2012 Archives — Page 11 of 74 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

All together now

Michael Redmond

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February 25, 2014

arts@sfbg.com

As she stares down the remainder of what’s sure to be the busiest year of her career, Angel Olsen’s new digs are helping calm any potentially frayed nerves.

“It’s so mellow here, and people just don’t give a shit,” says the indie-folk singer about her new home of Asheville, N.C. “They build campfires and go to softball games or DJ nights. It’s nice after so much traveling to go somewhere that’s not a huge city.”

For example: Chicago, where Olsen spent the previous seven years developing a devoted following for her striking vocals and emotional songwriting. Although she cherishes the city for helping her hone her craft, the move to a smaller, more rural home was long overdue. It makes sense, then, that Burn Your Fire For No Witness, her excellent second full-length, was born in the spirit of her new surroundings.

Strange Cacti, Olsen’s 2010 debut EP, was a lo-fi and spare batch of songs built entirely upon simple guitar strumming and loads of reverb. The biggest draw, however, was her voice, with its distinctive blend of influences: echoes of Roy Orbison’s pained runs and Patsy Cline’s plaintive twang, among others. She upped the ante for her first LP, 2012’s Half Way Home, enlisting the help of Emmett Kelly (The Cairo Gang), who fleshed things out with bass, drums and a cleaner production sound. By the time she was beginning work for Burn Your Fire For No Witness, the collaborative bug had fully taken hold.

“The new material I was writing was different than what I’d done previously,” she says. “It was more electric and I had a vision for a louder sound with more going on between the singing. The idea was to create an album that sounded not just like Angel Olsen, but that sounded like a band.”

In putting together a group, Olsen looked to a pair of musicians she’d worked with during her Half Way Home tour. Joshua Jaeger and Stewart Bronaugh are strong and tactful in their contributions, adding color with keyboards, pounding drums and something entirely new to Olsen’s music — distorted guitars. The new approach molded her songwriting in unexpected ways.

“Working with the band and experimenting with my voice made me interested in making music that can breathe, instead of it continually being so focused on the words,” she says. “I can see people being concerned that the sound is coming from a producer or someone else making the changes, but really I’ve just been changing myself.”

Of course, for someone used to shaping her music on her own, having extra hands in the studio took some getting used to.

“I suddenly felt a lot of pressure by having all these people now involved in what I was doing, so I wanted to be very particular about my choices,” she says.

Luckily it didn’t take long for her to build a strong relationship with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, The Walkmen, Rogue Wave). Songs were arranged and rearranged until everyone was happy with the result.

For all the bells and whistles, however, the standout of Burn Your Fire For No Witness is still Olsen’s vocals. Whether singing a stripped-down acoustic ballad (“Enemy”), belting out pop hooks (“Hi-Five”) or pulling off haunting restraint (“White Fire”), she’s never sounded more self-assured. The rubber-band vocal flexibility allows her to shade the album’s 11 tracks in a variety of moods that still work harmoniously as a whole.

“I wanted to take what I’d learned with Strange Cacti being so lo-fi and with Half Way Home being kind of dry, with no reverb or affect, and use both those sounds and apply them to each song depending on what it called for,” she says.

Like many singer-songwriters who have transitioned to the full band format, Angel Olsen is kicking off the next stage of her career. It’s a rare treat, however, to see it handled with such surefooted poise.

“When you’re with a band, you can listen back and after the show talk about what parts you like or what parts need work,” she says. “When you’re on your own you don’t experience it that way. So the whole idea of sharing it with people has been really fun and interesting.”

Angel Olsen

With Cian Nugent

Mon/3, 8pm, $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.slimspresents.com

Evolution of yoga

Michael Redmond

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February 25, 2014

4

steve@sfbg.com

YOGA Being suspended upside down in an aerial yoga swing in Peaceful Warrior position, transitioning into Happy Buddha as I reached for the Quantum Playground to deepen my stretch, I gained a new perspective on the world — and the ongoing evolution of yoga in the Bay Area.

Innovation and the cross-pollination of various ideas and practices are as quintessential to the Bay Area as yoga and other mindful approaches to self-improvement and secular spirituality. So it makes sense that local yoga teachers and entrepreneurs are developing new twists on a timeless art.

My yoga practice began in 2001, and I was fortunate to have an instructor who emphasized that yoga is about breathing more than stretching or exercise. It’s about being present and maintaining that presence through the pain of life and its contortions. Inhale to lengthen, exhale to deepen; breathe in, breathe out, repeat indefinitely.

When aerial yoga instructor Jen Healy first hung me upside down in her San Rafael home and “Healyng Sanctuary” while we were dating in 2012, that focus on breathing was essential just to keep my lunch down (or up, in this case). Yoga can have that disorienting quality, particuarly in the inverted postures.

And then I worked through it, finding a new world opened up on the other side where previous limits yielded to new openness and flexibility. It can be playful, as in Healy’s Aerial Yoga Play swings and teacher trainings; or the partner-based AcroYoga that emerged here about 10 years ago.

“You get to play your way to a healthier and happier state of being,” Healy says, calling her swings and jungle-gym-like Quantum Playground she built tools for “awakening the courageous inner child.”

Or the new approaches to yoga can cultivate a deeper sense of self-awareness, purpose, and integration of our mental, emotional, and physical bodies, as instructor Dina Amsterdam strives for with her InnerYoga approach.

“Yoga is about finding balance. We are walking around so out of balance as a culture,” Amsterdam says, describing her teachings as helping people better understand their inner landscape “so they can discover what is out of balance within them…InnerYoga is not a style, it’s an approach to life.”

San Francisco’s progressive, humanist values have also helped project yogic teachings onto the sociopolitical scene through groups such as Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM), with the mission “to use the power of yoga to inspire conscious, sustainable activism and ignite grassroots social change.”

A new local company called YOL is trying to marry that sense of activism with the yoga retreats to exotic locales that have become so popular, creating trips that combine yoga and meditation with volunteer work on service projects.

“I do think it’s part of yoga’s evolution,” says YOL co-founder David Cherner. “It’s taking that good feeling you get from yoga and channeling it into giving to someone else.”

A DAY TO BREATHE

In this hustle-bustle world of ours, it feels grounding and luxurious to take a full day to breathe, to meditate, and to practice yoga. Retreats of a day to a week have become big in the yoga world, but my first one was Feb. 23 at Amsterdam’s home near Mt. Tamalpais.

“Yoga in the United States, particularly in the Bay Area, became very focused on the physical component,” says Amsterdam, who instead strives “to really make self-awareness and connection to essence the primary purpose of yoga.”

She developed her InnerYoga approach in 2008 during the economic crash — since then graduating 36 teachers who now employ her approach — using the mindful evolution of her own practice to meet the growing anxiety and imbalance she saw in the community.

“What I was most effective at teaching is what people were really needing,” Amsterdam said. “My classes slowed way down.”

I met Amsterdam through the YinYoga classes that she teaches at Yoga Tree, classes that involve holding postures for extended periods of time — from a few minutes up to a half-hour — which can open up both joints and deep emotions as practioners breathe through their resistance.

But Amsterdam says that YinYoga is just part of InnerYoga, which involves active and passive poses, meditation, and teachings and exercises designed to connect yoga with a mindful approach to life. Its four foundations are “awareness, kindness, breath, and ease.”

“I’m teaching people self-care practices both on the mat and off the mat,” Amsterdam said.

That idea was the basis for OTM, which is “in the business of creating leaders and helping leaders connect to their passions,” says Rebecca Rogers, who splits her professional time between teaching yoga and working for OTM on its seva fundraising campaigns.

“When you slow things down, you have more time to make choices,” Rogers said, describing the notion of mindfulness that yoga helps create. “A big part of mindfulness is the ability to tune into the world.”

That bridge between the yoga and political worlds will be tested this year as yogini and renowned author Marianne Williamson runs for Congress in Southern California, promoting mindfulness, a campaign that OTM’s Yoga Votes project is supporting.

Between the connections to self and to the world, AcroYoga is a hybrid of yoga, acrobatics, and Thai massage, a fluid practice where partners use one another for pressure or as a plaform for poses.

“I don’t think there’s enough safe touch in the world, so AcroYoga allows that,” says Tyler Blank, who discovered the practice in 2004 and became one of its first certified teachers.

Later, in Hawaii, Blank discovered the concept of ecstatic dance — with its “contact improv” techniques that are similar to AcroYoga — and brought it to the Bay Area, where its twice-weekly events in Oakland have grown in popularity.

“I realized we could take partner yoga and start to dance with it very slowly,” Blank said. “I think yoga is evolving into dance.”

However yoga evolves, the Bay Area is likely to be at the center of that process.

Climate fight is a street fight

Michael Redmond

-

February 25, 2014

41

STREET FIGHT

Prolonged warm-weather droughts seem a normal part of California life, but the intensity of drought impacts — shrinking snowpack, intense wildfires, crop failures, and the devastation of wildlife habitat and fisheries — is likely accentuated by global warming.

So it’s not enough to simply save water. In this drought, our sense of urgency about global warming should be ramped up. The science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, respected scientists like James Hansen, and even the World Bank (historically no friend to radical ecologists) all stress that droughts will get worse unless greenhouse gas emissions peak in the next decade.

The science is clear. If we are to avoid a disastrous future of ecological upheaval, violence, and forced mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people (many of whom produce the least amount of carbon emissions) then we must dramatically reduce emissions now, and we must do it in a globally fair and equitable way. And to be fair and equitable, we must reduce driving. Here’s why.

Globally, transportation is the fastest growing sector of greenhouse emissions, owing in large measure to the expansion of global automobility. Presently 500 million passenger cars are in use (approximately one-third of them in the United States), but by 2030, this figure is expected to reach 1 billion worldwide.

This increase in automobility will contribute substantially to the “trillionth ton” of cumulative carbon emissions, which is an emissions threshold signaling global climate catastrophe. Today we are more than halfway there (556 billion tons). At current rates of consumption, including America’s ownership of 800 cars and trucks per 1,000 persons, we hit the trillionth ton in 28 years.

To avoid this, we must keep as much fossil fuel as possible in the ground. Because the United States is disproportionately responsible for at least 27 percent of the cumulative carbon emissions since industrialization, and has a disproportionate number of cars compared to the rest of the world, we in the United States have a particular responsibility to keep carbon in the ground.

If China, which has produced 10 percent of global emissions so far, had the same per capita car ownership rate as the United States, there would be over 500 million more cars, doubling the current worldwide rate. This would be madness. It would be worse than building the Keystone pipeline, which is what Hansen called “game over” for the global climate because it’s a spigot into the sticky, tarlike oils in Alberta which, if fully tapped, would be a carbon time bomb.

Ask yourself this: If China (and possibly India) successfully copy American-style driving, how much tar sands would that require? What kind of world would that look like? And if Americans (and especially environmentalists) expect the global middle class in China and India to stand aside while we keep on driving, that is stark, crass, and inequitable.

Many well-meaning environmentalists and progressives think that driving a Prius or buying an electric car will be adequate in mitigating this conundrum. They must reconsider. There is no “green” car when a global middle class replicates American driving patterns.

If the world’s fleet of gasoline-powered automobiles magically shifts to electric, hydrogen fuel cells, or biofuels, the change will draw resources away from industrial, residential, and food systems, or it will have to involve an entirely new layer of energy production (more tar sands). Massive quantities of coal and petroleum will be needed to scale-up to wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear, and other arrays of energy, as well as for all the new “clean cars.”

Are environmentalists still planning to drive around the Bay Area while waiting for this magic? I sure hope not.

In these global warming days, with drought on everyone’s mind, we must avoid wasting precious water washing cars, and we must reallocate street space with fewer cars in mind. A critical piece of the puzzle is to prioritize public transit and bicycles over automobiles by building exclusive transit and bicycle lanes, remove the lanes and curbside parking available to cars, install signal prioritization for transit and bicycles at intersections, queue-jumping so that transit can bypasses traffic stalled at intersections, restrictions on turns for automobiles, and transit stop improvements including bus stop bulb-outs and amenities.

Reconfigured streets must furthermore exclude car-oriented land uses like more off-street parking in the 92,000 new housing units projected for San Francisco by Plan Bay Area. These units, whatever size or income, should be completely car-free. And this must include removal of existing parking beneath homes, replacing garages with housing and returning the privatized curb cut to the public.

VISIONS FOR HAIGHT

In many respects, the Haight Street corridor is a model for the kind of global warming mitigation strategy the rest of America should follow. The corridor has high density, transit dependent, and car-free households (over 30 percent in the Upper Haight and almost 50 percent in the Lower Haight/Hayes Valley) It has several walkable neighborhood commercial districts, as well as several hundred units of new housing (some of which are below market rate) under construction in Hayes Valley. Almost 25,000 passengers take the Haight buses (6-Parnassus and 71-Haight Noriega) daily, making it one of the busiest combined transit corridors in the city.

But the buses are crowded and often stuck in traffic, so the SFMTA has plans to improve service by increasing frequency, converting more of the existing route into faster “limited” service whereby some buses stop only at key points and removing the “jog” at Laguna and Page which adds delay to the inbound buses.

As I’ve written before, the Muni staff has a good plan known as the Transit Effectiveness Project, with a modest reallocation of street space for higher transit reliability, attracting more ridership, and potentially enabling San Franciscans to conveniently reduce driving to half of all trips by 2018 (it was at 62 percent in 2012). But on both ends of Haight Street, the city has fumbled. While not a disaster, hopefully Muni can learn some lessons and tweak the plans.

On the eastern end, Muni will shift buses off Page Street, converting a short segment of Haight back to two-way. The new two-way Haight includes a transit-only lane between Laguna and Gough/Market streets, which will dramatically improve travel times and reliability. Part of it will enable buses to bypass queues of cars making the right turn from Haight onto Octavia.

Where this scheme falls short is in the plans to simply give former bus stops on Page to private cars for parking. A more progressive plan would instead use the space to help make room for needed bicycle improvements on Page between Laguna and Market. Nearby are multiple housing construction sites where curbside parking has been temporarily removed — such as at the 55 Laguna site. The city has a great opportunity to innovate with transit-first policies at all of these construction sites.

Instead of turning space over to private cars when construction concludes, the city could instead build more bus lanes, pedestrian space, curbside car sharing, and bicycle space. The city could also return some of the space to parking, but only in exchange for parking removal upstream, such as at Haight and Fillmore, where bus stop improvements are sorely needed.

Throughout the city, there are block-by-block opportunities like these, where the city can help the climate instead of giving away parking. As the city discontinues bus stops and sees more housing construction, the policy should be to use curbside space for bicycles, pedestrians, or curbside car share — not simply giving it away to private car parking.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Haight, the city has also fumbled in proposing to reroute the 6-Parnassus, an important electric trolley bus line, off the Frederick-Cole-Parnassus segment. Bus riders in the Upper Haight are incensed. At a recent public meeting, a crowd of 90 people balked at the cut. Muni planners defended the proposal, arguing that ridership is low in the hilly segment above, and that a less productive segment would be shifted to the more crowded Haight Street.

This might seem logical but it may also be shortsighted, especially since the existing segment has overhead trolley wires. Drought notwithstanding, the electric trolley buses are the greenest motorized mobility in San Francisco, propelled by hydroelectricity from Hetch Hetchy.

Taking a longer and more progressive view, it might be useful to think of the debate over the 6-Parnassus this way: If the city is hoping to wean motorists from their cars by achieving the laudable goal of having 30 percent of all trips in the city by transit (up from 17 percent today), cutting service, even in relatively low ridership routes, is counterproductive. It raises the question: Is the ridership level low because the service was poor to begin with, including such irritating factors as less frequency, less reliability, or fewer hours of service? What would ridership levels look like if these less-crowded routes had high frequency, all-day and late-night service with high reliability?

Moreover, what would demand for these routes look like if parking were substantially reduced throughout the city while car-travel lanes were removed, creating space for bicycle lanes and transit lanes? Or what if there were a regional gasoline tax, a congestion charge, or other measures that priced automobility closer to its real social cost, thus producing higher demand for transit?

Surely, reducing the footprint of transit service, however inefficient that service might seem now, is not creating a template necessary for carrying 1.4 million daily passengers in the future, which is what it would take to reach significant emissions reduction goals and 30 percent mode share. Removing segments like the 6-Parnassus on Frederick will only make it harder to rebuild and accomplish that goal. And for political expediency it will also make it harder for Mayor Ed Lee to sell his transportation funding ballot proposals to progressive voters in November.

Muni planners ought to ditch the proposal to reroute the 6-Parnassus, and instead focus on maximizing improved reliability and transit efficiency on the other end of Haight Street by removing parking and prioritizing transit and bicycling on Haight and Page respectively.

Thinking globally about climate change means acting locally, on the streets of San Francisco.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a professor at San Francisco State University’s Department of Geography and Environment.

SFBG Wrap

Michael Redmond

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February 25, 2014

0

Google bus plan challenged

San Francisco activists and labor filed an appeal of the controversial commuter shuttle (aka, the Google buses) pilot program with the Board of Supervisors on Feb. 19, alleging it was pushed through without a proper environmental review.

The appeal was filed by a coalition of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, SEIU 1021, The League of Pissed Off Voters, and Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee.

The shuttles, mostly to Silicon Valley tech firms, pick up passengers at Muni bus stops. The use of public bus stops would incur a $271 fine for private autos, and often do, but the shuttles have largely received a free pass from the city. Last month, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency approved a pilot plan hatched behind closed doors that allows use of 200 bus stops by the private shuttles, charging only $1 per stop, per day.

The appeal alleges that the program needed review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which asks for projects to be analyzed for, among other things, land use, housing, and public health impacts.

“CEQA actually identifies displacement as an environmental impact,” attorney Richard Drury, who filed the appeal on behalf of the coalition, told us. “Almost no one knows that. Honestly I didn’t know that, until I started researching all of this.”

If the Board of Supervisors doesn’t back the appeal, there may be a court battle on the environmental impact of the shuttle stops, which increase rents and home prices nearby.

Paul Rose, spokesperson for the SFMTA, responded to the complaint in an email to the Guardian.

“We developed this pilot proposal to help ensure the most efficient transportation network possible by reducing Muni delays and further reducing congestion on our roadways,” Rose wrote. “We are confident that the CEQA clearance is appropriate and will be upheld.” (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Library cracks down on the homeless

The way homeless residents are treated in San Francisco has come under scrutiny lately, with recent reports of homeless individuals being sprayed with hoses by Department of Public Works staff who started doing early-morning sidewalk cleanings nearby Twitter’s mid-Market headquarters.

This week, much discussion has been focused on homeless individuals’ use of the city’s Main Library — and while library administrators say they are just trying to make the facility safe and enjoyable for everyone, advocates have voiced concern that the homeless are being unfairly targeted.

“We want people to use the library from all walks of life,” library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers told the Guardian, saying a new set of proposed policies is not meant to be directed at homeless people in particular.

But it’s difficult to imagine who else would be bathing in the restrooms, for instance, or bringing a shopping cart into the library.

There is even a line in the code of conduct policy that forbids emitting “strong or pervasive odors.” While the policy notes that this could mean perfume, it could also mean body odor.

At a recent meeting, the San Francisco Library Commission considered bulking up security staff and imposing stricter penalties for these violations and others, such as sleeping in the library, asking for money, or bringing carts or luggage into the building.

Under proposed revisions to the library’s “Code of Conduct,” patrons could face tougher penalties for such offenses. (Rebecca Bowe)

Kelly runs in D10

After being narrowly edged out in the race for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors four years ago, Potrero Hill political activist Tony Kelly launch his campaign for the seat Feb. 19, challenging incumbent Malia Cohen.

In 2010, after former Sup. Sophie Maxwell was termed out, the D10 race was a wide open contest that had low voter turnout and the squirreliest ranked-choice voting ending that the city has seen. On election night, former BART director Lynette Sweet finished first, followed by Kelly, a third place tie between Cohen and Marlene Tran, and Potrero Hill View publisher Steve Moss in fourth.

But the strong negative campaigning between Sweet and Moss, the leading fundraisers in the race, allowed the likable but then relatively unknown Cohen to vault into the lead on the strength of second- and third-place votes, finishing a few hundred votes in front of Kelly, who came in second.

Cohen has had an unremarkable tenure on the board, spearheading few significant legislative pushes and being an ideological mixed bag on key votes. But she’ll likely retain the support of African American leaders and voters in Bayview and Hunters Point, and enjoy the always significant advantage of incumbency.

Kelly hopes to turn that advantage into a disadvantage, tying Cohen to City Hall economic development policies that have caused gentrification and displacement. “Too many San Franciscans face an uphill battle, especially here in District 10,” Kelly said in a statement announcing his candidacy. “Our district is part of one of the richest cities in the richest state in the richest country in the world, and yet our neighborhoods are home to the highest unemployment rates in the City, our homeowners are at risk of foreclosure, and our tenants at risk of evictions. This is unacceptable, and we must do better.” (Steven T. Jones)

Obamacare vs. HealthySF

Thousands of Healthy San Francisco enrollees will soon face a dilemma.

Federal health care reform will hold them to the “individual mandate,” a requirement to obtain health insurance — but Healthy San Francisco doesn’t count. Roughly 70 percent of uninsured San Franciscans currently rely upon the city-administered program, created by San Francisco’s Health Care Security Ordinance, to access medical care.

Anyone who doesn’t satisfy the individual mandate will be made to fork over $95 as a penalty — but that noncompliance fee will skyrocket to $625 in 2015.

Meanwhile, people who are eligible for subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will automatically become ineligible for Healthy San Francisco under current rules, according to San Francisco Department of Public Health Deputy Director of Health Colleen Chawla.

The prospect of becoming suddenly ineligible for Healthy San Francisco will leave thousands of residents in the bind of being unable to rely on the system they now use to access care, while also being unable to afford the new insurance option — and so far, city officials have found no clear resolution to this dilemma.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who authored the legislation that created Healthy San Francisco as a member of the Board of Supervisors, admonished the Department of Public Health last week for turning away enrollees, conveying to program participants that only those who are undocumented would be eligible to remain in Healthy San Francisco. On Feb. 18, the San Francisco Health Commission approved a temporary solution, signing off on a resolution that creates a “transition period” allowing Healthy San Francisco enrollees to remain in the program until the end of the 2014. (Rebecca Bowe)

SF has fastest growing wealth gap

San Francisco has the second highest gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution. The study looked at US Census data across different income levels and ranked cities for not only the widening chasm between the rich and the poor, but also the speed at which that gap increased. Though San Francisco has the second widest income inequality gap (second to Atlanta, where the poor are poorer, but the rich far less rich than here), it’s tops in terms of the speed at which the wealthy are pulling away from the rest of us, the study found. “Not surprisingly, San Francisco experienced the largest increase in its ratio from 2007 to 2012,” the Brookings Institution reported. “Income for its typical 20th-percentile household dropped $4,000 during that period, while income for its typical 95th-percentile household soared by $28,000. No other city saw nearly as large an increase in its rich households’ incomes.” (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Tougher library policies would penalize homeless patrons for sleeping, body odor

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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February 20, 2014

78

Tougher library policies would penalize homeless patrons for sleeping, body odor

The way homeless residents are treated in San Francisco has come under scrutiny lately, with recent reports of homeless individuals being sprayed with hoses by Department of Public Works staff who started doing early-morning sidewalk cleanings nearby Twitter’s mid-Market headquarters.

This week, much discussion has been focused on homeless individuals’ use of the city’s Main Library – and while library administrators say they are just trying to make the facility safe and enjoyable for everyone, advocates have voiced concern that the homeless are being unfairly targeted.

“We want people to use the library from all walks of life,” library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers told the Bay Guardian, saying a new set of proposed policies is not meant to be directed at homeless people in particular.

But it’s difficult to imagine who else would be bathing in the restrooms, for instance, or bringing a shopping cart into the library.

There is even a line in the code of conduct policy that forbids emitting “strong or pervasive odors.” While the policy notes that this could mean perfume, it could also mean body odor.

At a recent meeting, the San Francisco Library Commission considered bulking up security staff and imposing stricter penalties for these violations and others, such as sleeping in the library, asking for money, or bringing carts or luggage into the building.

Under proposed revisions to the library’s “Code of Conduct,” patrons could face tougher penalties for such offenses.

While those violations currently result in a simple warning, library staff recommended banning people from the premises for the rest of the day for such behavior. On a second and third offense, patrons would be banned for three days and seven days, respectively.

Meanwhile, staff recommended increasing the time that a patron could be suspended from the library for “unreasonable use of rest rooms,” including “laundering, bathing, smoking, soliciting, or clogging plumbing.”

Currently a person can be banned for three days for such behavior; staff recommended banning them for three months instead. The maximum suspension period for this offense, meanwhile, would increase from one month to one year.

“This all stems from the mayor’s visit, a few months ago,” Jeffers explained in an interview with the Bay Guardian. “He issued a letter to the library commission, saying ‘I call on you to look at more stringent policies for dealing with bad behavior.’”

On the whole, problematic incidents within the library have actually declined, according to Jeffers. The most recent data reflected a 32 percent decline in overall incidents since 2011, and an 18 percent decline since 2012.

But several high-profile incidents caused Mayor Ed Lee to issue a call to action, Jeffers said.

“A man was arrested for urinating on books,” she explained. In another incident, “A person took a hammer and broke a computer.” Someone else threw a chair at a patron.

While many of the new policy recommendations address issues such as assault, harassment, indecent exposure, or weapons, advocates of the homeless population say many of the proposed rules unfairly target a population that has few other options for being indoors during the day.

Representatives from the Coalition on Homelessness and voiced concern at the Library Commission meeting, saying the proposed rules unfairly targeted a vulnerable population and were just another example of criminalizing homelessness in San Francisco at a time when people face steeper challenges than ever to securing permanent housing.

On Wed/19, library officials met with COH director Jennifer Friedenbach and others.

Jeffers said the library is committed to working with the coalition, and noted that the recommendations will be revisited and resubmitted in coming months.

“It’s a difficult situation, because we want people to feel safe in the library,” Jeffers said. “But many people who are experiencing homelessness also want to feel safe in the library.”

Bevan Dufty, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to help the city coordinate homeless services, said a better approach is needed.

