in the inevitable Dead Space 4; in the here and now, Dead Space 3 is exciting, beautiful, and best of all — scary.

Up the game

Andrew Lam
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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS K-3PO lives right in the neighborhood and claims to have played ping-pong with me in the ’90s. He also claims to have photographed my old band, and on this score I believe him.

We write at the same coffee shop. Right now, for example, I’m writing about him and he’s sitting across the room from me, either oblivious or not. Who knows?

He doesn’t have a cell phone. He has a weekly planner, with a black cover.

“Remember these?” he said, trying to make a dinner plan with me.

“Oh yeah. You’re old-fashioned,” I said, and he feigned offense. “I mean that as a compliment.” (The truth.)

Anyway, yeah, we had tried to go eat barbecue one night last week at the new neighborhood smokehouse, Hi-Lo, and luckily for all of us — but especially Hi-Lo, I’m thinking — they were closed for a private function.

I buy my pork steaks at that divey little market, 19th and Mission, and my bread at Duc Loi, so I walk past Hi-Lo pretty often, “doing the block.” There’s always some kind of friendliness marking the spot, lately. Like, a couple weeks ago a guy was standing outside and Hedgehog had already told me that barbecue was going in there, so I said: “Open?”

“Not yet,” he said, “but go on in and look around.”

I did. It must have been like a dress rehearsal, or something. Waitresspersonpeople were everywhere, the kitchen was all a-bustle, smelled like smoke . . . The one thing missing was customers. Of which I would have gladly been one, if they were open open.

I also wish they would have showed me to the basement, where they keep their three-ton smoker, but that didn’t seem to be going to happen, so I went on ahead to the market and got my pork steaks, and to Duc Loi, and home.

Then, when we tried to go with K-3PO, there was a sign on the door saying closed for private function. I must have looked sad, cause someone came out and gave me a little paper bag of cookies.

Those cookies were good! They were not barbecue, but they were sweet and salty. And buttery. I ate them at Baobab, while we were waiting for our red curry prawns, red curry chicken, and some other kind of chicken. With black-eyed peas.

None of which was barbecue, either. But: good. But, according to K-3PO, overpriced. I give up on anything ever being cheap anymore, in the Mission. I just wish that places would step up their game a little, to earn it. In addition to going, OK, it’s the Mission so let’s charge 20 to 30 percent more, go: it’s the Mission so let’s also make our food 20 to 30 percent more amazing.

It’s too close: I will, eventually, give Hi-Lo a chance, but people on Yelp are saying 15 clams for three to five slices of pretty dry brisket, without any sides. So they better step up their game. I can get friendliness and cookies for a lot cheaper than that, even without leaving the ‘hood, and I have a smoker of my own. Albeit not a three-ton one.

Wait. Why would you want a giant smoker? If the idea of barbecue is to impart smoke to meat (and it is) . . . seems to me that smaller spaces full of smoke would make meat smokier than bigger ones. But there’s probably something I’m not factoring in.

Anyway, this isn’t a review of Hi-Lo.

It’s a character study of K-3PO, who — this is what he’s been up to: “watching hundreds of archived mental hygiene films from the ’40s and ’50s,” he said.

Because that’s what he does. Here in the teens. He makes mentally hygienic films, hisself. I saw one, one time. It was freakin’ beautiful.

Another thing we talked about was almost dying, and how each of us has done it, in life. K-3PO told the story of a hike he took in Israel, in the desert, when he and a friend got stuck on the trail overnight and almost froze to death.

Hedgehog, turns out, just missed being torpedoed by an exploding fire extinguisher while she was in film school.

And I … I ate too many pancakes.

Fresh sips

Andrew Lam
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Fresh sips

virginia@bayguardian.com

APPETITE In my endless treks ’round the city for the best partnerships of drink and food, here are a few notable current menu offerings.

MEZCAL AND COFFEE

Easily one of our city’s best bars, Comstock Saloon maintains historical reverence to SF’s Barbary Coast days without being stuffy. Old World decor, live jazz, and bartenders who know how to make a proper cocktail make it one of the most blessedly grown-up watering holes, particularly in partying North Beach. If this weren’t enough, it’s a top notch restaurant. Chef Carlo Espinas churns out dishes better than your typical gastropub “upscale comfort food” fare.

Mostly classic cocktails ($8-12) are often best ordered as a “Barkeep’s Whimsy” option (let the bartender decide how to make it, $12), like a gorgeous Smith & Cross Sour, showing off the musky-elegant-spicy notes of Smith & Cross rum with lemon, sugar, and frothy egg white. Another “whimsy” from the talented Ethan Terry: a stunner of smoky mezcal weaving with Firelit Coffee liqueur, Oloroso sherry and orange bitters. Menu classics remain, like an ever-drinkable Cherry Bounce: bourbon, cherry brandy, lemon, Angostura, Champagne.

Eat: I can’t resist melting soft, mashed potato fritters ($9) dipped in “loaded baked potato dip” (essence of bacon and chives in sour cream — I had to ask for more). Salads are refined yet comforting, whether the austere green of raw kale ($9) tossed with little gems, Parmesan and watermelon radishes in bright lemon dressing, or chunks of fresh crabmeat and smoked trout in a lentil, baby chicories salad ($12). Good thing I can contrast that healthy eating with bacon-wrapped meatloaf ($16), bearing a caramelized “skin” of ridiculously fine house ketchup (of brown sugar, tomato, chili, and more) alongside dreamy coleslaw.

Comstock Saloon 155 Columbus Ave., (415) 617-0071, www.comstocksaloon.com

MINI-MARTINIS AND G&TS

Consider leisurely Brasserie S&P, inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel, your gin and tonic haven. But not just any G&T. Though cocktails fall on the pricey side ($12-16), beverage manager Priscilla Young oversees a robust gin collection, blends tonic waters in house, and presents mix-and-match G&T options via iPad. Her sommelier’s palate ensures tonics align with botanical profiles of gins like local Old World Spirits’ Blade Gin, its Asian botanicals dancing with Young’s citrus-tinged Sensei #1 tonic, orange, and Thai chilies. There’s an earthier G&T of St. George’s Dry Rye Gin with Sensei #1 tonic, orange, black pepper. In a “Dirty” G&T, Scottish Botanist Gin flows with celery brine and Q Tonic, decorated with salt-pepper rim. Outside of G&Ts, Fresno chilis and bacon make the Diablo’s Whisper a refreshingly savory cocktail of Don Julio reposado tequila, blackcurrant hibiscus, and lime.

Bonus: A new (and genius) offering is mini-martinis available all day at $5, like First Word, a twist on a classic Last Word cocktail, with Beefeater Gin, Green Chartreuse, lime and grapefruit. Imbibing guilt free, the diminutive size makes you want to order another.

Eat: Conveniently open 11am-11pm, the Bar at Brasserie S&P is an all day, downtown drink option, though it’s also a smart, non-trendy power lunch spot. Light, clean kanpachi crudo ($17) nods to Hawaii with Kona fish and macadamia nuts, drizzled in sesame oil and Fresno chilis. Also light yet laden with Dungeness crab is a Louie salad ($19) stacked with butter lettuce, sieved egg, avocado. I often glaze over chicken, but Mary’s chicken paillard ($18) is a highlight breaded in anchovy garlic crumbs over marcona almond pesto.

Brasserie S&P Mandarin Oriental, 222 Sansome, (415) 986-2020, www.mandarinoriental.com

CILANTRO DAIQUIRIS AND CIDER SOURS

Rock-star cool and sexy describe Chambers’ record-lined dining room, one of the most striking in the city. Cocktails ($11) are improved from early days when it opened in 2011. Straightforward and unfussy, the drinks are well-made and thirst-quenching. Playing off one of the greats, a whiskey sour, the Whiskey Cider Sour combines house-made cider, whiskey, egg, and fresh-grated nutmeg. A garden-fresh cilantro daiquiri blends silver rum, Cointreau, and lime with plenty of muddled cilantro.

Eat: Appreciating executive chef Trevor Ogden’s unique presentation of smoked fish (salmon) in the past, now it’s tea-smoked tombo tuna ($15), slowly smoking over a grate tableside. Despite pork belly burnout years ago, I hadn’t tried smoking pork belly ($13) until recently, soft fat releasing its aromas as it burns before you, accompanied by Early Girl tomato kimchee. How could I resist? But salads unexpectedly steal the show. Winter is exemplified in an artistic display of fuyu persimmons ($10) happily partnered with burrata and toasted oat toffee, dotted with Angostura bitters (you heard right), olive oil, sea salt, and garam masala spices. Salade Lyonnaise ($12) is artfully deconstructed: grapefruit wedges, pork biscotti, lardons (thin strips of pork fat), and candied pomelo splay out spoke-like from a sous vide egg resting atop a mound of frisée in the center.

Chambers 601 Eddy St., (415) 829-2316, www.chambers-sf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Go South

Andrew Lam
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Go South

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM San Francisco is a town of many film festivals: SF IndieFest wraps up Thu/21, and the Center for Asian American Media Festival (formerly the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival) kicks off March 14. Lest you suffer fest withdrawal, the gap between is filled nearly end-to-end by Cinequest — San Jose’s 23rd annual salute to cinema that has a Silicon Valley-appropriate focus on technological innovations.

One example of that focus: Sony-sponsored 4K digital screenings of Taxi Driver (1976), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). While there’s no replacing the experience of seeing these classics projected on film, these restorations promise to render even Travis Bickle’s grimy apartment in eye-poppingly sharp relief. (“You talkin’ to me, or you checkin’ out my dirty dishes?”)

If the idea of burning highway miles to see movies you’ve already snagged on Blu-ray doesn’t appeal, Cinequest has corralled a genuine Hollywood icon for its Maverick Spirit Award: Harrison Ford. He’ll attend in person to discuss his career and, no doubt, field many a question about his rumored involvement in the upcoming Star Wars sequel-reboot-spinoff-thing — to be directed by J.J. Abrams, a past Maverick recipient himself. Other 2013 Maverick winners include Salman Rushdie, who’ll receive his award after the closing-night screening of Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, based on Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel; and Chuck Palahniuk, who’ll be honored after a screening of a short film he scripted, Romance (one theme: Britney Spears), among others.

Cinequest’s largest component is, of course, its actual film programming, with a wide array of shorts, narratives, and docs. The fest kicks off with Sally Potter’s downbeat coming-of-age tale Ginger & Rosa. It’s the 1960s, nuclear war is a real possibility, and nuclear-family war is an absolute certainty, at least in the London house occupied by Ginger (Elle Fanning), her emotionally wounded mother (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks), and her narcissistic-intellectual father (Alessandro Nivola). Ginger’s teenage rebellion quickly morphs into angst when her BFF Rosa (Beautiful Creatures‘ Alice Englert) wedges her sexed-up neediness between Ginger’s parents. Hendricks (playing the accordion — just like Joan!) and Annette Bening (as an American activist who encourages Ginger’s political-protest leanings) are strong, but Fanning’s powerhouse performance is the main focus — though even she’s occasionally overshadowed by her artificially scarlet hair.

Horror fans: the number one reason to haul your carcass to Cinequest is Year of the Living Dead, a ghoulishly delightful look back at the making of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Rob Kuhns’ doc skews more cultural-legacy than fanboy, deploying a variety of talking heads (critics Mark Harris and Elvis Mitchell, Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd, filmmaker Larry Fessenden) to explain why Night — offering just as much social commentary as any film from the Vietnam and Civil Rights era, except with way more squishy entrails — endures on so many levels. The best part, though, is the extended interview with George A. Romero, grinning and chuckling his way through anecdotes and on-set memories. On directing his amateur actors: “Just do your best zombie, man!”

Also highly enjoyable is Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, an affectionate portrait of the longtime Paris Review editor and “professional collector of experiences” who wrote books, articles, and made TV specials about his delight in being “the universal amateur.” His endeavors included playing football with the Detroit Lions, hockey with the Boston Bruins, and the triangle with the New York Philharmonic, among even more unusual pursuits. Some called him a dilettante (to his face while he was alive, and in this doc, too), but most of the friends, colleagues, and family members here recall Plimpton — born to an upper-crust New York family, he was friends with the Kennedys and worshipped Hemingway — as an irrepressible adventurer who more or less tailored a journalism career around his talents and personality.

Less upbeat but just as fascinating is Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross’ The Believers, which starts in 1989 as University of Utah scientists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons hold a press conference to announce they’ve discovered cold fusion — a way to make clean, cheap, plentiful power by fusing atoms instead of splitting them. But the initial excitement over their announcement soon gave way to skepticism and widespread dissent; eventually, their careers were in ruins, and by 1996, cold fusion was reduced to being a plot device for Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction.

With new input from nearly everyone who was involved in the controversy (save the intensely private Pons, who’s seen in archival footage), The Believers captures cold fusion’s slow and spectacular fall from favor, while giving equal screen time to visionaries who believe it may still be possible. More importantly, its broader message explores what happens — or more pointedly, what doesn’t happen — when a radical idea appears, seemingly out of nowhere, to challenge an established way of thinking.

CINEQUEST

Feb. 26-March 10, $5-$50

Various venues, San Jose

www.cinequest.org

 

Travels well

Andrew Lam
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0
Travels well

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN I was going to write this column about what it was like to be art star Kehinde Wiley’s model. It was supposed to be an eloquent reflection on musedom, and I’d locked down a post-performance chat with Ethiopian Israeli rapper Kalkidan, who stars in several of Wiley’s portraits in the current show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

But you know what, Tel Aviv to San Francisco is a long flight and I’ll wager that if you followed up the same journey with two hip-hop sets in front of the opening night Contemporary Jewish Museum hoi polloi — whose hosted-bar pink cocktails gave birth to some very art-world dance moves — you would wind up much the same way Kalkidan did for our chat. Call it jet lag. Our interview veered towards monosyllabic, though I did manage to gather he’d seen the Wiley paintings in which he stars two times before, when the exhibition toured LA and New York. And that he’s an Aquarius.

