2012 Archives — Page 4 of 74 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Refugee crisis hits home

Michael Redmond

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July 22, 2014

In the small, colorful Precita Valley Community Center, a woman clutches a black ceramic goblet, circling a teenage girl with wisps of incense, and repeats the act with the 60 or so attendees. The spiritual cleansing ritual is much needed. Afterward, the San Franciscans will set their minds to saving the lives of children.

Nearly 50,000 Central American children crossed the Mexican border since October, according to federal data, fleeing targeted violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This recent surge has hit home, as hundreds of those young refugees, often unaccompanied, seek asylum through immigration courts in San Francisco.

The courts often decide between life and death: Do the children stay in the safety of our sanctuary city, or return to countries from which they fled violence and chaos?

Jose Artiga, executive director of the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation, told the crowd a story of life in El Salvador.

“A boy of only 11 years old waited for his grandfather one day,” he said, in Spanish. “A gang captured him, and the community organized to search for the boy. They found the child, but in six parts. The grandfather said, ‘How can I bring my grandchild back to his mother in six parts?’ This was a child. The gang showed up at the funeral, and would not let the community bury him.”

Some say the rising power of gangs sparked this surge in immigration. As President Barack Obama struggles with a bitterly partisan and gridlocked Congress to find a solution, US cities are dealing with the impacts of the overburdened immigration court system.

Now politicians of all partisan stripes, activists, and families are coming together to help the child refugees. Just last week, Sup. David Campos’ resolution to find additional aid for overburdened immigration services unanimously passed the Board of Supervisors. The next step, he told the Guardian, is to determine how best to use funds to help these children.

At the Precita Valley Community Center and beyond, activists call for that funding to reach attorneys, without which these kids will almost certainly be sent home into harm’s way.

OVERBURDENED

The refugees travel far. Children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala trek through Mexico to cross the US border, and some die in the attempt. Those who live and are discovered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest border are held temporarily in crowded, cold detention centers in McAllen, Texas, or Nogales, Ariz.

Images of these detention centers show groups of children lying on hard floors in thin blankets, and some advocates for the refugees reported feces and urine soaking the floors. The young refugees tell officials where they have family connections, and are flown to immigration courts across the country.

One such court is in San Francisco.

In 2005, San Francisco had 227 new active deportation proceedings for unaccompanied children, according to federal data obtained by Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project. That number was stable until 2012 when it jumped to 450 new cases. In 2013, the number jumped again, to 820.

San Francisco now has over 1,900 pending juvenile immigration cases, according to TRAC. Most of those children are Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan. The surge is pushing organizations that help these children to the breaking point.

Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, knows one thing for sure: “Things have been crazy.”

CARECEN is one of many organizations providing legal representation to Central American child refugees in San Francisco. Two attorneys and two paralegals handle the bulk of cases, which jumped from 20 children a month to 60.

“All a child is given is a court date,” Dugan-Cuadra told the Guardian. “While the US guarantees the right to court, it does not guarantee the right to representation.”

While US citizens have a constitutional right to representation by an attorney, noncitizens in Immigration Court do not. And when organizations like CARECEN can’t provide an attorney, the child loses.

“We’ve heard cases where a 6-year-old will go before a judge having to represent themselves,” she said. “The judges are throwing their hands up saying ‘Are you serious!?'”

Data obtained by TRAC Immigration backs up her claim.

Nationwide, only 52 percent of unaccompanied children are represented by an attorney in deportation court proceedings.

With an attorney, judges rule in a juvenile’s favor to stay about half the time, TRAC’s research found. Without an attorney? Only one in 10 children are granted asylum.

No legal representation means no hope. The ACLU filed a class-action suit against the United States earlier this month on behalf of unrepresented child immigrants, alleging just that.

“The onus has been hard on nonprofit providers and pro-bono attorneys,” Dugan-Cuadra said, because they know the stakes. Legal Services for Children, Catholic Charities, and the Asian Law Caucus are among the organizations calling for more aid.

Many of the attorneys are experiencing burnout. One we talked to was on a vacation for her mental health. Studies by the American Bar Association show judges are burning out too, and things are only getting worse: California has 77,000 pending immigration cases backlogged in its courts.

But locally, the children bear the worst of this: TRAC Immigration’s data shows only 71 of the new 830 unaccompanied children in San Francisco were represented by an attorney as of June 2014.

And without representation, many will be sent home to violence.

REFUGEES OR IMMIGRANTS?

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said the children fleeing Central American countries should officially be considered refugees in need of asylum, a claim with legal ramifications President Obama so far has hesitated to make.

“We’re witnessing a complex situation in which children are leaving home for a variety of reasons, including poverty, the desire to join family, and the growing influence of trafficking networks,” Shelly Pitterman, UNHCR’s regional representative in the United States, said in a press statement. “Within this movement there are also children who are fleeing situations of violence at the hands of transnational organized criminal groups and powerful local gangs.”

Those fleeing violence and persecution, said Pitterman, will require access to asylum determination procedures and will need long-term protection. Others should be sent home, she said, and assisted with reintegration.