“Years ago, when I was on the [Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee], and the library asked for a dramatic increase in security funds, I went and talked to [Chief Librarian] Luis Herrera … and said, Luis, I get it. Patrons see people doing their laundry in the bathrooms, they see problems. Why not hire a social worker?”

The library has done so, and both Jeffers and Dufty report that this program has been successful in connecting homeless patrons with services. Yet the library continues to aim for tougher regulations and enforcement, in accordance with Mayor Lee’s wishes.

“I’ve been a big advocate for Five Keys, which is the adult charter school that existed in our jails for the past 12 years,” Dufty added. “I have said to Luis, hey, this would be good. People are clearly coming here for refuge. I get that people sleeping, and doing other things are problematic, But why not have a school where people could be engaged? Some of the people may not even be literate who are sitting in the library.”

New study: San Francisco has second highest inequality in United States

Erica Hanna

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February 20, 2014

131

New study: San Francisco has second highest inequality in United States

San Francisco has the second highest gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution released today.
The study looked at US Census data across different income levels and ranked cities for not only the widening chasm between the rich and the poor, but also the speed at which that gap increased. Though San Francisco has the second widest income inequality gap (second to Atlanta, where the poor are poorer, but the rich far less rich than here), it’s tops in terms of the speed at which the wealthy are pulling away from the rest of us, the study found.

“Not surprisingly, San Francisco experienced the largest increase in its ratio from 2007 to 2012,” the Brookings Institution reported. “Income for its typical 20th-percentile household dropped $4,000 during that period, while income for its typical 95th-percentile household soared by $28,000. No other city saw nearly as large an increase in its rich households’ incomes.”

inequalityrowth

San Francisco was second place for highest inequality, but tops in terms of speed at which the income gap widened.

San Francisco differed from other cities in the unique nature of its inequality as well — for the most part, we’re unequal because our rich got richer, while other cities’ poor got poorer. “San Francisco’s ratio is high because its wealthy households have very high incomes, considerably higher than in any other major city ($353,000 at the 95th percentile),” Brookings Institution reported. And as anyone who’s looked for an apartment in San Francisco has seen, the poor and middle class are also getting pushed out of the city, which the study also noted.

One of the most depressing flyer on San Francisco housing you’ll see. pic.twitter.com/1uTm9BLodZ

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) February 19, 2014

So why is all this such a problem? Can’t everyone just move to Oakland? The study also noted the problems inherent in a city with a wide income gap.

“A city where the rich are very rich, and the poor very poor, is likely to face many difficulties,” the Brookings Institution noted. “It may struggle to maintain mixed-income school environments that produce better outcomes for low-income kids. It may have too narrow a tax base from which to sustainably raise the revenues necessary for essential city services. And it may fail to produce housing and neighborhoods accessible to middle-class workers and families, so that those who move up or down the income ladder ultimately have no choice but to move out.”

These are problems the city knows all too well. As the San Francisco Public Press reported recently, our public school system is increasingly divided between haves and have-nots, and as the Guardian reported only this week, our infrastructure funding is lacking by billions of dollars. And of course, as our families flee the city, San Francisco loses its children in droves, which US Census data has also highlighted.

Read the full report from on San Francisco’s widening income gap here.

Sundance, fin: more from the Native Forum

Sue Vaughan

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February 19, 2014

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Sundance, fin: more from the Native Forum

Running into Chris Eyre was easily one of the most exciting moments of this year’s festival. Following his 1998 Audience Award-winning debut, Smoke Signals, Eyre premiered Skins at Sundance 2002, just a few months after 9/11 — and it still ranks as one of the most memorable cinematic experiences I’ve ever had.

After the film, which offers a harrowing look at a sheriff on the Pine Ridge reservation (which is still to this day the poorest in the nation), Park City audiences were dumbfounded as to how to respond. Producer Jon Kilik, who also helped Spike Lee with his ensemble masterpieces Do the Right Thing (1989) and Clockers (1995) was on hand with director Eyre as they plowed through us progressive pit fallers at Sundance. “We are all responsible.” Eyre’s words are still stuck in my head.

Other than directing a couple of Friday Night Lights episodes and a few TV movies, Eyre has since had difficulty getting features financed. Make sure to track down his stunning 40-minute A Thousand Roads (2005), created for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. It showcases a harrowing score by Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard.

And so the baton seems to have been passed to 34-year-old Oklahoma-based Sterlin Harjo, who read a segment from Hal Ashby’s Bound To Glory (1976), an ode to folk pioneer Woody Guthrie, at the Native Forum anniversary celebration. It perfectly connected his regional stories to a larger context.

Harjo’s third feature, documentary This May Be the Last Time (US) is a historian’s as well as musicologist’s dream, as Harjo attempts to uncover his grandfather’s disappearance in 1962. As he traces the origins of the Seminole songs that he grew up with, he learns that his tribe’s singing style is tied to traditions that originated in Scotland, Appalachia, and the experiences of enslaved African Americans.

With a film that plays out similarly to Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching For Sugar Man (2012), Harjo has constructed a deeply moving personal documentary that transcends the region, and can connect to anyone interested in our country’s complicated colonialism.

I was able to track Sterlin Harjo down post-fest for a quick interview, and he’s as thoughtful and as passionate as his films suggest. Smoke Signals and Jim Jarmusch’s acid-western Dead Man (1995) both came out at the perfect time to open Harjo’s eyes to filmmaking as a possible career.

“Jarmusch did such a wonderful job with Dead Man, even better than some Native filmmakers. The language, the wardrobe, the regions, it was all so well researched. And the film isn’t about an Indian; it’s about a human who’s complicated, with a dark side and a lighter side,” he said. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1998, Harjo found that he had to leave home to begin reflecting on his own part of the country.

After completing the Sundance Lab and Native Forum through the Sundance Institute, Harjo made his debut feature, Four Sheets to the Wind (2007), a terrific hipster comedy about a twenty-something who takes a trip to visit his sister off the reservation. “The film is a reactionary Native film to the reactionary Native films that I grew up with. I wanted to contradict the newly formed stereotypes from within the community. No one was going to walk around talking about ‘being an Indian,’ because that didn’t happen in my world. There’s an integrated relationship with a white woman and no one was going to comment on it. Indians were going to drink beer and smoke pot and it wasn’t going to be an issue.”

Though star Tamara Podemski won an Independant Spirit Award nomination as well as a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her “fully realized physical and emotional turn,” the film ran into categorical problems from distributors. “There were supposedly three-hour meetings about how the film was ‘too Indian’ as well as ‘not Native enough’,” he recalled.

And here lies perhaps the biggest problem with second-generation Native/Indigenous cinema; Who wants to watch these films? Harjo’s follow-up, 2009’s Barking Water, which premiered at Sundance, spotlights a powerhouse performance by Richard Ray Whitman as a man dying of cancer trying to get back home.

With shades of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999), this poignant piece engages the viewer thoroughly through the struggles of generation gaps in our contemporary culture. And all the while, it exposes Oklahoma’s quiet and even “magical” ambiance, according to Harjo.

“It’s true, all of my films are centered around ‘Home’. That’s ‘Home’ with a capital H because growing up, displacement was a constant subject taught to us. The Trail of Tears seems to still be affecting us to this day. And so ‘Home’ is sacred and part of our mythology yet we are aware of it often feeling temporary. Funny enough, my next film Chief (which is a term used for homeless Natives) is centered around the loss of home when a man is forced to head to Tulsa, where he becomes homeless and finds himself in the middle of the city’s homeless population. You could call it a poetic thriller.”

Harjo is exactly the type of filmmaker I hope to uncover at film festivals: his work is thought-provoking, passionate, and energized. It’s now up to us to seek out and watch his films so that we don’t read about him 30 years from now and ponder “it’s too bad those second-generation filmmakers didn’t make more cinema.”

Up next: SLAMDANCE!

Goldies 2014 Music: The Seshen

Steven T. Jones

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February 18, 2014

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GOLDIES “What was the latest? Afro-futurism? Afro-futurism,” says Lalin St. Juste, songwriter and lead singer in the East Bay band The Seshen, of how the somewhat un-categorizable band has been categorized by critics most recently. “Which we’re kind of OK with. It makes me think of, like, a silver afro.”

“Or, you know, like we trade in afro futures,” says keyboardist Mahesh Rao, between bites of chips and salsa, eliciting a burst of laughter from his bandmates. “Electro-soul is OK too. We were calling ourselves electro-pop for a while, but then Paris Hilton came out with a record a while back that she was calling electro-pop, and I was like, Lalin, we gotta take that off our business cards.”

Call them what you will. The sounds this seven-piece band makes are captivating, layering the soulful, Erykah Badu-reminiscent vocals of St. Juste and the musical theater-trained Akasha Orr — whose smile you can hear in her voice — with precise electronic samples, dub sounds, R&B guitar grooves, bass lines that beg to be bumped out your car window at a stoplight, and percussion that seems to borrow from at least three continents.

It’s both sexy and a little nerdy: immersive, inviting, warmer than your weirdest Radiohead, but with a chilled-out, dreamy, late-night sensibility and spirituality. It’d be just at home on an indie-rock mix as, say, Beach House, but it’s hardly background music — there’s just too damn much going on. Live, the Seshen is committed to a specific blend of electronic elements and “humanity…I think we have something really human and warm, because of the vocals, live drums, other human elements,” says percussionist Mirza Kopelman. Regardless, the band’s setup is far from straightforward; St. Juste’s custom pedal board looks like it could power a small plane. “Sound guys hate us,” offers synchronizer-sampler Kumar Butler.

People often don’t quite know what to do with them, Seshen members are the first to admit. They’ve been labeled “world music” in the past simply because, as far as they can tell, they’re seven people representing a wide range of ethnicities. But especially following the release of last summer’s spaced-out, sped-up trip-hoppy, drum-and-keyboard-driven single “2000 Seasons,” which revealed a more upbeat sound than The Seshen’s self-titled 2012 debut, hip-shaking seems to be a common reaction.

Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

“Some songs are meant for sitting and relaxing,” says St. Juste, “but in general, we want people to dance.” Bigger crowds and stages have followed. Playing Oakland’s Hiero Day last year, band members were overwhelmed to hear that some of their local childhood hip-hop heroes were Seshen fans, too.

It’s a rehearsal evening, which means members are sprawled around their studio — the tricked-out den of an El Cerrito house that St. Juste, producer-bassist Aki Ehara, and Orr all share — with snacks and beers and their notes about the most recent mixes of their upcoming EP, due out this spring. There’s a dartboard in one corner; a campy poster featuring the winged angel version of Michael Jackson dominates another, while D’Angelo stares across the room from an LP cover.

Just past a tiny enclave marked by a photo of Ehara’s grandfather is the producer’s recording and mixing setup — the band does it all, quite literally and very meticulously, in-house. The value of Ehara’s determined focus on the subtleties of a mix cannot be overstated, say his bandmates. In honing the band’s sound, says Ehara, he’s influenced by delving into the history of electronic music, he says, going back to John Cage and early BBC radio electronica. “That, alone, opened a whole other door for me.”

“I’ve played in a lot of bands, and I’ve never been in one that pays this much attention to detail,” says drummer Chris Thalmann. “Everyone has a really high level of expectation for what we put out there.” That perfectionism is starting to get attention: In January, they inked a deal with Tru Thoughts, an independent label out of Brighton, UK. After the EP comes out, the big plan for 2014 is to tour more — pack themselves into a 15-passenger van and find out if they get along as well on the road, stinky socks and all, as they do at home.

“We do have to corral ourselves back into working sometimes,” says Orr. “It is pretty amazing that with this many people we all really get along, but we do. We have fun, and we love each other. That part’s organic.”

“I think that’s part of what sets us apart from some electronic acts,” says Kopelman. “We’re seven people making something together. Not, you know, a mustachioed hipster on a laptop.”

www.theseshen.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkubxzD4gY

Theater Listings: February 19 – 25, 2014

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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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.

THEATER

OPENING

The Altruists Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.shewolftheater.com. $19-34. Opens Thu/20, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through March 8. She Wolf Theater performs Nicky Silver’s “politically incorrect” play that exposes the real motivations behind altruistic behavior.

Hundred Days Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $10-100. Previews Thu/20-Sat/22 and Feb 27-28, 8pm; Feb 26, 7pm. Opens March 1, 8pm. Runs Wed and Sun, 7pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through April 6. Z Space presents the world premiere of a folk rock odyssey conceived and created by Abigail and Shaun Bengson.

Twelfth Night Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, SF; www.calshakes.org. $20. Opens Thu/20, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sun, 8pm (also Sun/23 and March 2, 2pm). Through March 2. California Shakespeare Theater kicks off its 40th anniversary season with a touring performance of Shakespeare’s classic romance, featuring an all-female cast.

The World of Paradox Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.paradoxmagic.com. $12-15. Opens Mon/24, 8pm. Runs Mon, 8pm (no show March 10). Through April 7. Footloose presents David Facer in his solo show, a mix of magic and theater.

Yellow New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Opens Fri/21, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 23. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the Bay Area premiere of Del Shores’ Mississippi-set family drama.

BAY AREA

Lasso of Truth Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $37-58. Previews Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 7pm. Opens Tue/25, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also March 1 and 15, 2pm; March 6, 1pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 16. Marin Theatre Company performs Carson Kreitzer’s new play about the history of Wonder Woman.

The Lion and the Fox Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Previews Thu/20-Fri/21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 30. Central Works performs a prequel to its 2009 hit, Machiavelli’s The Prince, which depicts a face-off between Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia.

ONGOING

Children Are Forever (All Sales are Final!) Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 22. W. Kamau Bell directs Julia Jackson in her solo show about adoption.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (March 2, performance at 2pm; March 9, performance will be a reading of Charlie Varon’s Fish Sisters). Through March 16. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Hir Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Wed/19-Sat/22, 8pm (additional show Wed/19, 2:30pm); Sun/23, 2:30pm. Taylor Mac, creator of 2011’s five-hour six-director extravaganza The Lily’s Revenge, returns to the Magic Theatre with a much more straightforward, if not exactly straight, family comedy-drama in two acts. An Iraq vet named Isaac (Ben Euphrat) returns to his childhood home from the war, where his job was picking up body parts. His now touchy stomach is set off right away by the disturbing changes that have taken place while he was away. For one thing, the place is a dump. His father (a toddling, half-vacant, half-wily Mark Anderson Philips) has had a stroke that has left him an overgrown infant in thrall to his mother, Paige (a honeyed but brassy Nancy Opel), now come into her own as a liberated woman whose badge of honor is a derelict household out of all usual (patriarchal) order and discipline — and whose manner is just a little like that of an open-minded, half-savvy drag queen. Still more troubling to Isaac is his sister Maxine, now Max (an animated and winning Jax Jackson), in the midst of transitioning via regular Internet-purchased doses of testosterone. (Max insists on being addressed with gender-neutral, third-person pronouns ze, in place of she/he, and hir for him/her). Soon Isaac shores up his father’s position and mounts a counteroffensive to reclaim lost ground. An ideological turf war commences for control of the hearth and, by extension, the future of the family as an institution. Directed by Niegel Smith, the cast is competent but only intermittently effective at selling the high-octane comic premise. Jackson and Opel are the most consistent and persuasive. The play, meanwhile, has some good one-liners in addition to its intriguing premise, but gets mired in a broad and emotionally detached sitcom-like style, which can make the playwright’s more theme-oriented, expositional dialogue sound all the more jarring. Nevertheless, the play tackles a serious question: whether it is better to build on the flawed institutions one inherits and try to do better or scrap it all for something supposedly new. It has the good sense to refrain from an easy resolution of the socially and politically freighted dynamic it sets up, pointing a little vaguely to some third-way forward, outside the traditional family, in Max’s forestalled but anticipated flying of the coop. (Avila)

An Indian Summer Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.wehavemet.org. $20-40. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through March 1. Multi Ethnic Theater presents local playwright Charles Johnson’s parable of race relations in the Deep South of the 1980s. On a small stage split into two alternating scenes by a movable wall in director-designer Lewis Campbell’s set, two sets of working-class residents of rural Alabama, one white and one black, have their discrete worlds unexpectedly collide. Musician Charlie Ray (a less than convincing Kevin Wisney) is fresh from the pen and living with girlfriend Pearle (AJ Davenport). Plucking at his guitar, he dreams of getting some money to afford time in a recording studio. But his brother Bobby (Paul Rodriguez) has a way of talking him into sketchy schemes, which has Pearle worried, especially after a visit from the Sheriff (Richard Wenzel). For his part, Bobby is hoping to make some money to appease his pregnant wife, Sarah (Bree Swartwood), who wants Bobby to move her and their baby to Maine. Meanwhile, Junior (a forceful Bennie Lewis, alternating nights with Stuart Hall) is a feisty wheelchair bound African American man living in a small trailer. Junior’s friend Emmitt (Fabian Herd, alternating with Vernon Medearis) tries to convince him he should put his money in a bank rather than keeping it in his trailer — especially now that Junior is selling his land for a tidy sum — but Junior doesn’t trust banks. Next, Junior gets a letter from a lawyer claiming half the profit from the land sale on behalf of a long lost, half-white relative — the offspring of an illicit romance between Junior’s father and a white woman, related to Pearle. The situation, of course, spells trouble. But while we see it coming, there’s meant to be pathos in the tangled connections among these parallel stories. Unfortunately, the artificial nature of the plot makes it hard to credit, while the desultory pace and uneven acting make the going harder still. (Avila)

Jerusalem San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-100. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through March 8. SF Playhouse presents the West Coast premiere of English playwright Jez Butterworth’s West End and Broadway hit, a three-act revel led by a larger-than-life rebel, a stout boozed-up drug-dealer, habitual fabulist, and latter-day Digger of sorts named Johnny “Rooster” Byron (Brian Dykstra). The dominion of this Falstaffian giant is the English countryside outside his squalid trailer door, not far from Stonehenge, where he seems to incarnate a rather dissipated version of an ancient English independence, like one of the great mythical beings of rural lore. Aptly enough, it’s Saint George’s Day, the feast day of England’s national saint, but it’s not all a party this time around. Authorities have issued a final 24-hour eviction notice on Rooster’s tin door; there are luxury apartments in the works; and there’s concern in town about the underage teens who flock to Rooster like so many fledglings — one, in particular, has gone missing: Phaedra (Julia Belanoff), who we see at the very outset of the play donning a fairy costume and singing the title song, based on the Blake poem and England’s unofficial national anthem. The next 24 hours will be either the breaking point or the apotheosis for all Rooster has made himself out to be. In Butterworth’s big-eyed comedy, we are meant to feel a stake in this outcome whether we actually like Rooster or not — his independence, the scope of his life and vision, suggests the outer limit of possibility in an ever more disciplined and circumscribed world. Director Bill English (who also designed the impressive bucolic-trailer-park set) and his large cast (which includes a strong Ian Scott McGregor as longtime Rooster sidekick, Ginger) dive into the comedy with gusto. But somehow the drama, the larger stakes in the storyline, falls short. A certain requisite intensity and momentum are only fitfully achieved. Dykstra, as the expansive antihero, has the biggest burden here. And while he has an appealing swagger throughout, his wayward brogue and unconvincing bellicosity undercut the culmination of the play’s (admittedly somewhat overwrought) mythopoeic proportions. (Avila)

“The Love Edition: Love Bytes” Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; facebook.com/TheLoveEdition. $10-20. Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm. Bindlestiff performs six different tales about online dating, loneliness in the cyber age, Google stalking, and other modern-day matters of the heart.

Lovebirds Marsh San Francisco Studio, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 15. Theater artist and comedian Marga Gomez presents the world premiere of her 10th solo show, described as “a rollicking tale of incurable romantics.”

Napoli! ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $10-120. Opens Wed/19, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm; Tue, 7pm (March 4, show at 8pm). Through March 9. American Conservatory Theater performs a new translation of Eduardo de Filippo’s poignant Italian comedy.

The Oy of Sex Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $20-100. Sat/22, 5pm. Comedian Alicia Dattner performs her solo show, based on her stories from her own life and love addiction.

The Paris Letter New Conservatory Theater Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed/19-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Robin Baitz’s tale of a Wall Street powerhouse desperately trying to keep his sexual identity a secret.

The Scion Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-60. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 1. Brian Copeland’s fourth solo show takes on “privilege, murder, and sausage.”

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Extended through March 1. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blonde innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: the energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $60-90 (add-ons: casino chips, $5; dance lessons, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Through March 15. Boxcar Theatre presents Nick A. Olivero’s re-creation of a Prohibition-era saloon, resulting in an “immersive theatrical experience involving more than 35 actors, singers, and musicians.”

Ubu Roi Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through March 9. Cutting Ball Theater performs Alfred Jarry’s avant-garde parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, presented in a new translation by Cutting Ball artistic director Rob Melrose.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through March 9. The popular, kid-friendly show by Louis Pearl (aka “The Amazing Bubble Man”) returns to the Marsh.

BAY AREA

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-35. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 1. Don Reed’s new show offers more stories from his colorful upbringing in East Oakland in the 1960s and ’70s. More hilarious and heartfelt depictions of his exceptional parents, independent siblings, and his mostly African American but ethnically mixed working-class community — punctuated with period pop, Motown, and funk classics, to which Reed shimmies and spins with effortless grace. And of course there’s more too of the expert physical comedy and charm that made long-running hits of Reed’s last two solo shows, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel (both launched, like this newest, at the Marsh). Can You Dig It? reaches, for the most part, into the “early” early years, Reed’s grammar-school days, before the events depicted in East 14th or Kipling Hotel came to pass. But in nearly two hours of material, not all of it of equal value or impact, there’s inevitably some overlap and indeed some recycling. Note: review from an earlier run of the show. (Avila)

Escanabe in da Moonlight Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.theatrefirst.com. $10-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 8. TheatreFIRST performs Jeff Daniels’ raucous comedy.

Geezer Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 1. Geoff Hoyle moves his hit comedy about aging to the East Bay.

Gideon’s Knot Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 9. Aurora and director Jon Tracy’s Bay Area premiere of Johnna Adams’ two-hander features strong acting, strong enough almost to make us believe in its premise. A harried mother named Corryn (a terrific Jamie J. Jones) arrives at the empty middle-school classroom overseen by a distracted teacher, Heather (a subdued yet agitated Stacy Ross). Corryn, proud but somehow desperate, admits to having not slept. Heather initially doesn’t know why she’s there — until it becomes clear she’s the mother of a recent suicide, who has come to keep her prior appointment for a parent-teacher conference. The two women await the arrival of the absent principal, but Corryn presses for answers now to the circumstances surrounding her child’s final days, which included his suspension from school and a beating received at the hands of fellow students. Heather, who seems to be hiding some separate anxiety or grief of her own (and is, though what we don’t learn until nearly the end of the play), does her best to deflect any such conversation until the principal arrives but is soon embroiled in an argument with the headstrong and canny mother in front of her, a literature professor at a major university. Their dance centers on Corryn’s son’s last assignment, a short story, one his teacher sees as nothing but “hate-filled poisonous attacks,” but his mother calls “poetry.” In addition to the clash between a teacher’s authority and a mother’s regard, there’s a class component to these differing perspectives, we presume. Yet there is a real issue here, somewhere, about art and education and authority — or would be if it did not end up buried along with the young writer we never meet. Playwright Adams advances the dramatic tension by tacking this way and that around her subject, but loses sight of the shore meanwhile, as her characters debate whether or not the short story contains a virtuous accusation against an instance of child abuse, only to drop this crux a moment later in a hard-to-credit squeamishness on Corryn’s part over the potentially homoerotic longings of her deceased son. The final note lands in an even hokier key of mutual sorrow and understanding. (Avila)

The House That Will Not Stand Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-59. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and March 13, 2pm); Wed, 7pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 16. July 4, 1836: As a white New Orleans patriarch (Ray Reinhardt) passes from the scene, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, his longtime mistress, Beartrice (an imposing, memorable Lizan Mitchell), and their daughters (the charmingly varied trio of Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Flor De Liz Perez, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart) — all free women of color — vie for dominance while trying to secure their respective futures in Berkeley Rep’s sumptuous and beautifully acted world premiere. Nationally acclaimed playwright and Oakland native Marcus Gardley (And Jesus Moonwalked the Mississippi; This World in a Woman’s Hands) brews up a historically rich and revealing, as well as witty and fiery tale here, based on the practice of plaçage (common-law marriages between white men and black Creole women), grounding it in the large personalities of his predominately female characters — who include a nosy and angling intruder (played with subtlety by Petronia Paley) — and lacing it all with a delirious dose of magical realism via the voodoo charms of Beartrice’s slave, Makeda (Harriett D. Foy, who with Keith Townsend Obadike also contributes lush, atmospheric compositions to the proceedings). Gardley delves productively into the history overall, although he sometimes indulges it too much in awkward and ultimately unnecessary expository dialogue. When he allows his characters full scope for expression of their personalities and relationships, however, the dialogue sails by with brio and punch —something the powerhouse cast, shrewdly directed by Patricia McGregor, makes the most of throughout. (Avila)

An Ideal Husband Douglas Morrison Theatre, 22311 N. Third St, Hayward; www.dmtonline.org. $10-29. Fri-Sat and Feb 27, 8pm (also Sat/22, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through March 2. Douglas Morrison Theatre performs Scott Munson’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic, reset in 1959 Washington, DC.

The Laramie Project Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond; www.masquers.org. $22. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm. Masquers Playhouse performs the theatrical collage about the real-life hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard.