“Leviathan Zodiac”

… Leaving me to my own devices with you, dear reader. Well, not entirely. I did have a chance to ask Wiley about the direction he gives to his “painfully young and present models,” as he calls them, mere minutes after his flight touched down from New York. (Right before another journalist saw fit to ask him about Frank Ocean? Has a moratorium been decreed on talking to black queers, or anyone even tangentially related to hip-hop, about anything else?)

Insight into Wiley’s models seems central to his gorgeous “World Stage” series, for which he poses young men of color in classic historical poses, with ornate backgrounds and rarified postures mimicking 18th and 19th European portraiture, among other influences. The conceit started when the San Francisco Art Institute grad moved to New York, and he’s painted other chapters of “World Stage” starring men in India, Nigeria, Brazil, China, and elsewhere.

Kalkidan on “World Stage: Israel” opening night at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Photo by David Schnur

Coupled with his subjects’ vivid streetwear, which Wiley and his assistants (the artist is well-known for employing staff that contribute the pieces’ background, if not more) render faithfully, and region-specific background motif, the series is a gorgeous homage to modern brown and black manhood, with a swagger that is decidedly hip-hop.

“There is an aspect of black American creative culture that has become globalized. Every country finds their own response to this evolving reality,” reads a Wiley quote that greets visitors to the CJM exhibit. How has a culture that’s made its way everywhere still so vilified?

Wiley allowed to our group of arthounds at the preview that he does tend to capture men who are gorgeous — you won’t miss the fact once surrounded by his canvas gods — but that his choice has less to do with his own personal preferences. “You can’t know who’s zooming who,” he said. “Nor is it a particular interest of mine.” I overheard curator Karen Tsujimoto tell another reporter that she didn’t believe sexuality played a role in his work.

I guess I buy that. Wiley said that painting beautiful men is about highlighting factors rarely pulled out to the front in the art world. “Male beauty seems to be the elephant in the room when it comes to the history of painting,” he reflected.

“The World Stage: Israel” Through May 27. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. www.thecjm.org

BOYCHILD DOES BIG APPLE

I’d be wrong if I didn’t laserpoint out that drag (is that term adequate still?) babe boychild for bringing genderphucked Bay Area fierce to the runway for the Hood By Air-New York Fashion Week collection named, yeah, “boychild.” You know you’re the buzz when you’re overshadowing rapper A$AP Rocky, who also walked in the show. The look? Wetsuits and sportswear with glittering detail: canary yellow do-rags with blonde extensions, pearl-headphone earrings, French manicure. Strong, kinda freaky, hella pretty. Just like our child.

Psychic Dream Astrology: February 20-26, 2013

Andrew Lam
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Mercury goes retrograde Feb. 23 through Mar. 17. Work with it, people.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Keep your thinking focused on building this week, Aries. Whether you are at the brainstorming phase, you’ve only got a floor plan, or you are deep in construction, you have a lot more to execute on the material plane to get where you want to be. Vision, patience and perseverance will get you there.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

It is not cruel to be upfront with others. It often feels bad when someone corrects us or is super direct, but that doesn’t mean it is bad. This week, practice honesty in a compassion sandwich! Present what’s true for you with kindness and concern; don’t water down it to make it more digestible for others.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Sometimes you need to risk your safety in the short term in order to create lasting security in the long run, Gemini. There are ways that you have been doing things that are familiar and therefore feel reliable, but they really bring you to the same brick wall time and again. Create steady foundations this week.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

The people closest to us tend to expect us to remain the same or to change in tandem with them. This week you are being challenged to be true to yourself, even if that means disappointing the expectations of others. Be yourself, and allow space and time for your life to adjust to your new and improved ways.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Connecting with what most nurtures you will help turn things in the right direction this week. You are changing and nothing will fortify you more than friendship, warmth and loving connection. Support yourself by leaning on others and you will see paths open up to you that will bring you where you need to be.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

You need to let go of something, Virgo, and if you do you will find that the room it creates is exactly what’s needed to let even better stuff to come in to. Stay open hearted this week as you experiment with different ways of relating to what you desire and the things standing your way.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Everybody is scared and often unconsciously trying to protect themselves from whatever demons they most fear. If things go wrong do not assume the worst, Libra. Take on the perspective that other folks are trying just as hard as you are to carve out some safety and happiness, and see how that changes your perspective.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

The worst tricks can be played on your heart by your own mind. Don’t buy any over-rationalized reasons for why you can’t have love and happiness in your life. Follow the will of your heart, even if you have an impressive list of reasons why that’s not safe. If love weren’t so valuable you wouldn’t be so scared, Scorpio.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

No matter how restless you are, don’t go stirring things up this week. Accepting people or situations as they are is hard, especially when you have super-sonic vision when it comes to perceiving potential. Acknowledge where things stand before you try to shove your vision down others’ throats just to have it backfire on you, pal.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Don’t add anything new to your plate this week, because it’s hard enough managing what you’ve already got, Cap. Let things develop before you make your next moves. You are not locked in to your commitments; you can always change your mind. Be patient and tolerate your worries about what comes next.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

When you have bad dreams or restless nights it’s generally your subconscious trying to work something out that you are unwilling or unable to look at with your waking mind. Try recording your dreams this week to help see what they are reflecting back to you. Repression will get you nowhere, Aquarius.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Be the agent of change, the plumber to your leaks, the landscaper of your own garden. This week you should strive to be pro-active in creating the circumstances you want instead of just wishing things were different. You have the raw materials; all you need now is enough self-confidence to use them.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 18 years. Check out her website at

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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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

The Lisbon Traviata New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25. Opens Fri/22, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 24. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Terrence McNally’s play, a mix of comedy and tragedy, about the relationship between two opera fanatics.

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Fri/22, 8pm. Runs Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 22. Kurt Bodden’s San Francisco Best of Fringe-winning show takes a satirical look at motivational speakers.

BAY AREA

Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Previews Thu/21-Fri/22, 8pm. Opens Sat/23, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 31. Central Works performs Gary Graves’ adaptation of the story-within-a-story from The Brothers Karamazov.

My Recollect Time South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview, Berk; (510) 788-6415. $12-25. Opens Fri/22, 9pm. Runs Sat/23-Sun/24, Feb 28, March 2, 7, and 9, 8pm; March 1, 8, 9pm; March 3, 5pm. Through March 9. Inferno Theater performs Jamie Greenblatt’s play about the life of former slave Mary Fields.

ONGOING

Dear Harvey New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed/20-Sat/23, 8pm; Sun/24, 2pm. There’s always room in San Francisco for milk — Harvey Milk, that is, our very own out-and-proud crusader for equal rights for all, whose election as city supervisor in 1977 and assassination in 1978 galvanized the LGBT movement on a national level. Part history lesson, part memorial tribute, the Patricia Loughrey-penned Dear Harvey offers details of the extent of his influence, mostly in the realm of the political, collected from interviews with over 30 of Milk’s associates and friends. Interspersing testimonials with Bay Area Reporter headlines, fan mail, and projections of Daniel Nicoletta’s candid photos of the era, each member of the ensemble cast assumes multiple roles throughout the piece including Harvey’s activist nephew Stuart Milk, the "Queen Mother of the Americas" Nicole Murray-Ramirez, openly-gay politician Tom Ammiano, former youthful aide and prominent AIDS activist Cleve Jones, Milk’s spitfire campaign manager Anne Kronenberg, and even Milk himself. At its core, Dear Harvey plays out mainly like a talking head-style documentary, the disparate strands of monologue woven together providing a composite image of a single character. But as endearing in many ways that character is, it’s not enough to sustain the overall piece, which never develops its other, often fascinating, characters enough for the audience to feel much of a connection to the stage, no matter how much, personally, they might feel a connection to Milk himself. (Gluckstern)

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

God of Carnage Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. $38. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through March 30. Shelton Theater presents Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning comedy about upper-middle-class parents clashing over an act of playground violence between their children.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $25-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 5pm). Through March 2. Hold onto your hairpiece, Boxcar Theatre is reprising their all-too short summer run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and just in case you think you saw it already, be forewarned — you ain’t seen nothing yet. Recast, redesigned, and re-vamped, this outcast-rock musical familiarly follows the misadventures of one Hedwig Robinson (né Hansel Schmidt) with glam, guts, and glitter. But unlike the movie version penned by and starring John Cameron Mitchell as the titular chanteuse, or other staged versions, director Nick A. Olivero splits the larger-than-life, would-be rock sensation into eight different characters, who are each given a solo turn as well as plenty of ensemble harmonizing during the course of the two hour-plus performance. The effect is often electric, and just as frequently hilarious, as when the four female actors playing the role stomp across the stage swinging imaginary dicks in the air to the lyric "six inches forward and five inches back, I got a, I got an angry inch!" Supported by a tight quartet of rock musicians led by Rachel Robinson, and the phenomenal Amy Lizardo as Hedwig’s beleaguered "man Friday" Yitzhak, Hedwig keeps on extending for what appears to be an indefinite run, employing the time-honored Thrillpeddlers’ tradition of rotating cast members and comeback performances, which means you could theoretically go multiple times and never see quite the same show twice. I certainly plan to. (Gluckstern)

Jurassic Ark Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. $15-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 16. Writer-performer David Caggiano’s zany, well-executed solo play centers on a Christian televangelist who is unwaveringly bent on making a big-budget movie about a cowboy-like Biblical Noah, his Ark, and the largely lovable dinosaurs callously left out of the story — a project he sees delivering a decisive blow to the Darwinians, while turning cineplexes across the land into celluloid cathedrals. Brother Dallas and his proselytizing pitch eventually find receptive ears in a trinity of movie-industry heavies, whose collective business acumen demands a few changes to the script. Meanwhile, the intoxicating power of it all leads to a lapse in Brother Dallas’s righteousness and a scandal reminiscent of Hugh Grant’s career. Dallas rebounds from this bout with the Devil and sees his movie made — but surely only he is unaware that the Devil keeps a Hollywood address. Smartly directed by Mark Kenward, this low-frills production relies almost exclusively on Caggiano’s sturdy ability with quick-change characterizations (couched in Dylan West’s modest lighting design and a suggestive soundscape by sound editor–musician John Mazzei). The fitful satire trades in pretty orthodox caricature and, in Brother Dallas, lacks a very compelling or sympathetic central figure; but it unfolds with a very cinematic imagination that, while formulaic, is itself one hell of a movie pitch. (Avila)

The Little Foxes Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Wed/20-Sat/23, 8pm. Tides Theatre Company performs a modern take on the Lillian Hellman classic.

The Motherfucker with the Hat San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-70. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through March 16. A fine cast makes the most of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s deceptively coarse, often amusing little play, The Motherfucker with the Hat, which receives its local premiere in a sure and rowdy production from SF Playhouse. Director and designer Bill English’s striking two-tier set almost belies the intimate nature of the quirky story, which concerns a hapless parolee and recovering alcoholic named Jackie (a winningly frazzled, bumptious Gabriel Marin) who retreats to his AA sponsor’s apartment to pine and plot revenge after he discovers a stranger’s hat in the bedroom of his longtime Puerto Rican girlfriend, Veronica (played vividly by an at once edgy and vulnerable Isabelle Ortega). But Ralph, his suave and persuasive sponsor (played with unctuous charm gilded by just a hint of ineptitude by an excellent Carl Lumbly), may not be the guy he wants in his corner. Not that Jackie can see that — he’s got a man-crush on Ralph that dwarfs his already ambivalent affection for much put-upon but stalwart cousin Julio (a sharply funny Rudy Guerrero) and blinds him to the warning signals from Ralph’s own disgruntled wife (a coolly disgusted Margo Hall). Throughout, these working-class New York borough dwellers display their wit and shield their soft underbellies with a rapid-fire barrage of creative swearing. English and cast display a real comfort with this kind of material (this is SF Playhouse’s fourth Girguis play), which drapes its soft heart in the intimations of violence more than the real thing. If the heat and imaginative cursing also seem to cover up for a play with little dramatic purpose beyond a gentle and somewhat pat exploration of loyalty, maturity, and trust, there’s pleasure to be had in the unfolding. (Avila)

Not a Genuine Black Man Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri/22, 8pm; Sat/23, 5pm. What, the unapologetically middle-class Brian Copeland asks, is the real meaning behind the phrase "a genuine black man"? By way of an answer, the stand-up comic and KGO radio host offers up a simultaneously funny and disarmingly frank story about growing up African American in the racist suburb that was San Leandro in the early 1970s. Letting his narrative bounce back and forth between his boyhood memories and a period of depression that overtook him as a parent in 1999 — and interlacing the autobiography with verbatim utterances from both sides of the fight his family joined to desegregate the city — Copeland brings admirable chops as a comedian to bear on some difficult and disturbing, if ultimately hopeful, material. Note: review from an earlier run of the same show. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. Lady Bear, Trixie Carr, Heklina, and D’Arcy Drollinger star in this drag tribute to the long-running HBO show.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Extended through March 17. The Amazing Bubble Man (a.k.a. Louis Pearl) continues his family-friendly bubble extravaganza.

