• No categories

Trash

Take it sleazy

-
0

CULT FILM Erstwhile cofounder of San Francisco’s late, lamented Werepad — a "beatnik space lounge" (among other things) — Jacques Boyreau, also a filmmaker (Candy Von Dewd), lives in Portland, Ore., these days. But he’s dropping into town again with a characteristic surprise package in the form of the Supertrash Peepshow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’re promised a slide show and lecture revealing the "secret schools of design" in vintage exploitation movie posters and other pop ephemera, as showcased in Boyreau’s new coffee-table tome, Supertrash, a sequel to 2002’s eye-popping volume Trash. Then, to dive more deeply into the cinematic sleaze of yore, he’ll present a true rarity: the fragrantly named Fleshpot on 42nd Street, the final sexploitation epic of notorious grade-Z Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan. It was one of his few real hits — if only on the 1973 downtown grindhouse circuit — but has since become one of the least-remembered titles in an already obscure oeuvre (The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!, The Ghastly Ones), since only a single print survives.

Fleshpot juggles Milligan’s usual hysteria, misanthropy, crude technique, and ripe dialogue with more restrained, realistic aspects in line with mainstream counterculture downers of the period like The Panic in Needle Park and Go Ask Alice. Heroine Dusty (Laura Cannon, a.k.a. Diane Lewis) is a morally lax looker who splits when her latest sugar daddy asks her to, like, pick up after herself. She thus goes from "playing house with some guy in Queens" to playing house with a real queen: blond-fright-wigged Cherry (Neil Flanagan), a tranny hooker pal who says, "Why don’t we join forces? We could both turn quite a few each night if we play our cards right!"

Swapping abusive, money-pinching tricks, these two indelicate souls are well matched: she’s a petty thief who hates sex but would rather trick than work a regular job, and he’s an even crasser soul who sobs, "I’m no prize package: a cocksucker — not even a good one. Too weird to be called a man, too old to try and look like one!" It’s a shock when Dusty meets a guy who’s nice, employed, and genuinely likes her — Bob, played by no less than Deep Throat porn legend Harry Reems. Of course, in the Milligan universe this rare glimpse of happiness (let alone good, consensual intercourse) is doomed to end tragically. Lurid, lively, and cheap as a back-alley BJ, Fleshpot embodies a particular brand of movie entertainment that you can’t get anymore in a public space. When it’s over, you’ll want to be hosed off.

SUPERTRASH PEEPSHOW

Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

A brief history of space vampires in the movies

-
0

70MM MANIA With everyone vulnerable to psychic Taser attacks through e-mail and cell phones, you don’t have to peek over shoulders to be a space vampire today. Is there any doubt that space vampirism is running rampant?

The answer, my friends and fellow Criswell worshippers, is no. This makes the sheer lack of space vampire movies downright shocking. Leave it to Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks to confront the problem by reviving one of the greatest space vampire movies ever, Tobe Hooper’s 1985 Lifeforce. Now you can ponder space vampirism in its full, bodacious 70mm splendor, as primarily embodied by naked alien Mathilda May, who brought anarchic madness to London almost 20 years before 28 Days Later.

Lifeforce was coproduced by the Cannon Group, a name that — along with fellow producer Golan-Globus — is an absolute guarantee of mind-boggling visions. In addition to the ever-naked (except when wearing a trash bag) May, Lifeforce features Halley’s Comet, a space vampire nun, a screaming Steve Railsback (is there any other kind?), and an overblown score by Henry Mancini, who has wandered a long way from "Moon River." It also includes copious homoeroticism, especially when Patrick Stewart, chrome domed even back then, is possessed by May’s wily feminine spirit. Could Lifeforce have been crazier? It seems impossible. And yet: Klaus Kinski was originally supposed to play one of the film’s mad scientists. (It goes without saying that the scientist is mad.)

Within the It! The Terror from beyond Space–derived upper echelon of the space vampire canon, Lifeforce rivals Curtis Harrington’s 1966 Queen of Blood. In place of a naked May, Harrington’s movie offers a green-skinned alien vampire (the amazing Florence Marly) wrapped in an extratight bodysuit and sporting a hairdo that has been described as a "testy beehive" and a "turnip" by online reviewers and compared to Mister Softee ice cream by me. (Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of the Vampires is more of an antecedent to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien.) As for Lifeforce’s futurist twist on body snatching, it does live on in at least one 21st-century movie, 2001’s Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse), by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director who also qualifies as probably the biggest fan on the planet of Hooper’s 1990 Spontaneous Combustion.

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS IN 70MM

Fri/21, 7 p.m. (Ghostbusters) and 9 p.m. (Lifeforce); double feature, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.thecastrotheatre.com

Tough turf

-
0

CULT FILM "WAAAR-ee-erzzz — come out to PLAAY-ee-ay!" This catchphrase, first spoken in an annoyingly unforgettable singsong (and supposedly improvised) by actor David Patrick Kelly, has infiltrated pop culture to the extent that it’s been sampled or mimicked by musicians from Twisted Sister to the Wu-Tang Clan to the Offspring. If you don’t know — how could you not? — it’s from The Warriors, Walter Hill’s 1979 urban action joyride. Revived this weekend at the Red Vic Movie House (hardly for the first time), The Warriors barely rippled across the radar of most respectable critics at the time (though the New Yorker and the New York Times liked it). Yet it’s grown more beloved and influential than all the prestige releases of 1979 combined (Apocalypse Now possibly aside). I mean, who quotes lines now from Kramer vs. Kramer or Norma Rae?

Based on a 1965 novel by Sol Yurick (very loosely, which he did not appreciate), the film finds nine representatives of Coney Island’s Warriors gang journeying in their scruffy-sexy little leather vests all the way to the Bronx. There, messianic Cyrus (Roger Hill) of the Black Panthers–like, paramilitaristic Gramercy Riffs has called a summit for all 100 New York City gangs. Saying their combined 60,000 soldiers could take over the city against a measly 20,000 cops if they united forces, he bellows, "We got the streets, suckers! Caaaan youuuu diiiiig iiiiitttt?"

Just cuz he can, weasly li’l psycho Luther (Kelly) of the Rogues chooses this moment to assassinate Cyrus. Amid the subsequent pandemonium, Luther pins the blame on the Warriors, whose black leader, Cleon (Dorsey Wright), is promptly lynched. This conveniently leaves the cutest white boy — Andy Gibb–coiffed, clench-jawed Michael Beck as Swan — in charge. He has to get the remaining Warriors, now pursued by every gang and cop around, safely home from "27 miles behind enemy lines." Their breathless all-night journey includes altercations with myriad rival units, all outlandishly outfitted in matching costumes: the Baseball Furies wear pinstripe uniforms and KISS-style makeup; the Punks look more like pop rockers, with overalls and a shaggy-haired boss on roller skates. Other groups look like mimes (now that’s tough), disco funksters, ninjas, and so on. Luther’s guys resemble extras from Scorpio Rising. The Lizzies are, uh, lezzies, though they pretend otherwise to entrap some easily dick-led Warriors.

Movies from the ’70s often seem idly paced now, yet The Warriors moves like greased lightning. There’s nonstop action yet surprisingly not all that much serious violence, save at the beginning and the end. But it didn’t seem that way to most observers in early ’79, when word quickly spread of gang beatdowns and three alleged murders taking place in or outside screenings. (Easy to see why actual gang members flocked to the movie — it flatters them with a fantasy of gang life as unflappable, thrill-a-minute, dark-superhero coolness.)

Naturally, there were also rumors that these reports were fake — drummed up by either the studio or procensorship types to create controversy. In the unlikely case that Paramount was behind it, its strategy certainly backfired, since the studio ended up having to pull ads and some prints and bankroll security at certain theaters. (Nonetheless, the film did pretty well nationwide.)

There were regrettable consequences for other movies too. Their suddenly skittish distributors didn’t do jack to promote two terrific movies now tainted by the gang label: Philip Kaufman’s wonderful The Wanderers, which was more an American Graffiti–style nostalgic flashback than anything else, and Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, a brilliant suburban-teen-revolt study. Both found their audiences in subsequent nonstop cable airings.

Most Warriors fanatics were dismayed when a director’s cut DVD came out earlier this year that inserted comic book–style freeze-frame graphics and a pretentious prologue. There may be worse indignities to come: Tony Scott, who’s never made a realistic movie in his life, is slated to direct a "more real, less camp" remake using Los Angeles gang members. Can you dig it? Er, no. (Dennis Harvey)

THE WARRIORS

Fri/14–Sat/15, 7:15 and 9:20 p.m. (also Sat/15, 2 and 4 p.m.), $5–$8.50

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com<

Northern Frights

-
0

FESTIVAL REPORT Leave it to me to pack as much violence as possible into my first days at the Toronto International Film Festival. (And that’s with only having seen one entry in the horror-heavy Midnight Madness series.) In Spanish spookfest The Orphanage — featuring a Poltergeist shout-out for Zelda Rubenstein fans — fingers are slammed in doors, limbs are snapped, and a few unfortunate, uh, accidents occur. Jodie Foster goes aggro with a cause in The Brave One, poppin’ pricks with a pistol (and other handy tools). But the standout gross-outs so far are the Coen brothers’ Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men and Dario Argento’s long-awaited final entry in his Three Mothers trilogy, Mother of Tears.