A Maze Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.justtheater.org. $20-25. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 9. Following a well-received run last summer at Live Oak Theater, Just Theater’s West Coast premiere of Pittsburgh-based playwright Rob Handel’s 2011 jigsaw drama gets a second life, courtesy of presenter Shotgun Players, in this remounting at Ashby Stage. Half the pleasure of a play like this is the unfolding of its serpentine plot, which becomes much more linear in the second half but initially seems to hover around three very disparate situations: 17-year-old Jessica (Frannie Morrison), recently escaped from eight years of captivity in the home and cellar of her kidnapper, prepares for an interview with a Barbara Walters-like TV journalist (Lauren Spencer); Oksana (Sarah Moser) and Paul (Harold Pierce), who head up their own highly successful rock band (suggestively titled the Pathetic Fallacy), are in the midst of a tough transition as Oksana checks Paul into rehab; and a fairytale King (Lasse Christiensen) responds to the Queen’s (Janis DeLucia) news that they are about to have an “heir” by beginning construction on a gigantic, seemingly endless maze emanating outward from their cozy den to the furthest reaches of the kingdom. Meanwhile, the director of the rehab clinic (Carl Holvick-Thomas) introduces Paul to another artist-resident, a fussy, eccentric author named Beeson (Clive Worsley) at work on a multi-volume graphic novel of maddening intricacy. As the three storylines begin to coalesce, the play asks us to consider questions about artistic liberty, authorship, responsibility, human connection — big themes like that. It does so in a mostly playful, only slightly eerie way, despite the grim central situation revolving around the bright and surprisingly outgoing Jessica. Employing almost the identical cast as last time, again under director Molly Aaronson-Gelb, the proceedings unfold with generally solid acting, if not always persuasive dialogue, at least where things are meant to be more or less realistic (to an extent, the fairytale segment comes across more compellingly for being strictly bound by the artificial nature of its narrative). There’s a quirky quality to the play, and the production, that amuses, even as the coy plotline bemuses. And much like an amusement park adventure, the play makes sure no one really gets lost. This is a play that is happy to tell you the various ways the central “maze” might be read metaphorically, for instance, so that everything is tidy and clear — like a fairytale, or a graphic novel — not so mysterious in the end, just tinged with a kind of comfortable melancholy. (Avila)

The Music Man Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-60. Fri and March 20, 7pm; Sat, 1 and 6pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through March 23. There’s trouble in River City! See it unfold amid all those trombones at Berkeley Playhouse.

Quality of Life Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Jane Anderson’s play about two couples coming to grips with losses in their lives.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Attractive Camp” Lost Weekend Video, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.eventbrite.com. Sun/23, 8pm. $10. Stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and short films with Kyle Mizono, Brendan Lynch, Amy Miller, George Chen, and more.

“Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now” This week: Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.bcfhereandnow.com, www.dancemission.com. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 7pm. $10-20. The festival, which runs through March 8, continues its 10th anniversary with “Next Wave Choreographers Showcase.”

“Bob Rubin IS the Winter Olympics” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. Sat/22, 8 and 10pm. $17. The stand-up comedian performs.

“The Buddy Club Children’s Shows” Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Way, SF; www.thebuddyclub.com. Sun/23, 11am-noon. $8. With juggler, magician, and tongue-twister Bob Kann.

Camerata Vocale Sine Nomine St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, 1111 O’Farrell, SF; www.sfbg.org. Tue/25, 8pm. $10. SF Boys Chorus and Ragazzi Boys Chorus present the Havana, Cuba-based men’s chamber chorus, here on its first visit to the US.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat/22, March 1, 8, 16, 22, and 30, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Chita: A Legendary Celebration” Venetian Room, Fairmont San Francisco, 950 Mason, SF; www.bayareacabaret.org. Sun/23, 3 and 7:30pm. $43-48. Two-time Tony winner Chita Rivera stars in this solo concert event highlighting memorable moments from her career.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Thu/20, 8pm. $7-20. Stand-up with Diane Amos, Zahra Noorbakhsh, Ian Williams, Nathan Habib, and Lisa Geduldig.

“Entertaining Mr. Sloane” Garage, 725 Bryant, SF; facebook.com/vintagewestproductions. Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. $25. Vintage West Productions presents a 50th anniversary performance of Joe Orton’s black comedy.

“Ethel Merman Experience” Beaux, 2344 Market, SF; www.beauxsf.com. Tue/25, 10pm. Free. Ethel Merman (aka Mark Sargent) fronts this one-of-a-kind rock ‘n’ roll cover band.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: Paula West, Thu/20-Fri/21, 8pm; Sat/22-Sun/23, 7pm, $35-50.

“Die Fledermaus” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm (also Sat/22, 2pm); Sun/23, 2pm. $15-59. Lamplighters Music Theatre (noted for its Gilbert and Sullivan productions) performs Johann Strauss’ “bubbly tale of revenge and temptation.”

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. March 7 and April 4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“Purple Paoli Memorial Hoopla” Brava Theatre, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. Mon/24, 7:30pm. $20-50. San Francisco clowns gather to perform and remember Bay Area circus legend Paoli Lacy.

“The Queen of Hearts” Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.divafest.info. Wed/19, 8pm. $25-150. Alice in Wonderland-themed performance fundraiser for the 13th annual DIVAfest.

“Solo Sundays: The Past That Haunts Us” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun/23, 7pm. $12. With solo performances by Peter L. Stein, XiaoJuan Shu, and Candace Roberts.

“WritersCorps Live” Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; sfartscommission.org/WC. Thu/20, 6-7pm. Free. Award-winning author NoViolet Bulawayo reads alongside WritersCorps youth poets and teaching artists.

BAY AREA

Café Flamenco Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding, Alameda; www.rhythmix.org. Sun/23, 7pm. $10-20. Flamenco music and dance with Caminos Flamencos and special guests.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 3pm. $30-68. The NYC-based company performs Indigo Rose (1998), Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue (2007), and Necessity, Again (2012).

“I Look Like an Egg, But I Identify as a Cookie” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/24-Tue/25, 8pm. $20. Heather Gold brings her hit comedy back to the East Bay.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

“Poetry Express” Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University, Berk; poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com. Mon, 7pm. Free. Ongoing. This week: fruits and vegetables theme night, plus open mic. *

Film Listings: February 19 -25, 2014

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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

OPENING

Barefoot Tonight, the part of manic pixie dream girl will be played by Evan Rachel Wood. (For another MPDG option, see The Pretty One, below.) (1:30)

Hank: Five Years from the Brink This latest doc from Joe Berlinger (the Paradise Lost trilogy) follows the template favored by Errol Morris in films like 2003’s The Fog of War and last year’s The Unknown Known, surrounding an extended sit-down interview with news footage and home movies reflecting on a political subject’s career. On the hot seat is former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who walks us through the 2008 financial crisis (Jon Stewart referred to him as “Baron Von Moneypants”) with the benefit of hindsight, and a certain amount of self-effacing humor. Whether or not you agree with the guy’s actions, he’s actually pretty likeable, and Berlinger’s decision to include interviews with Paulson’s no-nonsense wife, Wendy, adds a human angle to the decisions behind the “too big to fail” fiasco. (1:25) Roxie. (Eddy)

In Secret Zola’s much-adapted 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is the source for this rather tepid period melodrama with Elizabeth Olsen as that character, dumped by the seafaring father she never sees again on the doorstep of a joyless aunt (Jessica Lange). The latter pretty much forces Thérèse to eventually marry her own son, sickly Camille (Tom Felton), and even a move to Paris does little to brighten our heroine’s dreary existence. Until, that is, she meets Camille’s contrastingly virile office coworker Laurent (Oscar Isaac), with whom she’s soon more-or-less graphically doing all the sweaty sexy thangs Zola could only hint at. When their passion becomes more than they can bear maintaining “in secret,” they find themselves considering murder as one way out. The original author’s clever plot mechanizations create some suspense in the late going. But despite good performances around her, Olsen doesn’t make her heroine very interesting, and director-adaptor Charlie Stratton is all too faithful to the depressing nature of this classic tale — visually the film too often seems to be crouching beneath a heavy, damp cloak, proud to be saving on candle wax. (1:47) (Harvey)

Love & Air Sex Convinced his life has gone nowhere since/because they broke up, Stan (Michael Stahl-David) hops the next plane to Austin upon hearing that his ex girlfriend Cathy (Ashley Bell from the Last Exorcism movies) is headed there to visit BFF Kara (Sara Paxton), the ex-gf of his BFF Jeff (Zach Cregger). Cathy isn’t over him, either. But the other duo are apparently really, really over each other, as they have a full weekend of hopeful revenge sex with as-yet-unmet strangers planned out. Jeff is taking it even further by participating in the Alamo Drafthouse’s Air Sex Championship. (This is an actual event, and better yet, it tours. Best name for a team competing against Jeff: Insane Clown Pussy.) This raunchy independent comedy doesn’t stray too far from formula, coming up with a Mr. (Justin Arnold as a romance-novel-grade old school Southern gentleman) and Ms. Right (Addison Timlin, playing a Fiona Apple-like song with cello) for heroine and hero to be distracted by. Never mind that you have to accept two almost churchy-nice types like Cathy and Stan would be friends with the incredibly crass, filter-free likes of Kara and Jeff — if you expect credibility from a rom-com, you are barking up the wrong genre. Bryan Posner’s film is a bit hit-and-miss, but the cast is excellent, and there are a fair share of hilarious bits. Special honors go to native Austinite Marshall Allman as Ralphie, a very dim bulb with one extra-large virtue. (1:31) Roxie. (Harvey)

Omar Palestine’s contender for Best Foreign Language Film is a mighty strong one, with a top-notch script and direction by previous nominee Hany Abu-Assad (2006’s Paradise Now). After he’s captured following the shooting of an Israeli soldier, the titular freedom fighter (a compelling Adam Bakri) is given an unsavory choice by his handler (Waleed F. Zuaiter): rot in jail for 90 years, or become an informant (or “collaborator”) and rat out his co-conspirators. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Omar is in love with Nadia (Leem Lubany, blessed with a thousand-watt smile), the younger sister of his lifelong friend, Tarek (Iyad Hoorani), who planned the attack. Betrayals are imminent, but who will come out ahead, and at what price? Shot with gritty urgency — our hero is constantly on the run, ducking down alleys, scaling walls, scrambling across rooftops, sliding down drainpipes, etc. — Omar brings authenticity to its embattled characters and setting. A true thriller, right up until the last shot. (1:38) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Pompeii Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington stars as a gladiator in this action epic about Mount Vesuvius erupting all over you-know-which ancient city. (1:45)

The Pretty One Examined from a certain remove, the premise of writer-director Jenée LaMarque’s first feature is a pretty bizarre exercise in wish fulfillment. Zoe Kazan plays a pair of identical twins who, if you swirled their DNA together, would make up one pretty decent manic pixie dream girl, but separate out into perfectly drawn foils: awkward, stay-at-home oddball Laurel and LA professional hipster Audrey — aka the pretty one, who left their small hometown while Laurel hung back to look after their father in the long wake of their mother’s death. Laurel is clearly stuck. But it’s unfortunate that it takes a fiery car wreck that kills Audrey and leaves her body burned beyond recognition, while flinging Laurel to safety, to get her to move forward — which she does by letting everyone believe that she died and taking on Audrey’s identity, as well as her job, her BFF, the mortgage payments on her two-unit bungalow in L.A., and her tenant, scruffy charmer Basel (New Girl‘s Jake Johnson). Turning these circumstances into romantic comedy gold doesn’t sound likely. But in LaMarque’s sweet, funny, slightly off-center film, the oddity of the situation begins to give way, or rather to make some room for an odd girl to fumble around in. The glare of the artifice dims a bit, revealing a peculiar, affecting manifestation of grief and loss. And while LaMarque cuts a few corners in steering her protagonist toward a life of her own, Laurel and Basel’s engaging, comic rapport, as they begin keeping company, is pleasurable to watch. (1:30) Metreon. (Rapoport)

3 Days to Kill McG directs, Luc Besson produces, and Kevin Costner plays the dad-by-day, Secret-Service-agent badass by night. What, Liam Neeson had something better to do? (1:40)

The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki announced that Oscar nominee The Wind Rises would be his final film before retiring — though he later amended that declaration, as he’s fond of doing, so who knows. At any rate, it’d be a shame if this was the Japanese animation master’s final film before retirement; not only does it lack the whimsy of his signature efforts (2001’s Spirited Away, 1997’s Princess Mononoke), it’s been overshadowed by controversy — not entirely surprising, since it’s about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed war planes (built by slave labor) in World War II-era Japan. Surprisingly, a pacifist message is established early on; as a young boy, his mother tells him, “Fighting is never justified,” and in a dream, Italian engineer Giovanni Caproni assures him “Airplanes are not tools for war.” But that statement doesn’t last long; Caproni visits Jiro in his dreams as his career takes him from Japan to Germany, where he warns the owlish young designer that “aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction.” You don’t say. A melodramatic romantic subplot injects itself into all the plane-talk on occasion, but — despite all that political hullabaloo — The Wind Rises is more tedious than anything else. (2:06) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

ONGOING

About Last Night (1:40)

American Hustle David O. Russell’s American Hustle is like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct. He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses; she’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward and gave herself a bombshell makeover. The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go. She’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of Mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians, hustling a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) in the process. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting here is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity. (2:17) (Harvey)

August: Osage County Considering the relative infrequency of theater-to-film translations today, it’s a bit of a surprise that Tracy Letts had two movies made from his plays before he even got to Broadway. Bug and Killer Joe proved a snug fit for director William Friedkin (in 2006 and 2011, respectively), but both plays were too outré for the kind of mainstream success accorded 2007’s August: Osage County, which won the Pulitzer, ran 18 months on Broadway, and toured the nation. As a result, August was destined — perhaps doomed — to be a big movie, the kind that shoehorns a distracting array of stars into an ensemble piece, playing jes’ plain folk. But what seemed bracingly rude as well as somewhat traditional under the proscenium lights just looks like a lot of reheated Country Gothic hash, and the possibility of profundity you might’ve been willing to consider before is now completely off the menu. If you haven’t seen August before (or even if you have), there may be sufficient fun watching stellar actors chew the scenery with varying degrees of panache — Meryl Streep (who else) as gorgon matriarch Violet Weston; Sam Shepard as her long-suffering spouse; Julia Roberts as pissed-off prodigal daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), etc. You know the beats: Late-night confessions, drunken hijinks, disastrous dinners, secrets (infidelity, etc.) spilling out everywhere like loose change from moth-eaten trousers. The film’s success story, I suppose, is Roberts: She seems very comfortable with her character’s bitter anger, and the four-letter words tumble past those jumbo lips like familiar friends. On the downside, there’s Streep, who’s a wizard and a wonder as usual yet also in that mode supporting the naysayers’ view that such conspicuous technique prevents our getting lost in her characters. If Streep can do anything, then logic decrees that includes being miscast. (2:10) (Harvey)

Dallas Buyers Club Dallas Buyers Club is the first all-US feature from Jean-Marc Vallée. He first made a splash in 2005 with C.R.A.Z.Y., which seemed an archetype of the flashy, coming-of-age themed debut feature. Vallée has evolved beyond flashiness, or maybe since C.R.A.Z.Y. he just hasn’t had a subject that seemed to call for it. Which is not to say Dallas is entirely sober — its characters partake from the gamut of altering substances, over-the-counter and otherwise. But this is a movie about AIDS, so the purely recreational good times must eventually crash to an end. Which they do pretty quickly. We first meet Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) in 1986, a Texas good ol’ boy endlessly chasing skirts and partying nonstop. Not feeling quite right, he visits a doctor, who informs him that he is HIV-positive. His response is “I ain’t no faggot, motherfucker” — and increased partying that he barely survives. Afterward, he pulls himself together enough to research his options, and bribes a hospital attendant into raiding its trial supply of AZT for him. But Ron also discovers the hard way what many first-generation AIDS patients did — that AZT is itself toxic. He ends up in a Mexican clinic run by a disgraced American physician (Griffin Dunne) who recommends a regime consisting mostly of vitamins and herbal treatments. Ron realizes a commercial opportunity, and finds a business partner in willowy cross-dresser Rayon (Jared Leto). When the authorities keep cracking down on their trade, savvy Ron takes a cue from gay activists in Manhattan and creates a law evading “buyers club” in which members pay monthly dues rather than paying directly for pharmaceutical goods. It’s a tale that the scenarists (Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack) and director steep in deep Texan atmospherics, and while it takes itself seriously when and where it ought, Dallas Buyers Club is a movie whose frequent, entertaining jauntiness is based in that most American value: get-rich-quick entrepreneurship. (1:58) (Harvey)

Endless Love Just about everything about this very, very loose rework of the 1981 Franco Zeffirelli schmaltzathon-slash-cinematic stab at Scott Spencer’s well-regarded novel — apart from Alex Pettyfer’s infallible chest — is endlessly laughable. The Zeffirelli effort was dedicated to the nation’s sexualization of all things Brooke Shields, with an added Reagan-era rebuff of perceived loosey-goosey boomer mores. Mixed messages, certainly, but that was a different time and place, and instead of viewing youthful sexual obsession-cum-romance as an almost-anarchic force of nature, threatening life, limb, and everything we hold dear, this venture defuses much of that dangerous passion and turns it all into a fairly weak broth of watered-down Romeo and Juliet. Here, Jade (Gabriella Wilde) is the privileged, golden-girl bookworm who has no social life — her family, headed by control-freak doctor dad (Bruce Greenwood), has been preoccupied with the care and finally passing of her beloved, cancer-striken brother. Enter hunky po’ boy David (Pettyfer), who finds a way into a lonely girl’s heart, with, natch, his social savvy and fulsome pecs. Standing in the way of endless love? A great medical internship for Jade and a bossy pants father who worked very hard to get that internship for her. Pfft. Love finds its work-around amid those low stakes, and we’re all left marveling at Wilde’s posh, coltishly thin limbs and Pettyfer’s depthless dimples. (1:44) (Chun)

Frozen (1:48)

Gloria The titular figure in Sebastian Lelio’s film is a Santiago divorcee and white collar worker (Paulina Garcia) pushing 60, living alone in a condo apartment — well, almost alone, since like Inside Llewyn Davis, this movie involves the frequent, unwanted company of somebody else’s cat. (That somebody is an upstairs neighbor whose solo wailings against cruel fate disturb her sleep.) Her two children are grown up and preoccupied with their adult lives. Not quite ready for the glue factory yet, Gloria often goes to a disco for the “older crowd,” dancing by herself if she has to, but still hoping for some romantic prospects. She gets them in the form of Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), who’s more recently divorced but gratifyingly infatuated with her. Unfortunately, he’s also let his daughters and ex-wife remain ominously dependent on him, not just financially but in every emotional crisis that affects their apparently crisis-filled lives. The extent to which Gloria lets him into her life is not reciprocated, and she becomes increasingly aware how distant her second-place priority status is whenever Rodolfo’s other loved ones snap their fingers. There’s not a lot of plot but plenty of incident and insight to this character study, a portrait of a “spinster” that neither slathers on the sentimental uplift or piles on melodramatic victimizations. Instead, Gloria is memorably, satisfyingly just right. (1:50) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Gravity “Life in space is impossible,” begins Gravity, the latest from Alfonso Cuarón (2006’s Children of Men). Egghead Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is well aware of her precarious situation after a mangled satellite slams into her ship, then proceeds to demolition-derby everything (including the International Space Station) in its path. It’s not long before she’s utterly, terrifyingly alone, and forced to unearth near-superhuman reserves of physical and mental strength to survive. Bullock’s performance would be enough to recommend Gravity, but there’s more to praise, like the film’s tense pacing, spare-yet-layered script (Cuarón co-wrote with his son, Jonás), and spectacular 3D photography — not to mention George Clooney’s warm supporting turn as a career astronaut who loves country music almost as much as he loves telling stories about his misadventures. (1:31) (Eddy)

The Great Beauty The latest from Paolo Sorrentino (2008’s Il Divo) arrives as a high-profile contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, already annointed a masterpiece in some quarters, and duly announcing itself as such in nearly every grandiose, aesthetically engorged moment. Yes, it seems to say, you are in the presence of this auteur’s masterpiece. But it’s somebody else’s, too. The problem isn’t just that Fellini got there first, but that there’s room for doubt whether Sorrentino’s homage actually builds on or simply imitates its model. La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) are themselves swaying, jerry-built monuments, exhileratingly messy and debatably profound. But nothing quite like them had been seen before, and they did define a time of cultural upheaval — when traditional ways of life were being plowed under by a loud, moneyed, heedless modernity that for a while chose Rome as its global capital. Sorrentino announces his intention to out-Fellini Fellini in an opening sequence so strenuously flamboyant it’s like a never-ending pirouette performed by a prima dancer with a hernia. There’s statuary, a women’s choral ensemble, an on-screen audience applauding the director’s baffled muse Toni Servillo, standing in for Marcello Mastroianni — all this and more in manic tracking shots and frantic intercutting, as if sheer speed alone could supply contemporary relevancy. Eventually The Great Beauty calms down a bit, but still its reason for being remains vague behind the heavy curtain of “style.” (2:22) (Harvey)

Her Morose and lonely after a failed marriage, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) drifts through an appealingly futuristic Los Angeles (more skyscrapers, less smog) to his job at a place so hipster-twee it probably will exist someday: beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he dictates flowery missives to a computer program that scrawls them onto paper for paying customers. Theodore’s scripting of dialogue between happy couples, as most of his clients seem to be, only enhances his sadness, though he’s got friends who care about him (in particular, Amy Adams as Amy, a frumpy college chum) and he appears to have zero money woes, since his letter-writing gig funds a fancy apartment equipped with a sweet video-game system. Anyway, women are what gives Theodore trouble — and maybe by extension, writer-director Spike Jonze? — so he seeks out the ultimate gal pal: Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the year’s best disembodied performance. Thus begins a most unusual relationship, but not so unusual; Theodore’s friends don’t take any issue with the fact that his new love is a machine. Hey, in Her‘s world, everyone’s deeply involved with their chatty, helpful, caring, always-available OS — why wouldn’t Theo take it to the next level? Inevitably, of course, complications arise. If Her‘s romantic arc feels rather predictable, the film acquits itself in other ways, including boundlessly clever production-design touches that imagine a world with technology that’s (mostly) believably evolved from what exists today. Also, the pants they wear in the future? Must be seen to be believed. (2:00) Castro. (Eddy)

Inside Llewyn Davis In the Coen Brothers’ latest, Oscar Isaac as the titular character is well on his way to becoming persona non grata in 1961 NYC — particularly in the Greenwich Village folk music scene he’s an ornery part of. He’s broke, running out of couches to crash on, has recorded a couple records that have gone nowhere, and now finds out he’s impregnated the wife (Carey Mulligan) and musical partner of one among the few friends (Justin Timberlake) he has left. She’s furious with herself over this predicament, but even more furious at him. This ambling, anecdotal tale finds Llewyn running into one exasperating hurdle after another as he burns his last remaining bridges, not just in Manhattan but on a road trip to Chicago undertaken with an overbearing jazz musician (John Goodman) and his enigmatic driver (Garrett Hedlund) to see a club impresario (F. Murray Abraham). This small, muted, droll Coens exercise is perfectly handled in terms of performance and atmosphere, with pleasures aplenty in its small plot surprises, myriad humorous idiosyncrasies, and T. Bone Burnett’s sweetened folk arrangements. But whether it actually has anything to say about its milieu (a hugely important Petri dish for later ’60s political and musical developments), or adds up to anything more profound than an beautifully executed shaggy-dog story, will be a matter of personal taste — or perhaps of multiple viewings. (1:45) (Harvey)

Labor Day Sweet little home repairs, quickie car tune-ups, sensual pie-making, and sexed-up chili cookery — Labor Day seems to be taking its chick-flick cues from Porn For Women, Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative’s puckish gift-booklet that strives to capture women’s real desires: namely, for vacuuming, folded laundry, and patient listening from their chosen hunks of beefcake. Let’s call it domestic close encounters of the most pragmatic, and maybe most realistic, kind. But that seems to sail over the heads of all concerned with Labor Day. Working with Joyce Maynard’s novel, director-screenwriter Jason Reitman largely dispenses with the wit that washes through Juno (2007) and Up in the Air (2009) and instead chooses to peer at his actors through the seriously overheated, poetically impressionistic prism of Terrence Malick … if Malick were tricked into making a Nicholas Sparks movie. Single mom Adele (Kate Winslet) is down in the dumps over multiple miscarriages and her husband’s (Clark Gregg) departure. Son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) becomes her caretaker of sorts — thus, when escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin) forces the mother-and-son team to give him a ride and a hideout, it’s both a blessing and a curse, especially because the hardened tough guy turns out to be a compulsively domestic, hardworking ubermensch of a Marlboro Man, able to bake up a peach pie and teach Henry to throw a baseball, all within the course of a long Labor Day weekend. Hapless Adele is helpless to resist him, particularly after some light bondage and plenty of manly nurturing. Ultimately this masochistic fantasy about the ultimate, if forbidden, family man — and the delights of the Stockholm Syndrome — is much harder to swallow than a spoonful of homemade chili, despite its strong cast. (1:51) (Chun)

The Lego Movie (1:41)

Like Father, Like Son A yuppie Tokyo couple are raising their only child in workaholic dad’s image, applying the pressure to excel at an early age. Imagine their distress when the hospital phones with some unpleasant news: It has only just been learned that a nurse mixed up their baby with another, with the result that both families have been raising the “wrong” children these six years. Polite, forced interaction with the other clan — a larger nuclear unit as warm, disorganized, and financially hapless as the first is formal, regimented and upwardly mobile — reveals that both sides have something to learn about parenting. This latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda (1998’s After Life, 2004’s Nobody Knows, 2008’s Still Walking) is, as usual, low-key, beautifully observed, and in the end deeply moving. (2:01) (Harvey)

The Monuments Men The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” goes both ways. On paper, The Monuments Men — inspired by the men who recovered art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and directed by George Clooney, who co-wrote and stars alongside a sparkling ensemble cast (Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh “Earl of Grantham” Bonneville, and Bill Fucking Murray) — rules. Onscreen, not so much. After they’re recruited to join the cause, the characters fan out across France and Germany following various leads, a structural choice that results in the film’s number one problem: it can’t settle on a tone. Men can’t decide if it wants to be a sentimental war movie (as in an overlong sequence in which Murray’s character weeps at the sound of his daughter’s recorded voice singing “White Christmas”); a tragic war movie (some of those marquee names die, y’all); a suspenseful war movie (as the men sneak into dangerous territory with Michelangelo on their minds); or a slapstick war comedy (look out for that land mine!) The only consistent element is that the villains are all one-note — and didn’t Inglourious Basterds (2009) teach us that nothing elevates a 21st century-made World War II flick like an eccentric bad guy? There’s one perfectly executed scene, when reluctant partners Balaban and Murray discover a trove of priceless paintings hidden in plain sight. One scene, out of a two-hour movie, that really works. The rest is a stitched-together pile of earnest intentions that suggests a complete lack of coherent vision. Still love you, Clooney, but you can do better — and this incredible true story deserved way better. (1:58) (Eddy)