But some can’t find refuge anywhere at home, no matter where they go.

“My brother’s son was kidnapped eight years ago by extortionists,” one Salvadoran woman at the Precita center told the Guardian, declining to give her name out of fear for her family’s safety. Her brother moved to other cities, but the gangs continued to harass him and his family in provinces throughout El Salvador.

“He got letters threatening to kidnap his child. ‘We know where you live, we know where your child goes to school,'” she said. Her nephew is now 14. The last time she visited him she saw something that chilled her.

“He was approached by gangs to be recruited. I witnessed that. One day after when we were in the car, my nephew saw the gangs in another car. He hid on the floor and started to shake.”

The woman turned her head away and held back tears.

“My brother said ‘I have to take you out of here.'”

Now her nephew is somewhere safe in the United States, she said, though she would not say where. But the reason he left is clear.

“These kids don’t want to be the next dead body on the street,” Clarisa Sanchez, a Board of Immigration’s representative from Catholic Charities CYO told the Guardian.

Nationally, Republicans are calling for the mass deportation of these children. “I won’t stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said this week, as he announced deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops along the Texas border.

But many pin the origins of the crisis squarely on the United States.

DRUG LEGACY

Salvadorans are familiar with violence and cruelty. In 1932, more than 30,000 Salvadorans were slaughtered in a peasant revolt called la matanza: the slaughter. Nearly 75,000 civilians died in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, from 1980-1992.

The US government intervened in that war, sending government aid to the Salvadoran government. Now the US has a hand in today’s violence in Central America, some say, as our country’s drug habits fuel cartels throughout the region. Those cartels are arming Central American gangs, whichObama admitted in a press conference last year.

“The United States recognizes that we’ve got responsibilities; that much of the violence in the region is fueled by demand for illegal drugs, including in the United States,” the president said.

Obama requested $3.7 billion emergency funding that would bring at least $64 million to immigration courts, but also at least $1.5 billion to border security and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a troubling addition to needed funding.

Back at the Precita Valley Community Center, Jose Cartagena pled for legal aid at the border. Cartagena is intimately familiar with the need: He fled El Salvador’s civil war over 30 years ago. As he crossed the Tucson desert, 13 of his fellow border-crossers died in the blazing southwestern heat. Only Cartagena survived. Now he’s a representative for the National Network of Salvadorans in the Exterior in San Francisco.

He called for justice.

“We have to help these kids find their families or sponsors,” he said. “If we don’t provide legal support now, the Obama administration may deport all of them. We can’t wait until it’s too late.”

If you’d like to help the efforts around the Central American child refugees, you can contact CARECEN, Catholic Charities, or Superivsor David Campos’ office.

Last chapters?

Michael Redmond

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July 22, 2014

27

news@sfbg.com

The tale of the threatened independent bookstore, quivering under the might of Amazon, is nothing new.

It’s only been two months since Marcus Books was evicted from its Fillmore District location. Both Adobe and Forest bookstores fled the Mission’s 16thh Street last year. But ebook sales growth is shrinking, and sales for many of San Francisco bookstores are up.

Instead, the tale of the struggling indie bookstore has become less about Amazon and more about a different monster: gentrification. San Francisco’s rising rents, demand for commercial space by deep-pocketed chains, and lack of commercial rent control are putting the squeeze on the city’s remaining bookstores.

Take Bibliohead, for instance. Its owner has recently been forced to relocate in spite of her bookstore’s success. Bibliohead is an easily navigable, highly curated, and tiny book jungle — more like a carefully manicured garden, really. The whole store can be explored in minutes, and there’s a gumball machine that dispenses poetry out in front once the book-happy are satisfied.

Its size has served it well. Sales at Bibliohead — Hayes Valley’s only bookstore — have risen solidly 7 percent each year since the store opened 10 years ago.

“We’re small, but mighty,” Melissa Richmond, Bibliohead’s owner, told the Guardian. “Although recently we haven’t been feeling so mighty. I’m kind of a wreck.”

In May, Richmond learned that she has until January 2015 to leave her store for four months while her building undergoes mandatory earthquake retrofitting. The landlord will double Richmond’s rent after the retrofitting, and has asked Richmond to pay for further renovations to the building when she returns.

“It’s off the table that I can stay here,” Richmond said. “I will not be offered a new lease. I don’t hate landlords, but I want a landlord who will contribute to the spirit and creativity of San Francisco.”

On June 22, Richmond launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise the $60,000 she’ll need to move and attract new customers. So far, with a little less than a month to go, she’s raised almost $3,000.

“What really breaks my heart is when a new customer walks in,” Richmond said. “They ask you how you’re doing after they’ve fallen in love with the place a little bit. Then you have to break their hearts by saying you don’t know what’s in store for your future right now.”

DISPLACEMENT TREND

Richmond is not the only bookseller in San Francisco forced to relocate. Last year, Adobe Books and Forest Books were forced out of 16th Street within three months of each other when their rents increased. Forest Books slipped quietly off to Japantown, and has since experienced an increase in sales. Adobe Books’ anticipated closure was met with an invigorating Kickstarter campaign that raised $60,000. It was enough to keep the store alive, but not on gentrifying 16th Street.