You Know When the Men Are Gone Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $30-55. Wed/20-Thu/21, 7pm; Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm; Sun/24, 3pm. Word for Word mounts two related short stories from the titular collection by Siobhan Fallon about the home-front impact of warfare on the families of an American army base. In The Last Stand, an injured soldier (Chad Deverman) returns home to his young wife (Roselyn Hallett) to find she has decided to leave him. In Gold Star, a wife (Arwen Anderson) learns of her soldier husband’s (Ryan Tasker) death — the officer who died saving the life of the young soldier in the first story. Reeling from grief, she innocently hangs on the words of the young soldier (Deverman) as he comes to visit her. Beautifully designed — with shrewd use of Z Space’s large, potentially engulfing stage by Jacqueline Scott (set), Drew Yerys (lighting, sound), Delia McDougall (costume, props), and Andrea Weber (choreography) — directors Joel Mullennix (Last Stand) and Amy Kossow (Gold Star) show an imaginative command of the material that has made the company’s trademark verbatim staging of literature a viable theatrical undertaking in its own right, with much to admire and ponder in the juxtaposition of words, blocking, characterization, and imagery. Moreover, the ensemble (rounded out by Marilet Martinez and Armando McClain) is very strong, with standout turns from the mutually sympathetic but achingly at-odds characters played by Deverman and Hallett in the first half, and by Anderson’s shattered, erratic, yet highly attuned new widow in the second. As for the stories themselves, certain details of base life (such as the prime parking spaces eerily and crassly allotted widows of soldiers killed in combat) reveal the author’s firsthand knowledge as the wife of an active-duty soldier, adding a sense of authenticity to these intimate, heartfelt, and movingly told stories. Their essentially everyday tragedies, however, remain tightly focused on the subtleties of grief rather than any larger contextualizing of the immediate political and moral dimensions of the American imperial machine in which all characters ultimately serve. That leaves largely intact and unexamined the usual allusions to sacrifice, service, nationhood, duty, and traditional modes of male and female heroism in war, which is perhaps the most distressing thing about these otherwise quietly troubled stories. (Avila)

BAY AREA

The Fourth Messenger Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.thefourthmessenger.com. $23-40. Wed-Thu, 7pm (no show Wed/20); Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 10. It’s been some time since a work by local playwright Tanya Shaffer last graced our stages, not since 2005 to be precise, and in keeping with her penchant for multicultural themes, her latest piece, The Fourth Messenger, is a reimagining of the Siddhartha story, written as a musical in collaboration with composer Vienna Teng. Raina (Anna Ishida), a "hungry" journalism intern with a secret agenda, pitches her first scoop — the debunking of a beatific guru named Mama Sid (Annemaria Rajala) — and embeds herself in a meditation retreat where she can get close to the famously private teacher and uncover her past. Neither as humorous or as merciless as Jesus Christ Superstar or as exuberant as Godspell (though the excellent song "Monkey Mind" crackles with wit and trenchant observation, and the tender "Human Experience" genuinely uplifts), Messenger does offer a fairly solid primer to the path of spiritual enlightenment including its all-too-human fallout and sacrifices. The white-on-wood set design by Joe Ragey frames the action in a deceptively delicate layer of gauze and mystery, and the capable ensemble inhabit their multiple roles with ease — from jaded newsies to loyal disciples. Which makes it doubly unfortunate that the jazzy, piano-driven score seems pitched just outside of most of the actor’s ranges, even those of the notably skilled Ishida and Rajala, an admitted distraction for the monkey-minded, which is to say most of us. (Gluckstern)

Our Practical Heaven Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through March 3. Anthony Clarvoe’s new play receives its world premiere as a 2011 prizewinner in Aurora’s Global Age Project (GAP), which cultivates new work addressing life in the 21st century. In the case of this labored and dull effort, the young century and its anxious outlook come refracted through three generations of women who gather for holidays at a seaside home whose own future is threatened by, first, financial and, ultimately, climatic conditions. Neurotic, self-absorbed Sasha (Anne Darragh) and capable businesswoman Willa (Julia Brothers) are middle-aged best friends forever who grew up in the home of Sasha’s mother (Joy Carlin) and late father. Joining Sasha’s two daughters by separate husbands, Suze (Blythe Foster) and Leez (Adrienne Walters), is Willa’s daughter, Magz (Lauren Spencer), who suffers from a debilitating disease. Despite many personal and generational differences — and a rising conflict over the house — all six women share in a traditional bout of bird watching in this fragile nature "refuge" for bird and human alike. While bird watching supplies the play’s operative metaphors, however, it does little to actually bring these characters together in any compelling or convincing way. In fact, respective backstories are pretty sketchy in general, dialogue strained and broadcasting, and performances correspondingly patchy. The three stage veterans in director Allen McKelvey’s cast — Brothers, Carlin, and Darragh — go furthest toward making Clarvoe’s leaden exposition somewhat buoyant, but the momentary pleasure they provide can’t stem the overall tide. (Avila)

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

"Analog: New Work by Katharine Hawthorne" Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama, SF; analogdance.eventbrite.com. Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm. $15-25. A full evening of choreography inspired by the intersection of art and science.

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.improv.org. Sat/23, 8pm. $20. The company performs "Warp Speed: An Improvised Trek!"

"Comedy Night at the Presidio" Presidio Café and Golf Course, 300 Finley, SF; www.presidiocafe.com. Thu/21, 8pm. $10. With Will Durst, Andrew Holmgren, and host Justin Gomes.

"Dance and Diaspora" ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm. $25-30. Featuring the work of belly dance artist Jill Parker and Afro-Brazilian choreographer Tania Santiago.

"Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/21-Sun/24, 8pm. $20-25. DavEnd’s performance extravaganza promises "singing pink cakes, dancing mirrors, and couture genitalia."

"Killing Me Softly With Jazz Hands" Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; (415) 517-3581. Wed/20, 8pm. $10. Comedian Becky Pedigo performs.

"Megillah 3.0" Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, SF; www.killingmylobster.com. Sat/23, 7pm, $20. Killing My Lobster launches its online collection of original videos, music, and performance with a Purim carnival, featuring live sketch shows, KML comedy videos, and more.

"Our Voices, Our Stories Play Reading Festival" San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. Mon/25, 7:30pm. Free. Readings of in-development works Without and Opportunity for Defense and Obeah.

"San Francisco Magic Parlor" Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

"Smack Dab" Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; www.magnetsf.org. Wed/20, 8pm. Free. Open mic featuring Randy Alford.

"Solo Sundays: Family Blend, the Sweet and the Bitter" Stage Werx Theatre, 433 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun/24, 7pm. $12. With Susan Ito, Lisa Marie Rollins, and Zahra Noorbakhsh.

Tanya Bello’s Project. B. and Karen Reedy Dance ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF; www.odcdance.org. Sat/23, 8pm; Sun/24, 7pm. $22. Featuring the world premiere of Bello’s Games We Play(ed).

BAY AREA

"One-Off Wednesdays (or sometimes Two-Off)" Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Wed/20, 8pm. $15-50. This week: Wayne Harris in The Letter: Martin Luther King at the Crossroads.

Music Listings

Andrew Lam
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Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Apopka Darkroom. Bleached Palms Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Guido vs Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Jesus and the Rabbies, Cello and the Beggers Who Give Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $10.

Keith Crossan Blues Showcase with Tom Lindsay Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Leftover Salmon Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $29-$34.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Shannon and the Clams, Mallard, Blasted Canyons, Swiftumz Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10-$100. Benefit for 23 Street/Capp fire victim Ursula Rodiriguez.

Sir Richard Bishop Independent. 8pm, $15.

Spell, Rosa Grande, Future Space and Time Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Spooky Flowers, Standard Poodle, Big Long Now Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Terry Disley’s Mini-Experience Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

Freddie Hughes Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 6:30pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Daniel Seidel Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Timba Dance Party Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 10pm, $5. Timba and salsa cubana with DJ Walt Diggz.

THURSDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Meg Baird, Daniel Bachman, Luke Sweeney Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $7.

Steve Bernstein/Sex Mob, Deep Space Quartet, Klaxon Mutant Allstars Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10-$13.

Coheed and Cambria, Between the Buried and Me, Russian Circles Warfield. 8pm, $32.

Robert DeLong, Neighbourhood Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $13-$15.

Doro, Sister Sin, Bottom Thee Parkside. 9pm, $16.

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Kid Ink, DJ Jack DNA Lounge. 8pm, $20

Lisa Loeb, Satellite Independent. 7:30pm, $25.

Night Marchers, Intelligence, Mrs. Magician Cafe Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.50-$15.

Pansy Division El Rio. 8:30pm.

Papa Bear’s Birthday Bonanza with Baby Bear, Easy Love, Mowgli’s, Whiskerman, Sufis Great American Music Hall. 8:30pm, $14.

JC Rockit vs Guido Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Salvador Santana, Scribe Project Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

Chris Slebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

“Stevie Ray Vaughan Tribute” Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20. With Alan Iglesias and Crossfire.

Our Vinyl Vows, Pounders, Dangermaker Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Gustaf Sjokvist Chamber Choir Grace Cathedral, 1100 California, SF; www.cityboxoffice.com. 7:30pm, $15-$50.

Gayle Lynn and Her Hired Hands Atlas Cafe, 3049 20th, SF; www.atlascafe.net. 8pm, free.

Tipsy House Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Twang! Honky Tonk Fiddler’s Green, 1330 Columbus, SF; www.twanghonkytonk.com. 5pm. Live country music.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8. DJs-hosts Pleasuremaker and Senor Oz spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). The best of ’80s mainstream and underground.

Ritual Temple. 10pm-3am, $5. Two rooms of dubstep, glitch, and trap music.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more.

Twista, King Most, Ant-1 1015 Folsom, SF; www.1015folsom.com. 9pm, free with RSVP.

FRIDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

ALO, Diego’s Umbrella Fillmore. 9pm, $22.50.

Dave Alvin and the Guilty Ones, Marshall Crenshaw Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $22.

Back Pages Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys Elbo Room. 9pm, $18.

Jules Broussard Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Con Brio, Justin Ancheta Band Independent. 9pm, $18.

Funk Revival Orchestra Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $15.

Indians, Night Beds, Cat Martino Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $12.

Limousines, Doe Eye DNA Lounge. 9pm, $20.

Midtown Social, Sufis Cafe Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Sellassie and Rakim 1015 Folsom, SF. 9pm, $20.

Seshen, Guy Fox, Ash Reiter Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10.

Somebody’s Darling, David Luning, Elliot Randall, Andrew Blair Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

“Stevie Ray Vaughan Tribute” Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20. With Alan Iglesias and Crossfire.

Tambo Rays, Sunbeam Rd., Thralls Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Wallpaper, Con Bro Chill, Jhameel Slim’s. 9pm, $16-$18.

Greg Zema, Jeff V., Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 9pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Baxtalo Drom Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10. Live music, gypsy punk, belly dancing.

Get Offa My Lawn Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Inspector Gadje, Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, La Dee Da Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15.

“One Great City: Alexandra Iranfar and Timothy Sherren” Unitarian Universalist Society of SF Chapel, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.tangentsguitarseries.com. 7:30pm, $10-$15.

Trio Troubadour Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

DJ Sneak, Doc Martin, James What Public Works. 9:30pm, $20.

Hegemoney presents Lil Texas, B. Bravo, Swerve, Trill Team 6, Pyramids/Ka$hmir F8, 1192 Folsom, SF. 9pm, $5-$10.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

SATURDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

ALO, California Honeydrops Fillmore. 9pm, $22.50.

Blues Ambassadors Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Burn River Burn, Disastroid, Fortress Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Foxtail Somersault, Tomihira, Astral, United Ghosts Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Fusion Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Hammond Organ Soul Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Middle Class Murder, Imperial Pints Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Permanent Collection, Cobalt Cranes, Legs Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Phenomenauts, La Plebe, Dirty Hand Family Band, Bruises Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Radical Something Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 6:30pm, $12-$30.

Rangda, Blues Control Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.chapelsf.com. 9pm, $18-$22.

Revivalists, Great White Buffalo, Solwave Independent. 9pm, $14.

Spindrift, Gram Rabbit, Matthew Tow, Pow! Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 10pm, $10-$12.

Tracorum and Sean Leahy Boom Boom Room. 9pm, $10.

Jeff V., Jason Marion, Greg Zema Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm, free.

Tyrone Wells, Graham Colton, Brett Young Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $18.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Culann’s Hounds Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Sex With No Hands Connecticut Yankee. 10pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF: Rihanna Mashup Night DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-$15. With A Plus D, Smash-Up Derby, and more.

120 Minutes Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. With Venus X, resident DJs S4NtA MU3rTE and Chauncey CC.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

Temptation Cat Club. 9:30pm. $5-$8. Indie, electro, new wave video dance party.

SUNDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Brickbat, Hank IV, Hot Lunch, Mitchell and Manley Bottom of the Hill. 3pm, $15. Benefit for Scott Jones.

Bex Marshall Biscuits and Blues. 7 and 9pm, $15.

David Crosby, Marty Balin and Friends, MC Country Joe McDonald Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $50. Benefit for Slick Aguilar.

Judgement Day, Satya Sena, Iron Mountain, Armed for Apocalypse Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $8.

Spencer Moody, Corey Brewer Hemlock Tavern. 10:30pm, $7.

Morrissey Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness, SF. 8pm, $49.50-$89.50.

Grant-Lee Philips, Garrin Benfield Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $20.

Residents Bimbo’s. 8pm, $35.

Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Swingin’ Utters, Inciters, Impalers Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

Velvet Acid Christ, Twilight Garden, Vile Augury DNA Lounge. 9pm, $14.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil and Beyond Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 6:30pm, free.

Jack Gilder, Darcy Noonan Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Heel Draggers Amnesia. 8pm, $5-$10.

Twang Sunday Thee Parkside. 4pm, free. With Mad Mama and the Bonafide Few, Rocketship Rocketship.

DANCE CLUBS

Deep Fried Soul Dance Party Boom Boom Room. 8pm, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. With DJ Sep, Vinnie Esparza, Jah Yzer.

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

Scraps! DJ Night Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.chapelsf.com. 8:30pm, free.

MONDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Roem Baur Osteria, 3277 Sacramento, SF; (415) 771-5030. 7pm, free with RSVP.

Down Dirty Shake, Mean Streets, Han Cholo, Broonies Elbo Room. 9pm.

Surfer Blood, Grand Rapids, Aaron Axelson Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $10.53.