Nebraska Alexander Payne may be unique at this point in that he’s in a position of being able to make nothing but small, human, and humorous films with major-studio money on his own terms. It’s hazardous to make too much of a movie like Nebraska, because it is small — despite the wide Great Plains landscapes shot in a wide screen format — and shouldn’t be entered into with overinflated or otherwise wrong-headed expectations. Still, a certain gratitude is called for. Nebraska marks the first time Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor weren’t involved in the script, and the first one since their 1996 Citizen Ruth that isn’t based on someone else’s novel. (Hitherto little-known Bob Nelson’s original screenplay apparently first came to Payne’s notice a decade ago, but getting put off in favor of other projects.) It could easily have been a novel, though, as the things it does very well (internal thought, sense of place, character nuance) and the things it doesn’t much bother with (plot, action, dialogue) are more in line with literary fiction than commercial cinema. Elderly Woody T. Grant (Bruce Dern) keeps being found grimly trudging through snow and whatnot on the outskirts of Billings, Mont., bound for Lincoln, Neb. Brain fuzzed by age and booze, he’s convinced he’s won a million dollars and needs to collect it him there, though eventually it’s clear that something bigger than reality — or senility, even — is compelling him to make this trek. Long-suffering younger son David (Will Forte) agrees to drive him in order to simply put the matter to rest. This fool’s mission acquires a whole extended family-full of other fools when father and son detour to the former’s podunk farming hometown. Nebraska has no moments so funny or dramatic they’d look outstanding in excerpt; low-key as they were, 2009’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants had bigger set pieces and narrative stakes. But like those movies, this one just ambles along until you realize you’re completely hooked, all positive emotional responses on full alert. (1:55) (Harvey)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Animated” Five nominees — plus a trio of “highly commended” additional selections — fill this program. If you saw Frozen in the theater, you’ve seen Get a Horse!, starring old-timey Mickey Mouse and some very modern moviemaking techniques. There’s also Room on the Broom, based on a children’s book about a kindly witch who’s a little too generous when it comes to befriending outcast animals (much to the annoyance of her original companion, a persnickety cat). Simon Pegg narrates, and Gillian Anderson voices the red-headed witch; listen also for Mike Leigh regulars Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall. Japanese Possessions is based on even older source material: a spooky legend that discarded household objects can gain the power to cause mischief. A good-natured fix-it man ducks into an abandoned house during a rainstorm, only to be confronted with playful parasols, cackling kimono fabric, and a dragon constructed out of kitchen junk. The most artistically striking nominee is Feral, a dialogue-free, impressionistic tale of a foundling who resists attempts to civilize him. But my top pick is another dialogue-free entry: Mr. Hublot, the steampunky tale of an inventor whose regimented life is thrown into disarray when he adopts a stray robot dog, which soon grows into a comically enormous companion. It’s cute without being cloying, and the universe it creates around its characters is cleverly detailed, right down to the pictures on Hublot’s walls. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Live Action” With the exception of one entry — wryly comedic The Voorman Problem, starring Sherlock‘s Martin Freeman as a prison doctor who has a most unsettling encounter with an inmate who believes he’s a god — children are a unifying theme among this year’s live-action nominees. Finnish Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?, the shortest in the bunch, follows a cheerfully sloppy family’s frantic morning as they scramble to get themselves to a wedding. Danish Helium skews a little sentimental in its tale of a hospital janitor who makes up stories about a fanciful afterlife (way more fun than heaven) for the benefit of a sickly young patient. Spanish That Wasn’t Me focuses on a different kind of youth entirely: a child soldier in an unnamed African nation, whose brutal encounter with a pair of European doctors leads him down an unexpected path. Though it feels more like a sequence lifted from a longer film rather than a self-contained short, French Just Before Losing Everything is the probably the strongest contender here. The tale of a woman (Léa Drucker) who decides to take her two children and leave her dangerously abusive husband, it unfolds with real-time suspense as she visits her supermarket job one last time to deal with mundane stuff (collecting her last paycheck, turning in her uniform) before the trio can flee to safety. If they gave out Oscars for short-film acting, Drucker would be tough to beat; her performance balances steely determination and extreme fear in equally hefty doses. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Documentary (presented in two separata programs)”

Philomena Judi Dench gives this twist on a real-life scandal heart, soul, and a nuanced, everyday heft. Her ideal, ironic foil is Steve Coogan, playing an upper-crusty irreverent snob of an investigative journalist. Judging by her tidy exterior, Dench’s title character is a perfectly ordinary Irish working-class senior, but she’s haunted by the past, which comes tumbling out one day to her daughter: As an unwed teenager, she gave birth to a son at a convent. She was forced to work there, unpaid; as supposed penance, the baby was essentially sold to a rich American couple against her consent. Her yarn reaches disgraced reporter Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), who initially turns his nose up at the tale’s piddling “human interest” angle, but slowly gets drawn in by the unexpected twists and turns of the story — and likely the possibility of taking down some evil nuns — as well as seemingly naive Philomena herself, with her delight in trash culture, frank talk about sex, and simple desire to see her son and know that he thought, once in a while, of her. It turns out Philomena’s own sad narrative has as many improbable turnarounds as one of the cheesy romance novels she favors, and though this unexpected twosome’s quest for the truth is strenuously reworked to conform to the contours of buddy movie-road trip arc that we’re all too familiar with, director Stephen Frears’ warm, light-handed take on the gentle class struggles going on between the writer and his subject about who’s in control of the story makes up for Philomena‘s determined quest for mass appeal. (1:35) (Chun)

Ride Along By sheer dint of his ability to push his verbosity and non-threatening physicality into that nerd zone between smart and clueless, intelligent and irritating, Kevin Hart may be poised to become Hollywood’s new comedy MVP. In the case of Ride Along, it helps that Ice Cube has comic talents, too — proven in the Friday movies as well as in 2012’s 21 Jump Street — as the straight man who can actually scowl and smile at the same time. Together, in Ride Along, they bring the featherweight pleasures of Rush Hour-style odd-couple chortles. Hart is Ben, a gamer geek and school security guard shooting to become the most wrinkly student at the police academy. He looks up to hardened, street-smart cop James (Cube), brother of his new fiancée, Angela (Tika Sumpter). Naturally, instead of simply blessing the nuptials, the tough guy decides to haze the shut-in, disabusing him of any illusions he might have of being his equal. More-than-equal talents like Laurence Fishburne and John Leguizamo are pretty much wasted here — apart from Fishburne’s ultra lite impression of Matrix man Morpheus — but if you don’t expect much more than the chuckles eked out of Ride Along‘s commercials, you won’t be too disappointed by this nontaxing journey. (1:40) (Chun)

RoboCop Truly, there was no need to remake 1987’s RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s smart, biting sci-fi classic that deploys heaps of stealth satire beneath its ultraviolent imagery. But the inevitable do-over is here, and while it doesn’t improve on what came before, it’s not a total lost cause, either. Thank Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, whose thrilling Elite Squad films touch on similar themes of corruption (within police, political, and media realms), and some inspired casting, including Samuel L. Jackson as the uber-conservative host of a futuristic talk show. Though the suit that restores life to fallen Detroit cop Alex Murphy is, naturally, a CG wonder, the guy inside the armor — played by The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman — is less dynamic. In fact, none of the characters, even those portrayed by actors far more lively than Kinnaman (Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley), are developed beyond the bare minimum required to serve RoboCop‘s plot, a mixed-message glob of dirty cops, money-grubbing corporations, the military-industrial complex, and a few too many “Is he a man…or a machine?” moments. But in its favor: Though it’s PG-13 (boo), it’s also shot in 2D (yay). (1:50) (Eddy)

Saving Mr. Banks Having promised his daughters that he would make a movie of their beloved Mary Poppins books, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) has laid polite siege to author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) for over 20 years. Now, in the early 1960s, she has finally consented to discuss the matter in Los Angeles — albeit with great reluctance, and only because royalty payments have dried up to the point where she might have to sell her London home. Bristling at being called “Pam” and everything else in this sunny SoCal and relentlessly cheery Mouse House environ, the acidic English spinster regards her creation as sacred. The least proposed changes earn her horrified dismissal, and the very notion of having Mary and company “prancing and chirping” out songs amid cartoon elements is taken as blasphemy. This clash of titans could have made for a barbed comedy with satirical elements, but god forbid this actual Disney production should get so cheeky. Instead, we get the formulaically dramatized tale of a shrew duly tamed by all-American enterprise, with flashbacks to the inevitable past traumas (involving Colin Farrell as a beloved but alcoholic ne’er-do-well father) that require healing of Travers’ wounded inner child by the magic of the Magic Kingdom. If you thought 2004’s Finding Neverland was contrived feel-good stuff, you’ll really choke on the spoons full of sugar force-fed here. (2:06) Castro. (Harvey)

The Square Like the single lit candle at the very start of The Square — a flicker of hope amid the darkness of Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship — the initial street scenes of the leader’s Feb. 11, 2011, announcement that he was stepping down launch Jehane Noujaim’s documentary on a euphoric note. It’s a lot to take in: the evocative shots of Tahrir Square, the graffiti on the streets, the movement’s troubadours, and the faces of the activists she follows — the youthful Ahmed Hassan, British-reared Kite Runner (2007) actor-turned-citizen journalist Khalid Abdalla, and Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Magdy Ashour, among them. Yet that first glimmer of joy and unity among the diverse individuals who toppled a dictatorship was only the very beginning of a journey — which the Egyptian American Noujaim does a remarkable job documenting, in all its twists, turns, multiple protests, and voices. Unflinching albeit even-handed footage of the turnabouts, hypocrisies, and injustices committed by the Brotherhood, powers-that-be, the army, and the police during the many actions occurring between 2011 and the 2013 removal of Mohammed Morsi will stay with you, including the sight of a tank plowing down protestors with murderous force and soldiers firing live rounds at activists armed only with stones. “We found ourselves loving each other without realizing it,” says Hassan of those heady first days, and Noujaim brings you right there and to their aftermath, beautifully capturing ordinary people coming together, eating, joking, arguing, feeling empowered and discouraged, forming unlikely friendships, setting up makeshift hospitals on the street, and risking everything, in this powerful document of an unfolding real-life epic. (1:44) (Chun)

Stranger by the Lake Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is an attractive young French guy spending his summer days hanging at the local gay beach, where he strikes up a platonic friendship with chunky older loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumcao). Still, the latter is obviously hurt when Franck practically gets whiplash neck swiveling at the sight of Michel (Christophe Paou), an old-school gay fantasy figure — think Sam Elliott in 1976’s Lifeguard, complete with Marlboro Man ‘stache and twinkling baby blues. No one else seems to be paying attention when Franck sees his lust object frolicking in the surf with an apparent boyfriend, one that doesn’t surface again after some playful “dunking” gets rather less playful. Eventually the police come around in the form of Inspector Damroder (Jerome Chappatte), but Franck stays mum — he isn’t sure what exactly he saw. Or maybe it’s that he’s quite sure he’s happy how things turned out, now that sex-on-wheels Michel is his sorta kinda boyfriend. You have to suspend considerable disbelief to accept that our protagonist would risk potentially serious danger for what seems pretty much a glorified fuck-buddy situation. But Alain Guiraudie’s meticulously schematic thriller- which limits all action to the terrain between parking lot and shore, keeping us almost wholly ignorant of the characters’ regular lives — repays that leap with an absorbing, ingenious structural rigor. Stranger is Hitchcockian, all right, even if the “Master of Suspense” might applaud its technique while blushing at its blunt homoeroticism. (1:37) (Harvey)

That Awkward Moment When these bro-mancers call each other “idiots,” which they do repeatedly, it’s awkward all right, because that descriptor hits all too close to home. Jason (Zac Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller) are douchey book-marketing boy geniuses, with all the ego and fratty attitude needed to dispense bad advice and push doctor friend Mikey (Michael B. Jordan), whose wife recently broke it off after an affair with her lawyer, into an agreement to play the field — no serious dating allowed. The pretext: Anything to avoid, yup, that awkward moment when the lady has the temerity to ask, “So — where is this going?” How fortuitous that Jason should run into the smartest, cutest author in NYC (Imogen Poots), all sharp-tongued charisma and sparkling Emma Stone-y cat eyes; that Daniel would get embroiled with his Charlotte Rampling-like wing woman (Mackenzie Davis); and Mikey would edge back into bed with his ex. That’s the worst — or best — these tepid lotharios can muster. The education of these numbskulls when it comes to love and lust aspires to the much-edgier self-criticism of Girls — but despite the presence of Fruitvale Station (2013) breakout Jordan and the likable Poots, first-time director Tom Gormican’s screenplay lets them down. (1:34) (Chun)

Tim’s Vermeer “I’m not a painter,” admits Tim Jenison at the start of Tim’s Vermeer. He is, however, an inventor, a technology whiz specializing in video engineering, a self-made multimillionaire, and possessed of astonishing amounts of determination and focus. Add a bone-dry sense of humor and he’s the perfect documentary subject for magicians and noted skeptics Penn & Teller, who capture his multi-year quest to “paint a Vermeer.” Inspired by artist David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Jenison became interested in the theory that 17th century painters used lenses and mirrors, or a camera obscura, to help create their remarkably realistic works. He was especially taken with Vermeer, feeling a “geek kinship” with someone who was able to apply paint to canvas and make it look like a video image. It took some trial-and-error, but Jenison soon figured out a way that would allow him — someone who barely knew how to hold a brush — to transform an old photograph into a strikingly Vermeer-like oil painting. He decides to recreate The Music Lesson (1662-65), using only materials Vermeer would have had access to, and working from an exact replica of the room in Vermeer’s house where the painting was made. A few slow moments aside (“This project is a lot like watching paint dry,” Jenison jokes), Tim’s Vermeer is otherwise briskly propelled by the insatiable curiosity of the man at its center. And Jenison’s finished work offers a clear challenge to anyone who subscribes to the modern notion that “art and technology should never meet.” Why shouldn’t they, when the end results are so sublime? (1:20) (Eddy)

12 Years a Slave Pop culture’s engagement with slavery has always been uneasy. Landmark 1977 miniseries Roots set ratings records, but the prestigious production capped off a decade that had seen some more questionable endeavors, including 1975 exploitation flick Mandingo — often cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favorite films; it was a clear influence on his 2012 revenge fantasy Django Unchained, which approached its subject matter in a manner that paid homage to the Westerns it riffed on: with guns blazing. By contrast, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is nuanced and steeped in realism. Though it does contain scenes of violence (deliberately captured in long takes by regular McQueen collaborator Sean Bobbitt, whose cinematography is one of the film’s many stylistic achievements), the film emphasizes the horrors of “the peculiar institution” by repeatedly showing how accepted and ingrained it was. Slave is based on the true story of Solomon Northup, an African American man who was sold into slavery in 1841 and survived to pen a wrenching account of his experiences. He’s portrayed here by the powerful Chiwetel Ejiofor. Other standout performances come courtesy of McQueen favorite Michael Fassbender (as Epps, a plantation owner who exacerbates what’s clearly an unwell mind with copious amounts of booze) and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o, as a slave who attracts Epps’ cruel attentions. (2:14) (Eddy)

Vampire Academy After playing hooky for a year in the real world (if Portland, Ore. counts), nice vampire Lissa (Lucy Fry) and wisecracking half-human BFF Rose (Zoey Deutch, channeling plagiaristic levels of Ellen Page) are dragged back to their Hogswarts-like gated high school-estate where life is just like Beverly Hills 90210 except the parts that are more like Twilight or Harry Potter. I’m willing to believe Richelle Mead’s well-regarded series of YA novels are much better than the horrible first-last movie anyone will ever make from them. But once upon a time, the Brothers Waters made 1988’s Heathers (scenarist Daniel), Mean Girls (2004), and 1997’s The House of Yes (director Mark), so need this have been so bad? Vampire Academy is frantically paced in inverse proportion to its sluglike delivery of laughs, thrills, and general give-a-shit-ability. So you’ll be wide awake to all feelings of annoyance and déjà vu. Not to mention horror upon hearing such witty exchanges as “After all that, to be shamed by our queen bee?!” “You mean ‘queen bee-atch’?” Oh snap. As in, snap my cerebral cortex right off if you ever see me within a block of a theater playing Vampire Academy 2. (1:45) (Harvey)

Winter’s Tale Adapted from Mark Helprin’s fantastical 1983 novel of the same name, but with most of the sense and all of the wonder drained from it, Winter’s Tale follows the fortunes of Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a mechanic turned expert thief on the run from evil incarnate in early-19th-century New York City. Having incurred the wrath of one Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) — presiding boss of the five boroughs and dedicated minion of Lucifer (Will Smith) — Peter Lake scrapes acquaintance with a magical white horse and then, while burglarizing her mansion home, with a lovely, doomed young consumptive named Beverly (Downton Abbey‘s Jessica Brown Findlay), with whom he falls in love. A marvelous destiny is much hinted at, and something about the balance of good and evil in the world, but it’s hard to connect these exalted bits, or a series of daffy voice-overs by the ethereal Beverly about light and stars and angels’ wings, with the tortured plotline. First-time feature director Akiva Goldsman, whose writing and producing credits include A Beautiful Mind (2001), I Am Legend (2007), and the TV show Fringe, has written a screenplay that attempts to rein in Helprin’s sprawling, complicated epic — and in doing so, simplifies his tale to the point of nonsensicality. The metaphysics are fuzzy, while the miraculous is so insistently heralded that when we see it, it doesn’t leave much of an impression.(1:58) (Rapoport)

The Wolf of Wall Street Three hours long and breathless from start to finish, Martin Scorsese’s tale of greed, stock-market fraud, and epic drug consumption has a lot going on — and the whole thing hinges on a bravado, breakneck performance by latter-day Scorsese muse Leonardo DiCaprio. As real-life sleaze Jordan Belfort (upon whose memoir the film is based), he distills all of his golden DiCaprio-ness into a loathsome yet maddeningly likable character who figures out early in his career that being rich is way better than being poor, and that being fucked-up is, likewise, much preferable to being sober. The film also boasts keen supporting turns from Jonah Hill (as Belfort’s crass, corrupt second-in-command), Matthew McConaughey (who has what amounts to a cameo — albeit a supremely memorable one — as Belfort’s coke-worshiping mentor), Jean Dujardin (as a slick Swiss banker), and newcomer Margot Robbie (as Belfort’s cunning trophy wife). But this is primarily the Leo and Marty Show, and is easily their most entertaining episode to date. Still, don’t look for an Oscar sweep: Scorsese just hauled huge for 2011’s Hugo, and DiCaprio’s flashy turn will likely be passed over by voters more keen on honoring subtler work in a shorter film. (2:59) (Eddy) *

Goldies 2014 Lifetime Achievement: Sara Shelton Mann

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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Goldies 2014 Lifetime Achievement: Sara Shelton Mann

GOLDIES In 1979, Sara Shelton Mann — the farm girl from the wilds of Tennessee who ended up studying with such greats as Alwin Nikolais, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham — moved to San Francisco. Earthquake country. And did she ever shake up the place. With Contraband, the collective of performers she directed until 1996, she reconfigured what the dancing body can be. Their aim, she has said, was to “make bold live theater with an aggressive, lyric physicality.”

But why San Francisco? “I was lonely in those cold winters in Nova Scotia,” she recalls; she’d been working there with a support of a Canadian arts support program. So she jumped at the chance when Mangrove (the all-male troupe that grew into Mixed Bag Productions) invited her to join it. It was here where she translated concepts like “improv-based,” “collaborative,” “interdisciplinary,” and “dance theater” into vital, raucous, and highly effective performances that inspired a whole generation of artists to wander into unknown territory. The Bay Area would not be as welcoming and supportive of experimentation in dance were it not for the ongoing presence of Sara Shelton Mann.

With Contraband, she staged pieces in theaters, warehouses, the pit of a former apartment building, an abandoned public housing project, under bridges, and on the streets, both in this country and abroad. The troupe described itself as wanting to “manifest joyous creation — reclaiming the flight of the imagination, laughter, love, truth, and evolutionary impulse.”

The works were irresistible because of the daring, the force, and the integrity of the processes that made them possible. “We believed that art could change the world,” Shelton Mann says. At the height of the AIDS crisis, Evol turned the concept of love inside out. Religare honored the people who died or became homeless after the 1975 arson fire that gutted the Mission District’s Gartland Apartments. Oracle was a painful examination of the burdens of the past. The Mira Cycles and Monk at the Met dug deep into spirituality, both individual and communal.

Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

“I had only one rule,” she explains. “Everybody does personal inquiry, everybody does contact, everybody sings, everybody dances, everybody writes, everybody makes images, everybody works outdoors.”

This process encouraged individual voices to emerge, allowing members of the group to go on to substantial careers of their own. Besides designers and musicians, there were, among others, Rinde Eckert; Jess Curtis (“Contraband was an amazing laboratory of group process and collaboration, always with Sara at the center,” he says); Keith Hennessey (“Working with Sara revealed me to myself, and revealed me to the worlds around me”); Nina Haft (“I like to think my work is better for having been part of that wild soup of training in the ’80s. Sara still amazes me with what she does”); and Kim Epifano (“We learned from each other as we created with Sara’s thrust of topic and mastery of metaphor. It was a place where gender did not define the physicality but a common ground of athletic love”).

Indeed, in addition to her formidable reach as an artist, Shelton Mann’s role as a teacher has been immense. The latest wave of artists to find Shelton Mann and the rare degree of mutual inspiration she offers includes many of the most persuasive dance makers in the Bay Area.

“When you’ve trained with Sara, and you’ve worked with Sara, your idea of dance really explodes,” says Jesse Hewit. “You identify what your dance is in your body.” Hewit explains the difference as distinct from a focus on mere technical perfection. “The dancing is crazy virtuosic,” he notes, “but not virtuosic in the high-kick, pointed-toe sense; virtuosic in that it’s infused with an intense energetic focus.”

Shelton Mann celebrated her 70th birthday in December, and her work shows no signs of dimming. Even in the smaller, minimalist dances of recent months she proves riveting: a lovingly rowdy duet with Hewit at Z Space during the 2013 West Wave Dance Festival; a reading at Kunst-Stoff in January for Fresh Festival — delivering a slipstream rumination on time, decay, and memory in the body, the body social, the body politic. More recently still, she had a cameo during a comic-chaotic conversation about contemporary dance in Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Saul Garcia Lopez, and Esther Baker Tarpaga’s Part 1: Dancing with Fear at Galería de la Raza.

In the last two years, Shelton Mann has been at work on a set of extraordinary solos, a series she calls The Eye of Leo. Each has been made on a different dancer, and each one thus far has premiered in the plain white box of the Joe Goode Annex.

In October 2012, the first, featuring Jorge De Hoyos, was a revelation. The limpidness of these works, their spare quality — in contrast to the exuberant sumptuousness of Contraband or even recent Shelton Mann work like 2011’s Zeropoint, made with regular collaborator David Szlasa — combined with a quivering field of contact between dancer and choreographer, represents a powerful shift in focus.

The Leo series culminates outdoors and downtown this April, in a simultaneous unfolding she calls a “mandala of magic,” The Eye of Horus. The project is more proof that Shelton Mann is working at the height of her powers. One of the country’s supreme artists, she continues to evolve — moving more than the land she adopted back in 1979, and more sensitive to the tremors beneath our feet than a Richter scale.

“She’s a very strong conduit now. A very strong conduit. I mean, I think she’s a goddess,” says Kathleen Hermesdorf, another Contraband veteran who has gone onto a formidable career of her own. “I can’t help but deify her a bit. I can’t pigeonhole her. She’s still an iconoclast; she’s still part of the avant-garde. And it still comes from so deep inside her.”

Goldies 2014 Performance: SALTA

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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GOLDIES Creating a space for experimental contemporary dance and performance in Oakland, outside of the usual channels and roadblock$, has been an instigating, galvanizing mission for SALTA. The collective — a sharp and motivated group of seven women, all Oakland-based choreographers and dancers under 30 — has made a scene, built an audience, developed a network, enlarged an ethic, and opened up horizons in a beleaguered arts ecosystem.

They also know how to party.

SALTA was born at the same time as its monthly curated performance series, a spirited affair known during its first year as PPP (apropos of nothing), which rides high on a principle of serious experimentation in an utterly laid-back, strictly noncommercial setting.

A roving event that settles wherever the keys are handed over gratis (a surprising number of places), PPP and its progeny have showcased ragtag and newer pieces by a range of young, mid-career, and senior artists whose only brief is that they try something. While such a platform naturally embraces failure in the cause of exploration, the results have held many surprises and epiphanies.

A few dancer-choreographers spotted at past SALTA evenings: Mary Armentrout, Christine Bonansea, Abby Crain, Hana Erdman and Allison Lorenzen, Keith Hennessy, Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias, Monique Jenkinson, and fellow Goldies 2014 honoree Brontez Purnell.

Meanwhile, an open-door policy and community-stocked bar and boutique contribute to the lighthearted, well-oiled mingling of a crowd that often goes beyond dance initiates to embrace artists, bohos, and travelers of many kinds. (The first installment, at poet Zach Houston’s space downtown back in June 2012, was already bringing together normally discrete artistic milieus. As much a social experiment as an artistic one, it’s set the tone for those that have followed.)

Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

SALTA has ambitions beyond the performance series. Back in June 2013, when the collective was celebrating its first birthday with the 11th installment of PPP, its members decided to take a summer hiatus from the performance series to concentrate on other projects. The plan was to reinstate it in the fall at a slower clip. But the momentum proved hard to deny, as the seven members of SALTA (who prefer to speak as a collective rather than use their individual names) recently explained.

“I think after we last talked to you in [June 2013] we were going to do our anniversary performance, and then we were going to do less. We were going to do one every three months or something. But we had people contact us. And people really followed through who wanted us in their spaces. So we couldn’t say no, in a way.”

“We got swept up.”

“Yeah, it was really great, because with some — like Transmission Gallery [last December] — there was that intent, an invitation to collaborate with the space. People were interested in what we were doing in this different way. And that just provides us with food for thought, as far as how we then invite artists to be in that space in a particular way.”