"If this ain’t the mess," reckons No Country‘s Texas sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), "it’ll do till the mess gets here." The mess, later dubbed a "colossal goatfuck," is indeed a doozy of a rural crime scene, involving gun-shot bodies both fresh and long bloated, a dead dog, a truckload of drugs, much spent ammo, and a missing satchel containing $2 million. Clutching that dough is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a ne’er-do-well who soon realizes his windfall will also be his downfall — in the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, exquisitely coiffed), a ruthless killer hired to hunt down the cash. No Country for Old Men is certainly the greatest Coen film in a good while — no Tom Hanks joking about waffles here. It’s beautifully shot and edited (aside from a maybe too-extended ending), and while there’s not much dialogue when Ed Tom’s not onscreen, every nugget’s worth waiting for. Bardem is particularly golden, but the whole cast is on point.

And yeah, since I know you wanna know, Mother of Tears is likewise certainly the greatest Argento film in a good while. I’m not saying it’s a perfect film, but it has all the gnarly stuff you expect from the director of Suspiria, Inferno, Phenomena, and Tenebre: over-the-top occult themes, shrill acting (Asia Argento’s the lead, and she turns it out), goth punk gangs of giggling witches, a plot that makes only sporadic sense, Udo Kier (as an exorcist!), a pounding electronic score, and, of course, eye gougings like they’re going out of style. Thank goodness they never will. (Cheryl Eddy)

For more reports from the Toronto International Film festival, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Stormy leather

-
0

Cruising for a Bruising By Jason Shamai

FILM William Friedkin, like it or not, has contributed so much to mainstream queer cinema that it’s remarkable his name primarily calls up images of projectile vomiting and Gene Hackman running a lot. The Boys in the Band (1970) and the more high-profile Cruising (1980) are bookends to a decade of comparatively unencumbered gay sex that is legendary to gay men of my generation (I was alive for a gloriously unencumbered two months of it), yet there was almost no mainstream representation of gay men in pop culture between the two films that didn’t involve guest spots on Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.

Last year’s excellent Friedkin offering, Bug, spent its first 15 minutes or so, gratuitously but innocuously, within a lesbian community. And let’s not forget Father Dyer’s gayer-than-gay proclamation in The Exorcist (1973) that “My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they love me.” Friedkin’s representations of queer people are hardly consistent in their degrees of sophistication, but the venom he’s inspired in so many activists is certainly excessive and arguably not worth the energy. If he can be accused of exploitation, what he’s exploiting is of no mere passing fascination to him. For some reason the man, whether or not he’s welcome, has clearly thrown in his lot with the queers.

Cruising — let’s just get it out of the way — is a pretty terrible movie in most of the major categories: dialogue, acting, and plot all add up to a big fat blecch, and the restored version playing at the Castro Theatre beginning Sept. 7 in anticipation of the DVD release does nothing to remedy the narrative inertia. The murder mystery it purports to be — regarding an undercover cop’s pursuit of a serial killer in the West Village’s leather-clad S-M scene — is a murky and parenthetical excuse for a series of Boschian tableaux of boot licking, fist fucking, and ass ramming. But beyond a frustrating mess of implications about the scene’s negative influence on Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), Friedkin isn’t guilty of much beyond overexuberance.

The initial vitriolic reaction to Cruising, it seems, had more to do with its depiction, embellished a touch, of a significant chunk of the gay world with its legs up in the air. The flatteringly concentrated sexual activity in the bar scenes may be less of an issue nowadays because of the growing number of politically engaged queer people, unconcerned with assimilation and happy to sign off on anything that makes jittery straight people uncomfortable. But does this say enough about the movie’s sexual proclivities? There isn’t much talk about Cruising as a pageant of eroticized violence or as a film eager in its bloodiness for the titillated approval of its viewers. Were Friedkin’s murder scenes — overt visual associations of anal and violent penetration, blood sprayed across the screen in a porn booth — intended as an extension of his conception of S-M play? Would it be wrong for him to do so, or for the audience to be duly turned on?

I’ve always taken for granted that Cruising‘s two major scenes of police harassment were your garden-variety (though highly effective) critiques of injustice, a risk-minimizing way of approaching an unfamiliar culture. But now I’m wondering if these scenes were intended as an indictment of the police at all (was the unnecessarily long, squirm-inducing raid on an all-black bar in The French Connection intended as an indictment?) or if they were simply elaborate fetish scenarios, artistic expansions of the imagery and dynamics already well integrated into the S-M scene? Mr. Friedkin, are you trying to get us off? ——————- ——————-

Stormy Leather by Matt Sussman

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder.

In a December 1979 Oakland Tribune article, Konstantin Berlandt, a member of the group Stop the Movie Cruising and perhaps the film’s most vociferous adversary in local gay rags, called Cruising “a genocidal attack on gay people.” Two months later, the STMC helped organize a demonstration at the Transamerica Pyramid, protesting one of Transamerica’s subsidiaries — the film’s distributor, United Artists. On opening day hundreds of protesters picketed the St. Francis Theatre.

“I don’t remember what I thought of the whole thing other than it was kind of stupid and annoying,” recalls Marc Huestis, one of the cofounders of the city’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now the SF International LGBT Film Festival). “As long as I’ve been here, there has always been the battle between the respectable gays and the fringe gays,” Huestis continues. “The respectable gays — many of whom I will say probably went to the leather bars to cruise after their protests — were all into showing a positive face.”

The issue of positive representation — and whether or not Cruising‘s problematic yoking of gay sadomasochism and serial murder warranted merely protest or outright censorship — was at the core of much of the debate. One reader wrote to San Francisco’s Sentinel, “It is ironic that we who have long been victims of prejudice and censorship should attempt to use these weapons of oppression against the movie.” In a February 1980 cover story, “The Men of Cruising,” in Mandate (the gay “international magazine of entertainment and Eros”), Rod Morgan, one of the gay extras in the film’s bar scenes, commented, “If the protesters want progay propaganda, let them get the money together and make their own movie.”

“The stakes of gay representation were very different at the time,” reflects Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of LGBT media nonprofit Frameline. “They were much higher because it was, like, ‘Hollywood hasn’t given us anything, and then they give us this?’ ” However, critic Scottie Ferguson, writing in the Advocate in April 1980, found a thrilling frisson in Cruising‘s portrayal of gay men and asked readers, “What Hollywood film has made the sexual electricity of the gay male seem so vibrant and visceral and unnerving?”

By 1995, when the Roxie Film Center revived Cruising, Ferguson’s observations had been somewhat vindicated. Mainstream LGBT film was taking off, and thanks to the risky work of directors like Gregg Araki and Tom Kalin, new queer cinema had confronted audiences with visceral and unnerving representations of violence-prone gay men.

In contrast to the largely positive reevaluations in the local press, David Ehrenstein implied in the Bay Area Reporter that the Roxie’s revival was tantamount to screening the notorious anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (1940). Representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showed up to hand out protest literature. “It was hilarious,” former Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine recalls. “There was a line around the block, and 90 percent of those waiting were in the leather crowd, and these GLAAD folks are trying to persuade them not to see the movie.”

Cruising has, to some extent, been defanged by the passage of time, its campier moments and macho signifiers embraced by a younger generation of queers. Clearly, though, the film still touches nerves: flame wars are being ignited as fast as they are being put out on Craigslist.com. And even for this gay fan of slasher movies, the film’s murder scenes are incomparably unsettling.

After a recent local media screening of the restored movie’s DVD release — at which director William Friedkin was present — DJ Bus Station John, whose clubs Tubesteak Connection and the Rod evoke the milieu of gay nightlife at the time Cruising was made, commented in an e-mail that “Friedkin’s present claim that contemporary audiences are more ‘sophisticated’ and therefore more receptive to Cruising, if not more friendly [to the film], doesn’t mitigate the damage done to our community at the time [of its release].”

CRUISING

Sept. 7–13, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

For Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Cruising director William Friedkin, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

 

Reasons for the season

-
0

FILM On any given day, on any given Muni, you’re likely to hear John Carpenter’s Halloween theme trilling out of some kid’s cell. Sprung from one gloriously terrifying, terrifyingly simple idea (in a word: babysitters!), the seminal horror series welcomes its ninth installment with Rob Zombie’s remake of the 1978 original. I can hear you, horror snob: "Ninth installment? Remake? Why the fuck would I wanna see that?" Well, really, it’s simpler than a razor-bladed Snickers bar:

1) Halloween sequels are generally enjoyable — and I’m not even talking about the attempts to hipsterfy the series with entries starring Josh Hartnett (1998) or a webcam (2002, which also featured Busta Rhymes delivering the immortal line, "Trick or treat, motherfucker!") I’m talking the shit that nobody ever watches, except us late-night cable addicts: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989), i.e. the Danielle Harris–as–Michael Myers’s–long-lost-niece era; and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), starring a pre-Clueless Paul Rudd. Don’t get me started on Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), or I’ll be singing about Silver Shamrock long past Oct. 31.

2) The Carpenter universe allows for remakes. One of the director’s best efforts is The Thing (1982), a most righteous reimagining itself. In recent years, The Fog (1980) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) have been snatched up by a Hollywood that thinks nobody remembers the early ’80s. Halloween is his most sacred product, but it’s also his most unusual, taking on a life beyond the Carpenter canon. Michael Myers is a universally recognized movie monster, sharing Halloween Superstore costume-rack space with Freddy, Jason, and Austin Powers. If Tinseltown was molesting They Live (1988), we might have words. But Myers’s kill-crazy, supernatural blankness lets him roam different landscapes (Haddonfield, private school, the Internet) for different directors and remain reliably menacing.