Touche, Starskate, Teenage Sweater Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Joe Radio, Decay, and Melting Girl.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, Hip-Hop, Neosoul, reggae, dancehall, and more with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

TUESDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Animal Friend, Turn Me on Dead, Treehouse Orchestra Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Bobb Saggeth, Killbossa, SFO+H Amnesia. 9pm, $10.

Body/Head, Horsebladder, Burmese, Noel Von Harmonson Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $15.

Butt Problems, Secret Secretaries, Sweat Lodge Knockout. 9:30pm, $6.

John Garcia Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, Jenny-O, Will Sprott Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $14.

Philistines, Nomad, Control-R Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Qumran Orphics, Eye of Satan Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Soul Mechanix Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $5.

Stan Erhart Band Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Stick to Your Guns, Vera Project, Saint Vernon, Murder DNA Lounge. 8pm, $15.

Used, We Came As Romans, Crown the Empire, Mindflow Fillmore. 7pm, $27.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Terry Disley’s Mini-Experience Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazilian Zouk Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 9:30pm, $5-$12.

Seisiun Plough and Stars. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Stylus John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. Hip-hop, dancehall, and Bay slaps with DJ Left Lane.

Takin’ Back Tuesdays Double Dutch, 3192 16th St,SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 10pm. Hip-hop from the 1990s.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. Due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

OPENING

Bless Me, Ultima A mysticism that melds the Latin American shamanism with old-world Catholicism suffuses this bildungsroman of a memory movie, warmly rendered by director Carl Franklin, perhaps best known for his noirish tendencies in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and One False Move (1992). Here, working with Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark Chicano novel and material steeped in curandera, or shamanistic, folkways, he continues to exhibit that close attention to detail and the emotional truth of his characters that he brought to his more sensational genre work. This is a smaller, yet no less powerful, story: Antonio (Luke Ganalon) is the youngest son of a vaquero father (Benito Martinez) and a mother (Dolores Heredia) who hails from a farming family — yet perhaps his most important connection is with the woman who midwifed him, Ultima (Miriam Colon), who is taken in by his family out of respect for her deep folk magic and knowledge as a healer. Under Ultima’s close tutelage — while faithfully attending church and working his uncles’ fields —Antonio learns about life and the earth’s bounty, dangers, and cycles, particularly when one of his uncles falls prey to wicked brujas who practice blood sacrifice and Ultima is called in to help him. All of which makes for emotionally resonant storytelling that imparts the impact of Anaya’s tale and his reverence for spiritual practice — of all sorts — and our planet’s power and magic. (1:46) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Chronicle of My Mother Japanese import about the post-war relationship between a successful but arrogant writer, who bases his novels on his own life experiences, and his aging mother. (1:59) Four Star.

Dark Skies Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton star in this aliens-in-suburbia thriller. (runtime not available)

The Gatekeepers Coming hard on the heels of The Law in These Parts, which gave a dispassionate forum to the lawmakers who’ve shaped — some might say in pretzel form — the military legal system that’s been applied by Israelis to Palestinians for decades, Dror Moreh’s documentary provides another key insiders’ viewpoint on that endless occupation. His interviewees are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Their top-secret decisions shaped the nation’s attempts to control terrorist sects and attacks, as seen in a nearly half-century parade of news clips showing violence and negotiation on both sides. Unlike the subjects of Law, who spoke a cool, often evasive legalese to avoid any awkward ethical issues, these men are at times frankly — and surprisingly — doubtful about the wisdom of some individual decisions, let alone about the seemingly ever-receding prospect of a diplomatic peace. They even advocate for a two-state solution, an idea the government they served no longer seems seriously interested in advancing. The Gatekeepers is an important document that offers recent history examined head-on by the hitherto generally close-mouthed people who were in a prime position to direct its course. (1:37) (Harvey)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga The ever-intrepid Werner Herzog, with co-director Dmitry Vasyukov, pursues his fascination with extreme landscapes by chronicling a year deep within the Siberian Taiga. True to form, he doesn’t spend much time in the 300-inhabitant town nestled amid “endless wilderness,” accessible only by helicopter or boat (and only during the warmer seasons); instead, he seeks the most isolated environment possible, venturing into the frozen forest with fur trappers who augment their passed-down-over-generations job skills with the occasional modern assist (chainsaws and snowmobiles are key). Gorgeous cinematography and a curious, respectful tone elevate Happy People from mere ethnographic-film status, though that’s essentially what it is, as it records the men carving canoes, bear-proofing their cabins, interacting with their dogs, and generally being incredibly self-reliant amid some of the most rugged conditions imaginable. And since it’s Herzog, you know there’ll be a few gently bizarre moments, as when a politician’s summer campaign cruise brings a musical revue to town, or the director himself refers to “vodka — vicious as jet fuel” in his trademark droll voice over. (1:34) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Snitch The Rock goes undercover for the DEA to help clear his son’s name. What could possibly go wrong? (runtime not available)

ONGOING

Amour Arriving in local theaters atop a tidal wave of critical hosannas, Amour now seeks to tempt popular acclaim — though actually liking this perfectly crafted, intensely depressing film (from Austrian director Michael Haneke) may be nigh impossible for most audience members. Eightysomething former music teachers Georges and Anne (the flawless Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are living out their days in their spacious Paris apartment, going to classical concerts and enjoying the comfort of their relationship. Early in the film, someone tries to break into their flat — and the rest of Amour unfolds with a series of invasions, with Anne’s declining health the most distressing, though there are also unwanted visits from the couple’s only daughter (an appropriately self-involved Isabelle Huppert), an inept nurse who disrespects Anne and curses out Georges, and even a rogue pigeon that wanders in more than once. As Anne fades into a hollow, twisted, babbling version of her former self, Georges also becomes hollow and twisted, taking care of her while grimly awaiting the inevitable. Of course, the movie’s called Amour, so there’s some tenderness involved. But if you seek heartwarming hope and last-act uplift, look anywhere but here. (2:07) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Argo If you didn’t know the particulars of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, you won’t be an expert after Argo, but the film does a good job of capturing America’s fearful reaction to the events that followed it — particularly the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran. Argo zeroes in on the fate of six embassy staffers who managed to escape the building and flee to the home of the sympathetic Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). Back in Washington, short-tempered CIA agents (including a top-notch Bryan Cranston) cast about for ways to rescue them. Enter Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directs), exfil specialist and father to a youngster wrapped up in the era’s sci-fi craze. While watching 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Tony comes up with what Cranston’s character calls “the best bad idea we have:” the CIA will fund a phony Canadian movie production (corny, intergalactic, and titled Argo) and pretend the six are part of the crew, visiting Iran for a few days on a location shoot. Tony will sneak in, deliver the necessary fake-ID documents, and escort them out. Neither his superiors, nor the six in hiding, have much faith in the idea. (“Is this the part where we say, ‘It’s so crazy it just might work?'” someone asks, beating the cliché to the punch.) Argo never lets you forget that lives are at stake; every painstakingly forged form, every bluff past a checkpoint official increases the anxiety (to the point of being laid on a bit thick by the end). But though Affleck builds the needed suspense with gusto, Argo comes alive in its Hollywood scenes. As the show-biz veterans who mull over Tony’s plan with a mix of Tinseltown cynicism and patiotic duty, John Goodman and Alan Arkin practically burst with in-joke brio. I could have watched an entire movie just about those two. (2:00) Castro. (Eddy)

Beasts of the Southern Wild A year after winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (and a Cannes Camera d’Or), Beasts of the Southern Wild proves capable of enduring a second or third viewing with its originality and strangeness fully intact. Magical realism is a primarily literary device that isn’t attempted very often in U.S. cinema, and succeeds very rarely. But this intersection between Faulkner and fairy tale, a fable about — improbably — Hurricane Katrina, is mysterious and unruly and enchanting. Benh Zeitlin’s film is wildly cinematic from the outset, as voiceover narration from six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) offers simple commentary on her rather fantastical life. She abides in the Bathtub, an imaginary chunk of bayou country south of New Orleans whose residents live closer to nature, amid the detritus of civilization. Seemingly everything is some alchemical combination of scrap heap, flesh, and soil. But not all is well: when “the storm” floods the land, the holdouts are forced at federal gunpoint to evacuate. With its elements of magic, mythological exodus, and evolutionary biology, Beasts goes way out on a conceptual limb; you could argue it achieves many (if not more) of the same goals Terrence Malick’s 2011 The Tree of Life did at a fraction of that film’s cost and length. (1:31) (Harvey)

Beautiful Creatures In the tiny South Carolina town of Gatlin, a teenage boy named Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) finds himself dreaming about a girl he’s never met (Alice Englert), until she shows up at school one day with an oddly behaving tattoo on her wrist and the power to disrupt local weather patterns when she loses her temper. Thus begins Richard LaGravenese’s adaptation of the first installment in Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s four-book YA series the Caster Chronicles. The girl of Ethan’s dreams, Lena Duchannes, is the youngest member of a reclusive local family long suspected by the town’s inhabitants of performing witchcraft and otherwise being in league with Satan. They’re at least half right, though Lena and her relatives (among them Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, and Emmy Rossum) prefer the term caster to witch, a slur inflicted on them by mortals. As for the diabolical part, casters are, it seems, slaves to essentialism: their coming-of-age rite at age 16 entails learning whether their true nature will turn them toward the forces of darkness or light. Lena’s special birthday, as it happens, is coming up, a circumstance complicating the romance that sparks between her and Ethan. Though the altitude is lower, and the sweeping pans of coniferous forests have been replaced by claustrophobic shots of swampland and live oaks draped with Spanish moss, comparisons to the Twilight franchise are inevitable. But while we’re not unfamiliar with the arc of a human teenage protagonist who is drawn into the orbit of an alluring supernatural and finds life forever changed, Beautiful Creatures‘ young lovers are more relatable, less annoying and creepy, and smaller targets for an SNL spoof. (2:04) (Rapoport)

Bullet to the Head Not to be mistaken for the John Woo passion play, this head wound of a revenge flick instead pits a hired assassin (Sylvester Stallone) against an outsider cop (Sung Kang), the corroded action star who emerged from the thicket of ’70s Italian American iconic actors against a smooth-faced Asian American indie actor associated with the Fast and Furious franchise. Sly’s James Bonomo and his partner have been set up by a set of tepid bad guys (Oz fave Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, here sleep-raging his way through Bullet; a very unpumped Christian Slater; and Jason Momoa, who glowers like he’s still playing a warlord on Game of Thrones). So Bonomo and Kang’s Taylor Kwon — the former’s got the brawn, the latter’s got the smartphone with access to criminal databases — must reluctantly team up to mete out some kind of justice. Yawn. The uninspired oh-so-gritty camera effects don’t help matters when it comes to staving off the sleepies induced by this tired enterprise — director Walter Hill certainly seems to have succumbed to the big snooze. The only real fun to be gleaned here is in watching your random, uh, ax fight and studying the Stallone’s weirdly crumbling yet inert rubble of face, which almost seems to scream to us about — yo, not Adrian, but the ravages of age, surgery, and excess. (1:32) (Chun)

Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti western homage features a cameo by the original Django (Franco Nero, star of the 1966 film), and solid performances by a meticulously assembled cast, including Jamie Foxx as the titular former slave who becomes a badass bounty hunter under the tutelage of Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Waltz, who won an Oscar for playing the evil yet befuddlingly delightful Nazi Hans Landa in Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, is just as memorable (and here, you can feel good about liking him) as a quick-witted, quick-drawing wayward German dentist. There are no Nazis in Django, of course, but Tarantino’s taboo du jour (slavery) more than supplies motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite theme (revenge). Once Django joins forces with Schultz, the natural-born partners hatch a scheme to rescue Django’s still-enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), whose German-language skills are as unlikely as they are convenient. Along the way (and it’s a long way; the movie runs 165 minutes), they encounter a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose main passion is the offensive, shocking “sport” of “Mandingo fighting,” and his right-hand man, played by Tarantino muse Samuel L. Jackson in a transcendently scandalous performance. And amid all the violence and racist language and Foxx vengeance-making, there are many moments of screaming hilarity, as when a character with the Old South 101 name of Big Daddy (Don Johnson) argues with the posse he’s rounded up over the proper construction of vigilante hoods. It’s a classic Tarantino moment: pausing the action so characters can blather on about something trivial before an epic scene of violence. Mr. Pink would approve. (2:45) (Eddy)

Escape from Planet Earth (1:35)

56 Up The world may be going to shit, but some things can be relied upon, like Michael Apted’s beloved series that’s traced the lives of 14 disparate Brits every seven years since original BBC documentary 7 Up in 1964. More happily still, this latest installment finds nearly all the participants shuffling toward the end of middle-age in more settled and contented form than ever before. There are exceptions: Jackie is surrounded by health and financial woes; special-needs librarian Lynn has been hit hard by the economic downturn; everybody’s favorite undiagnosed mental case, the formerly homeless Neil, is never going to fully comfortable in his own skin or in too close proximity to others. But for the most part, life is good. Back after 28 years is Peter, who’d quit being filmed when his anti-Thatcher comments provoked “malicious” responses, even if he’s returned mostly to promote his successful folk trio the Good Intentions. Particularly admirable and evidently fulfilling is the path that’s been taken by Symon, the only person of color here. Raised in government care, he and his wife have by now fostered 65 children — with near-infinite love and generosity, from all appearances. If you’re new to the Up series, you’ll be best off doing a Netflix retrospective as preparation for this chapter, starting with 28 Up. (2:24) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Gangster Squad It’s 1949, and somewhere in the Hollywood hills, a man has been tied hand and foot to a pair of automobiles with the engines running. Coyotes pace in the background like patrons queuing up for a table at Flour + Water, and when dinner is served, the presentation isn’t very pretty. We’re barely five minutes into Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad, and fair warning has been given of the bloodletting to come. None of it’s quite as visceral as the opening scene, but Fleischer (2009’s Zombieland) packs his tale of urban warfare with plenty of stylized slaughter to go along with the glamour shots of mob-run nightclubs, leggy pin-curled dames, and Ryan Gosling lounging at the bar cracking wise. At the center of all the gunplay and firebombing is what’s framed as a battle for the soul of Los Angeles, waged between transplanted Chicago mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) — who wields terms like “progress” and “manifest destiny” as a rationale for a continental turf war — and a police sergeant named John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), tasked with bringing down Cohen’s empire. The assignment requires working under cover so deep that only the police chief (Nick Nolte) and the handpicked members of O’Mara’s “gangster squad” — ncluding Gosling, a half-jaded charmer who poaches Cohen’s arm candy (Emma Stone) — know of its existence. This leaves plenty of room for improvisation, and the film pauses now and again to wonder about what happens when you pit brutal amorality against brutal morality, but it’s a rhetorical question, and no one shows much interest in it. Dragged down by talking points that someone clearly wanted wedged in (as well as by O’Mara’s ponderous voice-overs), the film does better when it abandons gravitas and refocuses on spinning its mythic tale of wilder times in the Golden State. (1:53) (Rapoport)