“It’s kept us interested and engaged doing these events.”

“We’ve been talking more about finding some permanent space as well.”

A permanent space?

“We aren’t going to go into details because it’s still in the works, but let’s just say we’re looking at a space in the Temescal area to do more curation, and hopefully be able to invite more people from out of town.”

“The other exciting thing for us about this opportunity is that it is a collective of collectives, here in Oakland. So it’s not just us who would be in the space but several other groups.”

“It still reflects our spirit, how we intend to be in spaces, engaging alternatively, without a big output of money. We found freedom in not doing that. It’s very specific to this opportunity, which is not set at all, but it’s a nice thing to think about.”

Among the advantages of such a move, they say, is the chance to become part of a touring network, while providing ongoing workshops and rehearsal room — “affordable open space for people to not just show work but develop.”

With or without a permanent space, SALTA’s second year is poised to expand. In April, the collective travels to the East Coast to co-curate an evening with New York’s AUNTS, another dance-performance collective (and an early inspiration), and to take part in an international symposium in Montreal on alternative models of curation in the performing arts. They’re already networking with other likeminded groups along the route, like Montreal’s Wants&Needs and the Centre for Feminist Pedagogy.

And, for the first time, they’re making a piece of their own together: an experience they call “pretty amazing and crazy.” As a process it’s also, needless to say, “as collaborative as possible.” SALTA moves in collaboration.

“Somehow we end up having this momentum. There’s this ease that just happens. We definitely work hard but with joy, I think. All of a sudden we’re rolling really fast.”

Goldies 2014 Visual Art: Michelle Ramin

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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marke@sfbg.com

GOLDIES The San Francisco Art Institute’s landmark 2012 MFA exhibition sprawled through the kitschy Phoenix Hotel in the Tenderloin, partnering artists with often radically different styles in each room. Seen from one angle, it hilariously replicated one particular nostalgia-inducing area of the Internet: bright and noisy chatrooms, overflowing with random strangers, streaming with argument, affinity, and information overload.

Standout exhibitor Michelle Ramin used the opportunity to kick that proto-social media vibe up a notch: “I took one look at the closet and thought, ‘This could be a photobooth,'” she told me over drinks at the Dogpatch Saloon. “That was when every party had to have a photobooth and Instagram was getting popular. There were also a lot of issues of surveillance in the news. I wired the photobooth to the TV permanently installed in the room and displayed the resulting photographs in real time to onlookers.”

But there was one more essential element. Working with programmer Jesse MacDonald, Ramin developed a “Mask Booth” Android app that superimposed her trademark motif — a ski mask — over everyone’s face. That balaclava (menacing, deracinating, liberating, everywhere in pop culture right now, from Pussy Riot to Spring Breakers) shows up often in Ramin’s gorgeous figurative colored pencil drawings and oil paintings, which popped off the Phoenix’s walls.

The masks are donned by “privileged hip young people at leisure” and come in stark contrast to their surroundings. In Three Aliases (2011), a bemasked trio of American Apparel-ready loungers puppy-piles onto a dazzling floral sofa; a scruffy male in a pixilated shirt pushes another masked figure forward on a tricycle with almost violent glee in Joel and Jewel.

“I’m fascinated by how we mask ourselves to form our online profiles, how we develop, or overdevelop, another identity that’s really only just a part of ourselves, but that we find acceptable to share with the world. But there’s another part of ourselves that we call ‘private’ that we also hide behind a mask.” Ramin told me. “We create these dual identities, and there’s a danger of one or the other going off balance.”

“But the mask is also liberating” — Oscar Wilde’s old saw “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth” — “and it has its own history of transformation. It started out as something to protect against the cold, but now its come to mean many other things, from terrorism to fashion statement.”

Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

Ramin was born in 1982 and knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. After earning a Fine Arts B.A. at Penn State, she and her now-husband, who appears in many of her works, followed their art dreams to New York City. But they found the experience isolating and expensive, so they impulsively loaded up their car and moved to Portland. “We suddenly found a community, and a close circle of friends. We could work part-time and survive, have a life.” Ramin’s art from that period, of bridges and colorful landscapes, reflected that new-found connectivity and sense of home.

Her move to Portland coincided with the rise of Etsy and the explosion of the online handmade craft marketplace, and her artworks were perfect for the medium. “I could be my own dealer, I was successful, and I suddenly had a platform that reached the whole world,” she said. But she wanted to continue developing, and started looking toward a master’s degree at SFAI, drawn to work with associate professor Brett Reichman, who would become her mentor. She funded her move to SF through an ingenious art auction that linked Etsy to eBay, and anticipated the crowdfunding craze.

Yet her Portland community still inspired. “I had been thinking about masks for awhile, inspired by [San Francisco artist] Desiree Holman’s work. While I was back home in Portland in 2010, my husband and I organized a weekend trip with a bunch of our friends to the coast. On our way out of town I had an inspiration. We drove past an outdoor store, and I stopped and picked up 12 ski masks.

“At the beach house, I asked my friends if they were OK with putting the masks on and having me photograph them — acting normally, holding hands, walking on the beach, all with ski masks on. I took a bunch of photos of them in hopes that they’d turn into a new body of work. It must’ve looked really bad to the neighbors, hipster 20-somethings riding around on tricycles with ski masks on. Because we were told not to return to the house again!”

Since drawing that series from those photographs, and another luminescent series of female nudes (often in balaclavas) in office and classroom settings that raise questions about women’s bodies in arts institutions, Ramin has begun to move on from the masks. “My most recent work has to do with escapism and complacency. I’m still taking photos of my friends, but without showing a literal mask. I want to find another way to talk about the public vs. private ‘branding’ that we all have to invent for ourselves. It’s extremely exhausting to keep up with the latest social media fads, but the reality is that it’s really difficult to remove ourselves completely, especially for artists.

“I’d be happy to ‘go off the grid,’ but a huge part of an artist’s job is to be a social networker. So I suppose sites like Facebook can be a necessary evil for us. The new direction in my art involves discussing the place at which these opposing ideas cross.”

www.michelleramin.com

Introducing BayLeaks

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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rebecca@sfbg.com

From time to time, sources have told us at the Bay Guardian that they would love to share sensitive information for news articles, but fear they would be retaliated against or even terminated from employment if they were to do so.

We have found a way around that.

Sources who wish to retain their anonymity while sharing information they believe the public has a right to know now have the option of using an encrypted submission system to anonymously send documents to our news team.

Created by Bay Area technologists in partnership with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, BayLeaks uses the latest cryptography software to protect the identities of our sources. This is a secure, anonymous way for concerned citizens to communicate with journalists to release information.

“Politically, economically, and socially, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bay Area is at a crossroads. We see BayLeaks as a critical first step in securing radical transparency in public discourse as the region charts its future,” said T.R. Hwang, a BayLeaks partner and deputy director of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, a citizens’ alliance dedicated to enhancing the public sphere through technology.

Our system uses SecureDrop, a whistleblowing platform managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Tor, an online anonymity network that has gained the trust of Internet users around the world.

The SecureDrop program originated with the late Aaron Swartz, who developed it in collaboration with Wired Editor Kevin Poulson. Swartz was an Internet activist and programmer known for hashing out inventive ways to fight corruption and promote transparency. He’s remembered, among other things, for cofounding Reddit, the online news site; and for founding Demand Progress, an online activism group known for its 2012 campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

To access BayLeaks once you have logged onto Tor, type this URL into the browser: l7rt5kabupal7eo7.onion.

Now SecureDrop is managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 that is “dedicated to helping support and defend public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government.”

To provide maximum security, BayLeaks is only accessible over the Tor anonymity network.

When connecting to Tor in order to submit documents through SecureDrop, the Freedom of the Press Foundation recommends first going to a public location, such as a library or a café, rather than using one’s home or work station where it would be easier for a third party to detect you as a Tor user.

The Tor Browser is as easy to use as other browsers. But once you have downloaded it, it masks the IP address of the computer you are working on by sending your requests through a set of computer relays to keep anyone from tracing communications back to you.

Using the Tor Browser allows you to access Tor Hidden Services like BayLeaks, which are only available over Tor and can be much more secure than ordinary websites. These hidden services have .onion Web addresses (the .com of the digital anonymity world). After you’ve submitted something to BayLeaks, journalists can use the SecureDrop system to communicate securely and anonymously with you. Once you’ve sent all documents to BayLeaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation recommends deleting the Tor Browser Bundle, destroying any recorded copies of your codename (see “A Low Tech How-To”), and erasing or destroying any media (CD-ROMs, USB sticks) used to copy the leaked documents.

“As the old adage goes, ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,'” said J.D. Shutt, a BayLeaks partner and Special Initiatives director of the SF Committee of Vigilance. “We’re excited to provide a technologically robust means of bringing this basic rule of civics into the 21st century.”

“Monologos de la Vagina” An artistic and cultural triumph at the Brava theater in the Mission

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February 17, 2014

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I had just settled into my seat Friday night at the Brava Theater in the Mission to see the opening night production of “Monologos de la Vagina” and the San Francisco debut of Eliana Lopez as a performer and producer.

This would be an interesting evening, I mused, because the play is being performed in Spanish and I speak only a word or two of Spanish. The play, known in English as the “Tne Vagina Monologs,” was written by Eve Ensler. It opened in 1994 for a five year run off Broadway and has been produced internationally in many variations. It became, as the New York Times put it, “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” .

Art Agnos, the ex-mayor who is leading the battle to stop the Manhattanization of the waterfront, was attending the performance with his wife Sherry. He tapped me on the shoulder and said quietly, Bruce, they filed a lawsuit this afternoon to block our waterfront initiative. They, he explained, were the developers, the Building Trades and Construction Union, and the San Francisco Giants. We chatted for a few moments about the impact of the suit and what must be done quickly to stop it in court.

This was, I thought, a quintessential San Francisco moment.

Here were Sherry and Art, coming to the Brava Theater, deep in the heart of the Mission at 2781 24^th St., on the very day that the waterfront gang were bringing up their big guns to knock out a people’s initiative aimed at saving the waterfront on the other end of town. The timing was exquisite and the political and community points became eminently clear as the evening wore on.

The Warriors’ arena proposal, as Art and his allies have argued, is merely a loss leader for a monstrous condos-for-millionaires project by a Los Angeles developer that would do serious short and long term damage to one of the most valuable pieces of property in the world. And it’s on public property on the waterfront and would involve enormous public subsidies for the duration. The Giants, quiet till now, have their own highrise agenda.

By contrast, here were Eliana, the Brava Theater, and her merry band of monologists working to do good, lots of good, by producing the first professional Spanish-speaking production of the Monologs in San Francisco—and its message that illuminated women’s sensuality and the social stigma of rape and abuse. In the process they were helping to save a lovely old Mission theater building and institution and helping the Mission District, which needs all the help it can get these days.

Neighborhood theaters like Brava are an endangered species in San Francisco and its home base in the Mission is under relentless eviction and gentrification pressure. San Francisco is the only major urban municipality in California that is not seeing an increase in its Latin population..

Eliana became famous in her native Venezuela as a star in television soap operas, but her real passion is live theater. Her father is a theater director in Caracas and live theater is in her bones. She feels strongly that San Francisco needs more and better access to Spanish-speaking theater and Brava is a wonderful venue for her to indulge her passion. She and her husband, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, live with their son Theo, 4, on the edge of the Mission, only three blocks from the theater.

I found that the good thing about seeing the Monologos without knowing the language was that I could still get a lot out of the play and the production The lady from Venezuela can act—and did so beautifully and with charm, gusto, and style. And she can perform in both English and Spanish, as she has done in other Monolog productions. .

She can also produce, mounting a professional production that could play on any stage in San Francisco or Caracas or points in between. And she is also a splendid promoter and public face of the play and the theater, appearing regularly on Spanish programs on radio and television and in public appearances. Her six person ensemble included two actors who have performed the Monologs in Spanish in Miami and New York: Alba Roversi and Marisol Correra. Eliana performed with Alba in Caracas.

The actors worked together nicely, obviously enjoyed each other and the dialog, played to each other’s strengths, and got their points across with expressive gestures and voice inflections and humor and poignancy. They loved the play and got a big kick out of performing at the Brava Theater. The audience loved the ladies and their performance and gave them a standing ovation. Alas, the play was only for the three day Valentine’s Day weekend.

Bravo, Eliana. Bravo. Keep on rolling, as we say in English. B3

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it. Mark Twain (The motto of Random Lengths, an alternative newspaper published by James Allen in San Pedro, Calif.)

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the Bay Guardian. He was the editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble of the Guardian, 1966-2012)

Guardian honored for investigation of buying influence at City Hall

Sasha Cuttler

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February 13, 2014

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Guardian honored for investigation of buying influence at City Hall

Bay Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe and Staff Writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez are being honored by the Society of Professional Journalists with a James Madison Freedom of Information Award for “Friends in the Shadows,” our investigation of the shady ways that developers and other powerful players buy influence at City Hall.

The package of articles, prepared for the Guardian’s 47th anniversary issue of Oct. 6, used extensive public records to show how contributions to the city’s various “Friends Of…” organizations create cozy relationships between regulators and the regulated, donations that are often designed to skirt public disclosure requirements.

“Their detailed and thorough account explored a trail of money through myriad city agencies and departments,” the awards committee wrote, noting how the paper “used public records, interviews and independent research to probe how developers, corporations and city contractors use indirect gifts to city agencies to buy influence.”

The Guardian will profile the other winners in our annual Freedom of Information Issue on March 12, and all the winners will be honored at SPJ’s James Madison Awards banquet on March 20. The full press release follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JAMES MADISON AWARD WINNERS FOR SUNSHINE AND FIRST AMENDMENT WORK ANNOUNCED BY NORCAL SPJ CHAPTER

SAN FRANCISCO – Retired San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Sussman, known for histireless pursuit of an end to restrictions on media access to prisoners, his support of the inmate journalists’ rights, and for his many other contributions to journalism, has been named winner of the Norwin S. Yoffie Award for Career Achievement Award by the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California chapter.

Sussman will be honored along with other winners of the chapters’ James Madison Freedom of Information Awards on Thursday, March 20 in San Francisco. Other winners include three high school journalists who honored confidential agreements with sources by beating back a subpoena for their notes, an online newspaper that successfully sued for its right to basic law enforcement information after being blacklisted by a county sheriff it had angered by reporting on his past, and an investigative journalist who used more than 100,000 pages of documents to report on potential structural problems on the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

The 29^th Annual James Madison Awards will be presented to champions of the First Amendment and freedom of information on Thursday, March 20, 2014, at a banquet at the San Francisco City Club.

Besides Sussman, whose award is named for the late editor of the San Rafael Independent Journal and co-founder of the SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee who was a staunch advocate for transparency, the honorees are:

Rob Gunnison, a former instructor and Director of School Affairs at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism will be honored with the Beverly Kees Educator Award for his years of mentoring aspiring journalists and for the re-establishment of required course work on access to public records. The award is named for a former SPJ NorCal president who was an educator and nationally recognized journalist.

In a year when whistleblowers have been both applauded and excoriated, Peter Buxton will be honored with the FOI Whistleblower/Source Awardfor his historic 1972 role in exposing to a reporter the evils of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. From 1932 to 1972 African-American sharecroppers who thought they were getting medical care went untreated for syphilis so the government could study the disease’s progression.

State Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco will receive the Public Official recognition award for his courage to oppose his own Democratic Party leaders and the governor in 2013 with public criticism of efforts to weaken the California Public Records Act by loosening disclosure requirements for local governments.

The Lake County News and its co-foundersElizabeth Larson and John Jensen will receive theNews Media Award, for their successful legal fight to force the county sheriff to end a news blacklist of the paper after a series of hard-hitting, critical articles about his conduct in office.

Attorney Terry Gross of Gross Belsky Alonso, will receive the FOI Legal Counsel Award in recognition of his years of work to expand the rights of online journalists and to protect reporters who were victims of corporate email snooping and to redress the illegal police detention of reporters during protests in Oakland and Berkeley, among many causes.

Freelance journalist Richard Knee will receive a Distinguished Service Award for 12 years of service on San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member body that monitors City Hall’s compliance with open-government laws. He has served two decades on the SPJ NorCal FOI Committee and he helped in a successful ballot-measure campaign to strengthen the Sunshine law in 1998-99.

Reporter Tom Vacar of KTVU Channel 2 will receive a Journalist Award for his story exposing false claims by BART and BART unions that the California Public Utilities Commission certifies BART train operators. Using the California Public Records Act, Vacar forced the CPUC to disclose it does not certify, review, test or train operators, but is no more than a rubber stamp for BART operator certification.

The San Quentin News will be honored with aNews Media Award for accomplishing extraordinary journalism under extraordinary circumstances. In the only inmate-produced paper in California, and under the scrutiny of prison authorities, the inmate journalists and volunteers covered a prison hunger strike, overcrowding and denial of compassionate release for a dying inmate.

Samuel Liu, Sabrina Chen and Cristina Curcelli, reporters at The Saratoga Falcon, at Saratoga High School, will receive the Student Journalist—High School Award for their resistance to subpoenas for their notes and for protecting their sources by invoking California’s reporter shield law as they covered cyberbullying claims and the suicide of a classmate.

Judith Liteky, a former nun, and Theresa Cameranesi, will receive the Citizen Award, for pressing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Defense to win a precedent-setting ruling that the government may not withhold on national security grounds the names and military unit information of graduates and instructors at the former School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

News Editor Rebecca Bowe and staff writerJoe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of the San Francisco Bay Guardian will receive Journalist Awards for extensive use of public records, independent research and interviews to produce a detailed account of financial “gifts” given to some city agencies that are used to curry favor out of the limelight.

Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer who launched a method of secure communication between journalists and their sources, will be honored posthumously with the Public Service Award. Swartz died in January 2013 at the age of 26, but his work on the journalist-source software ‘Strongbox’ has flourished.

Senior investigative reporter Charles Piller ofThe Sacramento Bee will be honored with theJournalist Award for breaking the story that the tendons connecting the skyway portion of the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were corroded and could potentially fail. His digging led to the revelation that engineers had warned for two years of the danger.

Columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group will receive the Editorial & Commentary Award for his strong editorials that helped beat back a legislative attack on California’s Public Records Act. He also produced a string of columns critical of school districts that failed to report suspicious behavior and he challenged the lack of disclosure during BART labor negotiations.

The awards banquet will be held at the City Club of San Francisco, 155 Sansome Street, 9^th floor, 1½ blocks from the Montgomery St. BART station. A no-host reception at 5:30 pm will be followed at 6:30pmby the dinner and awards ceremony. Tickets are $50 for SPJ members and students, and $70 for other attendees. Full table hosting opportunities and program sponsorships are also available.

To purchase tickets please go tohttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/29th-annual-james-madison-freedom-of-information-awards-banquet-tickets-10528851077

The James Madison Freedom of Information Award is named for the creative force behind the First Amendment and honors local journalists, organizations, public officials, educators and private citizens who have fought for public access to government meetings and records and promoted the public’s right to know and freedom of expression. The awards dinner is held annually during the week of Madison’s birthday, which was March 16, 1751.

Award winners are selected by SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee.

Background information, including a complete list and description of winners is attached. Additional information is available from FOI Committee co-chairs Thomas Peele or Geoffrey King at the email addresses listed above.

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2014 JAMES MADISON HONOREES

NORWIN S. YOFFIE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Peter Sussman has spent most of his career as a vocal advocate for journalistic ethics and freedom of information, and as an editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. But he is perhaps best known for his dogged advocacy for news media access to prisoners and as an advocate for prisoners’ right to practice journalism. He began pushing for media access to inmates when federal prison officials punished convicted bank robber Dannie “Red Hog” Martin for writing to Sussman in the 1980s. It began an epic fight for freedom of speech, and from 1986 to 1992 the Chronicle, with Sussman as his editor, published Martin’s articles about prison life. Sussman co-authored a book with Martin, “Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog.” During his stint as SPJ chapter president from 1995-1997, state prison officials issued “emergency” restrictions on media interviews with prisoners. During the ensuing national media attention, Sussman became the natural spokesman on the issue. For years after that he helped write and sponsor bills in Sacramento that would overturn the media access limits. He also helped to write the SPJ Code of Ethics. And in his spare time he edited “Decca,” a collection of letters by Jessica Mitford, muckraking journalist and memoirist.

BEVERLY KEES EDUCATOR AWARD

Rob Gunnison spent two decades as a journalist for United Press International and the San Francisco Chronicle, giving him the kind of hands-on experience journalism students covet. Gunnison taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1999 to 2013, mentoring dozens of students in the realities of news gathering. In the years before he left, Gunnison also served as the Director of School Affairs. He guided the school through trying periods of transition and pushed to reinstate requirements that students understand and are able to use public records laws. He has been an outstanding influence to aspiring journalists with his passion for reporting, his humility and approachability. He instilled optimism in the face of a rapidly shifting and often hostile media climate.

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WHISTLEBLOWER AWARD

Peter Buxton played a historic role as a whistleblower in 1972 by exposing the decades-long experimentation on the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of African-American sharecroppers. Although penicillin was a proven cure for syphilis, for 40 years, the government allowed the men to suffer and die, and to expose their wives and children to the disease, and left it untreated to monitor its course. As a young venereal disease researcher for the U.S. Public Health Service in Alabama, Buxton met with doctors and tried to force the issue of treatment, only to be mocked and refused. He left the service for the UC Hastings School of Law but, haunted by the plight of the men, he reached out to a journalist about the government’s experiment. As a result of his action, Congress reformed laws on human research, Medical Ethics Committees were required to have non-physician members and the victims were given $10 million in reparations. In 1997 President Bill Clinton apologized to the victims and their survivors: “The United States Government did something that was profoundly, morally wrong… clearly racist.”

JOURNALIST AWARD

Reporter Tom Vacar of KTVU Channel 2 pursued a critical safety story at the height of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) strike in 2013: Were substitute drivers, drawn from supervisor ranks, qualified to operate the trains? BART and the union told him the California Public Utilities Commission certified the train operators. But he was stonewalled when he asked the CPUC to explain how it certified operators. It was not until Vacar pressed for documentation, using the state Public Records Act, that he learned BART provided no more than a rubber stamp for drivers. He exposed the false claims of certification, showing the CPUC did not certify, review, test or train operators. In fact, after two BART workers were killed on the tracks by a passing train, he discovered the CPUC did not even have copies of training materials.

PUBLIC OFFICIAL AWARD

Despite the risk of infuriating his own Democratic party leadership and Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco spoke out early against the governor’s plan to weaken the California Public Records Act. A proposal, slipped into the 2013-2014 state budget would have allowed the open records law to be essentially optional for cities and other local agencies. Yee became the lone Democrat in the state Legislature to cry foul early. With public sentiment on his side, Yee ultimately prevailed. The governor and the legislature backed away from the plan when faced with a flood of opposition from newspaper editorials, environmentalists and conservatives.

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD

Freelance journalist Richard Knee has been a fixture on the SPJ NorCal’s FOI Committee for more than two decades. He played a major role in the successful effort to strengthen San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance in 1998-99. And since 2002 he has served on the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member body that monitors how well (or poorly) City Hall complies with local and state open-government laws. He has not been afraid to lock horns with powerful politicians suspected of sunshine-law violations, including former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and current Supervisor Scott Wiener.

NEWS MEDIA AWARD

Lake County News co-founder Elizabeth Larson first confronted a candidate for sheriff, Frank Rivero, in 2010, with evidence of his arrest record in Florida. When Rivero won the election, Larson learned he was under investigation for changing a story about shooting a man in 2008 while working as a deputy. His credibility was so undermined from the shooting statements that Rivero could not testify in court, without defendants being informed of his history under a legal precedent called the Brady rule. When Larson used the open-records law to expose Rivero’s status as a Brady violation risk, he retaliated by blacklisting the Lake County News from routine media information. Larson and her husband, John Jensen, took Rivero to court and in March 2013, with the help of attorney Paul Boylan of Davis, they won restoration of access to public media information and the county had to pay $110,000 to cover the pair’s legal fees.

STUDENT JOURNALISTS—HIGH SCHOOL AWARD

Samuel Liu, Sabrina Chen and Cristina Curcelli, reporters for Saratoga High School’s The Saratoga Falcon, questioned the accuracy of news accounts that attributed the tragic suicide of a schoolmate to virulent cyberbullying by fellow students. National headlines said students passed around photos of an alleged sexual assault on the girl during a party. Liu, Chen and Curcelli wanted to discover what was accurate. They interviewed more than 50 people, some on condition of anonymity. In sharp contrast to the national headlines, they reported “roughly 10 people” saw the illicit photos and they “never went on Facebook.” But on the first day back to school in 2013 the three were handed subpoenas demanding their emails, notes and names of sources from a lawyer for the girl’s family, which was suing the school. All three successfully resisted the subpoenas by invoking California’s reporter Shield Law. In so doing, they highlighted that the Shield Law is for all journalists, not just those working for pay. Guylyn Cummins, lawyer for the students, pointed out the Shield Law applies to student journalists, who do not lose their constitutional rights when they step onto campus.

JOURNALIST AWARD

Rebecca Bowe, San Francisco Bay Guardian news editor, and staff writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez used public records, interviews and independent research to probe how developers, corporations and city contractors use indirect gifts to city agencies to buy influence. Their investigation found that donations are not made directly to regulators where disclosure laws would leave them easily tracked. Instead, millions of dollars are funneled through private nonprofits, sometimes dubbed “Friends of” committees, such as Friends of City Planning or Friends of Animal Care and Control. Bowe and Rodriguez found that a mechanism allows large amounts of cash to flow in shadowy donations that make it difficult to see who is behind the money. Their detailed and thorough account explored a trail of money through myriad city agencies and departments.

NEWS MEDIA AWARD

The San Quentin News has accomplished extraordinary journalism under extraordinary circumstances. It is the only inmate-produced newspaper in California, begun in 1940 by warden Clinton Duffy. These prison reporters, along with volunteers from the outside, raise the curtain of secrecy that shrouds those who live behind the walls. Although under the scrutiny of prison authorities, they reported on last year’s prisoners’ hunger strike, prison overcrowding, the controversial handling of a deadly Valley Fever outbreak in the prisons and a feature on the refusal of a Superior Court judge to grant compassionate release to an 81-year-old inmate dying of cancer. They handle reporting with tenacity, sensitivity and thoroughness.