3) Which brings me to Zombie. He’s a huge horror fan anyway, and if you’ve seen The Devil’s Rejects (2005) or House of 1000 Corpses (2003), you know he’s all about paying homage to terror cinema past. But he’s got his own style too — gruesome, jump-cutty, and nihilistic. He’s also inspired enough to cast Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis (and Danielle Harris as Annie Brackett) in his remake. Hell, even Danny Trejo is in this thing. Is Zombie’s Halloween any good? Am I steering you wrong? I can’t even say, man. I’m seeing it the day before you do — right after I interview Zombie. Ass-backwards, yes. But it’s Halloween, a remake of my all-time favorite movie, not to mention my all-time favorite holiday. I’ll eat some razor blades myself if I have to. (Cheryl Eddy)

To read an interview with Rob Zombie, click here.

HALLOWEEN

Opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Deep digs into rock’s catalogue

-
0

DVD Chrome Dreams’ Under Review DVD series is one of the better things to happen for music geekdom since 180-gram vinyl or the twofer CD reissue. Where else are you going to find sober analysis of Captain Beefheart’s mid-’70s tragic band period or an in-depth discussion of the four Mott the Hoople albums that came out before All the Young Dudes (Columbia, 1972)?

My first brush with the series came a couple of years ago, with one of the earliest installments, Queen under Review: 1973–1980. This was followed by a similar album-by-album chronicle of Thin Lizzy’s career, on a different label, Castle Rock. This pairing led me to believe the format was somehow linked to the ’70s hard rock phenomenon — but not so. Chrome Dreams has steadily continued to churn out these things, surveying a broad and occasionally head-scratching variety of artists including Beefheart, Mott, Leonard Cohen, the Velvet Underground, the Smiths, David Bowie (his late ’70s Berlin trilogy), and the Who (pre-Tommy).

The format for these videos is pretty simple: get a bunch of critics, producers, and musicians together to break down a given artist’s catalog; interweave audio and video excerpts; then tie it all together with official-sounding narration. (It’s a British series, so of course the narration sounds official.) Copyright restrictions keep the producers from relying too much on video, although there’s some great rare footage to be glimpsed, from weird videos and promotional clips to obscure live excerpts that you won’t see on VH1. They rarely interview the bands themselves, and when they do, it’s usually peripheral members such as Velvets stand-in Doug Yule or Smiths second guitarist Craig Gannon. There are also celebrity interviewees such as the Clash’s Mick Jones (in the Mott video), ’60s Brit-rock producer Shel Talmy, and Factory Records loudmouth Tony Wilson — though, thankfully, no Thurston Moore so far.

Then there are the critics, many of whom are colorful in their own right, and not just for their Austin Powers–worthy teeth. Among the more enjoyable characters are Kerrang!‘s hyperanimated Malcolm Dome, Mohawk-sporting motormouth John Robb, and the soft-spoken but likable Nigel Williamson, a writer for Uncut who appears in nearly every volume. The idea of likable critics might seem like an oxymoron, but while one might not always agree with the opinions they express, it’s hard to fault the enthusiasm or passion they show for the music.

One of the best things about this series is that it doesn’t go "behind the music." Rather, it — gasp! — talks about the music itself without dwelling on who slept with whom or who did what drugs. Under Review’s incisive commentary won’t be found in dumbed-down VH1 documentaries or, for that matter, sterile rock ‘n’ roll museum presentations like those at the Experience Music Project. These people know what they’re talking about. And as a fellow music geek, I find it oddly enjoyable to hear others enunciate elusive truths about music that hasn’t been played on the radio for decades — whether it’s Williamson’s description of Beefheart’s failed crossover attempt Bluejeans and Moonbeams (Mercury/Blue Plate, 1974) as "the worst of both worlds" or Daryl Easlea’s assertion — regarding original Mott the Hoople vocalist Stan Tippens — that "groups with lead singers named Stan tend not to make it big."

Anyhow, I’m hooked on the series, and at this point I’d probably watch a video on Nazareth or the post-’70s Foghat catalog. Those aren’t requests, though. (Will York)

www.chromedreams.co.uk

Nerd resurge

-
0

ZEITGEIST This year just may go down as the one when nerds finally ruled the school, scattering HP calculators, parentally purchased button-downs, and World of Warcraft guild master credentials as they tripped on their own shoelaces on their way into WonderCon or the Lick Observatory. The infestation of all screens big and small hasn’t been quite so intense since the Ronald Reagan–era ’80s, when nerds were regularly toasted on TV’s Happy Days, then found fame in the cineplex’s Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Freaks, geeks, grinds, dorks, and losers have come a long way from Andy Kaufman cohort Fred Blassie’s 1976 novelty tune, "Pencil Neck Geek," and even further along from George Jones’s 1993 track "High-Tech Redneck" and the emergence of Pharrell Williams’s NERD production squad. Freaks and Geeks, Ugly Betty, and Steve Urkel of Family Matters have laid the foundation for fall’s TV invasion, including Aliens in America, in which an Asian exchange student meets geek with his nerd host; The IT Crowd, otherwise known as "Dances with Dudes Who Keep Late Hours Serving Your Server"; and Chuck, whose title character oversees a so-called Nerd Herd at the local Best Buy–esque big-box retailer and dabbles in international espionage. Shoring up the projected sales for Benjamin Nugent’s book, American Nerd: The Story of My People, due out in 2008, are silver-screen nerd workouts like Rocket Science, which painfully, wittily details the trials of a stuttering, would-be school debater trying to beat the odds with lots of baggage. The hot nerd sport of table tennis will be sent up in the forthcoming Balls of Fury, and the awkward raunch of nerd-focused teen sex comedy returns with next week’s gut-busting Superbad, buttressed by costar Michael "Baby Beck" Cera, who pushes the nerdiness of his übergeek character George Michael in Arrested Development to new heights in this and on his online TV series, Clark and Michael. Despite the fact that Underdog may be truly speaking for downtrodden puppies everywhere, Superbad probably represents the apogee of nerdocity, being coproduced by current comedy master of the universe Judd Apatow, who has played not a small part in the hip-to-be-uncool movement with the aforementioned Freaks and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.

So nerds rock, but why? Chalk it up to a once firmly bitch-slapped and now somewhat resuscitated tech sector — or an infusion of energy and capital in Silicon Valley? Is nerd valorization part of a backlash against the hippie hotties of the early ’00s — and a back-to-the-future glance at Reagan social conservatism? Or is this simply where all our heads are these days, as a logical extension of a perpetually wired culture? Nerdiness has seeped so deeply into everyday life that everyone, even the brawny bullies who spindled pocket protectors in the past, must to pay due respect when faced with a blank monitor. (Kimberly Chun)

Man vs. room service?

-
0

On the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls parachutes into remote wildernesses, from the swampy Everglades to the freezing Scottish Highlands, and finds his way out, seemingly on his own. However, in an article posted on the BBC News Web site July 24, survival consultant Mark Weinert alleged that Grylls spent some nights in a hotel during the Hawaii episode, among other solo-survival no-no’s. Whatever the case, Man vs. Wild is, in my opinion, the greatest nature-survival show since Marty Stouffer’s Wild America. The following is an abridged version of an e-mail interview with Grylls, which took place prior to the controversy:

SFBG How helpful do you think being a regular viewer of your show would be in a survival situation?

BEAR GRYLLS Well, hopefully it is pretty helpful! Really, the best survival advice is always to sit tight and wait for rescue. But having said that, the whole series is full of survival advice, with most of it quite out-of-the-box stuff, like using shoelaces to climb tress or drinking the fluids from elephant dung for water. I do get quite a few letters from people saying that they used something they saw me do on a show and it saved their lives. Whether they are making it up or telling the truth, I never know, but it is encouraging to read. When we first started filming, I used to think, "Will anyone ever watch this?" So it’s nice that they do!

SFBG What’s the one thing you’d recommend as indispensable training for anyone in terms of being able to survive in the wild?

BG Understand that survival is all about strength of mind, not body — hence in so many survival epics it has often been the ladies in high heels with no skills who have been victims of airplane crashes, etc., who beat the odds, whereas their fellow male survivors with all the gear and gung ho have crumbled. Why? Because their reason for staying alive was bigger — it drove them further, it made them think laterally, made them keep making decisions, never giving up and doing whatever it took to stay alive long enough to be found or get lucky. Those who stick it out are those who win.

SFBG What would you say was the single most challenging survival situation you’ve ever been in?

BG Losing my father when I was still young.

SFBG In this season of the show, what was the most difficult environment to survive in?

BG Scotland, ironically, was tough — classified as an Arctic landscape. I was there in winter in minus-40 degrees in a storm, with very little clothing. I would have been in real trouble if I had not found a deer carcass that I could gut and sleep inside. I have just returned from the Sahara for season two, where it was 140 degrees. I definitely was on the outer limit of my endurance, I felt.

SFBG Have you ever been close to throwing in the towel and asking for assistance?

BG Well, when it has been raining for 24 hours torrentially, I am lost, with limited food and water, no tent or mosquito net, in the Amazon, and I miss my family and two boys, it is okay to have the odd moment of "What the hell I am doing here?" I am not a robot. Being away from my wife and kids is the hardest part of all this for me.