A Good Day to Die Hard A Good Day to Die Hard did me wrong. How did I miss the signs? Badass daddy rescues son. Perps cover up ’80s era misdeeds. They’re in Russia&ldots;Die Hard has become Taken. All it needs is someone to kidnap Bonnie Bedelia or deflower Jai Courtney and the transformation will be complete. What’s more, A Good Day is so obviously made for export it’s almost not trying to court the American audience for which the franchise is a staple. In a desperate reach for brand loyalty director John Moore (2001’s Behind Enemy Lines) has loaded the film with slight allusions to McClane’s past adventures. The McClanes shoot the ceiling and litter the floor with glass. John escapes a helicopter by leaping into a skyscraper window from the outside. John’s ringtone plays “Ode to Joy.” The glib rejoinders are all there but they’re smeared by crap direction and odd pacing that gives ample time to military vehicles tumbling down the highway but absolutely no time for Bruce’s declarations of “I’m on VACATION!” Which may be just as well — it’s no “Yipee kay yay, motherfucker.” When Willis says that in A Good Day, all the love’s gone out of it. I guess every romance has to end. (1:37) (Vizcarrondo)

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters So here’s something you may not have been wondering: what exactly happened to Hansel and Gretel after they killed the gingerbread-house witch and made their way to freedom? Did they really live happily ever after? Did they land in the foster care system? Did they enter adulthood bearing the deep psychic wounds a person might well suffer after shoving a living creature into an oven and listening to her agonized howls as she burned alive? Or did they realize they’d discovered their life’s vocation without even having to complete the Myers-Briggs test? Shutting his eyes and pointing at random, director and screenplay cowriter Tommy Wirkola (2009’s Dead Snow) chooses the latter scenario, keeping his eyes closed to stab out some weak dialogue and half a plot for a script that leans heavily on the power of 3D technology to send eviscerated-witch guts and other biological shrapnel flying toward the eyeballs of audience members. Hansel (why, Jeremy Renner?) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) have grown up to share the intense sibling bond and wandering ways you might expect from a brother and sister abandoned at a tender age to starve and be rent limb from limb by wild animals. They’ve also taken full advantage of a niche witch-slaying market in and around the gloomy forest where they made their first kill. When they’re hired to track down a particularly loathsome practitioner of the dark arts (Famke Janssen) who’s been snatching up local children, multidimensional mayhem ensues. Arterton’s Gretel is pretty much a badass and the brains of the operation, while Renner’s Hansel is more of a strong, silent, and occasionally shit-faced type. Neither makes for a particularly memorable protagonist, but that flat look on their faces could just be disappointment or boredom with the material. (1:41) (Rapoport)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Make no mistake: the Lord of the Rings trilogy represented an incredible filmmaking achievement, with well-deserved Oscars handed down after the third installment in 2003. If director Peter Jackson wanted to go one more round with J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved characters for a Hobbit movie, who was gonna stop him? Not so fast. This return to Middle-earth (in 3D this time) represents not one but three films — which would be self-indulgent enough even if part one didn’t unspool at just under three hours, and even if Jackson hadn’t decided to shoot at 48 frames per second. (I can’t even begin to explain what that means from a technical standpoint, but suffice to say there’s a certain amount of cinematic lushness lost when everything is rendered in insanely crystal-clear hi-def.) Journey begins as Bilbo Baggins (a game, funny Martin Freeman) reluctantly joins Gandalf (a weary-seeming Ian McKellan) and a gang of dwarves on their quest to reclaim their stolen homeland and treasure, batting Orcs, goblins, Gollum (Andy Serkis), and other beasties along the way. Fan-pandering happens (with characters like Cate Blanchett’s icy Galadriel popping in to remind you how much you loved LOTR), and the story moves at a brisk enough pace, but Journey never transcends what came before — or in the chronology of the story, what comes after. I’m not quite ready to declare this Jackson’s Phantom Menace (1999), but it’s not an unfair comparison to make, either. (2:50) (Eddy)

Identity Thief America is made up of asshole winners and nice guy losers — or at least that’s the thesis of Identity Thief, a comedy about a crying-clown credit card bandit (Melissa McCarthy) and the sweet sucker (Jason Bateman) she lures into her web of chaos. Bateman plays Sandy, a typical middle-class dude with a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. He’s always struggling to break even and just when it seems like his ship’s come in, Diana (McCarthy) jacks his identity — a crime that requires just five minutes in a dark room with Sandy’s social security number. Suddenly, his good name is contaminated with her prior arrests, drug-dealer entanglements, and mounting debt; it’s like the capitalist version of VD. But as the “kind of person who has no friends,” Diana is as tragic as she is comic, providing McCarthy an acting opportunity no one saw coming when she was dispensing romantic advice on The Gilmore Girls. Director Seth Gordon (2011’s Horrible Bosses) treats this comedy like an action movie — as breakneck as slapstick gets — and he relies so heavily on discomfort humor that the film doesn’t just prompt laughs, it pokes you in the ribs until you laugh, man, LAUGH! While Identity Thief has a few complex moments about how defeating “sticking it to the man” can be (mostly because only middle men get hurt), it’s mostly as subtle as a pratfall and just as (un-)rewarding. (1:25) (Vizcarrondo)

The Impossible Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (2007’s The Orphanage) directs The Impossible, a relatively modestly-budgeted take on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, based on the real story of a Spanish family who experienced the disaster. Here, the family (Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, three young sons) is British, on a Christmas vacation from dad’s high-stress job in Japan. Beachy bliss is soon ruined by that terrible series of waves; they hit early in the film, and Bayona offers a devastatingly realistic depiction of what being caught in a tsunami must feel like: roaring, debris-filled water threatening death by drowning, impalement, or skull-crushing. And then, the anguish of surfacing, alive but injured, stranded, and miles from the nearest doctor, not knowing if your family members have perished. Without giving anything away (no more than the film’s suggestive title, anyway), once the survivors are established (and the film’s strongest performer, Watts, is relegated to hospital-bed scenes) The Impossible finds its way inevitably to melodrama, and triumph-of-the-human-spirit theatrics. As the family’s oldest son, 16-year-old Tom Holland is effective as a kid who reacts exactly right to crisis, morphing from sulky teen to thoughtful hero — but the film is too narrowly focused on its tourist characters, with native Thais mostly relegated to background action. It’s a disconnect that’s not quite offensive, but is still off-putting. (1:54) (Eddy)

Life of Pi Several filmmakers including Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and M. Night Shyamalan had a crack at Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” novel over the last decade, without success. That turns out to have been a very good thing, since Ang Lee and scenarist David Magee have made probably the best movie possible from the material — arguably even an improvement on it. Framed as the adult protagonist’s (Irrfan Khan) lengthy reminiscence to an interested writer (Rafe Spall) it chronicles his youthful experience accompanying his family and animals from their just shuttered zoo on a cargo ship voyage from India to Canada. But a storm capsizes the vessel, stranding teenaged Pi (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat with a mini menagerie — albeit one swiftly reduced by the food chain in action to one Richard Parker, a whimsically named Bengal tiger. This uneasy forced cohabitation between Hindu vegetarian and instinctual carnivore is an object lesson in survival as well as a fable about the existence of God, among other things. Shot in 3D, the movie has plenty of enchanted, original imagery, though its outstanding technical accomplishment may lie more in the application of CGI (rather than stereoscopic photography) to something reasonably intelligent for a change. First-time actor Sharma is a natural, while his costar gives the most remarkable performance by a wild animal this side of Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a charmed, lovely experience. (2:00) (Harvey)

Lincoln Distinguished subject matter and an A+ production team (Steven Spielberg directing, Daniel Day-Lewis starring, Tony Kushner adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Williams scoring every emotion juuust so) mean Lincoln delivers about what you’d expect: a compelling (if verbose), emotionally resonant (and somehow suspenseful) dramatization of President Lincoln’s push to get the 13th amendment passed before the start of his second term. America’s neck-deep in the Civil War, and Congress, though now without Southern representation, is profoundly divided on the issue of abolition. Spielberg recreates 1865 Washington as a vibrant, exciting place, albeit one filled with so many recognizable stars it’s almost distracting wondering who’ll pop up in the next scene: Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant! Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Lincoln! Lena Dunham’s shirtless boyfriend on Girls (Adam Driver) as a soldier! Most notable among the huge cast are John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and a daffy James Spader as a trio of lobbyists; Sally Field as the troubled First Lady; and likely Oscar contenders Tommy Lee Jones (as winningly cranky Rep. Thaddeus Stevens) and Day-Lewis, who does a reliably great job of disappearing into his iconic role. (2:30) (Eddy)

Les Misérables There is a not-insignificant portion of the population who already knows all the words to all the songs of this musical-theater warhorse, around since the 1980s and honored here with a lavish production by Tom Hooper (2010’s The King’s Speech). As other reviews have pointed out, this version only tangentially concerns Victor Hugo’s tale; its true raison d’être is swooning over the sight of its big-name cast crooning those famous tunes. Vocals were recorded live on-set, with microphones digitally removed in post-production — but despite this technical achievement, there’s a certain inorganic quality to the proceedings. Like The King’s Speech, the whole affair feels spliced together in the Oscar-creation lab. The hardworking Hugh Jackman deserves the nomination he’ll inevitably get; jury’s still out on Anne Hathaway’s blubbery, “I cut my hair for real, I am so brave!” performance. (2:37) (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2013: Animated” If you caught Wreck-It Ralph, nominated in the Best Animated Feature category, you’ve already seen John Kahrs’ Paperman, about a junior Mad Men type who bumbles through his pursuit of a lovely fellow office drone he spots on his commute. Or, if you saw Ice Age: Continental Drift, you’ve seen Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare, starring Homer and Marge’s wee one as she grapples with the social order at the Ayn Rand School for Tots. Among the stand-alones, Minkyu Lee’s Adam and Dog features a quick appearance by Eve, too, but the star is really the scrappy canine who gallops through prehistory playing the world’s first game of fetch with his hairy master. Two minutes is all PES (nom de screen of Adam Pesapane) needs to make Fresh Guacamole — which depicts grenades, dice, and other random objects as most unusual ingredients. The only non-US entry, UK director Timothy Reckart’s Head Over Heels, is about an elderly married couple whose relationship has deteriorated to the point where they (literally) no longer see eye to eye on anything. The program is rounded out by three more non-Oscar-nominated animated shorts: Britain’s The Gruffalo’s Child, featuring the voices of Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane; French art-thief caper Dripped; and New Zealand’s sci-fi tale Abiogenesis. (1:28) (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2013: Documentary” (3:29)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2013: Live Action” (1:54)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. “This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!” she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Rust and Bone Unlike her Dark Knight Rises co-star Anne Hathaway, Rust and Bone star Marion Cotillard never seems like she’s trying too hard to be sexy, or edgy, or whatever (plus, she already has an Oscar, so the pressure’s off). Here, she’s a whale trainer at a SeaWorld-type park who loses her legs in an accident, which complicates (but ultimately strengthens) her relationship with Ali (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, so tremendous in 2011’s Bullhead), a single dad trying to make a name for himself as a boxer. Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to 2009’s A Prophet gets a bit overwrought by its last act, but there’s an emotional authenticity in the performances that makes even a ridiculous twist (like, the kind that’ll make you exclaim “Are you fucking kidding me?”) feel almost well-earned. (2:00) (Eddy)

Safe Haven Over a decade and a half, as one Nicholas Sparks novel after another has hit the shelves and inexorably been adapted for the big screen, we’ve come to expect a certain kind of end product: a romantic drama that manages, in its treacly messaging and relentless arc toward emotional resonance, to give us second thoughts about the redemptive power of love. The latest, Safe Haven, directed by Lasse Hallström (2011’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, 1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), follows the formula fairly dutifully. Julianne Hough (2012’s Rock of Ages) plays Katie, a Boston woman on the run from the kind of terrifying event that causes a person to dye their hair platinum blond and board a Greyhound in the middle of the night, a trauma whose details are doled out to us in a series of flashbacks. Winding up in a small coastal town in North Carolina, she meets handsome widower and father of two Alex (Josh Duhamel), who runs the local general store and takes a shine to the unfriendly new girl. Viewers of last year’s Sparks adaptation The Lucky One will find some familiar elements (the healing balm of a good man’s love, cloying usage of the paranormal), as will viewers of 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy, another film that presents the fantasy of a fresh start in Smalltown, U.S.A. (1:55) (Rapoport)