CITIZEN AWARD

Judith Liteky, a former nun, and Theresa Cameranesi, sued in federal court in San Francisco to gain public release of the names of students and instructors at the U.S. military school known for its role in training military officers later linked to human rights abuses. Liteky was a founding member of the non-profit School of Americas Watch, formed after the 1990 murder of six priests and their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador. The massacre was linked to 19 Salvadoran military officers trained at the former U.S. Army School of the Americas. The two women sued the Department of Defense to force resumption of what had been routine release of student names. In 2013 they won a significant victory. An Oakland federal judge, in a precedent-setting decision, ruled the government could not withhold the names on a national security basis. Although the legal fight is not over, this ruling alone curbs the government’s ability to restrict access to internationally sensitive information.

LEGAL COUNSEL AWARD

Attorney Terry Gross of Gross Belsky Alonso, in San Francisco, has spent years working to expand the rights of online journalists, to vindicate reporters wrongly arrested during protests and to protect reporters whose phone records were subject to corporate snooping. Last year, Gross secured a $99,000 settlement for photojournalist Jane Tyska after former Oakland Unified School District Police Chief Art Michel detained her while she covered a protest. In 2012, he won a $162,500 settlement and restraining order against the UC Berkeley Police Department for the illegal arrest and search of a camera belonging to Indybay journalist David Morse during a 2009 protest. Gross successfully represented Think Secret in a landmark state appeal court decision that extended California’s journalist Shield Law to online-only publications. In 2008, he sought damages on behalf of The New York Times and several Business Week journalists from Hewlett-Packard, after it was discovered HP obtained the private telephone records of reporters in an attempt to discover a news source from unpublished material.

PUBLIC SERVICE CITATION

Aaron Swartz was, by all accounts, a brilliant and sophisticated young man. Although he died in January 2013 at the age of 26, his work on the journalist-source software “Strongbox” flourished. “Strongbox” — now renamed “SecureDrop” — promises to be a crucial tool for journalists and their sources in the wake of revelations about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. “Strongbox/SecureDrop” provides a secure system for sources and journalists to receive documents and communicate with each other confidentially in the digital age. Swartz initially conceived of “Strongbox” in San Francisco, where he lived at the time. The New Yorker adopted the secure document submission system in May and it has now been adopted by such publications as Forbes, The Global Mail and ProPublica. At the time of his death, Swartz was under federal indictment for downloading a large number of academic papers via MIT’s network, which he reportedly intended to distribute. He could have been sentenced to as many as 50 years in prison if convicted and many have attributed to his tragic taking of his own life to the government pressure he faced.

JOURNALIST AWARD

Senior investigative reporter Charles Piller of The Sacramento Bee pored over more than 100,000 pages of construction and inspection records to make a troubling discovery: Tendons on the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were subject to water-induced corrosion. He broke the story that a comparison of inspection records and a rosy report by the California Department of Transportation showed CalTrans found few significant problems and that its report was littered with misstatements and wrong information. His relentless digging uncovered the failure of CalTrans to protect the “post-tension” tendons on the new spans skyway from water and that the bridge construction violated universally accepted techniques meant to prevent corrosion. He was also able to report that inspectors had warned for at least two years about water leaks and potential corrosion.

EDITORIAL & COMMENTARY AWARD

Columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group helped beat back a 2013 attack by Governor Jerry Brown and the California Legislature on the California Public Records Act. Borenstein sounded the first alarm in his columns and kept up the attack. He also directly challenged a stonewalling school district attorney over access to documents, including the lawyer’s withholding of his own job contract renewal. This led the district to release them and fire the attorney. His tenacity in seeking out and monitoring of Bay Area Rapid Transit District paperwork during the BART administration’s months-long duel with unions over contract terms prompted him to call for more transparency and disclosure in a series of editorials. Lastly, he pushed for, and obtained, release of documents related to teacher abuse of students in local school districts, which enabled his colleagues to put together stories about the failure of local districts to report suspicious behavior to authorities as required by law.

Sundance, part nine: Foodies! Vampires! Kill! Kill!

Sue Vaughan

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February 11, 2014

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Sundance, part nine: Foodies! Vampires! Kill! Kill!

Miss any earlier Sundance coverage? Scroll down right here on Pixel Vision.

Blind (Norway/Netherlands) is the directorial debut of Eskil Vogt, screenwriter of Joachim Trier’s Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2012). It does not disappoint, and — appropriately enough, considering its writer-director’s background — it won the World Cinema Prize for Screenwriting.

Blind follows three characters through their loneliness and internal obsessions. Pay attention, because things start to twist and turn in ways that left me wanting to immediately watch the film again as soon as it ended.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZdcbMDdwy0

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Italy (UK/Italy) picks up where 2010’s The Trip left off. Once again, traveling companions and frenemies Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing exaggerated versions of themselves) hit the road — in Italy this time, as the title suggests — to taste fancy foods, fret over their mid-life crises, and launch into a variety of impressions, inevitably competing with each other. (The Michael Caine bit from the first film, culled like its sequel from a BBC miniseries, was a viral sensation). My fingers and toes are already crossed for a third entry.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (US/Iran) is the type of indie film that has the power to pop up on top 10 lists at the end of the year. This Iranian vampire western (yep) — shot in anamorphic ratio 2.40:1 — is blessed with a secret weapon: its director’s audacious style and aggressive risk-taking. During the Q&A, Amirpour sported a t-shirt depicting Bobby Peru — Willem Dafoe’s sleazy character in Wild at Heart (1991) — as well a giant bandage over her right eye.

After shouting out her responses to audience comments about how A Girl reminded them of early Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch films, and spaghetti westerns, she concluded the event by explaining she had a concussion from smacking her head on her balcony the night before. She needed 35 stitches, she explained, and by the way, if any of us wanted to see photos of her gash, they could come up after the film.

I genuinely hope her brain stays loose when making her next movie. Hers is a loud and refreshing voice that suggests more greatness to come.

This Week’s Picks: February 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond

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February 11, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 12

When The Landscape Is Quiet Again: North Dakota’s Oil Boom

In a land far, far away, the greedy hands of oilmongers are ripping apart Sarah Christianson’s home state. “Almost every local person I spoke with out there expressed some version of this sentiment: ‘I’m so glad so-and-so is dead, so they don’t have to see what’s happened to this place,'” says the photographer. Over the past year, Christianson documented the consequences of North Dakota’s newest oil boom: oil wells built on her parent’s mineral acres, drilling rigs planted on desolate horizons, natural gas flare pits disrupting untouched valleys. Her latest project, “When the Landscape is Quiet Again” hosted by SF Camerawork through April 19, examines the lasting repercussions of North Dakota’s 1973 oil boom, the new damages being inflicted today and the dichotomous effects on this economically depressed region. Opening reception will be held the following day at 6pm. (Laura B. Childs)

Free

SFCamerawork

1011 Market, 2nd floor, SF

www.sfcamerawork.org

Octopalooza

Are you a two-fisted drinker? Think you can keep up with an eight-armed party animal? Tonight’s your chance to do exactly that, and drink like a fish — literally! Head down to the waterfront tonight for “Octopalooza,” an SF Beer Week event celebrating cephalopods that will allow people to eat, drink and dance, all under the water. Featuring beers from San Francisco’s Pacific Brewing Laboratory (with labels such as “Squid Ink” and “Nautilus”) the fete will also include food from Pier 39 restaurants, octopus talks, squid dissections, squid ink block printing and a silent disco. Price of admission includes four drink tickets. (Sean McCourt)

6:30-9:30pm, $35

Aquarium of the Bay

Pier 39, SF.

www.aquariumofthebay.com

(415) 623-5300

THURSDAY 13

Breakfast: A History

Many modern Americans might have struggled with breakfast in the mid-1800’s, according to author Heather Arndt Anderson: “Bacon and eggs, pancake with syrup, and hot coffee were now considered as ‘injurious’ to one’s health as masturbation.” Anderson explains in her book Breakfast: A History how Americans’ healthy living attitudes at that time spurred the development of granola as a popular food. Anderson’s origin stories and accessible anthropological analysis showcase how the early day cuisine from different eras shape what we eat today. “Breakfast” also explores how culture, linguistics, religion and mass media elevated the morning meal’s status to the most important meal of the day. (Kevin Lee)

6:30pm-7:30pm

Omnivore Books

3885 Cesar Chavez, SF

(415)282-4712

www.omnivorebooks.com

Free

Valentine’s Day Gay Romance from Cleis Press

Don’t mind the fogged-up windows at Books Inc. in the Castro on Wednesday night. Cleis Press has a steamy evening in store for you! This pre-Valentine’s Day book reading will celebrate the best parts of gay romance with tales of first times, young love, and longtime commitments. The independent queer publishing company has lined up three celebrated gay erotica authors for a night of hot-and-heavy prose followed by a book signing. Rob Rosen will share a titillating excerpt from one of his recent erotic novels, while Felice Picano and Lewis DeSimone will read from Best Gay Romance 2014, a sexy and lustful anthology that tackles all matters of the heart, soul, and bedroom. (Laura B. Childs)

7:30pm, free

Books Inc. The Castro

2275 Market, SF

www.booksinc.net

FRIDAY 14

Thao and The Get Down Stay Down

Hometown hero Thao Nguyen has been very busy of late, touring her band’s newest album We the Common, writing and recording short films with the likes of Ira Glass for Funny or Die, shooting music videos (and getting shut down by the SFPD) on the new Bay Bridge, and volunteering frequently for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Thao and the Get Down Stay Down’s music, a folk-rock blend, is simultaneously intimate and socially conscious, with her most recent work featuring themes of community and gratitude. Nguyen has been playing San Francisco shows semi-frequently for years, but this night will see her headlining the beloved and historied Fillmore for the first time, so this gig is sure to be electric. (Haley Zaremba)

With Sonny and the Sunsets

9pm, $20

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-3000

www.thefillmore.com

CCR Headcleaner

Does your ideal Valentine’s Day date entail seeing a mixture of psych-infused sludge rock and girl-dominated punk bands, all for thecost of $5? If yes, then consider your plans made. CCR Headcleaner, Quaaludes and Mane are throwing a bash during everybody’s favorite Hallmark holiday at Hemlock Tavern. Local raucous rockers CCR Headcleaner recently made waves with its split EP alongside Ty Segall’s stoner garage rock band, Fuzz, for the “Less Artists More Condos” 7″ series. Playing with CCR Headcleaner is Quaaludes, a San Francisco punk girl band that draws influences from the likes of grunge and riot grrrl. Opening is ’80s goth-tinged post-punk girl band, Mane. Though each band draws from different influences, each band brings an unfiltered, raw quality to its performance. So grab your partner, sweetie, S.O. – or whatever you call them – and march on over to the Hemlock for a grimy punk show. (Erin Dage)

With Quaaludes, Mane

9pm, $5

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Hubba Hubba Revue

Looking for a Valentine’s event that’s sure to blow all the others away? Slip into the world of scandalous speakeasies, flirtatious flappers and gun-toting gangsters tonight when Bay Area burlesque group Hubba Hubba Revue presents a special “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” themed show. Enjoy bootlegged beverages while watching a bevy of beauties from around the world perform on stage, including Lilly Tiger from Berlin and Fever Blister from LA — expect spats to be stripped, and fedoras to be flung — all giving a racy take on romance from the roaring twenties. (Sean McCourt)

9pm, $15-$30

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

www.hubbarevue.com

Company C Contemporary Ballet

Some 12 years ago, Company C Contemporary Ballet started modestly with student performers; it now has a fine group of professional dancers and an infrastructure that supports it. After this season they’ll change to a “project-based” format that is less financially demanding and artistically more flexible. Artistic Director Charles Anderson has always had a knack for programming his own pieces in conjunction with intriguing works by other. That’s not likely to change. His is and will remain a ballet company featuring choreography that showcases 21st century dance. Among two of Anderson’s works, this program features Charles Moulton’s ingenious Nine Person Precision Ball Passing; Susan Jaffe’s Weather — who knew that the great ABT Ballerina choreographed? — and Yuri Zhukov’s expanded Railroad Joint. (Rita Felciano)

Feb. 13 and 14, 8pm. $25-48

Feb. 15, 6pm Gala. Feb. 16, 3pm

YBCA, LAM Research Center Theater, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

SATURDAY 15

Myron & E

The Stones Throw record label is sort of the indie Motown of the 21st century, and their latest output, Myron and E, has instantly become some of the coolest cats on the LA-based cadre of vinyl evangelists. The deliciously soulful duo will be bringing its spunky horns, soothing rhythms, and hypnotic vocals to the Independent in support of their debut LP Broadway. The lead single “If I Gave You My Love” showcases the duo’s one-two punch of Barry White-esque vocals on the chorus, surrounded by peppy falsetto. Myron and E got together in the Bay after Myron escaped from LA, where he was working on the sketch comedy show “In Living Color.” If there ever was an occasion to bust out your special bowtie and fancy dancing shoes, it’s this show. (George McIntire)

9pm, $20 adv, $22 door

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

B.A.R.F.

February 15 is the date that many people will join in one area for their common love of BARF (Bay Area Record Label Fair). Vomit word-play aside, here are the details: local organizations Father/Daughter Records and Professional Fans have come together to spearhead the first annual event honoring record labels across the Bay Area. Labels such as Polyvinyl, Castle Face, 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, Slumberland, and many more will be selling their music all under one roof for such an occasion. To sweeten the deal, uber-talented bands representing local labels such as “difficult” punks Twin Steps, pop-punk sister duo Dog Party, power-pop sensations Cocktails, and psych-rocker Al Lover will be performing at the gig! And the best part about this event? There’s no need to cough up cash to get in. (Erin Dage)

With Twin Steps, Dog Party, Cocktails, Al Lover

12pm, Free

Thee Parkside

1600 17th St, SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

John Talabot at Icee Hot

After slow simmering yet heavy hitting releases like ‘Sunshine,’ John Talabot released his debut ƒIN in 2012 to crossover attention. Add in a single live performance with collaborator Pional leading to touring with The xx, the only question would be what 2013 bring. The answer: an equally lauded entry into DJ-Kicks mix series, with Talabot taking his ability to sustain an emotional moment in time — dark, melancholic, tender, whatever — and extended it into a career-up to-here defining set. It’s perhaps the best entry yet into his sound, as much forward looking (including new songs “Without You” and “Siderall”) as tied to the past, with obscurities like Jurgen Paape’s remix of “Kron” by Sillikron reaching back to nights spent as a windowlicking trainspotter in Barcelona clubs, notebook in hand. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Galcher Lustwerk, Ghosts on Tape, Shawn Reynaldo, DJ Will

10pm-4am, $5-15 presale

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

SUNDAY 16

East Bay Comic Con

You don’t have to go all the way down to San Diego this year to get your comic book and pop culture fix — just check out East Bay Comic Con, a brand new event that will feature a host of comic book vendors along with several special guests including Richard Kiel (who played “Jaws,” the towering villain with metal teeth in two James Bond films) and John Stanley (author and host of KTVU’s classic TV show “Creature Features”). James O’Barr, the creator of The Crow, will also be on hand, and will kick off the party with a screening of the film based on his comic the night before. (Sean McCourt)

Movie screening and Q&A

7pm Sat/15, Free for first 350 fans

Brenden Theater

1985 Willow Pass Rd., Concord

East Bay Comic Con

10am-4:30pm, $5 (children 8 and under free)

Concord Hilton 1970 Diamond Blvd., Concord

www.eastbaycomiccon.com

TUESDAY 18

“Committed Cinema: Tony Buba” Braddock, Penn., got its big-screen moment last year with the release of Out of the Furnace, Scott Cooper’s occasionally overwrought tale of two brothers battling grim destinies in the crumbling steel town. As it turns out, documentarian Tony Buba has been lensing his blue-collar hometown for decades, and the filmmaker dubbed “a national treasure” by the Anthology Film Archives is coming to Berkeley to share his work and converse with USF education professor Rick Ayers. Tonight, “The Braddock Chronicles” compiles shorts from 1972-85. More shorts precede screenings of narrative Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988), and his most recent doc, 2013’s We Are Alive! The Fight to Save Braddock Hospital, on consecutive nights. (Cheryl Eddy)

Feb 18-20, 7pm, $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Rep Clock: February 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond

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February 11, 2014

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Schedules are for Wed/12-Tue/18 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $7-12. “Sistah Sinema: A Queer Women of Color Valentine,” short films, Fri, 8. “Small Press Traffic: Douglas Kearney, Claudia Rankine, Normal Cole,” reading, Sun, 5.

BALBOA THEATRE 3630 Balboa, SF; cinemasf.com/balboa. $7.50-10. “Popcorn Palace:” The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979), Sat, 10am. Matinee for kids.

BERKELEY FELLOWSHIP OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS 1924 Cedar, Berk; www.bfuu.org. $5-10. Rosa Luxemburg (von Trotta, 1986), Thu, 7.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Fargo (Coen and Coen, 1996), Wed, 7, and The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen and Coen, 2001), Wed, 8:55. •Age of Consent (Powell, 1969), Thu, 6:30, and Lolita (Kubrick, 1962), Thu, 8:30. “Marc Huestis presents:” The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985), Valentine’s Day Celebration with Oscar nominee Margaret Avery (“Shug”) in person, Fri, 7:30 (gala), 8:45 (film only). This event, $11-35; advance tickets at www.ticketfly.com. Annie (Huston, 1982), presented sing-along style, Sat-Sun, 1. This event, $10-16; advance tickets at www.ticketweb.com. •Miami Blues (Armitage, 1989), Sat, 6, and Scarface (De Palma, 1983), Sat, 8. •Baraka (Fricke, 1992), Sun, 5:05, 9, and Samsara (Fricke and Magidson, 2011), Sun, 7. •The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013), Mon, 2:30, 8, and The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012), Mon, 5:20.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-$10.75. times. “Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014,” call for dates and times. Gloria (Lelio, 2013), call for dates and times. The Past (Farhadi, 2013), call for dates and times. The New Public (Gunther, 2013), Wed, 7. Merrily We Roll Along, recorded live at West End London’s Harold Pinter Theatre, Sun, 7; Feb 23, 1; Feb 28, 7. “Mostly British Film Festival,” Feb 18-20. Visit www.mostlybritish.org for schedule.

CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $10. “Midnight Movies:” Harold and Maude (Ashby, 1971), Fri-Sun, midnight.

DAVIES SYMPHONY HALL 201 Van Ness, SF; www.sfsymphony.org. $25-80. “A Symphonic Night at the Movies:” “A Night at the Oscars,” famous clips and movie music with the SF Symphony, Sat. 8.

EXPLORATORIUM Pier 15, SF; www.exploratorium.edu. Free with museum admission ($19-25). “Resonance: The Freddy McGuire Show,” with video artist Anne McGuire and collagist Wobbly, Thu, 7. “Saturday Cinema:” “Lovesick Cinema,” short films, Sat, 1, 2, 3.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; milibrary.org/events. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: Villains We Love:” No Way to Treat a Lady (Smight, 1968), Fri, 6.

NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $10. The Motherhood Archives (Lusztig, 2013), Tue, 7. With filmmaker Irene Lusztig in person.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Film 50: History of Cinema:” Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952), with lecture by Emily Carpenter, Wed, 3:10. “African Film Festival 2014:” “Between Cultures: Recent African Shorts,” Wed, 7. “Against the Law: The Crime Films of Anthony Mann:” T-Men (1948), Thu, 7; Raw Deal (1948), Fri, 8:50. “Funny Ha-Ha: The Genius of American Comedy, 1930-1959:” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953), Fri, 7. “The Brilliance of Satyajit Ray:” The Big City (1963), Sat, 5:45. “Jean-Luc Godard: Expect Everything from Cinema:” Contempt (1963), Sat, 8:20. “Committed Cinema: Tony Buba:” “The Braddock Chronicles” (1972-85), Tue, 7.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. SF IndieFest, through Feb 20. For program info, visit www.sfindie.com.

TANNERY 708 Gilman, Berk; berkeleyundergroundfilms.blogspot.com. Donations accepted. “Berkeley Underground Film Society:” “LOOP Presents:” “Soundies!”, cinematic jukebox of rare musical films, Sat, 7:30; Take the Money and Run (Allen, 1969), Sun, 7:30.

VOGUE 3290 Sacramento, SF; www.mostlybritish.org. $12.50. “Mostly British Film Festival,” 25 classic and new films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and India, Feb 13-20.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “2013 British Arrow Awards,” award-winning commercials, Thu-Sat, 4, 6, 8; Sun, 2, 4, 6. *

Film Listings: February 12 -18, 2014

Michael Redmond

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February 11, 2014

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, Sam Stander, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

About Last Night First remake of the week: a do-over of the 1986 ensemble rom-com, based (like the earlier film) on a David Mamet play. This version stars Kevin Hart, Regina Hall, Michael Ealy, and Joy Bryant. (1:40)

Beijing Love Story Writer-director-star Chen Sicheng adapts his 2012 Chinese TV series, adding movie stars Carina Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai to the cast to up the big-screen wattage. The film follows an array of couples, starting with Chen and real-life wife Shen Yan as a young couple forced to make some hard choices after an unplanned pregnancy. “What’s love? It’s like a ghost. Everyone’s heard of it, nobody’s seen it,” the reluctant father-to-be’s cynical friend tells him. Said friend has been hitched for years; the film’s next storyline follows what happens when his wife finds out he’s been cheating (as it turns out, she has some secrets of her own). At one point, the action shifts from Beijing to Greece (for the Lau-Leung segment), before returning to the city for a teenage love story involving a cello prodigy who wants to compete on TV, and a boy who can “see auras,” among other fanciful talents. Finally, an elderly man embarks on a series of blind dates, looking for a second chance at love, with a twist that’s obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a rom-com before. By the time this flowery Valentine’s card of a movie reaches its melodramatic conclusion, it’s abundantly clear that Chen knows his target audience — see: the film’s multiple Titanic (1997) references — and that he’s a huge fan of the romance genre himself. Well, ’tis the season. (2:02) Metreon. (Eddy)

Endless Love Second remake of the week: a do-over of Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Scott Spencer’s young-adult-love-gone-awry novel. (1:44) Shattuck.

Like Father, Like Son A yuppie Tokyo couple are raising their only child in workaholic dad’s image, applying the pressure to excel at an early age. Imagine their distress when the hospital phones with some unpleasant news: It has only just been learned that a nurse mixed up their baby with another, with the result that both families have been raising the “wrong” children these six years. Polite, forced interaction with the other clan — a larger nuclear unit as warm, disorganized, and financially hapless as the first is formal, regimented and upwardly mobile — reveals that both sides have something to learn about parenting. This latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda (1998’s After Life, 2004’s Nobody Knows, 2008’s Still Walking) is, as usual, low-key, beautifully observed, and in the end deeply moving. (2:01) Shattuck, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Lovers of Eternity Other Cinema’s latest season opens with something truly special: a new Kuchar Brothers movie. Well, not exactly “new” — that would be difficult, as SF’s own beloved George is with us no more — but one that, incredibly, has never been seen on the West Coast before. Lovers of Eternity (1964) is a half hour color “camp treasure” recently transferred to 16mm from a sole surviving 8mm print. No clue what the cast or content is, but having been made when the Bronx bros were 22 years old, just before they stopped directing as a team, how could it not be genius? The bill will also include Mike Kuchar in person presenting his 1966 The Secret of Wendel Samson, starring Pop artist Red Grooms, George, and Kuchar staples including Donna Kerness and Bob Cowan; plus his brand-new Soulmates. There will also be miscellany including “an orgy of erotic romps” and “psychedelic smut.” Valentine’s Day was for lovers; at this Sat/15 event, get retro-sleazy. More info at www.othercinema.com. Artists’ Television Access. (Harvey)

RoboCop Truly, there was no need to remake 1987’s RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s smart, biting sci-fi classic that deploys heaps of stealth satire beneath its ultraviolent imagery. But the inevitable do-over is here, and while it doesn’t improve on what came before, it’s not a total lost cause, either. Thank Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, whose thrilling Elite Squad films touch on similar themes of corruption (within police, political, and media realms), and some inspired casting, including Samuel L. Jackson as the uber-conservative host of a futuristic talk show. Though the suit that restores life to fallen Detroit cop Alex Murphy is, naturally, a CG wonder, the guy inside the armor — played by The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman — is less dynamic. In fact, none of the characters, even those portrayed by actors far more lively than Kinnaman (Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley), are developed beyond the bare minimum required to serve RoboCop’s plot, a mixed-message glob of dirty cops, money-grubbing corporations, the military-industrial complex, and a few too many “Is he a man…or a machine?” moments. But in its favor: Though it’s PG-13 (boo), it’s also shot in 2D (yay). (1:50) Presidio. (Eddy)

Tim’s Vermeer See “Masterpiece Theater.” (1:20) Embarcadero.

Winter’s Tale Akiva Goldsman (Oscar-winning screenwriter of 2001’s A Beautiful Mind) directs Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, and Jennifer Connelly in this adaptation of Mark Halprin’s supernatural romance. (1:58) Four Star, Presidio.