SFBG Obviously, people are fascinated by the foul things you ingest in order to stay alive. Do you have a list of the most disgusting?

BG The top list is: goat testicles, raw (just wait for the new season!), sheep eyeballs (exploding goo of gristle and blood), grubs as big as fists (yellow ooze), and raw zebra neck. But that’s all for my work life. When I am home, I just love home cooking! (Duncan Scott Davidson)

To read the complete interview, go to dsc.discovery.com/fansites/manvswild/manvswild.html

Our Springfield soft spots

-
0

1. Tress MacNeille Julie Kavner and Hank Azaria always get props, but how about throwing down for my hero, the voice behind characters such as scathing Agnes Skinner, the brilliant-when-coherent Cat Lady, single working woman Cookie Kwan ("Stay outta the West Side!"; "Sign here, initial here, kiss me here!"), and Cookie’s sex-predator pal Lindsey Naegle, who appears as everything from a network executive ("We’re losing male tweens! Can you get jiggy with something?") to a consumer-testing ad sloganeer ("We’ll call it Desert Breeze!" she says after one spray of a product blinds Homer) to door-to-door baby-proofing salesperson (donning bonnet and pacifier in the process) to proud espouser of the child-free lifestyle. The sharpest sarcasm on The Simpsons comes straight from the mouth of MacNeille. (Johnny Ray Huston)

2. Homer as Mr. Sparkle (in "In Marge We Trust") After Homer spots his eerie likeness on a box of Mr. Sparkle, a Japanese detergent, he investigates. Though it’s later revealed that the Mr. Sparkle logo is actually an amalgamation of a fish and a lightbulb, the product’s television commercial is no less hilarious.

Disembodied Homeresque head: "I’m disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious? Out of my way, all of you! This is no place for loafers! Join me or die! Can you do any less?"

Giggling consumers: "What a brave corporate logo!" "I accept the challenge of Mr. Sparkle!" (Cheryl Eddy)

3. Springfield is for lovers We knew Matt Groening was ‘mo-friendly even pre-Simpsons, given the oft-nakedly frolicsome duo Akbar and Jeff of Life in Hell. But the show pushed boundaries right away — remember all that earnest "Is Smithers gay?" debate around school yards and watercoolers? Ah, how innocent (or just dumb) we were then. Aside from her time with a golf gender-bender, Patty’s love life has yet to be given much shrift, but at least two episodes wrapped themselves in the rainbow flag. In 1997’s "Homer’s Phobia," Homer (scared by flaming voice guest John Waters) decides Bart needs a father-son field trip to a steel mill — where, unfortunately, the uniformly hunky male workers spend their break shakin’ can to "Everybody Dance Now" by C+C Music Factory. Seven seasons later, "Three Gays of the Condo" found Marge and Homer temporarily separated, the latter moving in with a quarreling male couple in Springfield’s "gay ghetto." He fits in suspiciously well before heterosexual instincts triumph once again. (Dennis Harvey)

4. Quotability Every episode contains at least one line that can be used in any situation, be it from Comic Book Guy ("Ah yes — the Incredible Hulk Melon Baller!"), Ralph Wiggum ("When I grow up, I want to be a principal … or a caterpillar"), Groundskeeper Willie ("When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go … ach! doon-toon"), or, of course, Homer ("I’ve been a fan of the Who since the very beginning, when they were the Hillbilly Bugger Boys"). (Eddy)

5. Apt or prophetic celebrity cameos I’ll name just two: Serena Williams moaning, "I just ate a personal pizza," to beg out of a tennis match (in "Tennis the Menace") and Kathy Griffin as a bully named Francine who terrorizes Lisa (in "Bye Bye Nerdie"). For extra laughs, listen close to the crowd noises of the scientists in the latter episode and then brace yourself for the end, in which Griffin’s character howls with rage as she swallows the camera in an attempt to beat the stuffing out of the biggest nerd of all: you. (Huston)

6. Treehouses of Horror My favorite-ever "Treehouse of Horror" segment deserves its own mention. After a well-meaning Lisa frees Snorky — star dolphin performer at a Sea World–esque marine park — Springfield soon learns he’s King Snorky, finally able to lead his subjects from their forced habitation of the sea. Though Homer’s instinct to take a stand ("I’m not going to let a bunch of hoop-jumping tuna munchers push me around!") is classic, the most priceless moment is an aside between two supporting characters. Moe: "What did he say?" Carl: "He said years ago dolphins lived on the land." Moe: "Whaaaaaaa?" (Eddy)

7. Anthropomorphic slapstick See Snorky, above. I also give you rampaging rhinos, the sideways glances of annoyed-looking amphibians, the many worries of Mr. Teeny, and of course, Itchy and Scratchy, gleefully upping the ante of every cruel Warner Bros. cartoon ever made. (Huston)

8. All singing, all dancing Yes, Danny Elfman wrote the famous Simpsons theme, but the series’ real audio hero is composer-arranger Alf Clausen, who over 18 years has had occasion to brilliantly spoof just about every musical genre. Among serious songfests, it doesn’t get any better than Marge’s community theater turn as Blanche DuBois ("A Streetcar Named Marge") or Troy McClure’s big comeback as Charlton Heston in the Broadway-bound Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off ("A Fish Called Selma"). Then there was The Simpson Family Smile-Time Variety Hour, a 1997 tribute to horrendous ’70s variety shows that featured Smithers in chaps, singing Devo’s "Whip It." (Harvey)

9. Lenny Leonard What is it about Lenny Leonard (voiced by Harry Shearer)? Maybe it’s the sideburns, maybe the nonchalance — or the complete obliviousness — with which he floats through life. I don’t know, but I would do him. Carl is clearly the more functional half of their conjoined yet asexual partnership. But Lenny — he’s like Steve Buscemi with more sex appeal! (Harvey)

10. Yvan eht nioj ‘Nuff said. (Huston)

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

Opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.simpsonsmovie.com

Give a hoot (or else)

-
0

WILD WILDLIFE Had director Davis Guggenheim attempted to explore all the creative possibilities that lie behind such a name as Al Gore (get it?), An Inconvenient Truth would have been a much more interesting and way scarier film. Not that turning a pressingly threatening environmental issue into unforgettably blatant propaganda isn’t frightening. It’s just that if the former vice president had played some kind of freakish, global-warming-afflicted mutant — roaming the world, secretly planning to take his revenge by literally boring people to death with his clip show — the movie would have been closer to the truth and a lot more alarming.

Fortunately, the curators at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive have created a film series that gives environmental concerns the exact twist that Truth lacks and the depth that it persistently avoided. The major theme shared by all the earth-friendly flicks in "Eco-Amok! An Inconvenient Film Fest": the antagonistic relationship between science and nature, with the latter always the triumphant victor. Science is responsible for the destruction of the environment and the birth of many mutations, but it’s also the means by which people try to save the ecosystem.

"Eco-Amok!" ‘s selections also display admirably artistic inventiveness. Frogs (1972), Prophecy (1979), and Meet the Applegates (1991) all present the unstoppable power of nature, but they also reveal the reasons why we stay so apathetic to the danger we are facing. In Frogs the members of a wealthy family whose greed overcomes their environmental sensitivities are picked off, one by one, by the croaking (and hissing, and creepy-crawling) inhabitants of the abused swamp on their estate. In Prophecy the cheapskate owner of a lumber company uses mercury to process wood; as a result, the tainted water supply spawns a nasty-looking mutant bear that devours kids while they dream in their sleeping bags. And in Meet the Applegates, Brazilian cockroaches disguise themselves as a middle-class American family to carry out a nuclear explosion but are corrupted by capitalism’s lure.

Phase IV (1974), a film with extraordinary insect photography and many avant-garde qualities, presents nature’s revenge on a whole different level. Instead of getting rid of humans, hardworking and devoted-to-their-cause ants create a new Adam and Eve — a comment on the mutations that might take place in us if the ecosystem keeps changing at a rapid pace.

But even more troublesome is the obsession with creation that’s present in The Mutations (1974), Silent Running (1972), and Habitat (1997). In these three films, mad scientists are credited with the ability to create life. In The Mutations crazed Dr. Nolter (Donald Pleasence) forges humans from plants. In Silent Running delusional botanist Lowell (Bruce Dern) produces forests while floating in space. The wackiest of them all, Habitat‘s microbiologist Hank (Tchéky Karyo), turns into a higher form of energy after he transforms his house into a living "accelerated evolution" rain forest with the ability to kill.

What those three movies make crystal clear is the same thing that all the other films in the series more or less imply: science, even when used with the best of intentions, can only bring into existence abominable forms of life. Luckily, some of the time, no matter how horrid and gruesome these creations are, nature has better plans, including them in its survival scheme. But in a less fortunate and more frequent variation, these grim new species’ sole objective is to spread mayhem and introduce humans to their messy and abhorrent deaths — which some may argue isn’t so bad either.