The Sessions Polio has long since paralyzed the body of Berkeley poet Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) from the neck down. Of course his mind is free to roam — but it often roams south of the personal equator, where he hasn’t had the same opportunities as able-bodied people. Thus he enlists the services of Cheryl (Helen Hunt), a professional sex surrogate, to lose his virginity at last. Based on the real-life figures’ experiences, this drama by Australian polio survivor Ben Lewin was a big hit at Sundance this year (then titled The Surrogate), and it’s not hard to see why: this is one of those rare inspirational feel-good stories that doesn’t pander and earns its tears with honest emotional toil. Hawkes is always arresting, but Hunt hasn’t been this good in a long time, and William H. Macy is pure pleasure as a sympathetic priest put in numerous awkward positions with the Lord by Mark’s very down-to-earth questions and confessions. (1:35) (Harvey)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) (Chun)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat “silver linings” philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) (Eddy)

Skyfall Top marks to Adele, who delivers a magnificent title song to cap off Skyfall‘s thrilling pre-credits chase scene. Unfortunate, then, that the film that follows squanders its initial promise. After a bomb attack on MI6, the clock is running out for Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench), accused of Cold War irrelevancy in a 21st century full of malevolent, stateless computer hackers. The audience, too, will yearn for a return to simpler times; dialogue about “firewalls” and “obfuscated code” never fails to sound faintly ridiculous, despite the efforts Ben Whishaw as the youthful new head of Q branch. Javier Bardem is creative and creepy as keyboard-tapping villain Raoul Silva, but would have done better with a megalomaniac scheme to take over the world. Instead, a small-potatoes revenge plot limps to a dull conclusion in the middle of nowhere. Skyfall never decides whether it prefers action, bon mots, and in-jokes to ponderous mythologizing and ripped-from-the-headlines speechifying — the result is a unsatisfying, uneven mixture. (2:23) (Ben Richardson)

Stand Up Guys Call it oldster pop, call it geriatricore, just don’t call it late for its meds. With the oncoming boomer elder explosion, we can Depends — har-dee-har-har — on the fact that action-crime thrillers-slash-comedies like 2010’s Red, 2012’s Robot and Frank, and now Stand Up Guys are just the vanguard of an imminent barrage of grumpy old pros locking and loading, grousing about their angina, and delivering wisdom with a dose of hard-won levity. As handled by onetime teen-comedy character actor Fisher Stevens, Stand Up Guys is a warm, worthy addition to that soon-to-be-well-populated pantheon. It grows on you as you spend time with it — much like the two aging reprobates at its core, Val (Al Pacino) and Doc (Christopher Walken). Val, the proverbial stand-up guy who took the fall for the rest of his gang, has just completed a 25-year-plus stint in the pen. There to meet him is his only pal, and former partner in crime, Doc, who has been leading a humble life but has one last hit to commit for their old boss Claphands (Mark Margolis), who’s inexplicably named after a Tom Waits song. Sex, drugs, and some Viagra commercial-esque bluesy guitars are in order, but first Val and Doc must find their drive, in the form of their old driver buddy Hirsch (Alan Arkin), who they break out of a rest home, and, perhaps, their moral compass, which arrives with the discovery of a victim (Vanessa Ferlito) of baddies much less couth than themselves. The pleasure comes with following these stand-up guys as they make that leap from craven self-preservation to heroism, which might seem implausible to some. But to the cast’s, and Stevens’s, credit, they make it work — and even give the sentiment-washed finale a swashbuckling buddy-movie romanticism, the kind that a young Tarantino might dislike and an older Tarantino would be loathe to begrudge his lovable louses. (1:34) (Chun)

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) (Rapoport)

West of Memphis At this point, it’s hard to imagine a present-day murder trial more painstakingly documented than that of the so-called West Memphis Three. West of Memphis can be considered a crash course for those who somehow missed the Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger-directed Paradise Lost trilogy; it’s an evenly-paced montage of talking heads, archival trial footage, and interviews with investigators and legal experts, with additional focus on the relationship between former death row inmate Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis. (The other two accused men do appear in the film, but Echols is the focal point.) The doc traces the entire case, from the initial news reports of the disappearance of eight-year-olds Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch, to the supporter-funded, post-conviction investigation and appeals process still unfolding today. Over the years, Echols’ defense team had gradually amassed testimony from a slew of high-powered experts, which not only pointed away from the West Memphis Three, but also suggested new suspects. Despite this seemingly compelling material, Echols’ appeal hit a wall in 2008, when then-Circuit Court judge David Burnett, who had presided over the original trials, denied a new hearing, citing “inconclusive” evidence. At that point, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who had privately bankrolled much of the investigation leading to the DNA appeal, decided produce a doc; Amy Berg (2006’s Deliver Us from Evil) was tapped to direct. Whether or not this film advances the legal process any further remains to be seen, but it does offer a telling portrait of a deeply-flawed criminal justice system at work. (2:26) (Nicole Gluckstern)

Yossi A decade after Yossi (Ohad Knoller) lost his secret lover Jagger in a night raid during their Israeli Army service, the former is no longer a strapping, macho figure but a prematurely middle-aged sad sack. He works to the point of exhaustion as a Tel Aviv cardiologist, and his home life is pathetically lonely — an attempt to step out of the closet with an internet hookup turns out so humiliatingly that it seems he might as well shut the door on love for keeps. But forced to take a vacation, he finds some measure of hope in a chance encounter with four young soldiers who remind him of himself and still-mourned Jagger back when — except times have changed, and the gay identity he still hides even from closest colleagues doesn’t phase them in the least. Eytan Fox’s 2002 breakthrough Yossi & Jagger (originally made for Israeli TV) was sexy, then tragic, then stinging — consistently surprising and nuanced, with a memorably bitter resolution of social injustice. A sequel was theoretically a good idea, but the choices Fox has made for it (and for Yossi) are at once depressing and pat. It’s one thing that our hero has turned into such a piteous loser — these things happen, though the original edition didn’t seem like he’d give up so easily — quite another that his salvation comes in an all-too-convenient, movie wish-fulfillment form. As a stand-alone, melancholic character-study drama, Fox’s latest has its points. As a follow-up to what’s still his best film, however, it’s a bit more deflating and deflated than necessary. (1:24) (Harvey)

Zero Dark Thirty The extent to which torture was actually used in the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin may never be known, though popular opinion will surely be shaped by this film, as it’s produced with the same kind of “realness” that made Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008), so potent. Zero Dark Thirty incorporates torture early in its chronology — which begins in 2003, after a brief opening that captures the terror of September 11, 2001 using only 911 phone calls — but the practice is discarded after 2008, a sea-change year marked by the sight of Obama on TV insisting that “America does not torture.” (The “any more” goes unspoken.) Most of Zero Dark Thirty is set in Pakistan and/or “CIA black sites” in undisclosed locations; it’s a suspenseful procedural that manages to make well-documented events (the July 2005 London bombings; the September 2008 Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing) seem shocking and unexpected. Even the raid on Bin Ladin’s HQ is nail-bitingly intense. The film immerses the viewer in the clandestine world, tossing out abbreviations (“KSM” for al-Qaeda bigwig Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and jargon (“tradecraft”) without pausing for a breath. It is thrilling, emotional, engrossing — the smartest, most tightly-constructed action film of the year. At the center of it all: a character allegedly based on a real person whose actual identity is kept top-secret by necessity. She’s interpreted here in the form of a steely CIA operative named Maya, played to likely Oscar-winning perfection by Jessica Chastain. No matter the film’s divisive subject matter, there’s no denying that this is a powerful performance. “Washington says she’s a killer,” a character remarks after meeting this seemingly delicate creature, and he’s proven right long before Bin Ladin goes down. Some critics have argued that character is underdeveloped, but anyone who says that isn’t watching closely enough. Maya may not be given a traditional backstory, but there’s plenty of interior life there, and it comes through in quick, vulnerable flashes — leading up to the payoff of the film’s devastating final shot. (2:39) (Eddy)

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 20

Red Hots Burlesque Show El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.redhotsburlesque.com. 7:30, $5. Get ready for some hot bods, pasties, and outrageous costumes. Head over to El Rio beforehand to take advantage of its happy hour from 5-8pm with pints and wells for just three bucks.

THURSDAY 21

sfnoir Remixology Otis Lounge, 25 Maiden, SF. www.sfnoir.org. 6-9pm, free. Marking the start of sfnoir, a four-day culinary festival honoring black cuisine, some of the city’s top African-American mixologists have created an original cocktail menu starring fresh remixes of traditional favorites, as well as libations representing manifestations of the African diaspora all over the world.

There’s Nothing Beautiful Around Here book release SF Camerawork, 1011 Market, SF. www.owlandtiger.com. 6-9pm, free. Bay Area photographer Paccarik Orue likes to leave viewers with more questions than answers and his new photobook, There’s Nothing Beautiful Around Here does just that. The 48-page book spotlights the city of Richmond, California — not necessarily an area known for it’s beautiful scenery. Orue gives us a closer look at the city and proves that beauty can appear where you might least expect it.

“No Bones About It: The Diversity of Gelatinous Invertebrates in the Deep Sea” The Bone Room, 1573 Solano, Berkl. 7pm, free. www.boneroompresents.com. If you think the giant squids popping up in Monterey are awesome, wait until you find out what other crazy creatures call the Northern Coast home. Many of these species are so fragile they have only recently been observed, filmed, and collected. Tonight Dr. Steve Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute will discuss and introduce you to some of the strangest animals our sea has to offer.

FRIDAY 22

“Sugar Does San Francisco” Project One, 251 Rhode Island, SF. www.sugarartandfashionshow.com. 8pm-2am, $15. Purchase tickets online. A cultural smorgasbord showcasing some of San Francisco’s most creative ladies in music, fashion, photography, fine art, and graffiti art. An artist and photography showcase will begin at 8pm, followed by a fashion show featuring emerging and underground local fashion and accessory designers.

SATURDAY 23

Year of the Snake celebration Chinese Historical Society of America, 965 Clay, SF. www.chsa.org. 1pm, free. To celebrate its 50th anniversary the museum is offering free admission in February and holding special events this month and next. Getting the show started is James Beard-awarded Grace Young, author of Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edges. Young will give a demonstration of her cookbook, impart some wok wisdom and share Chinese New Year culinary customs and superstitions.

San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center, Bldg. A, SF. www.crystalfair.com. 10am-6pm, $6 for adults, free for children 12 and under. Crystals, jewels, and minerals, oh my! The 26th annual San Francisco Crystal Fair returns to add some sparkle to your weekend. In addition to the crystals, jewels, and minerals there will also be psychic readings, jewelry, and metaphysical healing tools from over 40 vendors.

Rubberband bookmaking Bayview Branch Library, 5075 Third St., SF. www.sfmcd.org. 12:30-2pm, free. Bookmaking doesn’t have to complicated. The Museum of Craft and Design wants to help you create a handmade book using only two materials — paper and colorful rubber bands. Use your new treasure as a journal, photo album, planner, or whatever you damn well please!

SUNDAY 24

“The World’s Funniest Bubble Show” The Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. www.themarsh.org. 11am, $8 for children under 12, $11 for adults. Blowing bubbles in the backyard is entertaining, but this is hour-long show nothing like that. Bubble artist Louis Pearl’s mix of comedy, artistry, and audience participation is captivating enough to keep both children and adults mesmerized. Expect to see square bubbles, bubbles inside bubbles, fog-filled bubbles, bubble volcanoes, and plenty of other bubbly shenanigans.

MONDAY 25

“Nerd Nite East Bay” The New Parkway Theatre, 474 24th St., Oakl. eastbay.nerdnite.com. 8pm, $8. Nerd out and pick up some trivia that is sure to pay off at your next pub quiz. Jessica Richman shares a bit about the microbial cells found in you that outnumber your own cells 10-to-one. Will Fischer will speak about modern manufacturing, and you’ll take a trip to Mars with Guy Pyrzak as he explains how we can take a 249 million miles road trip.

TUESDAY 26

“Snow Falling on Cedars” screening SF State University, Coppola Theatre, 1600 Holloway, SF. creativestate.sfsu.edu. 4:10-8pm, free. This 1999 Academy Award-nominated murder mystery flick “Snow Falling on Cedars” is set in the quiet community of San Piedro where a murder trial has severely disrupted the tranquil norm. Local reporter (Ethan Hawke) gets sucked into solving the case when he discovers his ex-lover was involved. After the screening will be a Q&A with one of the film’s executive editors and Hollywood veteran Lloyd A. Silverman.

 

Clubs vs. condos

Andrew Lam
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30
Clubs vs. condos

steve@sfbg.com

The Western South of Market area is ground zero for the city’s War on Fun, a place where nightlife often comes into conflict with residential expectations, particularly on the raucous 300 block of 11th Street and, to a lesser degree, Folsom Street’s old “miracle mile” of predominantly gay bars.

As the city’s Planning Department and its development community looks to accommodate another 4,000 homes for 10,000 new residents on less than 300 acres of Western SoMa — most of it along Folsom Street between 7th and 13th streets — that potential for conflict could grow in the coming years as funky old buildings give way to shiny new stacks of expensive condos.

And efforts to sort it out may hinge on the future of a 105-year old purple building.

After nearly eight years of work by a unique citizen-led task force, the Western SoMa Community Plan is now before the Board of Supervisors, with the Land Use Committee set to hold its first hearing on Feb. 25. Despite dozens of task force meetings seeking to strike the right balance between residential and entertainment interests, the plan is still being tweaked.

When the Planning Commission approved the plan and some related projects on Dec. 6, it followed King Solomon’s approach of cutting the 11th Street baby in half. The commission heeded the recent recommendation of the nightlife community and District 6 Sup. Jane Kim to modify the plan to prohibit new residential development on the 11th Street block where tipsy visitors to Slim’s, DNA Lounge, and other big clubs clog the sidewalks every weekend. But it also voted to grandfather in a 24-unit residential project at 340 11th Street, which everyone now involved in closed-door negotiations simply calls “the purple building,” a two-story masonry structure built in 1907 that is awaiting demolition.

The building houses light industrial businesses and is the former home of Universal Electric, whose owner, Tony Lo, wants to develop the property. Along with architect John Goldman, Lo submitted a residential project application in 2005, only to have it placed on hold pending adoption of the Western SoMa Community Plan.