ONGOING

American Hustle David O. Russell’s American Hustle is like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct. He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses; she’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward and gave herself a bombshell makeover. The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go. She’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of Mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians, hustling a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) in the process. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting here is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity. (2:17) Four Star, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

August: Osage County Considering the relative infrequency of theater-to-film translations today, it’s a bit of a surprise that Tracy Letts had two movies made from his plays before he even got to Broadway. Bug and Killer Joe proved a snug fit for director William Friedkin (in 2006 and 2011, respectively), but both plays were too outré for the kind of mainstream success accorded 2007’s August: Osage County, which won the Pulitzer, ran 18 months on Broadway, and toured the nation. As a result, August was destined — perhaps doomed — to be a big movie, the kind that shoehorns a distracting array of stars into an ensemble piece, playing jes’ plain folk. But what seemed bracingly rude as well as somewhat traditional under the proscenium lights just looks like a lot of reheated Country Gothic hash, and the possibility of profundity you might’ve been willing to consider before is now completely off the menu. If you haven’t seen August before (or even if you have), there may be sufficient fun watching stellar actors chew the scenery with varying degrees of panache — Meryl Streep (who else) as gorgon matriarch Violet Weston; Sam Shepard as her long-suffering spouse; Julia Roberts as pissed-off prodigal daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), etc. You know the beats: Late-night confessions, drunken hijinks, disastrous dinners, secrets (infidelity, etc.) spilling out everywhere like loose change from moth-eaten trousers. The film’s success story, I suppose, is Roberts: She seems very comfortable with her character’s bitter anger, and the four-letter words tumble past those jumbo lips like familiar friends. On the downside, there’s Streep, who’s a wizard and a wonder as usual yet also in that mode supporting the naysayers’ view that such conspicuous technique prevents our getting lost in her characters. If Streep can do anything, then logic decrees that includes being miscast. (2:10) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dallas Buyers Club Dallas Buyers Club is the first all-US feature from Jean-Marc Vallée. He first made a splash in 2005 with C.R.A.Z.Y., which seemed an archetype of the flashy, coming-of-age themed debut feature. Vallée has evolved beyond flashiness, or maybe since C.R.A.Z.Y. he just hasn’t had a subject that seemed to call for it. Which is not to say Dallas is entirely sober — its characters partake from the gamut of altering substances, over-the-counter and otherwise. But this is a movie about AIDS, so the purely recreational good times must eventually crash to an end. Which they do pretty quickly. We first meet Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) in 1986, a Texas good ol’ boy endlessly chasing skirts and partying nonstop. Not feeling quite right, he visits a doctor, who informs him that he is HIV-positive. His response is “I ain’t no faggot, motherfucker” — and increased partying that he barely survives. Afterward, he pulls himself together enough to research his options, and bribes a hospital attendant into raiding its trial supply of AZT for him. But Ron also discovers the hard way what many first-generation AIDS patients did — that AZT is itself toxic. He ends up in a Mexican clinic run by a disgraced American physician (Griffin Dunne) who recommends a regime consisting mostly of vitamins and herbal treatments. Ron realizes a commercial opportunity, and finds a business partner in willowy cross-dresser Rayon (Jared Leto). When the authorities keep cracking down on their trade, savvy Ron takes a cue from gay activists in Manhattan and creates a law evading “buyers club” in which members pay monthly dues rather than paying directly for pharmaceutical goods. It’s a tale that the scenarists (Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack) and director steep in deep Texan atmospherics, and while it takes itself seriously when and where it ought, Dallas Buyers Club is a movie whose frequent, entertaining jauntiness is based in that most American value: get-rich-quick entrepreneurship. (1:58) Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Harvey)

Devil’s Due (1:29) Metreon.

Frozen (1:48) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Gloria The titular figure in Sebastian Lelio’s film is a Santiago divorcee and white collar worker (Paulina Garcia) pushing 60, living alone in a condo apartment — well, almost alone, since like Inside Llewyn Davis, this movie involves the frequent, unwanted company of somebody else’s cat. (That somebody is an upstairs neighbor whose solo wailings against cruel fate disturb her sleep.) Her two children are grown up and preoccupied with their adult lives. Not quite ready for the glue factory yet, Gloria often goes to a disco for the “older crowd,” dancing by herself if she has to, but still hoping for some romantic prospects. She gets them in the form of Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), who’s more recently divorced but gratifyingly infatuated with her. Unfortunately, he’s also let his daughters and ex-wife remain ominously dependent on him, not just financially but in every emotional crisis that affects their apparently crisis-filled lives. The extent to which Gloria lets him into her life is not reciprocated, and she becomes increasingly aware how distant her second-place priority status is whenever Rodolfo’s other loved ones snap their fingers. There’s not a lot of plot but plenty of incident and insight to this character study, a portrait of a “spinster” that neither slathers on the sentimental uplift or piles on melodramatic victimizations. Instead, Gloria is memorably, satisfyingly just right. (1:50) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Gravity “Life in space is impossible,” begins Gravity, the latest from Alfonso Cuarón (2006’s Children of Men). Egghead Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is well aware of her precarious situation after a mangled satellite slams into her ship, then proceeds to demolition-derby everything (including the International Space Station) in its path. It’s not long before she’s utterly, terrifyingly alone, and forced to unearth near-superhuman reserves of physical and mental strength to survive. Bullock’s performance would be enough to recommend Gravity, but there’s more to praise, like the film’s tense pacing, spare-yet-layered script (Cuarón co-wrote with his son, Jonás), and spectacular 3D photography — not to mention George Clooney’s warm supporting turn as a career astronaut who loves country music almost as much as he loves telling stories about his misadventures. (1:31) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Great Beauty The latest from Paolo Sorrentino (2008’s Il Divo) arrives as a high-profile contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, already annointed a masterpiece in some quarters, and duly announcing itself as such in nearly every grandiose, aesthetically engorged moment. Yes, it seems to say, you are in the presence of this auteur’s masterpiece. But it’s somebody else’s, too. The problem isn’t just that Fellini got there first, but that there’s room for doubt whether Sorrentino’s homage actually builds on or simply imitates its model. La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) are themselves swaying, jerry-built monuments, exhileratingly messy and debatably profound. But nothing quite like them had been seen before, and they did define a time of cultural upheaval — when traditional ways of life were being plowed under by a loud, moneyed, heedless modernity that for a while chose Rome as its global capital. Sorrentino announces his intention to out-Fellini Fellini in an opening sequence so strenuously flamboyant it’s like a never-ending pirouette performed by a prima dancer with a hernia. There’s statuary, a women’s choral ensemble, an on-screen audience applauding the director’s baffled muse Toni Servillo, standing in for Marcello Mastroianni — all this and more in manic tracking shots and frantic intercutting, as if sheer speed alone could supply contemporary relevancy. Eventually The Great Beauty calms down a bit, but still its reason for being remains vague behind the heavy curtain of “style.” (2:22) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Her Morose and lonely after a failed marriage, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) drifts through an appealingly futuristic Los Angeles (more skyscrapers, less smog) to his job at a place so hipster-twee it probably will exist someday: beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he dictates flowery missives to a computer program that scrawls them onto paper for paying customers. Theodore’s scripting of dialogue between happy couples, as most of his clients seem to be, only enhances his sadness, though he’s got friends who care about him (in particular, Amy Adams as Amy, a frumpy college chum) and he appears to have zero money woes, since his letter-writing gig funds a fancy apartment equipped with a sweet video-game system. Anyway, women are what gives Theodore trouble — and maybe by extension, writer-director Spike Jonze? — so he seeks out the ultimate gal pal: Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the year’s best disembodied performance. Thus begins a most unusual relationship, but not so unusual; Theodore’s friends don’t take any issue with the fact that his new love is a machine. Hey, in Her‘s world, everyone’s deeply involved with their chatty, helpful, caring, always-available OS — why wouldn’t Theo take it to the next level? Inevitably, of course, complications arise. If Her‘s romantic arc feels rather predictable, the film acquits itself in other ways, including boundlessly clever production-design touches that imagine a world with technology that’s (mostly) believably evolved from what exists today. Also, the pants they wear in the future? Must be seen to be believed. (2:00) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Just when you’d managed to wipe 2012’s unwieldy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey from your mind, here comes its sequel — and it’s actually good! Yes, it’s too long (Peter Jackson wouldn’t have it any other way); arachnophobes (and maybe small children) will have trouble with the creepy, giant-spider battle; and Orlando Bloom, reprising his Lord of the Rings role as Legolas the elf, has been CG’d to the point of looking like he’s carved out of plastic. But there’s much more to enjoy this time around, with a quicker pace (no long, drawn-out dinner parties); winning performances by Martin Freeman (Bilbo), Ian McKellan (Gandalf); and Benedict Cumberbatch (as the petulent voice of Smaug the dragon); and more shape to the quest, as the crew of dwarves seeks to reclaim their homeland, and Gandalf pokes into a deeper evil that’s starting to overtake Middle-earth. (We all know how that ends.) In addition to Cumberbatch, the cast now includes Lost‘s Evangeline Lilly as elf Tauriel, who doesn’t appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original story, but whose lady-warrior presence is a welcome one; and Luke Evans as Bard, a human poised to play a key role in defeating Smaug in next year’s trilogy-ender, There and Back Again. (2:36) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Before succumbing to the hot and heavy action inside the arena (intensely directed by Francis Lawrence) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire force-feeds you a world of heinous concept fashions that’d make Lady Gaga laugh. But that’s ok, because the second film about one girl’s epic struggle to change the world of Panem may be even more exciting than the first. Suzanne Collins’ YA novel The Hunger Games was an over-literal metaphor for junior high social survival and the glory of Catching Fire is that it depicts what comes after you reach the cool kids’ table. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) inspired so much hope among the 12 districts she now faces pressures from President Snow (a portentous Donald Sutherland) and the fanatical press of Capital City (Stanley Tucci with big teeth and Toby Jones with big hair). After she’s forced to fake a romance with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the two watch with horror as they’re faced with a new Hunger Game: for returning victors, many of whom are too old to run. Amanda Plummer and Jeffrey Wright are fun as brainy wackjobs and Jena Malone is hilariously Amazonian as a serial axe grinder still screaming like an eighth grader. Inside the arena, alliances and rivalries shift but the winner’s circle could survive to see another revolution; to save this city, they may have to burn it down. (2:26) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

I, Frankenstein (1:33) Metreon.

Inside Llewyn Davis In the Coen Brothers’ latest, Oscar Isaac as the titular character is well on his way to becoming persona non grata in 1961 NYC — particularly in the Greenwich Village folk music scene he’s an ornery part of. He’s broke, running out of couches to crash on, has recorded a couple records that have gone nowhere, and now finds out he’s impregnated the wife (Carey Mulligan) and musical partner of one among the few friends (Justin Timberlake) he has left. She’s furious with herself over this predicament, but even more furious at him. This ambling, anecdotal tale finds Llewyn running into one exasperating hurdle after another as he burns his last remaining bridges, not just in Manhattan but on a road trip to Chicago undertaken with an overbearing jazz musician (John Goodman) and his enigmatic driver (Garrett Hedlund) to see a club impresario (F. Murray Abraham). This small, muted, droll Coens exercise is perfectly handled in terms of performance and atmosphere, with pleasures aplenty in its small plot surprises, myriad humorous idiosyncrasies, and T. Bone Burnett’s sweetened folk arrangements. But whether it actually has anything to say about its milieu (a hugely important Petri dish for later ’60s political and musical developments), or adds up to anything more profound than an beautifully executed shaggy-dog story, will be a matter of personal taste — or perhaps of multiple viewings. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Throwback Terror Thursday, anyone? If the early Bourne entries leapt ahead of then-current surveillance technology in their paranoia-inducing ability to Find-Replace-Eliminate international villains wherever they were in the world, then Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit flails in the opposite direction — toward a nonsensical, flag-waving mixture of Cold War and War on Terror phobias. So when covert mucky-muck Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) solemnly warns that if mild-mannered former Marine and secret CIA analyst Jack Ryan stumbles, the US is in danger of … another Great Depression, you just have to blink, Malcolm Gladwell-style. Um, didn’t we just do that? And is this movie that out of touch? It doesn’t help that director Kenneth Branagh casts himself as the sleek, camp, and illin’ Russian baddie Viktor Cherevin, who’s styled like a ’90s club tsar in formfitting black clothing with a sheen that screams “Can this dance-floor sadist buy you another cosmo?” He’s intended to pass for something resembling sex — and soul — in Shadow Recruit‘s odd, determinedly clueless universe. That leaves a colorless, blank Chris Pine with the thankless task of rescuing whiney physician love Cathy (Keira Knightley) from baddie clutches. Pine’s no Alec Baldwin, lacking the latter’s wit and anger management issues, or even Ben Affleck, who has also succumbed to blank, beefcake posturing on occasion. Let’s return this franchise to its box, firmly relegated to the shadows. (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Labor Day Sweet little home repairs, quickie car tune-ups, sensual pie-making, and sexed-up chili cookery — Labor Day seems to be taking its chick-flick cues from Porn For Women, Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative’s puckish gift-booklet that strives to capture women’s real desires: namely, for vacuuming, folded laundry, and patient listening from their chosen hunks of beefcake. Let’s call it domestic close encounters of the most pragmatic, and maybe most realistic, kind. But that seems to sail over the heads of all concerned with Labor Day. Working with Joyce Maynard’s novel, director-screenwriter Jason Reitman largely dispenses with the wit that washes through Juno (2007) and Up in the Air (2009) and instead chooses to peer at his actors through the seriously overheated, poetically impressionistic prism of Terrence Malick … if Malick were tricked into making a Nicholas Sparks movie. Single mom Adele (Kate Winslet) is down in the dumps over multiple miscarriages and her husband’s (Clark Gregg) departure. Son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) becomes her caretaker of sorts — thus, when escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin) forces the mother-and-son team to give him a ride and a hideout, it’s both a blessing and a curse, especially because the hardened tough guy turns out to be a compulsively domestic, hardworking ubermensch of a Marlboro Man, able to bake up a peach pie and teach Henry to throw a baseball, all within the course of a long Labor Day weekend. Hapless Adele is helpless to resist him, particularly after some light bondage and plenty of manly nurturing. Ultimately this masochistic fantasy about the ultimate, if forbidden, family man — and the delights of the Stockholm Syndrome — is much harder to swallow than a spoonful of homemade chili, despite its strong cast. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Lego Movie (1:41) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center.

Lone Survivor Peter Berg (2012’s Battleship, 2007’s The Kingdom) may officially be structuring his directing career around muscular tails of bad-assery. This true story follows a team of Navy SEALs on a mission to find a Taliban group leader in an Afghani mountain village. Before we meet the actors playing our real-life action heroes we see training footage of actual SEALs being put through their paces; it’s physical hardship structured to separate the tourists from the lifers. The only proven action star in the group is Mark Wahlberg — as Marcus Luttrell, who wrote the film’s source-material book. His funky bunch is made of heartthrobs and sensitive types: Taylor Kitsch (TV’s Friday Night Lights); Ben Foster, who last portrayed William S. Burroughs in 2013’s Kill Your Darlings but made his name as an officer breaking bad news gently to war widows in 2009’s The Messenger; and Emile Hirsch, who wandered into the wilderness in 2007’s Into the Wild. We know from the outset who the lone survivors won’t be, but the film still manages to convey tension and suspense, and its relentlessness is stunning. Foster throws himself off a cliff, bounces off rocks, and gets caught in a tree — then runs to his also-bloody brothers to report, “That sucked.” (Yesterday I got a paper cut and tweeted about it.) But the takeaway from this brutal battle between the Taliban and America’s Real Heroes is that the man who lived to tell the tale also offers an olive branch to the other side — this survivor had help from the non-Taliban locals, a last-act detail that makes Lone Survivor this Oscar season’s nugget of political kumbaya. (2:01) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

The Monuments Men The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” goes both ways. On paper, The Monuments Men — inspired by the men who recovered art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and directed by George Clooney, who co-wrote and stars alongside a sparkling ensemble cast (Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh “Earl of Grantham” Bonneville, and Bill Fucking Murray) — rules. Onscreen, not so much. After they’re recruited to join the cause, the characters fan out across France and Germany following various leads, a structural choice that results in the film’s number one problem: it can’t settle on a tone. Men can’t decide if it wants to be a sentimental war movie (as in an overlong sequence in which Murray’s character weeps at the sound of his daughter’s recorded voice singing “White Christmas”); a tragic war movie (some of those marquee names die, y’all); a suspenseful war movie (as the men sneak into dangerous territory with Michelangelo on their minds); or a slapstick war comedy (look out for that land mine!) The only consistent element is that the villains are all one-note — and didn’t Inglourious Basterds (2009) teach us that nothing elevates a 21st century-made World War II flick like an eccentric bad guy? There’s one perfectly executed scene, when reluctant partners Balaban and Murray discover a trove of priceless paintings hidden in plain sight. One scene, out of a two-hour movie, that really works. The rest is a stitched-together pile of earnest intentions that suggests a complete lack of coherent vision. Still love you, Clooney, but you can do better — and this incredible true story deserved way better. (1:58) Balboa, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Nebraska Alexander Payne may be unique at this point in that he’s in a position of being able to make nothing but small, human, and humorous films with major-studio money on his own terms. It’s hazardous to make too much of a movie like Nebraska, because it is small — despite the wide Great Plains landscapes shot in a wide screen format — and shouldn’t be entered into with overinflated or otherwise wrong-headed expectations. Still, a certain gratitude is called for. Nebraska marks the first time Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor weren’t involved in the script, and the first one since their 1996 Citizen Ruth that isn’t based on someone else’s novel. (Hitherto little-known Bob Nelson’s original screenplay apparently first came to Payne’s notice a decade ago, but getting put off in favor of other projects.) It could easily have been a novel, though, as the things it does very well (internal thought, sense of place, character nuance) and the things it doesn’t much bother with (plot, action, dialogue) are more in line with literary fiction than commercial cinema. Elderly Woody T. Grant (Bruce Dern) keeps being found grimly trudging through snow and whatnot on the outskirts of Billings, Mont., bound for Lincoln, Neb. Brain fuzzed by age and booze, he’s convinced he’s won a million dollars and needs to collect it him there, though eventually it’s clear that something bigger than reality — or senility, even — is compelling him to make this trek. Long-suffering younger son David (Will Forte) agrees to drive him in order to simply put the matter to rest. This fool’s mission acquires a whole extended family-full of other fools when father and son detour to the former’s podunk farming hometown. Nebraska has no moments so funny or dramatic they’d look outstanding in excerpt; low-key as they were, 2009’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants had bigger set pieces and narrative stakes. But like those movies, this one just ambles along until you realize you’re completely hooked, all positive emotional responses on full alert. (1:55) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Nut Job (1:26) Metreon.

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Animated” Five nominees — plus a trio of “highly commended” additional selections — fill this program. If you saw Frozen in the theater, you’ve seen Get a Horse!, starring old-timey Mickey Mouse and some very modern moviemaking techniques. There’s also Room on the Broom, based on a children’s book about a kindly witch who’s a little too generous when it comes to befriending outcast animals (much to the annoyance of her original companion, a persnickety cat). Simon Pegg narrates, and Gillian Anderson voices the red-headed witch; listen also for Mike Leigh regulars Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall. Japanese Possessions is based on even older source material: a spooky legend that discarded household objects can gain the power to cause mischief. A good-natured fix-it man ducks into an abandoned house during a rainstorm, only to be confronted with playful parasols, cackling kimono fabric, and a dragon constructed out of kitchen junk. The most artistically striking nominee is Feral, a dialogue-free, impressionistic tale of a foundling who resists attempts to civilize him. But my top pick is another dialogue-free entry: Mr. Hublot, the steampunky tale of an inventor whose regimented life is thrown into disarray when he adopts a stray robot dog, which soon grows into a comically enormous companion. It’s cute without being cloying, and the universe it creates around its characters is cleverly detailed, right down to the pictures on Hublot’s walls. Embarcadero. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Live Action” With the exception of one entry — wryly comedic The Voorman Problem, starring Sherlock‘s Martin Freeman as a prison doctor who has a most unsettling encounter with an inmate who believes he’s a god — children are a unifying theme among this year’s live-action nominees. Finnish Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?, the shortest in the bunch, follows a cheerfully sloppy family’s frantic morning as they scramble to get themselves to a wedding. Danish Helium skews a little sentimental in its tale of a hospital janitor who makes up stories about a fanciful afterlife (way more fun than heaven) for the benefit of a sickly young patient. Spanish That Wasn’t Me focuses on a different kind of youth entirely: a child soldier in an unnamed African nation, whose brutal encounter with a pair of European doctors leads him down an unexpected path. Though it feels more like a sequence lifted from a longer film rather than a self-contained short, French Just Before Losing Everything is the probably the strongest contender here. The tale of a woman (Léa Drucker) who decides to take her two children and leave her dangerously abusive husband, it unfolds with real-time suspense as she visits her supermarket job one last time to deal with mundane stuff (collecting her last paycheck, turning in her uniform) before the trio can flee to safety. If they gave out Oscars for short-film acting, Drucker would be tough to beat; her performance balances steely determination and extreme fear in equally hefty doses. Embarcadero. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Documentary (presented in two separata programs)” Opera Plaza.

The Past Splits in country, culture, and a harder-to-pinpoint sense of morality mark The Past, the latest film by Asghar Farhadi, the first Iranian moviemaker to win an Oscar (for 2011’s A Separation.) At the center of The Past‘s onion layers is a seemingly simple divorce of a binational couple, but that act becomes more complicated — and startlingly compelling — in Farhadi’s capable, caring hands. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) has returned to Paris from Tehran, where he’s been living for the past four years, at the request of French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo of 2011’s The Artist). She wants to legalize their estrangement so she can marry her current boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim of 2009’s A Prophet), whose wife is in a coma. But she isn’t beyond giving out mixed messages by urging Ahmad to stay with her, and her daughters by various fathers, rather than at a hotel — and begging him to talk to teen Lucie (Pauline Burlet), who seems to despise Samir. The warm, nurturing Ahmad falls into his old routine in Marie’s far-from-picturesque neighborhood, visiting a café owned by fellow Iranian immigrants and easily taking over childcare duties for the overwhelmed Marie, as he tries to find out what’s happening with Lucie, who’s holding onto a secret that could threaten Marie’s efforts to move on. The players here are all wonderful, in particular the sad-faced, humane Mosaffa. We never really find out what severed his relationship with Marie, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. We care about, and end up fearing for, all of Farhadi’s everyday characters, who are observed with a tender and unsentimental understanding that US filmmakers could learn from. The effect, when he finally racks focus on the forgotten member of this triangle (or quadrilateral?), is heartbreaking. (2:10) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Philomena Judi Dench gives this twist on a real-life scandal heart, soul, and a nuanced, everyday heft. Her ideal, ironic foil is Steve Coogan, playing an upper-crusty irreverent snob of an investigative journalist. Judging by her tidy exterior, Dench’s title character is a perfectly ordinary Irish working-class senior, but she’s haunted by the past, which comes tumbling out one day to her daughter: As an unwed teenager, she gave birth to a son at a convent. She was forced to work there, unpaid; as supposed penance, the baby was essentially sold to a rich American couple against her consent. Her yarn reaches disgraced reporter Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), who initially turns his nose up at the tale’s piddling “human interest” angle, but slowly gets drawn in by the unexpected twists and turns of the story — and likely the possibility of taking down some evil nuns — as well as seemingly naive Philomena herself, with her delight in trash culture, frank talk about sex, and simple desire to see her son and know that he thought, once in a while, of her. It turns out Philomena’s own sad narrative has as many improbable turnarounds as one of the cheesy romance novels she favors, and though this unexpected twosome’s quest for the truth is strenuously reworked to conform to the contours of buddy movie-road trip arc that we’re all too familiar with, director Stephen Frears’ warm, light-handed take on the gentle class struggles going on between the writer and his subject about who’s in control of the story makes up for Philomena‘s determined quest for mass appeal. (1:35) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Ride Along By sheer dint of his ability to push his verbosity and non-threatening physicality into that nerd zone between smart and clueless, intelligent and irritating, Kevin Hart may be poised to become Hollywood’s new comedy MVP. In the case of Ride Along, it helps that Ice Cube has comic talents, too — proven in the Friday movies as well as in 2012’s 21 Jump Street — as the straight man who can actually scowl and smile at the same time. Together, in Ride Along, they bring the featherweight pleasures of Rush Hour-style odd-couple chortles. Hart is Ben, a gamer geek and school security guard shooting to become the most wrinkly student at the police academy. He looks up to hardened, street-smart cop James (Cube), brother of his new fiancée, Angela (Tika Sumpter). Naturally, instead of simply blessing the nuptials, the tough guy decides to haze the shut-in, disabusing him of any illusions he might have of being his equal. More-than-equal talents like Laurence Fishburne and John Leguizamo are pretty much wasted here — apart from Fishburne’s ultra lite impression of Matrix man Morpheus — but if you don’t expect much more than the chuckles eked out of Ride Along‘s commercials, you won’t be too disappointed by this nontaxing journey. (1:40) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Saving Mr. Banks Having promised his daughters that he would make a movie of their beloved Mary Poppins books, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) has laid polite siege to author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) for over 20 years. Now, in the early 1960s, she has finally consented to discuss the matter in Los Angeles — albeit with great reluctance, and only because royalty payments have dried up to the point where she might have to sell her London home. Bristling at being called “Pam” and everything else in this sunny SoCal and relentlessly cheery Mouse House environ, the acidic English spinster regards her creation as sacred. The least proposed changes earn her horrified dismissal, and the very notion of having Mary and company “prancing and chirping” out songs amid cartoon elements is taken as blasphemy. This clash of titans could have made for a barbed comedy with satirical elements, but god forbid this actual Disney production should get so cheeky. Instead, we get the formulaically dramatized tale of a shrew duly tamed by all-American enterprise, with flashbacks to the inevitable past traumas (involving Colin Farrell as a beloved but alcoholic ne’er-do-well father) that require healing of Travers’ wounded inner child by the magic of the Magic Kingdom. If you thought 2004’s Finding Neverland was contrived feel-good stuff, you’ll really choke on the spoons full of sugar force-fed here. (2:06) Metreon. (Harvey)

The Square Like the single lit candle at the very start of The Square — a flicker of hope amid the darkness of Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship — the initial street scenes of the leader’s Feb. 11, 2011, announcement that he was stepping down launch Jehane Noujaim’s documentary on a euphoric note. It’s a lot to take in: the evocative shots of Tahrir Square, the graffiti on the streets, the movement’s troubadours, and the faces of the activists she follows — the youthful Ahmed Hassan, British-reared Kite Runner (2007) actor-turned-citizen journalist Khalid Abdalla, and Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Magdy Ashour, among them. Yet that first glimmer of joy and unity among the diverse individuals who toppled a dictatorship was only the very beginning of a journey — which the Egyptian American Noujaim does a remarkable job documenting, in all its twists, turns, multiple protests, and voices. Unflinching albeit even-handed footage of the turnabouts, hypocrisies, and injustices committed by the Brotherhood, powers-that-be, the army, and the police during the many actions occurring between 2011 and the 2013 removal of Mohammed Morsi will stay with you, including the sight of a tank plowing down protestors with murderous force and soldiers firing live rounds at activists armed only with stones. “We found ourselves loving each other without realizing it,” says Hassan of those heady first days, and Noujaim brings you right there and to their aftermath, beautifully capturing ordinary people coming together, eating, joking, arguing, feeling empowered and discouraged, forming unlikely friendships, setting up makeshift hospitals on the street, and risking everything, in this powerful document of an unfolding real-life epic. (1:44) Marina. (Chun)