ECO-AMOK! AN INCONVENIENT FILM FEST

Through Aug. 29

Wed., 7:30 p.m., $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Fin-tastic

-
0

TOOTHY TV Stop fronting like you don’t love Shark Week. You live for its exciting footage of the world’s most potent predators, its programming that veers between sensational and scientific, and its narration that comes overstuffed with metaphors: "She is a missile, armed with teeth … ready to fire!" The Discovery Channel knows it has you by the chum bucket, so it’s devoting an entire week of programming to Shark Week’s 20th anniversary. We’re talking 130 hours of sharks, which, if you break it down into minutes, approximates how many teeth a Great White might go through in a lifetime. Anyway, the point is, I’ve been watching Shark Week since I was 12 years old (I still have the glasses from when they did Sharks 3-D a few years back), and while I still don’t really understand how Discovery wants us to feel about sharks — for every program pointing out that humans kill way more sharks every year than vice versa, there’s a Shark Attack Rescuers — I ain’t gonna stop watching anytime soon.

Tops among the new programming is the two-hour Ocean of Fear: Worst Shark Attack Ever, which actually features scant shark footage but does reenact the ordeal of the crew of the USS Indianapolis (appropriately, Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss narrates). Survivors (some played by actors) share their grisly memories of what happened when the torpedoed ship — on a return voyage after delivering parts of the Hiroshima A-bomb — sank into the shark-infested Philippine Sea in 1945. The program includes the famed footage of the men’s eventual rescue.

Also new this year: Deadly Stripes: Tiger Sharks, which backs up its claim that tiger sharks are "the garbage-disposal units of the sea" by revealing that one was found with an entire suit of armor in its belly; Shark Feeding Frenzy, with the star of Discovery’s Survivorman wisely donning chain mail before jumping into a sea full of sharks with a box full of bait; and Perfect Predators, which may answer the age-old question of why hammerheads are so, uh, freaky looking. (Evolution, baby!) And if you think vacationing with your relatives is torture, hitch along with Sharks: A Family Affair, which trails the adventures of a family whose Pops has proudly created "the first-ever children’s shark cage." Dude, don’t you think there’s a reason nobody ever built one before?

SHARK WEEK Runs July 29–Aug. 4 on the Discovery Channel; see www.discovery.com for schedule.

Tune in, turn on, “Psych-Out”

-
0

CULT FILM Some movies define a generation. Some distort a generation. Very special ones manage both. Welcome to the genius of Psych-Out, a 1968 American International Pictures epic (produced by none other than squeaky-clean American Bandstand icon Dick Clark) that remains perhaps the all-time high-water mark in cinematic hippiesploitation.

Oh, Psych-Out, Psych-Out, Psych-Out! How many times have I loved your psychedelic excesses since that fateful first viewing in the 1980s at Boston’s annual Schlock-around-the-Clock marathon? Not even my housemate’s desperate need to exchange MDA-driven warm fuzzies in the lobby could tear me from such enchantment. (She did succeed in wrangling me away that night from such additional gems as The Thing with Two Heads. A small resentment lingers.)

Psych-Out, which plays as part of the Red Vic’s commemoration of the Summer of Love’s 40th anniversary, is the least heralded of an unofficial AIP trilogy from that year, alongside The Trip (Peter Fonda drops lysergic under the tutelage of ever-levelheaded Bruce Dern) and Wild in the Streets (the US voting age is lowered to 14, resulting in Shelley Winters being sent to a concentration camp for too-old people). Those films were actual hits. Psych-Out ran through the drive-in mill and was quickly forgotten.

Stupid humans!! How could they resist a film advertised thus: "These are the PLEASURE LOVERS! They’ll ask for a dime with hungry eyes. But they’ll give you love — for NOTHING! Have you ever TASTED FEAR or SMELLED MADNESS? LISTEN to the sound of PURPLE!" Nearly 30 Susan Strasberg plays Jenny, an underage runaway searching for her brother (Dern as "the Seeker," a sort of Crazy Acid Jesus). Escaping their abusive mother — glimpsed in one genuinely disturbing flashback — the mute Audrey Hepburn–goes–mod gamine arrives in San Francisco, center of the known counterculture universe, where she’s taken in by the hipsters who constitute rock group Mumblin’ Jim: a ponytailed Jack Nicholson, barely bothering to finger-mime rip-off Hendrix riffs as guitarist Stoney; jive-talking drummer Elwood (Max Julien); keyboardist Ben (biker-flick staple Adam Roarke); bassist Wesley (Tommy Flanders); and Wesley’s shareable wife, Lynn (Linda Gaye Scott), who can’t hit a tambourine on tempo to save her life. Then there’s Dean Stockwell as Dave, the serenely weird ex-bandmate turned fountain of guru wisdom. He lives in a rooftop cardboard box.

All help Jenny look for that elusive messianic bro, at least when not introducing her to the joys of thrift shop fashion montages and Golden Gate Park Be-Ins (at which garage greats the Seeds play). Befitting this turbulent generation, distracting crises occur. Some are peacenik-versus-redneck stuff requiring hippies to kick local junkyard greaser ass. Others are drug related, as when future bad director Henry Jaglom hallucinates that his limbs need cutting off. This occasions the immortal line "C’mon man! Warren’s freaking out at the gallery!"

Psych-Out has everything: kaleidoscope visuals, STP dosing, horror-movie hallucinations, and dialogue like "It’s all one big plastic hassle." The Strawberry Alarm Clock contribute not just their signature "Incense and Peppermints" but also a theme ("The Pretty Song from Psych-Out") whose lyrics and melody encapsulate the entire plotline with a dreamy be-there-or-be-square vibe and the song "Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow," which soundtracks a particularly senseless sequence involving the soft-focus stringing of beads around a communal household. More bent yet is the scene in which Nicholson and Julien sit in a van, their nutty bloodshot eyes suggesting major real-world fry-dom.

Psych-Out was largely filmed in the Haight-Ashbury of fall 1967, lending some aspects an authenticity that concurrent Hollywood hippiesploitation flicks lacked. Yet locals reportedly greeted the crew with such hostility that they had to hire Hells Angels as guards. The end-product melodramatic hash must have induced much derisive stoner laughter among subsequent longhaired viewers.

Director Richard Rush had an odd, thwarted career that peaked with one genuinely admired film (1980’s The Stunt Man), then after a long layoff crashed fatally against the 1994 erotic thriller absurdity Color of Night (Bruce Willis as a psychiatrist stalked by a transsexual patient). On the other hand, the richly colorful Psych-Out‘s Hungarian émigré cinematographer, Laszlo Kovacs, went on to shoot all of Peter Bogdanovich’s, Bob Rafelson’s, and Dennis Hopper’s major films — plus Shampoo, Ghostbusters, and less prestigious but popular recent vehicles for Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts.

Psych-Out is a camp classic that nonetheless makes you desperately wish you were there then. It’s a "bad" movie, yet wonderful in ways that aren’t silly or dated at all. Its freak flag is on.

PSYCH-OUT

Fri/6–Sat/7, 7:15 and 9:25 p.m. (also Sat/7, 2 and 4:15 p.m.), $5–$8.50

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

When cute animals attack

-
0

(Nintendo; Nintendo DS)

GAMER Continuing my current tendency to gravitate toward games involving cute animals, I recently became addicted to the latest Pokémon installment, Pokémon Diamond. Pokémon Pearl is the same game with some different Pokémon.

My first Pokémon experience came during a long road trip in 2000, when I got hooked on Pokémon Gold. I made myself popular with every grade school kid on the block because I was an adult who knew that Pikachu evolves into Raichu.

In the Pokémon games, you grind to level-up your small army of cute creatures in turn-based battles against random Pokémon who hang out in grassy areas. You also capture new Pokémon. Pokémon are stored in small spheres and are released to fight, after which they get sucked back into their Pokéballs. And you thought non-free-range chickens have it bad.

There’s a plot, something about stopping a team of gangsters called Team Galactic from using the powers of Pokémon for evil, and you shame them into submission by using your small, cute animals to rough up their small, cute animals. You use the same technique to earn badges at the gyms scattered throughout the game’s world.

These titles are all about the exploring and the collection. You collect Pokémon, Pokémon battle techniques, and gym badges. So if you like to play collection games, Pokémon will take over your life.

What’s different between these installments and the one I played when I first got hooked on Pokémon in 2000? About 100 colors. I’m just eyeballing it. Also, a new online mode allows you to trade Pokémon with other users. To be honest, I haven’t gotten the chance to use this, but I’ve heard from one of my coworkers that it is "full of dumb kids who want to trade their level 100 Geodudes for my ultrarare Mewtwo!"

These two are the first non-spin-off Pokémon games on the Nintendo DS, and the series is well served by the platform. Being able to choose moves for my Pokémon by touching the screen is natural. That said, the game could have done a lot more with the hardware. I would like to see the Pokémon world or the battles in 3-D, like in Animal Crossing: Wild World, as opposed to the top-down view. The battles have surprisingly minimal effects and animation. This was OK on the Game Boy Color but seems a bit cheap on the DS. The series hasn’t changed much at all, and that’s good, because the game play is as fun and addicting as ever. But it’s bad in the sense that the latest installments in the series have almost nothing new to offer.

“Heart” attack

-
0

FILM Angelina Jolie in blackface and a decent film? Both seem remarkable when one considers the cinematic caca generated by the Tomb Raider franchise star since her Oscar win for Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Decidedly weightier and more ambitious than the screwball Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), A Mighty Heart finds Jolie coated with a deep tan and kitted out in a faux pregnant belly as Marianne Pearl in an adaptation of the journalist’s 2003 best-selling account of the kidnapping and demise of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The part-French Jolie may be a more suitable choice than the last Marianne rumored to be slated for the project, coproducer Brad Pitt’s previous main squeeze, Jennifer Aniston, but surely there was a more apropos physical fit for the pixieish, caramel-skinned Pearl than the opulently Sophia Loren–like Jolie?