“It was well along when the Planning Department put the project on hold,” Goldman told us.

City officials and even many of the nightlife advocates say they sympathize with the long wait that Lo and Goldman have endured, even if many oppose housing on the site and have been urging Lo to find another use for the site, such as an office building.

“They would have no idea what they’re getting into until that first Saturday night,” nightlife advocate Terrance Alan said of the would-be residents of the building, envisioning a young couple who had only visited during daytime hours trying push a baby stroller past the throngs of club-goers. Alan took part in recent meetings Kim facilitated with Lo and Goldman, and Alan told us, “There was, for the first time, a very frank discussion about the problems that owners would experience and the pressure they would put on clubs in the area.”

For example, just one neighbor of Slim’s — a popular live music venue on the block owned by singer Boz Scaggs — has waged a relentless campaign that has forced temporary shutdowns and cost the club more than $750,000 in mediation costs, Alan said, despite the club’s sound buffering and general compliance with local codes.

Alan said that it’s simply unthinkable to add more than two dozen new homeowners to that busy block in a condominium building that only allows access on 11th Street. Alan is hopeful for a negotiated compromise with Lo, something that Kim told us she also thinks is likely.

“I’m hoping we can come to a consensus of the property owners and business owners on 11th street, including the purple building,” Kim said, echoing Alan’s point that, “Just one resident can really shut down a business and hurt its financing.”

Goldman said he understands the concern and “my client is considering alternatives to housing.” While he was a little frustrated that it wasn’t until November that they first heard about a proposal to ban residential projects on the block, “We’ve definitely heard the concerns of the nightlife entertainment folks…No decision has been made yet, but it’s the goal of my client to decide fairly soon.”

A ban on housing is just one of the changes that Alan and other members of the California Music And Culture Association (CMAC) are pushing the supervisors to make to the plan, provisions he was unable to get into the plan as a member of the Western SoMa Task Force for four years before resigning in frustration.

“The task force was made up of people primarily interested in residential development,” Alan told us. “The plan is pretty much about protecting residential.”

That perspective irritates task force chair Jim Meko, who said he held about 60 meetings on entertainment and nightlife issues and bent over backward to accommodate that community. “Overall, the Western SoMa Plan is very friendly to the entertainment industry,” Meko said, noting that the plan grandfathers in all existing nightclubs, even after a building is demolished, and requires new residential construction to buffer against street noise. “They’re never satisfied.”

But Meko does concede that accommodating existing residents and new residential development was central to the task force’s work, as it was charged with doing by the Planning Department. “The most important thing was to do no harm to anyone,” Meko said was the guiding philosophy behind the task force’s approach. “We’re the real test case for a mixed use community in the city.”

While Folsom Street has more bars that 11th street, and those bars will be protected under the plan, Meko said the idea was to keep them limited in scale and prevent the proliferation of large clubs that operate into the wee hours.

“Folsom Street is where the residential growth will go,” Meko said. “That’s the area where we want to add the most residential growth and it seems dumb to add more nightclubs there.”

But he also doesn’t think it makes economic sense for many clubs to open there anyway. With allowable height limits in that corridor being increased from 50 feet now up to 65 feet, and with the plan’s approval allowing development projects to move forward, many of what he called the “old junky buildings” where clubs could find cheap rent will likely be demolished.

“With the height increases, those buildings are going to be history in five years,” Meko said.

Kim said she is supportive of both nightlife and the plan’s facilitation of residential development.

“It’s transit-first and a good place to be able to handle the density that’s close to downtown,” Kim said, noting that she’s supportive of even the massive residential project proposed for 801 Brannan Street, mostly because it includes units with up to two and three bedrooms and an elegant design by architect David Baker.

That project would have 432 housing units with a total of 606 bedrooms, 22,124 square feet of retail, and a 422-car parking garage on a site of just over four acres. In many ways, it is typical of the housing density that will begin to crowd into Western SoMa.

Meko was critical of how the entertainment community was able to make changes to the plan after all the hard work of the task force, and he told us, “It was a choice Jane Kim had to make, and she will have to answer to her constituents in the future.”

But Kim said the change on 11th Street made sense and that it’s important to strike a balance. “Entertainment is clearly an important part of Western SoMa and 11th Street is unique in showcasing that community,” Kim said.

Alan and Glendon Hyde — an LGBT activist who, like Meko, ran against Kim for D6 supervisor two years ago — are also pushing for other changes in the rules governing nightlife in SoMa, including who can get the limited live music permits that the city issues and extending the 10pm curfew in those permits.

“I think small businesses throughout the district should be able to use the limited live music permits, and they’re available only on Folsom Street under the plan,” Hyde told us, noting that otherwise he thinks nightlife fares well until the plan, particularly after Kim’s intervention on 11th Street.

Kim said that she in reluctant to start tweaking too many provisions of the plan, which she characterized as a separate discussion that doesn’t have to happen now: “I’m open to further discussions after we get the plan passed.”

The Western SoMa Plan was broken off from the larger Eastern Neighborhoods Plan by then-Sup. Chris Daly in 2005 to let a citizen-based effort tackle this area’s unique challenges, and Kim said the plan is a testament to the diligent efforts of Meko and a diverse set of members.

“I think it was a really good process with lots of stakeholders involved,” Kim said. “I like the balance. I’m happy.”

 

What Obama said — and what he meant

Andrew Lam
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0

OPINION The words in President Obama’s State of the Union speech were often lofty, spinning through the air with the greatest of ease. But let’s decode the president’s smooth oratory in the realms of climate change, war and civil liberties.

“For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”

We’ve done so little to combat climate change — we must do more.

“I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change…”

Climate change is an issue that can be very good for Wall Street. Folks who got the hang of “derivatives” and “credit default swaps” can learn how to handle “cap and trade.”

“The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that.”

Dual memo. To T. Boone Pickens: “Love ya.” To environmentalists who won’t suck up to me: “Frack you.” (And save your breath about methane.)

“After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home.”

How’s that for an applause line? Don’t pay too much attention to the fine print. I’m planning to have 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan a year from now, and they won’t get out of there before the end of 2014. And did you notice the phrase “in uniform”? We’ve got plenty of out-of-uniform military contractors in Afghanistan now, and you can expect that to continue for a long time.

“We don’t need to send tens of thousands of our sons and daughters abroad, or occupy other nations. Instead, we’ll need to help countries like Yemen, Libya and Somalia provide for their own security, and help allies who take the fight to terrorists, as we have in Mali. And, where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans.”

We don’t need flag-draped coffins coming home. We’re so civilized that we’re the planetary leaders at killing people with remote control from halfway around the world.

“We must enlist our values in the fight. That’s why my administration has worked tirelessly to forge a durable legal and policy framework to guide our counterterrorism efforts.

I’m sick of taking flak just because I pick and choose which civil liberties I want to respect. If I need to give a bit more information to a few other pliant members of Congress, I will.

“The leaders of Iran must recognize that now is the time for a diplomatic solution, because a coalition stands united in demanding that they meet their obligations. And we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

Maybe it’s just about time for another encore of “preemptive war.”

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

THURSDAY 21

Confronting Climate Change Panel Discussion

Women’s Building, 3542 18th St., SF. www.ggphp.org. 7-9 p.m., free. Join Breathe California, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the Golden Gate Health Partnership for a panel discussion on youth-led movements that seek solutions to global climate change. Speakers will include representatives from Alliance for Climate Education, People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER), and others. The evening will begin with a networking reception with light refreshments, followed by a panel discussion beginning at 7:30.

FRIDAY 22

Lecture: 50 years of creating radical change at Glide

Berkeley Arts & Letters at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing, Berk. (800) 838-3006, tinyurl.com/glide50. 7:30pm, $10 in advance ($5 students), $12 at the door. The Reverend Cecil Williams and his wife, Janice Mirikitani, tell the story of half a century of advocating for a disenfranchised community through San Francisco’s famed Glide church in their book, Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Creating Radical Change in a Community Called Glide. Listen to Williams share stories of his experiences during the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Harvey Milk, and his clashes with conservative church factions as Glide pushed the boundaries.

Celebrating Domestic Worker Organizing

ILWU, Ship Clerk’s Local 34, 4 Berry, SF. 6:30-8:30pm, free. The Labor Archives & Research Center hosts a program entitled “More than a Labor of Love: the Work of Home Care,” highlighting the history of domestic workers in the United States. Refreshments at 6:30 followed by a 7 p.m. talk by Eileen Boris, who is co-author, with Jennifer Klein, of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State. Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a grassroots organization of Latina women, will provide an organizing update on domestic worker issues.

When bankers lie

Andrew Lam
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3
When bankers lie

By Darwin BondGraham

news@sfbg.com

Although few have ever heard of it, there’s probably no number more important to the global financial system than the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. Defined precisely, LIBOR is a set of different interest rates that the world’s largest banks charge one another for cash loans denominated in US dollars.

Because of its centrality to the economic system, and the trust placed in it, LIBOR is used to calculate everything from consumer loans and home mortgages to exotic financial derivatives and investments. LIBOR makes the financial world go round, influencing the price of everything. Fortune 500 companies decide whether or not to invest billions in new factories and product lines based on LIBOR’s direction. Governments rethink their debt levels and spending when LIBOR ticks up and down.

It turns out, however, that LIBOR has been a lie, and that the world’s biggest banks rigged the rate to skim off billions of dollars in value from other corporations and the general public. In a devastating set of revelations that began to surface two years ago, the panel of the largest global banks that set the LIBOR rate conspired to manipulate it, to increase or decrease LIBOR, solely because a higher or lower quote on particular days would allow them to reap millions in instant profits.

US authorities working with regulators in the UK, Japan, Switzerland, and Singapore are currently investigating upwards of two dozen banks in what is probably the single biggest financial crime ever perpetrated. So far, employees of Barclay’s, UBS, and Credit Suisse have been fired, arrested, and charged. Many more criminal prosecutions are surely coming, but the real battle will be in the civil courts and the court of public opinion.

To date only a handful of civil lawsuits have been filed, the first shot fired by the city of Baltimore early last year. Last month, the County of San Mateo, city of Richmond, and the East Bay Municipal Utility District filed their own cases which were quickly consolidated into a growing class action to be heard in New York’s Southern District Federal Court.

Now San Francisco is set to enter the ring. On January 29, Supervisor John Avalos called for public hearings to review the impact of LIBOR manipulation on San Francisco’s finances, starting next week. While other cities and public agencies might be ahead in the federal courts, Avalos’s recommendation takes the investigation further, and in a different direction.

“We’re trying to assess how the LIBOR scandal affects San Francisco, and that’s what the hearing is about,” Avalos told the Guardian. “These banks rigged the financial markets for their own benefit and the global economy suffered as a result.”

While early indications are that San Francisco is better protected than many jurisdictions, Avalos said, “I think it’s important to stand with other cities and counties that are suffering.” Or as his legislative aide Jeremy Pollock told us, “When a major city like San Francisco calls for hearings, it’ll get a lot more attention. The hearing will be an educational process for everyone to understand how this complicated financial world really works.”

Former Supervisor Chris Daly, now the political director for Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents most city employees, said there’s a need to hold the banks publicly accountable. “These other jurisdictions that have filed suit haven’t had a big public process. We don’t want to see settlements for less in courtrooms. We want to see the full public exposure of the issue, and in terms of the cause of bank accountability, it is the better approach.”

Avalos has already met with the heads of different city departments and agencies in an effort to determine what kinds of losses the public might have sustained as a result of LIBOR rigging. Pollock said the city’s finance staff and attorneys are currently working closely with the city’s airport, retirement system, and Office of the Treasurer to gauge the size of the problem.

“LIBOR rigging may have impacted the payments under the airport’s swaps,” said Kevin Kone, who oversees capital finance for the San Francisco International Airport. The swaps Kone is referring to include seven interest rate swaps that the airport used to convert variable rate debts into fixed rates for half a billion of SFO’s bonds (see “The losing bets,” 2/28/12).

The swaps require SFO to pay a fixed rate of between 3.4 and 3.9 percent on its half-billion dollars in debt, while the banks pay about 60 percent of LIBOR. When SFO signed these swap contracts years ago, 60 percent of LIBOR was roughly equal to 3.4 percent, meaning the net payments between SFO and the banks basically canceled one another out. However, if LIBOR was later rigged downward by the banks, then the net interest rate payments would shift in favor of the banks, draining hundreds of thousands or even millions from SFO’s capital budget.

“As an example of the order of magnitude, if LIBOR were set artificially low by 0.25 percent for a full two years, the Airport would receive $900,000 less each year (for a total of $1.8 million) than it should from its swap counterparties,” explained Kone in an email.

The airport’s counterparties on its swaps included JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan Chase sits on the committee of banks that sets various LIBOR rates, as does Bank of America, which bought Merrill Lynch in 2008. Both JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are named as conspirators in the LIBOR lawsuits pending in federal court. JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are also the subject of federal criminal investigations concerning LIBOR rigging.

Other losses may have been suffered by the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System which makes investments in derivative instruments that are linked to LIBOR. “The retirement board has been looking at this,” said Nadia Sesay, director of the Controller’s Office of Public Finance. “We know Retirement has exposure and they’re assessing their portfolios.”

According to the most recent audit of the Retirement System’s portfolio, SFERs holds two interest rate swaps on its books with a notional value of $15 million. In prior years, SFERs held other swaps. In 2010, the Retirement System’s audit showed three interest rate swaps with a total value of $41 million. Over the last two years these swaps drained $5.3 million from the pension system, and some of these losses might have been due to the downward manipulation of LIBOR. Also on the Retirement System’s books are other investments in bank loans, options, and other securities that might have been impacted by the LIBOR fraud.