Stranger by the Lake Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is an attractive young French guy spending his summer days hanging at the local gay beach, where he strikes up a platonic friendship with chunky older loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumcao). Still, the latter is obviously hurt when Franck practically gets whiplash neck swiveling at the sight of Michel (Christophe Paou), an old-school gay fantasy figure — think Sam Elliott in 1976’s Lifeguard, complete with Marlboro Man ‘stache and twinkling baby blues. No one else seems to be paying attention when Franck sees his lust object frolicking in the surf with an apparent boyfriend, one that doesn’t surface again after some playful “dunking” gets rather less playful. Eventually the police come around in the form of Inspector Damroder (Jerome Chappatte), but Franck stays mum — he isn’t sure what exactly he saw. Or maybe it’s that he’s quite sure he’s happy how things turned out, now that sex-on-wheels Michel is his sorta kinda boyfriend. You have to suspend considerable disbelief to accept that our protagonist would risk potentially serious danger for what seems pretty much a glorified fuck-buddy situation. But Alain Guiraudie’s meticulously schematic thriller- which limits all action to the terrain between parking lot and shore, keeping us almost wholly ignorant of the characters’ regular lives — repays that leap with an absorbing, ingenious structural rigor. Stranger is Hitchcockian, all right, even if the “Master of Suspense” might applaud its technique while blushing at its blunt homoeroticism. (1:37) Clay. (Harvey)

That Awkward Moment When these bro-mancers call each other “idiots,” which they do repeatedly, it’s awkward all right, because that descriptor hits all too close to home. Jason (Zac Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller) are douchey book-marketing boy geniuses, with all the ego and fratty attitude needed to dispense bad advice and push doctor friend Mikey (Michael B. Jordan), whose wife recently broke it off after an affair with her lawyer, into an agreement to play the field — no serious dating allowed. The pretext: Anything to avoid, yup, that awkward moment when the lady has the temerity to ask, “So — where is this going?” How fortuitous that Jason should run into the smartest, cutest author in NYC (Imogen Poots), all sharp-tongued charisma and sparkling Emma Stone-y cat eyes; that Daniel would get embroiled with his Charlotte Rampling-like wing woman (Mackenzie Davis); and Mikey would edge back into bed with his ex. That’s the worst — or best — these tepid lotharios can muster. The education of these numbskulls when it comes to love and lust aspires to the much-edgier self-criticism of Girls — but despite the presence of Fruitvale Station (2013) breakout Jordan and the likable Poots, first-time director Tom Gormican’s screenplay lets them down. (1:34) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

12 Years a Slave Pop culture’s engagement with slavery has always been uneasy. Landmark 1977 miniseries Roots set ratings records, but the prestigious production capped off a decade that had seen some more questionable endeavors, including 1975 exploitation flick Mandingo — often cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favorite films; it was a clear influence on his 2012 revenge fantasy Django Unchained, which approached its subject matter in a manner that paid homage to the Westerns it riffed on: with guns blazing. By contrast, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is nuanced and steeped in realism. Though it does contain scenes of violence (deliberately captured in long takes by regular McQueen collaborator Sean Bobbitt, whose cinematography is one of the film’s many stylistic achievements), the film emphasizes the horrors of “the peculiar institution” by repeatedly showing how accepted and ingrained it was. Slave is based on the true story of Solomon Northup, an African American man who was sold into slavery in 1841 and survived to pen a wrenching account of his experiences. He’s portrayed here by the powerful Chiwetel Ejiofor. Other standout performances come courtesy of McQueen favorite Michael Fassbender (as Epps, a plantation owner who exacerbates what’s clearly an unwell mind with copious amounts of booze) and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o, as a slave who attracts Epps’ cruel attentions. (2:14) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Vampire Academy (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Wolf of Wall Street Three hours long and breathless from start to finish, Martin Scorsese’s tale of greed, stock-market fraud, and epic drug consumption has a lot going on — and the whole thing hinges on a bravado, breakneck performance by latter-day Scorsese muse Leonardo DiCaprio. As real-life sleaze Jordan Belfort (upon whose memoir the film is based), he distills all of his golden DiCaprio-ness into a loathsome yet maddeningly likable character who figures out early in his career that being rich is way better than being poor, and that being fucked-up is, likewise, much preferable to being sober. The film also boasts keen supporting turns from Jonah Hill (as Belfort’s crass, corrupt second-in-command), Matthew McConaughey (who has what amounts to a cameo — albeit a supremely memorable one — as Belfort’s coke-worshiping mentor), Jean Dujardin (as a slick Swiss banker), and newcomer Margot Robbie (as Belfort’s cunning trophy wife). But this is primarily the Leo and Marty Show, and is easily their most entertaining episode to date. Still, don’t look for an Oscar sweep: Scorsese just hauled huge for 2011’s Hugo, and DiCaprio’s flashy turn will likely be passed over by voters more keen on honoring subtler work in a shorter film. (2:59) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy) *

England made him

Michael Redmond

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February 11, 2014

0

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Swinging London had a brief, faddish life in movies in terms of actual representation, far more fleeting than its influences on music or fashion. But the general cultural shift it signaled did bring some lasting changes to English cinema, notably a new kind of leading man — the period’s celebration of youth and dandyism made it OK for men onscreen to be coltish, vulnerable, androgynously attractive. The prime specimen was Michael York, unabashedly pretty and a bit of a toff — certainly no working-class rough like Angry Young Men Albert Finney or Michael Caine.

The Oxford grad joined Olivier’s National Theatre in 1965, getting cast in a production directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who then put him in his filmed hits The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Romeo and Juliet (1968). But it wasn’t until 1972 that he was seen by everyone as the Christopher Isherwood figure in Bob Fosse’s exceptionally sharp Cabaret, the Broadway musical drawn from that author’s fictionalized memoir. Never mind that he (nor Liza Minnelli, for that matter) would never really be a box-office star; as a name, he was made.

York had a good run through the 1970s. He was D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s Musketeer films (1973 and ’74), the titular tunic-wearer in 1976’s Logan’s Run, among the stars committing Murder on the Orient Express (1974), John the Baptist in Zeffirelli’s 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, and straight man in both The Last Remake of Beau Geste and the hardly-last Island of Dr. Moreau remake (both 1977).

But the favorite film he’s chosen for his in-person tribute this Saturday at SF’s Mostly British Film Festival is comparatively little-remembered. You could view 1973’s England Made Me as riding the coattails of Cabaret — after all, here he is again as another affable, genteel but cash-poor temporary English émigré to Germany just as the Weimer era is getting tramped by the stormtrooper boots of National Socialism. But the Graham Greene source material (first published in 1935) is strong stuff, intelligently handled by director and co-adaptor Peter Duffell.

York’s Tony Farrant is a pleasant, callow young failure, hopeless at any endeavor that might pay the bills. Having lost yet another job (this time in the Far East), he blows into Berlin to visit Kate (Hildegard Neil), the sister whose queasily inappropriate affections he’s oblivious enough not to have recognized as such, yet. She’s ensconced herself as mistress and second-in-command to Krogh (Peter Finch), international financial titan skating on thin ice amid Hitler’s increasingly nationalistic economic policies.

Once again in need of employment, Tony looks to get fixed up by big sis — in fact, his pleasing, sociable English manners could be quite useful to a man as brilliant yet uneasy with people as Krogh. Then again, his gabby naiveté could also jinx matters much bigger than he grasps. It’s inevitable in Greene’s universe that cruel fate should choose the least guilty party in a web of corrupt intrigue to fall upon, like an anvil from a rooftop.

The role could hardly fall more squarely in York’s comfort zone. Yet it would be a mistake to take the seeming ease with which he delivers Tony’s very easy personality as anything less than very deft work. No wonder it’s a personal favorite — you can sense his engagement in a hundred fresh, surprising, perfectly in-character touches.

After his Seventies peak, York remained busy. But his type began working against him — an ingenue’s worst enemy (even a male one’s) is the onslaught of age — and he didn’t transition as well as some peers to character roles. He slid down the ranks via such odd stints as a short run on Dynasty knockoff Knots Landing and playing Dario Argento’s Phantom of Death in 1988 (the director saving the word “opera” for a later movie). Eventually he was seldom used save to personify old-school Englishness as a joke or fossil, whether visibly (as Basil Exposition in the Austin Powers series) or as a voice actor (as a Transformer, in Star Wars and Batman cartoons, video games, audio books, etc.) In recent years he’s also written several well-received memoirs and lectured extensively on acting Shakespeare.

England Made Me is not the only older film in Mostly British this year, though it’s the only one that comes with a living star in person. No one will be resuscitating the recently decreased Peter O’Toole, memorialized with a screening of 1982’s My Favorite Year; nor will there be any thawing for Richard Burton as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 1965’s faithfully bleak adaptation of John le Carré’s breakthrough novel. The latter film plays a “British noir night” with Stephen Frears’ bizarre and rather brilliant 1984 The Hit.

Otherwise the focus, as usual, is on new (or new-ish) films from the UK and beyond. Some have already played theatrically here, like Neil Jordan’s middling vampire opus Byzantium (2012), Beatles-related documentary Good Ol’ Freda (2013), and Michael Winterbottom’s biopic about the UK’s sultan of 1960s and ’70s smut, The Look of Love (2013).

Coming soon to theaters — sooner still if you catch them as part of the festival — are director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi’s excellent seriocomedy Le Week-End, as well as Mumbai-set The Lunchbox. Speaking of the colonies, outback thriller Mystery Road and kidnapping drama Last Dance represent Australia.

If you appreciated Will Forte’s turn in Nebraska (2013), it’s worth seeing Run & Jump, in which he’s equally effective as an American doctor whose emotions unfreeze while doing research in Ireland — also the setting for Stay, a drearier piece distinguished by Aidan Quinn’s fine take on the stereotypical Irish rascally charmer. What Richard Did is a quietly intriguing melodrama about middle-class teenagers shaken by the aftermath of a fight outside a house party. Farther down the socioeconomic scale, Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant offers a portrait of children involved in petty crimes that’s as potent as the best of Ken Loach or the Dardennes. *

MOSTLY BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 13-20

Vogue Theatre

3290 Sacramento, SF

www.mostlybritish.org

Staying power

Michael Redmond

-

February 11, 2014

68

rebecca@sfbg.com

Despite the rain on Feb. 8, organizers of a citywide tenants’ convention at San Francisco’s Tenderloin Elementary School wound up having to turn people away at the door. The meeting was filled to capacity, even though it had been moved at the last minute to accommodate a larger crowd than initially anticipated.

“Oh. My. God. Look at how many of you there are!” organizer Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, called out as she greeted the hundreds in attendance. “Tenants in San Francisco, presente!”

The multiracial crowd was representative of neighborhoods from across the city, from elderly folks with canes to parents with small children in tow. Translators had been brought in to accommodate Chinese and Spanish-speaking participants.

Six members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also made an appearance: Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Malia Cohen, Jane Kim, and Board President David Chiu.

In recent weeks, the convention organizers had convened a series of smaller neighborhood gatherings to solicit ideas for new policy measures to stem the tide of evictions and displacement, a problem that has steadily risen to the level of the defining issue of our times in San Francisco.

Ana Godina, an organizer with the SEIU, went to the convention with her daughter Ella, 5. Godina drove from Sacramento to support her colleagues. Three of her fellow union members have been evicted recently, all of them Tenderloin and Mission residents. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

While several legislative proposals are on track to move forward at the Board of Supervisors, the meetings were called to directly involve impacted communities and give them an opportunity to shape the legislative agenda on their own terms, according to various organizers.

Addressing the crowd, Shortt recalled what she termed “some amazing jiu jitsu” during last year’s tenant campaigns, which resulted in a 10-year moratorium on condo conversions rather than simply allowing a mass bypass of the condo lottery, as originally proposed.

That measure, which won approval at the Board of Supervisors last June, was designed to discourage real estate speculators from evicting tenants to convert buildings to tenancies-in-common, a shared housing arrangement that’s often a precursor to converting rent-controlled apartments into condos.

That effort brought together the founding members of the Anti Displacement Coalition, and momentum has been building ever since. “This is the beginning of a movement today,” Gen Fujioka of the Chinatown Community Development Center, one of the key organizations involved, told the gathering. “We are shaking things up in our city.”

MAINTAINING DIVERSITY

Around 160 participants attended the first in a series of neighborhood tenant conventions in the Castro on Jan. 10. The one in the Richmond a week later drew so many participants that organizers had to turn people away to appease the fire marshal.

“The idea of the neighborhood conventions was to solicit ideas,” explained Ted Gullicksen, head of the San Francisco Tenants Union. “The idea of this event is to review existing ideas and ultimately rank them.” From there, the campaign will pursue a ballot initiative or legislative approval at the Board of Supervisors.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, and his dog Falcor. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

But first, a few speakers shared their stories. Gum Gee Lee spoke about being evicted from her Chinatown apartment last year along with her husband and disabled adult daughter, an event that touched off a media frenzy about the affordable housing crisis taking root in San Francisco.

“There were times that were very stressful for me. I would call places only for the owner to say, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ but they never did,” she said of that ordeal.

“To see everyone here, all kinds of people, it makes me really happy,” she later told the Bay Guardian through a translator. “I just hope they don’t get evicted.”

Mike Casey, president of UNITE-HERE Local 2 and an executive committee member of the San Francisco Labor Council, also made a few comments at the forum.

“Having the ability to live and vote in this city makes a difference,” he pointed out, saying workers who have to commute long distances for political actions because they’ve been displaced from San Francisco are less likely to get involved.

“The struggle of our time is the widening gap between the rich and the poor,” Casey added. “That is exactly what this struggle is about: to maintain that diversity. What we need to move forward on is bold, effective, measurable change that makes sure we are able to protect the fabric of this community.”

Maria Zamudio, an organizer with Causa Justa/Just Cause, emphasized the idea that the problem of evictions in San Francisco is less of a market-based problem and more of a threat to the city’s existing, interwoven communities.

“Those are our neighborhoods and our communities,” Zamudio said. “We’re fighting for the heart of San Francisco. Fighting for strong tenant protections is a necessary struggle if we are going to keep working class San Franciscans in their homes.”

ELLIS ACT UNDER FIRE

As Gullicksen noted at the start of the convention, San Francisco rents have ballooned in recent years, rising 72 percent since 2011.

“We are seeing the most evictions we have seen in a long, long, long, long time,” Gullicksen said. “Most Ellis evictions are being done by one of 12 real estate speculators — evicting us and selling our apartments, mostly to the tech workers.”

Even though median market-rate rents now hover at around $3,400 per month in San Francisco, low-income tenants can avoid being frozen out by sudden rental spikes because rent-control laws limit the amount rents may be increased annually.

But that protection only applies to a finite number of rental units, those built before 1979. That’s why tenant advocates speak of the city’s “rent-controlled housing stock” as a precious resource in decline. Long-term tenants with rent control — in the worst cases, elderly or disabled residents who might be homeless if not for the low rent — are often the ones on the receiving end of eviction notices.

From 2012 to 2013, according to data compiled by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, the use of the Ellis Act increased 175 percent in comparison with the previous year. That law allows landlords to evict tenants even if they’ve never violated lease terms. Advocates say real estate speculators frequently abuse Ellis by buying up properties and immediately clearing all tenants.

Concurrently with local efforts agitating for new renter protections, organizers from throughout California are pushing to reform the Ellis Act in Sacramento.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has promised to introduce a proposal by the Feb. 21 deadline for submitting new legislation, and Sen. Mark Leno is working in tandem with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on a parallel track to pursue some legislative tweaks aimed at softening the blow from the Ellis Act.

“Our goal is to change the conversation in Sacramento, where tenants’ concerns are routinely ignored,” said Dean Preston, director of Tenants Together, a statewide organization based in San Francisco.

Those who didn’t speak English were given head sets so they could listen to each of the speakers comments, which were translated into either Spanish or Chinese. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

On Feb. 18, busloads of protesters will caravan to Sacramento from San Francisco, Oakland, and Fresno for a rally. Preston said they’ve got three demands: reform the Ellis Act, restore a $191 million fund that provides financial assistance for low-income and senior renters, and pass Senate Bill 391, which would provide new funding for the construction of affordable housing.

Even though the law is technically intended to allow property owners to “go out of the business” of being a landlord, Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco are most often carried out by speculators who purchase real estate already occupied by tenants, Gullicksen said.

“Our focus is on the most immediate problem, which is the misuse of the Ellis Act by real estate speculators,” Preston said. “It’s urgent to address that specific use. That’s what Ammiano and Leno are looking at, is ‘what’s the best way to stop speculative use?'”

LOCAL POLICY CHANGES SOUGHT

Tyler McMillan of the Eviction Defense Collaborative said his group is often the last resort for tenants threatened with the loss of their rental units. “Too often, we face a losing fight at court,” he said. “We need to write better laws that work better to keep people in their homes.”

The legislative proposals moving forward at the local level seek to attack the problem of evictions and displacement from several angles. On Feb. 3, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to require landlords who invoke the Ellis Act to pay a higher relocation fee to displaced tenants, equaling two years’ worth of the difference between the tenants’ rent and what would have been considered market rate for that same unit.

“It is time that we recognize that tenants must receive assistance that is commensurate with market increases in rent if we are to truly address our affordability crisis and check the rampant growth of Ellis Act evictions,” Campos said.

As things stand, relocation assistance payments are around $5,261 per tenant, and are capped at $15,783 per unit, with higher payments required for elderly or disabled tenants. But at current market rates, a tenant would not last more than a few months in the city relying solely on the relocation fee to cover rental payments.

Surveying the strong turnout at the tenant convention, Campos said, “There is a movement that’s happening in San Francisco to take our city back, and to make it affordable for all of us.” Yet he noted that he is concerned there will be major pushback from the San Francisco Apartment Association and the real estate industry, formidable interests that oppose the relocation fee increase.

Meanwhile, Sup. Mar has proposed an ordinance that would require the city to track the conversion of rental units to tenancies-in-common, a housing arrangement where multiple parties own shares of a building through a common mortgage. Speculators who buy up properties and immediately evict under the Ellis Act often angle for windfall profits by immediately converting those units to TICs.

Campos is also working on legislation that would regulate landlords’ practice of offering tenants a buyout in lieu of an eviction, a trend advocates say has resulted in far greater displacement than Ellis Act evictions without the same kind of public transparency.

Peter Cohen of the Council on Community Housing Organizations said there’s “no silver bullet” to remedy San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis. “This process is going to come up with another bundle of things,” he said. “All of that is also complimentary to the state campaign. You could have five, six, or seven policy measures going forward — and all of them winnable.”

An idea Cohen said has received traction is the idea of imposing an anti-speculation tax to discourage real estate brokers who abuse the Ellis Act by buying up properties and evicting all tenants soon thereafter (see “Seeking solutions,” for details).

During a breakout session at the tenant convention, longtime LGBT activist Cleve Jones piped up to say, “Harvey Milk proposed the anti-speculation tax back in 1979.”

It wasn’t successful at that time, but Cohen said that given the current level of concern about housing in San Francisco, it’s being talked about in some circles as the most winnable ballot initiative idea.

TENANTS FIGHTING BACK

At the Feb. 8 convention, tenants shared stories of challenging orders to vacate their rental properties. “The most important thing that has brought us to the victories we’ve had so far is that tenants have stayed in their homes,” Shortt said. “Tenants have fought, tenants have sought help, tenants have organized.”

Tenants from a North Beach building owned by real estate broker Urban Green shared their story of banding together and successfully challenging an Ellis Act eviction. Chandra Redack, a nine-year resident of 1049 Market St., where tenants continue battling with owners who submitted eviction notices last fall, described to the Bay Guardian how her small group of tenants has continued to organize in the face of ongoing pressure, including the owners’ recent refusal to accept rent checks.

“Our organizations only can support tenants when they stand up and fight,” said Fujioka. “The tenants’ resistance themselves is part of the strategy. If we don’t have rights, we are going to create them.”

Paula Tejeda, a longtime resident of the Mission District originally from Chile, told the Bay Guardian that she’d been threatened with an eviction from her home of 17 years, a Victorian flat on San Carlos Street.

“I thought I was dealing with an Ellis Act, now he’s trying his best for a buyout,” she explained.

Living in that rent-controlled unit made it financially feasible for her to contribute to the Mission community as a small business owner, as well as a poet, author, and active member of the arts community, she said. Tejeda is the proprietor of Chile Lindo, an empanada shop at 16th and Van Ness streets.

“Having the rent control made it possible for me to build Chile Lindo, go back to college and get my MBA,” she said. That in turn gave her the resources to employ one full-time and three part-time staff members, she said.

When she was initially faced with the prospect of moving out, “I wanted to shut down and leave, and go back to Chile,” she said. “We are suffocated, as a society that cares only about the bottom line.”

But surveying the hordes of tenants milling about at the convention, she seemed a bit more optimistic. “The fact that this is happening to everyone at the same time,” she reflected, “is kind of like a mixed blessing.”

Free lunch, had some vegan options. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

Seeking solutions

A number of policy ideas emerged from the neighborhood tenant conventions, which were held by the San Francisco Anti Displacement Coalition in the Mission, Chinatown, Haight/Richmond, Castro, SoMa, and the Tenderloin.

Here’s a list of what tenants came up with at those forums, which attendees ranked in ballots collected at the event. The ideas will most likely result in a November ballot initiative and one or more legislative proposals, which organizers plan to announce in the near future.

Anti-speculation tax: One idea is to impose a tax on windfall profits garnered by speculators who buy up housing and then sell it off without maintaining ownership for at least six years. The tax would be structured in such a way that the quicker the “flip,” the higher the tax. This would require voter approval.

Eviction moratorium: This proposal is to put a yearlong freeze on certain kinds of “no-fault evictions,” instances where a tenant is ousted regardless of compliance with lease terms. State law would prohibit it from applying to Ellis Act evictions. It might potentially require voter approval.

Department of Rent Control Enforcement and Compliance: This new department, which could be done by local legislation, would create a new city department with the mission and mandate to enforce existing tenant-protection laws and conduct research on eviction trends.

Relocation assistance: While Sup. David Campos is working on legislation to upgrade relocation assistance payments to displaced tenants who face eviction under the Ellis Act, this proposal would do the same for all other forms of “no-fault” evictions. This would require voter approval.

“Excessive rents” tax: While the Costa-Hawkins state law does not allow for cities to control rents in vacant units, this proposal would create a tax on new rental agreements where rents exceed an affordability threshold.

Housing balance requirement: This proposal would make it so that approval of new market-rate housing would be restricted based on whether affordable housing goals were being met. It would create new incentives to build affordable.

Legalize illegal units: This would provide a way to legalize the city’s “illegal” housing units that nevertheless provide a safe and decent source of affordable housing. (Board President David Chiu has already introduced a version of this proposal.)

Sugar fix

Michael Redmond

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February 11, 2014

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A resolution to place a sugary beverage tax on the November ballot was introduced at the Feb. 4 Board of Supervisors meeting.

The two-cents-per-ounce tax would be levied at the point of distribution, with the ultimate goal of reducing the consumption of sodas and other sugary drinks to combat obesity in San Francisco. The tax, sponsored by Supervisors Scott Wiener, Eric Mar, Malia Cohen, John Avalos, and David Chiu, is similar to a resolution made two years ago in Richmond.

But Richmond voters ultimately voted it down by 66 percent, so how’s San Francisco any different?

In 2012, the American Beverage Association hired Chuck Finnie of San Francisco public relations group BMWL and Partners. The association funded the Community Coalition Against Beverage Taxes, which reached out to Latino communities and others, saying it was a tax on the poor.

Now Finnie is back as spokesperson for Stop Unfair Beverage Taxes — Coalition for an Affordable City, here in San Francisco.

“It’s a shallow argument, that it’s a regressive tax on poor people,” said Cohen, a sponsor of the ordinance. “What is it costing poor people? Literally it’s costing them their lives.”

Jeff Ritterman, a cardiologist and former Richmond City Council member, was a lead proponent of the Measure N campaign in 2012. He’s another actor from that campaign who’s back now too, helping the supervisors craft their new strategy.

Last time around they were outspent, Ritterman admits. But campaign money is only one way San Francisco is taking a different tack in the upcoming sugar battle.

The supervisors are also proposing to dedicate the estimated $30 million in revenue that the tax will generate to a specific purpose. The funding would be divided between the SFUSD, the Department of Public Health, and the Recreation and Park Department for a mix of outdoor activities and nutrition education. In contrast, Measure N left allocation of new funding open-ended.

In Richmond, “they told people on the telephone I’d use it for trips around the world. It got as crazy as that,” Ritterman said. “You get more support when you show you’ll use it for children’s health and physical activity.”

Since the use of tax funds collected was a major concern for Finnie’s group last time around, now that it’s been addressed he should be happy, right?

“No,” Finnie told the Guardian, flatly. “We disagree that singling out sugar sweetened beverages for special taxation has any merit whatsoever.”

Sundance, part eight: a quickie, for Leos Carax lovers

Sue Vaughan

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February 10, 2014

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Sundance, part eight: a quickie, for Leos Carax lovers

Tessa Louise-Salame’s ode to France’s punk-rock filmmaker Mr. leos caraX (France), or simply Mr. X, traces his 30 year career while also showcasing Denis Lavant, who stars in all five of his feature films.

Carax seems to have affected more than a few around the world, most recently with his surreal romanticism in Holy Motors (2012).

This artful documentary will inspire you to head straight to your queue and add Mauvais Sang (1986),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA3Xu7Jdyc4

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4R56VQDkqw

and Pola X (1999).