"I think that’s rubbish. It’s so superficial," A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom says, talking a mile a minute in a blurry, nasal Lancashire accent and alternately basking in and ducking the uncharacteristically bright San Francisco summer sun in the Ritz-Carlton courtyard. "The first time I met Angelina was with Marianne, and in fact they knew each other already and they trusted each other already. They’re kind of similar in lots of ways and talked about the story in similar ways. And that’s what’s important, really — to have someone actually know the person they’re playing, especially with a story that’s as sensitive as this."

In many ways Winterbottom was perfectly cast as the director for A Mighty Heart. He’s an ex-documentarian noted for striking a balance between intimate love stories (2004’s 9 Songs, 2003’s Code 46); tales like his Manchester music scene snapshot, 24 Hour Party People (2002), that revolve around the pleasure principle; politicized narratives firmly embedded in a labyrinthine geopolitical landscape (2006’s The Road to Guantánamo, 2002’s In This World, 1997’s Welcome to Sarajevo); and literary adaptations (2006’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 1996’s Jude).

"They’re also films about individuals as well," Winterbottom counters. And at times A Mighty Heart boils down uneasily as a Möbius strip of a meta–murder mystery — about the media, as documented by the media, intercut with shots of entangled Karachi phone and cable lines even as Brangelina paparazzi attempted to capture the couple’s every move and at least one scandal spun off the 2006 shoot (Mumbai residents charged the couple’s bodyguards with racism during filming at a school).

A Mighty Heart also reads somewhat like the flip side of Winterbottom’s previous release, The Road to Guantánamo, which blended dramatizations and documentarylike interviews with three British Muslims, a.k.a. the Tipton Three, who were held at Guantánamo Bay for two years before they were released without having been charged.

"In a way I think both stories are about people who are kind of victims of the extreme violence on both sides," the filmmaker says, describing both as post–Sept. 11 stories. "I think there are groups on both sides who want the violence to escalate."

Which gives Winterbottom impetus to carry on with his political-as-personal narratives, turning to the next in a series of Steve Coogan films, an adaptation of former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s memoir Murder in Samarkand. "We’re trying to do a comedy about the British ambassador in Uzbekistan being sacked because he didn’t agree about the use of information gained under torture."

A MIGHTY HEART

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Tastes like chicken

-
0

FILM Always be suspicious of any documentary that starts off with this snippet of dialogue: "Is it real, is it not real?" In fact, for the first 10 minutes of American Cannibal, directed by Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, I suspected I might be watching a mock doc. But nope, it’s real — more authentic than reality TV, anyway, which is the subject it chronicles via both insider insights (from showbiz types like Fox Reality Channel honcho David Lyle) and the tension-fraught journey of Gil S. Ripley and Dave Roberts, writing partners who turn to reality TV as their last make-a-buck resort. That chance comes in the form of skeezy Kevin Blatt, proud promoter of jailbird Paris Hilton’s sex tape, who bypasses their pitch Virgin Territory ("When you win it, you lose it!") in favor of American Cannibal, an extreme twist on Survivor that Ripley tosses out as more of a joke than anything else. Before he and Roberts can believe what’s happening, an American Cannibal pilot — presented to potential cast members as Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge, part of the show’s bait-and-switch tack — is in motion. Morals and friendships are soon tested, as is the idea that reality TV spells instant money and success for whoever can bring the last great idea to some new, more sensational level.

Seriously, though, would you actually eat someone’s finger for prize money, even if you were really, really hungry? Would anyone? American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been. It does feel like America’s rabid urge to devour prepackaged reality has settled down a bit, but you and I both know it’s never going away. Representing the craze’s high end, American Idol vet Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. At the low end, take your pick (wherefore art thou, The Littlest Groom?). But if Ripley and Robert’s American Cannibal — a show that was to strand constants on a desert island and starve them, then tell them they had to eat human flesh to survive — sounds so ridiculous that you feel kind of sorry it never made it to the airwaves so you could watch, you’re not alone. As doc interviewee and The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead points out, "If the lowest common denominator was a muscle, it could kick the shit out of anything else."

AMERICAN CANNIBAL

June 22–28, $4-8

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

The man whose head exploded

-
0

FILM Recently, my eyeballs were among the first to be skewered by the finished print of Hostel 2. As torture and black humor unspooled on the big screen, director Eli Roth — last seen working on Grindhouse, both as an actor and behind the camera for the Thanksgiving trailer — prowled about, gauging audience reactions to his third feature film. The next day I met Roth to discuss all things horror. He talks fast. Here are some excerpts.

On the Metreon audience’s response to Hostel 2: When you’re making a film, you’re literally going on instinct. I know my gore stuff is gonna work, but it’s the other stuff, those moments where you’re, like, "No, don’t, don’t, don’t!" — in editing, you’re just hoping the audience will feel that way. And I thought that every moment hit the way I wanted it to. Even in a fan-based audience, sometimes they’re, like, "All right, impress me, Roth. Let’s see what you got." I wanted people to be cheering and screaming and going wild the way they were at the end of the first one, and I really felt we got that.

On emuutf8g the grand old Italian B-movie tradition of killing kids: I wanted to take risks in the movie. I wanted things where people would go, "Oh, you can’t do that." Not just to offend, but I wanted to live in that danger zone. After I made it, I saw this film directed by [Narciso Ibáñez] Serrador called Who Can Kill a Child?, which I think is genuinely one of the single greatest horror films. I love those early 1970s Italian movies like Torso, Night Train Murders, and To Be Twenty, by Fernando di Leo. Have you seen To Be Twenty? At the end of this movie, my jaw was on the ground. It was so horrific that they pulled every single print from the theaters. But in all three of those films, it’s a group of college-age girls that are all going on a trip somewhere. The girls all make intelligent decisions; there’s nothing that they do that’s like a dumb movie moment. And there’s a real, palpable sense of dread in those movies. I really wanted to build that sense of dread for everybody [in Hostel 2].

On getting Ruggero Deodato, director of 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, to cameo: I went to Italy to do press for Hostel, and this journalist was producing behind-the-scenes interviews for No Shame DVDs. We drove an hour outside of Rome to the set of a TV show that Deodato was shooting. I brought my Cannibal Holocaust poster for him to sign. And he was so funny and so cool, and I was, like, "I got a cameo for you that I think the American fans would love." And Deodato is just a huge slice of ham. This guy loves being on camera. He’s so funny. And when he showed up on set, I got to ask him questions like, how do you direct people that live in trees, like in Last Cannibal World? It was great to hear his answers.

On his rivalry with the Saw filmmakers: I’m friends with all those guys, and we always call each other when we get a kill scene done. It’s almost like this bleeding contest we have. The Splat Pack — we all love each other’s movies. But there’s always that side of you that wants to have the rep of having the nastiest kill. We joke all the time: "We’re running out of body parts!"

On his inspiration for torture scenes: All you have to do is go to the Museum of Torture in Prague. The stuff you see is so shocking you couldn’t even film it. [In my films] it’s a combination of looking at history and what’s actually already been done and sort of walking around Home Depot and looking at tools. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what I think of — what makes the scene horrifying is whoever’s in the chair. It’s the actor. That’s what makes it really scary.

His response to people who think his films glorify violence: I say, don’t see them. I’m not making movies to appeal to everybody. I’m making movies for fans of this type of movie, and I want to stay true to that.

HOSTEL 2

Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

They shoot, he scores

-
0

FILM Even if you’ve never heard of the composer Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975), it’s a safe bet that you’ve quoted him at some point in your life. He’s the coauthor of the widely recognized shorthand for murder and mayhem, the mimed downward thrust of a knife accompanied by the high-pitched squeal, "Wee! Wee! Wee!" His collaborator on this contribution to the pop lexicon was Alfred Hitchcock, and its place of origin is, of course, 1960’s Psycho.

Herrmann, one of the most influential composers ever to work in the film industry, actually ignored Hitchcock’s instruction to leave the shower scene untouched. Hitchcock thought Janet Leigh’s death would be scarier without music but immediately relented on listening to Herrmann’s strings tear into human flesh. (He wasn’t so dazzled six years later when Herrmann pulled the same shit with Torn Curtain‘s score; Hitch dismissed the orchestra in a rage when he discovered the composer recording music for a fight scene intended to be left alone.) Though he’s most popularly associated with Hitchcock — he also worked on The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, and North by Northwest — Herrmann wrote dozens of scores for other directors and for television. I am partial to his theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone (though he didn’t write the "doo doo doo doo" that is the widely recognized shorthand for weird and creepy — that was introduced in the second season).

The Castro Theatre is giving Herrmann the same treatment it gave Ennio Morricone in April, programming a generous sampling of films featuring the composer’s work. Among the selections is his first Hollywood gig, a little picture called Citizen Kane. Herrmann, who followed Orson Welles to Hollywood, had already been working as composer for Welles’s radio anthology, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, for which Herrmann provided musical accompaniment to the mass hysteria of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast. Other inclusions in the Castro’s program are three Ray Harryhausen projects, Brian de Palma’s Vertigo-inspired Obsession, and the last film Herrmann ever scored, Taxi Driver.