Still more losses due to LIBOR-linked instruments on the city’s books will be investments held by the city treasury in pooled funds. Banks offer various investment products to local governments that need a temporary place to park millions or billions in cash; the returns on these investment are often pegged to LIBOR. Just as with the airport’s swaps with JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch subsidiary, often times these so-called “municipal derivatives” investments are sold to cities by the same global banks that sit on the British Banker’s Association panels that determine the various LIBOR rates.

That’s one of the most alarming things about the LIBOR scandal: how absurdly easy it was for just 16 banks to rig the entire world financial system in their favor for several years on end. LIBOR isn’t actually a market rate that is determined by the loans banks make to one another. Rather, it’s a rate the banks claim they would able to secure loans from their peers, and the final LIBOR numbers for any given day are determined not by some independent authority, but instead by the British Bankers Association’s panel members — the banks themselves.

“The problem is that there’s a clear conflict of interest,” explained Rosa Abrantes-Metz, an economist at the NYU Stern School of Business who has closely studied LIBOR and is an expert in financial markets and cartels. “Banks make proprietary trades on instruments related to LIBOR, so they do have an interest in moving LIBOR in their own favor.”

Abrantes-Metz is currently working as an expert in several LIBOR lawsuits. Among her recent research findings in studies that tracked LIBOR alongside other economic indicators is that all the conditions of a potential conspiracy are present, and empirical evidence points toward coordinated fraud. “The banks had, as we say, the means, motive, and opportunity,” concluded Abrantes-Metz.

Regardless of what San Francisco’s public hearings on LIBOR uncover, the road ahead will be long and complicated. When asked about the the expected flood of LIBOR litigation, Abrantes-Metz said it’s just getting started. “We’ve only had the settlements of three banks with the authorities [Barclays, UBS, and Credit Suisse]. I’ve read there are investigations of 14 of the 16 banks that were on the LIBOR panel. That’s just US Dollar LIBOR.”

“Then there’s Euroibor, and there’s 40 banks on that panel. Then there’s Tibor which some overlapping banks with Yen Libor banks,” said Abrantes-Metz, referring to other key global interest rates denominated in Euros and Yen. Like LIBOR, these lesser rates are used to calculate the values and obligations of trillions in securities and payments.

“Those are just the governmental investigations,” said Abrantes-Metz. “I’m sure as more evidence comes out of these settlements it will probably generate more private litigation. I think this is to go on for very many years.”

Meanwhile, a proposal that Avalos made in the fall of 2011 to have the city start a municipal bank is nearing completion of its legal analysis by the City Attorney’s Office. While it’s legally complicated and wouldn’t eliminate the local need for big banks, he said the LIBOR scandal reinforces the need for alternative lending institutions with great public accountability. “My goal is this year to have something on paper that will lead to a municipal bank,” Avalos told us. “These institutions are willing to rig the system, and we could protect ourselves more locally if we had a banking institution.”

Missing person

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Missing person

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A filthy, forlorn world emerges in surreal half-light at the outset of Magic Theater’s premiere of Se Llama Cristina, the new play by celebrated San Francisco–based playwright Octavio Solis. But almost as quickly, its initially intriguing outlines begin to look artificial, becoming the bloated lines of caricature more than a poetical evocation of real life, as the sentiment at the heart of this sometimes forceful but finally thin and frustrating play steadily takes over.

It’s odd and somehow appropriate that the two wayward characters at the center of the story — an at first nameless Woman (a vital Sarah Nina Hayon) and Man (a sympathetic but inconsistent Sean San José) — so aimless and rootless in their own lives, find themselves confined to the same dingy drug- and trash-strewn apartment (nicely realized by set designer Andrew Boyce and lighting designer Burke Brown), with initially no conception of where they are, who they are, or how they are related — let alone the meaning of the baby crib in the corner with a piece of fried chicken in it.

In this shabby environment, time and memory and biography all collapse and rise again as if within the ether of sleep or a heavy nod. Checkered histories and nervous dispositions slowly present themselves in a compact but oversaturated 80 minutes of dialogue that, at its best, pivots bracingly between horror and hilarity, with a rough lyricism that is a trademark of Solis’s border-town noir aesthetic. Soon a jilted villain named Abel (a very able Rod Gnapp) appears, incarnating the menace in the air. Also in the room is the possibility that the Man and Woman are about to be parents — or are already — which throws further fuel on the fire of their desperate coupling.

When, near the end, a young woman (Karina Gutiérrez) blows into this increasingly claustrophobic and wearying ménage, it’s like a breath of fresh air — and that is almost literally so, since she enters through the window. We could take her monologue as the voice of their daughter, the Cristina of the title, from some not too distant future. But whether or not we do, her impact is transformative in a way more or less synonymous with parenthood: presenting the couple with the possibility of a salvation at once of their own making and a gift from beyond — a kind of daughter ex machina.

If the details of the couple’s situation are better left subject to dream-logic than to a realistic accounting of probabilities and physical possibilities, it’s nevertheless true that the play suffers from an erratic need to fill in gaps. Among other things, that can lead to dialogue overburdened by exposition and back story (as in the Man’s graceless retelling of his self-exile from romantic attachments). Less would have been more. In director Loretta Greco’s staging, the awkward tension between the violence and despair of circumstance and an almost impatient rush toward love and hope is sometimes apparent in performances that can betray an uncertain balance between comedy, violence, and dread. In a scene where the Woman appears about to birth her daughter into the wicked, greedy mitts of Abel, the visceral, sexual, messy heat of the dialogue feels at odds with the somewhat guarded blocking of the actors. That said, there are moments in which a potent balance of elements reigns, as when Abel appears as the Telephone Man, threatening a total domination of the couple’s fate. It’s spooky, funny, surreal, and convincing at once.

In the end, however, the stakes never feel high or real, despite an almost too-insistent ladling on of gory detail, foul language, and teeth bearing. Like the impetuous verse scrawled on the back of Cristina’s sonogram image by her wannabe-writer father, Se Llama Cristina is ultimately a passionate poem to the deliverance that a child can offer her parents. But it’s scribbled too hastily and self-consciously in the hand of a playwright whose best instincts balk at the maudlin habit it encourages. *

SE LLAMA CRISTINA

Wed/13-Sat/16, 8pm (also Wed/13, 2:30pm); Sun/17, 2:30pm, $22-60

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, SF

www.magictheatre.org

 

No talking

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
No talking

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The 2013 San Francisco Silent Film Festival isn’t until July, but the fest’s Silent Winter offshoot offers a day packed full of classic delights to tide over its legions of fans until summer. The Castro Theatre plays host to four features and one shorts program, all of which boast live musical accompaniment.

Silent Winter’s earliest (1916) and latest films (1927) are both buoyed by charismatic leading ladies: Marguerite Clark, in J. Searle Dawley’s Snow White, and Mary Pickford in Sam Taylor’s My Best Girl. Clark, who found early fame as a Broadway star, was already in her 30s by the time film acting became a viable career option. No matter — she’s believably girlish as the princess with “skin white as snow,” hated by her jealous stepmother, whose own beauty comes courtesy of witchcraft. (Dig the proto-Witchiepoo who helps the conniving queen in her various evil schemes, and her giant kitty helper, too.) A teenage Walt Disney saw the film in 1917 and made animation history with the same story 20 years later — though his heroine lacks Clark’s easy effervescence.

Pickford’s own joie de vivre has been exhaustively documented, but she’s particularly charming in My Best Girl, a late-career film that marked her final silent film, as well as her only onscreen pairing with the man who’d become her third husband, Buddy Rogers (in a marriage that would last from 1937 until her death in 1979). Watching My Best Girl is an excellent reminder that the romantic comedy structure still used with great frequency today — boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back just in time for a happy ending — is very much an old-school invention. Here, Pickford plays sassy shopgirl Maggie, who has no idea her cute new co-worker, Joe (Rogers), is actually the store owner’s son pulling an Undercover Boss.

Though My Best Girl is ostensibly a comedy, Pickford’s standout scenes are the film’s most melodramatic: first, when she conveys equal parts mortification and heartbreak when she realizes who her new crush really is, and later, when she pretends to be a gold-digging jazz baby to chase him away, believing he’s too good for her. Sob. Suck it, Reese, Julia, and whoever else — Mary (who was actually Canadian) is America’s sweetheart forever.

Buster Keaton, another actor (and director) much-beloved by silent film fans, is spotlighted in “Think Slow, Act Fast,” a program of three early shorts. The Scarecrow (1920), about a pair of farm hands battling over the farmer’s comely daughter, features a winning turn by one of Hollywood’s first canine stars — Luke, a pit bull owned by Keaton mentor Fatty Arbuckle. One Week (1920) follows a hapless newlywed couple as they attempt to assemble their pre-fab house; it’s a set-up that offers ample opportunity to showcase Keaton’s physical-comedy gifts. Third entry The Play House (1921) opens with what was a dazzling special-effects achievement at the time, as multiple Keatons play all of the parts in a minstrel show (yes, there’s blackface). After this Keaton-opoly is revealed to be a backstage dream, the rest of the short follows the comedian as he woos a twin he can’t quite tell apart from her sister — pausing here and there to crash different shows, including one where he impersonates a monkey.

Rounding out Silent Winter are a freshly restored Douglas Fairbanks classic, Raoul Walsh’s high-flying fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924); and Nosferatu (1922) director F.W. Murnau’s take on Faust (1926), his final German film.

SILENT WINTER

Sat/16, $5–<\d>$15

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.silentfilm.org

Heat of the moment

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Heat of the moment

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The late 1950s saw Japanese film production and attendance at all-time highs. Soon the expanding television market would steadily draw audiences away, but in the meantime the industry was robust enough to encourage the promotion of assistant directors and other next-generation talents influenced by the era’s various artistic avant-gardes to make their own features. This resulted in a flowering of bold new voices parallel to France’s New Wave and other radical filmmaking shifts around the globe. As elsewhere, ideas and influences from the underground began bubbling up to the mainstream surface.

Unlike other places, however, Japan had its own conglomerate means of importing, producing, and exhibiting (in a micro-chain of specially designated theaters) more experimental work in direct if modest competition with commercial product. That means would be the Art Theater Guild of Japan, which a group of cineastes, filmmakers, and critics launched in 1961; by spring of the next year they’d secured 10 venues across the nation to showcase the work ATG distributed and, eventually, created in-house.

Two concurrent local retrospectives highlight the Art Theater Guild’s important but (at least in the West) underseen contributions. The organization is tangentially related to the roster of experimental shorts (plus Michio Okabe’s mondo-like 1968 feature counterculture overview Crazy Love) in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque’s two-week “Fragments of Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1974” series, which begins this week. But it’s central to the Pacific Film Archive’s already in-progress “Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild,” continuing through month’s end.

Raised in a society whose rigid codes for behavior and loyalty enabled a remarkable post-World War II economic recovery, but which could also stifle individual expression, Japanese filmmakers emerging in the 1960s were if anything even more eager than young Americans and Europeans to tear apart inherited thematic, stylistic, and commercial conventions. Whether advocating for full-on revolution, critiquing the status quo, or playing with form, ATG’s productions pushed both medium and audiences out of the comfort zone.

That aim couldn’t have been more apparent in the company’s first original feature (co-produced with Nikkatsu Corp.), 1967’s A Man Vanishes by the celebrated Shohei Imamura (1963’s The Insect Woman, 1966’s The Pornographers, 1983’s The Ballad of Narayama). Ostensibly an investigative documentary about a salaryman who’s gone missing for two years, it’s a poker-faced prank that slowly grows more convoluted and bizarre until the film becomes a chronicle of its own unmaking, and an accusation directed at any notion of truth in cinema.

More traditional subjects are turned inside out in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Shura (1971). The former is drawn from a 300-year-old tragic romance written for bunraku (puppet) theater; mixing abstraction and naturalism, actors human and otherwise, it’s a jewel that questions artifice itself. In contrast to the prolific Shinoda, Matsumoto made very few features, most famously 1969’s pop art-camp extravaganza Funeral Parade of Roses, which transplants Oedipus Rex to the Tokyo gay underground with cross-dressing singer-actor “Peter” as its ruthless glamazon protagonist.

Shura (a.k.a. Demons) is as cramped as that film is extravagant. Turning its extreme physical and budgetary limitations into the stuff of claustrophobic nightmare à la Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) or Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll (1957), it’s the tale of a samurai who gives everything up for love of a geisha — you know that’s a bad idea when early on she asks the question that needs no answer, “How dare you call me a vixen?” Once he realizes he’s been betrayed, all hell breaks loose in bursts of over-the-top violence that might be real or imaginary, given the film’s penchant for showing us successive alternate versions of the same scenes.

Arguably the series’ wildest stylistic leap is Shuji Terayama’s 1974 Pastoral: Hide and Seek, a bracing phantasmagorical chronicle of a very troubled mother-child relationship that reels from circus surrealism and mime makeup to porno sex and quiet lyricism. Perhaps its bitterest statement comes in the form of 1971’s The Ceremony from a pre-In the Realm of the Senses (1976) Nagisa Oshima. Rigorously formal in presentation (and taking place almost exclusively during public rituals), it traces the gradual soul crushing of a protagonist whose forced lifelong hewing to the model of a “pure and perfect Japanese” sacrifices any possibility of happiness. One of the ultimate “You think you hate your family?” horror films, it features multiple suicides and gruesomely joyless sexual interludes testifying to the suffocation of bourgeoisie conformity.

While its stature and role changed over time, ATG hung on through the mid 1980s, its final releases including such memorable ones as Yoshimitsu Morita’s anarchic social satire The Family Game (1983), an international hit. *

“CHRONICLES OF INFERNO: JAPAN’S ART THEATER GUILD”

Through Feb. 27

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

bampfa.berkeley.edu

“FRAGMENTS OF JAPANESE UNDERGROUND CINEMA 1960-1974”

Feb. 14-28

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

 

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