His uncharacteristically sax-heavy score for Martin Scorsese’s film has never really been my cup of tea, to be honest. My favorites are the overture to 1962’s Cape Fear (which film composer Elmer Bernstein adapted and conducted for Scorsese’s remake), Psycho‘s Prelude (an obvious but unavoidable choice, all the more so thanks to Busta Rhymes’s "Gimme Some More"), the spiraling freefall of Vertigo‘s Prelude, and Fahrenheit 451‘s "Suite for Strings."

LEGENDARY COMPOSER: BERNARD HERRMANN

June 1–7, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Some kind of monster!

-
0

CULT FILM It’s fitting that Troll 2 is playing at Midnites for Maniacs — it’s truly a film only a maniac could love. This 1990 masterpiece (sorry, Julia Louis-Dreyfus fans — it’s a sequel to 1986’s Troll in name only) was made by an Italian crew (director Drake Floyd’s real name: Claudio Fragasso), starring a cast of Salt Lake City locals. The Italians, none of whom spoke much English, were focused on making what was intended to be a B-grade horror flick; the American actors, presented with a screenplay about a family whose country vacation spirals into a life-or-death standoff with a pack of hungry goblins, remained baffled throughout the three-week shoot.

Speaking to me from his office in Alabama, Dr. George Hardy — an SLC dentist when he was cast as the patriarch in Troll 2, a gig that earned him "around $1,500" — recalls the filming with great delight. "We had no direction at all. We tried to decipher the script, and it was so discombobulated. We had no idea what we were doing from scene to scene. All we knew was that it was shot on 35mm and that they took no time in doing retakes. They just got through one scene to the next as quickly as possible."

After the movie wrapped, Hardy moved to Alabama and went about his life, his showbiz days presumably over — until a patient alerted him to the VHS availability of a certain Troll 2. His reaction crystallized the film’s first, perhaps most important, enigma: "I heard the name of the movie, and I thought, ‘This is weird. Why would it be called Troll 2 when there’s no trolls in the movie, only goblins?’" Frequent airings on HBO raised Troll 2‘s profile even higher. By 2003, when the film was released on the flip side of the Troll DVD, Troll 2 had become a genuine cult classic. An IMDb.com poster recently dubbed it "the Holy Grail of bad movies."

At first, Hardy and his fellow castmates weren’t sure how to react to being part of a film that raised badness to such soaring new heights. "We all ran from it. We were totally embarrassed at the time. But I guess it’s almost like an old wine that starts to taste good after a few years. We then began to embrace it because we saw the craze that was going on."

Hardy and costar Michael Stephenson — who played Troll 2‘s skateboard-riding, bologna-eating young hero, Joshua — recently reconnected and set up a Web site, www.bestworstmovie.com, and are working on a documentary titled Best Worst Movie about what Hardy calls "the Troll 2 phenomenon." Special event screenings, like the film’s much-anticipated 35mm debut at the Castro Theatre (featuring Hardy and Stephenson in person), are planned throughout the summer in a variety of hospitable cities.

Los Angeles resident Stephenson — who still acts but will likely never top the scene in which 10-year-old Joshua pees all over his family’s dinner to prevent Mom, Dad, and Sis from becoming a goblin snack pack (don’t ask) — shares Hardy’s enthusiasm for the second coming of Troll 2.

"For years I thought, ‘I’m gonna die and be remembered as the kid who was in this awful horror movie,’" he told me from Hawaii, where he was vacationing. "But about a year ago, I woke up and turned to my wife and said, ‘I’m the star of one of the worst films ever made. This is pretty cool.’ And then I started looking into what the fans were doing around the film. I was getting e-mails from fans around the world that were throwing Troll 2 parties. And that’s when I thought, ‘This isn’t just the worst movie — it’s the best worst movie.’"

And frankly, folks, it very well may be — apologies to Showgirls, but all the G-strings in the world can’t compete with lines like "They’re eating her. Then they’re gonna eat me. Oh my godddd!"

Stephenson elucidates: "People like it because everybody [involved in] Troll 2 went out and tried to make an earnest horror film. It wasn’t meant to be campy. And it was a miserable failure. It was a cinematic car crash. And then all of a sudden, it took on this new life — like a car crash, you have to look at it. You stare at it. You wonder, ‘What the hell is going on with this thing?’ I think with Troll 2, the fans have taken ownership of the film. It’s like drinking spoiled milk. You taste it, and then you’re, like, ‘Aw, you gotta taste this! It’s terrible!’ You immediately want someone else to taste it so you can share that experience."

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS: VERTICALLY CHALLENGED MONSTERS TRIPLE FEATURE

Fri/25, Gremlins, 7:30 p.m.; Howard the Duck, 9:45 p.m.; Troll 2, midnight; $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Rave on, Anon.

-
0

ART BOOK Any ole body can start a LiveJournal or blog these days with the flick of a mousing finger and a peck on a keyboard. But how many people can undertake a project such as the one documented in The 1000 Journals Project (Chronicle Books, $22.95)? At a time when you can post your thoughts to zillions in an instant, there’s still something romantic and risky in the act of taking 1,000 blank books and dropping them like so many inspiring dandelion seeds in bars, cafés, and Muni buses, as San Francisco art instigator Someguy (né Brian Singer) did seven years ago.

It all started after the graphic designer became fascinated by the scribblings on urinal walls. "When I was in college, the art department shared a building with the ROTC, and there would be some very interesting conversations taking place on the bathroom walls," Someguy recalls from a job at Apple in Cupertino. "That was sort of the genesis of The 1000 Journals Project — try to figure out what people do when no one is watching and try to get these conversations on paper in some form."

Word of the project spread online, and after launching a site, Someguy began to get e-mail requests for books, which he fulfilled until the 1,000 were gone. Then he began organizing waiting lists.

Surrealists did it with exquisite corpses; punkers shot off mail art from afar. But The 1000 Journals Project is more anonymous, intimate, and unschooled — it’s a chain message in a bottle, bidding the finder to express him- or herself and pass it on. The product of nameless contributors in more than 40 countries, the volume is by turns grittily beautiful, quirky, and rough-hewn — filled with drawings, cartoons, collages, and stitched pages located somewhere between classroom doodles meant for one set of eyes and graffiti scrawl writ small for all the world to see.

Why 1,000? "It was sort of like those turtles running across a beach," Someguy says. "Not all of them are going to make it. It’s nearly impossible to get ahold of one nowadays." (Filmmaker Andrea Kreuzhage has managed to trace some participants for a forthcoming documentary.)

Only two completed journals ever made the journey back to Someguy, though while working on the book, he put out a call for partially filled journals, which he scanned and sent back out. "One in the book, Journal 49, was left on a scripture table overlooking a city in Croatia," Someguy remembers. "Someone in London left it in a phone booth, open to a spread saying, ‘This is for you.’" And then there were the big question marks: one contributor was held up at gunpoint and had to forfeit a bag containing a journal, and some Midwestern pirate-costumed jokers created a treasure hunt that led to a journal in the maw of a giant turtle statue. "That one," Someguy marvels, "I never heard from again!"

www.1000journals.com

Wild Tigers, Painted Bird

-
0

COSTUME One gray Garfield sweatshirt; a blue wool sleeveless sweater with little birds and a white sheep stitched on it; clean Chuck Taylor high-tops; an orange Kawasaki motorcycle T-shirt; a little red hoodie; a beige suede vest with tassels. These are some of the clothes sported by Logan (Malcolm Stumpf), the gender-jumping cusp-of-teens boy at the center of Cam Archer’s debut feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known.

"At that age you aren’t concerned with what other people think. You choose what [clothing] appeals to you – you’re just going for it," says Stephanie Volkmar, the film’s costume designer, as cars whiz by on Guerrero Street. "Logan’s outfits are sometimes outrageous, or some might say a little risque. Cam has an obsession with short-shorts and tank tops. He’ll be mad if that makes it into print, but it does help express the character’s vulnerability. We wanted Logan to wear things that would make him seem awkward and different."

One reason I’m asking Volkmar about her no-budget costume work for Wild Tigers is that she works at the store we’re sitting next to, Painted Bird. Over the past two years, I’ve assembled a Painted Bird wardrobe about as expansive as Logan’s, though riddled with the occasional label (Dior, Gucci, Adidas – all cheap), thus proving Volkmar’s point that in comparison to adults, kids just don’t care.

It turns out that Painted Bird’s connection to Archer’s movie – which, after debuting last year at the Sundance Film Festival, plays as part of the Mission Creek festivities – is also familial. The director’s brother, Nate, who did the movie’s layered, impressionistic sound design, is (along with Sonny Walker) one of the shop’s co-owners. "Nate is good at finding [music] that blows me away," Volkmar says. He certainly succeeds in Wild Tigers, braiding everything from the hand claps and "oo-oowoh" ‘s of the Michael Zager Band’s disco classic "Let’s All Chant" to the drowsy, faraway loneliness of Laura Nyro’s "Desiree" and the Langley Schools Music Project around Logan’s daydreams.

According to Volkmar, both Wild Tigers and Painted Bird emerged from family or familylike bonds formed in Santa Clara, where she met Cam Archer and worked on about 10 other short projects with him. Judging by the many five-star reviews for Painted Bird on sites such as Yelp, I’m not the only one who wants to rave about Walker and Nate Archer’s shop while also being protective of it. Why? It avoids the kitsch pitfalls and the overdressed look favored by SF vintage and secondhand places, and most important, its low prices correspond with a friendly atmosphere. Keeping an eye out for quality moderate vintage labels as much as typical high-end names, the Painted Bird folks are in the clothing biz because they like clothes, and they have a definite, yet easygoing, sensibility.

In Wild Tigers, Logan has a unique sensibility too, but his run through lust is a mostly solitary one. Though its conflation of the titular animals with desire might be a nod to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (as well as drawn from Santa Clara’s untamed suburban terrain), Archer’s movie emerges from the still too-small genre of US queer kids’ films that includes Todd Haynes’s Dottie Gets Spanked, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and SF director Justin Kelly’s new Cannes-bound short, Front. (Also, one of Wild Tigers‘ executive producers, Darren Stein, was behind the pre-Tarnation queer childhood doc Keep the Camera on Me.) Without a doubt, Volkmar’s costumes have a role in some of the movie’s best scenes, such as when Logan’s friend Joey (Max Paradise) – complete with a golden bowl cut and a striped shirt buttoned all the way up to its collar – tries to get him to contribute to a "ways to be cool" list.

A cynic might point out that there isn’t a huge gap between the outfits sported by the children of Wild Tigers and the clothes favored by San Francisco’s eternal youth of today. (I stand semiconvicted.) In fact, Volkmar drew extensively from the shop where she works while dressing the movie’s primarily preteen and teen characters. But the spirit of Painted Bird’s staff is a lot like Logan from Wild Tigers: not too cool for school, just – as Volkmar says – going for it. (Johnny Ray Huston)

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN

Wed/16, call or see Web site for time, $4-$8

Roxie Film Center

3117 and 3125 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

www.paintedbird.org

Locals only?

-
0

BOOK REVIEW Not for Tourists Guidebooks has just released the fourth edition of its Not for Tourists Guide to San Francisco. Besides having a mad grip of inaccuracies, the title is problematic: this tome is definitely not not for tourists.

The first thing I found wrong with the book was its only foldout map. It’s a highway map, which is weird, since most city dwellers tend to stay clear of the damn things. They’re for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and, uh, the tourists. And the map isn’t even detailed enough for you to see where on- and off-ramps are or tell which is which. And with San Francisco’s grand total of four highways, it’s hard to imagine why the NFT folks didn’t devote their largest page to a Muni map – just one of many things this book doesn’t have.

In all fairness, Muni routes are included in the 120 minimaps that comprise most of the book. But the layout is incredibly daunting! To follow one bus route, you might have to flip back and forth 20 times to see where the line will take you – shit most locals just don’t have friggin’ time for. I became further discouraged by the decision to devote pages to Ghirardelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Pier 39. (If not for tourists, for whom?) But despite this and despite noticing an ad for Segway Tours of the Marina Green (insert sound of me retching here), I still gave the rest of the guide a whirl, determined to get some practical use out of it.

I attempted to find a liquor store when I was trapped in SoMa without rolling papers – only to discover the intersection I was at, Fourth Street and Mission, was on the corner of three maps. The bar I was in (my favorite) was nowhere to be found. I was in minimap limbo. Next I tried to wax nostalgic with the maps of neighborhoods where I used to live – only to discover that some bars listed on the neighborhood directories weren’t dotted on the maps.

So I tried using the guide to call my neighborhood grocery store, Eight-Twenty-Eight Irving Market, to see if it carried printer paper. Apparently, it falls somewhere between liquor store and supermarket, because it’s not in the book. (BTW: it carries college rule but not printer paper.) Finally, I called the Hotel Utah – only to lose an eardrum when that killer "bee-doo-eet!" sound alerted me to the fact that the number listed in the guide was disconnected.

Maybe, maybe buy the Not for Tourists Guide for first-year college students or other new SF transplants. But if you’ve been here for longer than six months, just hang on to your Muni map and your BART schedule and save the $14.95 (suggested retail) for 411 charges.

www.notfortourists.com

The pigs are alright

-
0

FILM Rejoice, fans of smart, sharp, genre-tweaking comedy: Hot Fuzz — the latest from Shaun of the Dead writer-director Edgar Wright, cowriter-star Simon Pegg, and costar–slacker extraordinaire Nick Frost — has arrived. Pegg plays a London supercop whose makes-everyone-else-look-bad ways get him shunted to a small town where policing is limited to underage drinking and escaped swans. Or is it? Hot Fuzz apes British cop shows and American blockbusters that take law enforcement to explosive levels, including the singularly silly Bad Boys II. Recently, I sat down with the trio to get the buzz on Fuzz.

SFBG Considering Shaun‘s popularity, do you think people were surprised you didn’t make another horror movie or a sequel?

EDGAR WRIGHT I think, because every film takes three years essentially to make, to spend six years of our lives on the same idea would have been a mistake. We have so many stories to tell that you just want to keep moving on.

NICK FROST Most of the [Shaun] characters died, as well.

SIMON PEGG Plus I don’t think we wanted to be specifically tied to one genre — even if we do comedies every time — and be known as the guys who do horror comedy. It would be nice to flip between genres and types of comedy as well.

SFBG I was watching the trailers before The Hills Have Eyes 2, and someone yelled out, "Shaun of the Dead!" when the Hot Fuzz preview came on.

SP I don’t think Hot Fuzz would have been such an easy sell over here if it had been our first film, because even though it ends up being much more American than Shaun of the Dead is, it’s also much more British than Shaun of the Dead is. What we’re kind of hoping is that the groundswell of support for that film, which seemed to take place mainly on DVD, will be the thing that brings people to Hot Fuzz. I’ve been amazed at how many people have seen Shaun of the Dead.

SFBG What do people say when they see you on the street?

NF [Noo Yawk accent] Hey, Shaun of the Dead, right here!

SP I ran into someone on the Sunset Strip who was wearing a Shaun of the Dead T-shirt. He was a bit stunned, and so was I. (Cheryl Eddy)

Hot Fuzz opens April 20 in Bay Area theaters. For an extended interview with its creators, click here.

Hook, line, and Lypsinka

-
0

LIP SERVICE "Why are gay men fascinated with Joan Crawford?" John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, asks contemplatively over the phone from New York. "One reason I’m drawn to her is because of her face, which is so graphic — beautiful and scary and ridiculous at the same time. It became even more so in the 1950s, and then in the ’60s and the ’70s, it softened somehow."

All alone in a hallowed spot somewhere above great female impersonators from the past who lack a feminist consciousness and contemporary drag queens who don’t know how to act, one finds Lypsinka, the role of a lifetime for Epperson, who translates cinematic gestures to the stage like no other performer. Lypsinka’s new show, The Passion of the Crawford, portrays the great movie star through a different avenue than that used by most post–Mommie Dearest drag queens. The show’s source material is Joan Crawford Live at Town Hall, an onstage interview with Crawford late in her career. "When I moved to New York in 1978," Epperson says, "I remember that across the street from Radio City Music Hall there was a whole window in the Sam Goody store promoting the vinyl recording of Live at Town Hall. It had this multiple Andy Warhol–like image of her, and of course I had to have it."

The Crawford captured on Town Hall is more than a little tipsy. A recent bootleg CD reissue has fun with her awkward asides about planes flying through thunderheads and her many portentous declarations, ending with a remix that splices her comments for maximum comedy: "I wish I were Duke Wayne, really. Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way." Considering Lypsinka’s incredible offstage talent for editing dialogue, it’s safe to assume that The Passion of the Crawford won’t play things straight either.

But in sticking to a thorough portrait of Crawford rather than using dialogue from dozens of movies to form the ultimate movie megadiva, The Passion of the Crawford marks a departure for the peerless Lypsinka, whose visits to San Francisco’s Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint in the ’90s might be the last peaks of an era when there was art instead of just commerce in the Castro. This show returns for its second run at the downtown cabaret mainstay the Plush Room, which is fitting since Epperson mentions the celebrated cabaret return of 75-year-old Marilyn Maye as one recent inspiration.

There’s a fun irony to a phone chat with Epperson, the real voice behind the lip-synching star of some of the most hilarious phone call scenes ever staged, and by the end of our interview, we’re as tipsy as Crawford at Town Hall. But in this case, we’re drunk on camp, whether discussing Pauline Kael’s rave review of Brian de Palma’s The Fury ("She totally got it," Epperson says), an After Dark review of Little Edie Bouvier Beale’s post–Grey Gardens cabaret show ("Did it talk about the eye patch she wore over her eye with the flower attached to it?" he asks), or the many splendors of Dario Argento’s Suspiria ("I love it when Joan Bennett says, ‘We’ve got to kill that bitch of an American girl,’ " he declares, doing a perfect Bennett impression). Of course, a mention of Suspiria-era Bennett can only lead to her Dark Shadows costar Grayson Hall. I tell Epperson that I have a biography about Hall titled A Hard Act to Follow. "A hard actress to follow," he retorts.

During a recent Washington, DC, engagement of The Passion of the Crawford, Epperson used his time offstage to dig through the Library of Congress’s film collection and see movies such as 1971’s Pretty Maids All in a Row, directed by Roger Vadim and starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson. "Roddy McDowell and Keenan Wynne are also in it," Epperson says. "And an actress called Joy Bang. Have you ever heard of Joy Bang?

"What else can I tell you?" (Johnny Ray Huston)

THE PASSION OF THE CRAWFORD

Through April 22

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $42.50–$47.50

Plush Room

940 Sutter, SF

1-866-468-3399

www.lypsinka.com

For a Q&A with John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

1...567...9Page 6 of 9

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org