Nowadays, Adobe is re-branded as Adobe Books and Art Cooperative at its 24th Street location. The original Adobe’s charming, lackadaisical, and no- structured structure has been traded for alphabetized and carefully curated books. There are only two staff members, and its used books are selling far faster than in the old location, despite its shrunken size.

“It’s strange. A lot of the times I was not sure if it would work at all, and now here we are in this shop,” Brett Lockspeiser, a member of the Adobe Books and Art Cooperative, told us. “Things are running differently, but it’s still Adobe.”

Adobe will soon be celebrating its first anniversary in the new spot. The store might not be making any profits, according to Lockspeiser, but the cause for celebration is that it’s survived.

There has been discussion among the collective members about whether or not Adobe should try to sell eReading devices, like Green Apple Books has done without much success for almost two years with the Kobo eReader. Adobe’s collective voted against Kobo, preferring not to use the same weapons as its competitor.

“I’m pretty technology positive, but I think some people in the group thought it was an ‘us or them’ kind of thing,” said Lockspeiser. “Like either you’re a book reader or you’re a techie who reads on a Kindle.”

Besides, it seems that ebooks’ incredible growth rate has finally simmered down. According to the Association of American Publishers, ebooks accounted for 27 percent of all adult trade sales in 2013. While that was up from 23 percent in 2012, it marked the first year ebook growth was down to the single digits. In January, a Pew study reported that among adults who read at least one book in the past year, just 5 percent said they read only an ebook.

Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, reports that book sales throughout San Francisco bookstores have increased overall in the past two years. Green Apple Books, an expanding bookstore with an growing collection of books and records, is even poised to open another location in the Sunset below beloved video rental store Le Video on Aug. 1.

Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of Green Apple Books, said he recently got a call from Bibliohead’s owner asking for advice on potential neighborhoods and techniques for negotiating with landlords. But he can’t always explain his own store’s success.

“Some of it is just the economy. All that money floating around South of Market is maybe trickling over here,” he told us. “Or maybe the waiters are getting better tips. I don’t know what it is, but things have been better for us.”

The growth of bookstore sales, Landon said, is mainly because Barnes & Noble has been cast out of San Francisco. Last year, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, reported that its revenue decreased by 8 percent in the final quarter. The company’s Nook division, meanwhile, slid down 32 percent.

Yet Joe Marchione, who owns Mission Street’s Valhalla Books, still places the blame for his diminishing foot traffic on Amazon, which has made his hard-to-find books pretty easy to locate online. In 1998, when his store opened, 90 percent of Valhalla’s business came from people browsing through his odd and unique assortment of rare and used books. Now, 95 percent of his business is online.

“People forgot the joy of browsing,” Marchione told us.

As soon as his landlord makes him commit to a lease, he says he’s going to have to leave the business. “When we first opened, we were smug. We said there was no way trendy was ever going to come to Mission between 17th and 18th [streets]. Get real!” he said. “But trendy creeps in closer by the week. There’s no problem with that, except it’s forcing us out.”

“TRENDY CREEPS IN”

It’s even forcing successful booksellers, like Bibliohead’s owner, to worry. Her faith in the printed word remains strong. “I find that there’s a whole core of people who are relieved to feel something in their hands, to flip the pages of really cool, beautiful books and kind of remember with their bodies what reading is like,” Richmond said.

When Kate Rosenberger opened a fourth bookstore in 2011 — Alleycat Books on 24th Street — many questioned her sanity, the owner said. The store has only recently been able to pay its own bills, having been relying on Rosenberger’s other store, Dog Eared Books, for survival. But the rent at Dog Eared Books is set to increase, and that means trouble.

“You can talk about e-readers, and people being distracted. You can talk about people slipping out since the Gutenberg press was invented, and all that’s true, sure,” Rosenberger told us. “But when you get hit with a huge increase in your rent, how do you deal with that? When the lease is up, you can pretty much figure you’re gone.”

These days, you deal with it by setting up a crowdsourcing campaign, and crossing your fingers that people with money like you. Or maybe you transform into an art cooperative. Or you just go somewhere else. But Richmond doesn’t want to leave San Francisco.

“I would like to preserve the culture of the city,” Richmond said. “I still think there’s something really special here.”

Barnes & Noble might be gone, ebook sales might have stabilized, and the printed word might just still be alive — but for San Francisco’s booksellers, that no longer means anyone in the book business is safe.

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project highlights Urban Green’s record of displacement

Sasha Cuttler

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July 22, 2014

5

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project highlights Urban Green’s record of displacement

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s latest creation illustrates the eviction history of Urban Green Investments, a San Francisco-based real estate company that was recently put in the spotlight with its controversial attempted eviction of 98-year-old Mary Elizabeth Phillips.

The Mapping Project’s graphic shows the properties owned by Urban Green and its affiliates, assets that number 385 units in more than 15 buildings. According to the Mapping Project, they have displaced “numerous tenants in the San Francisco Bay Area,” led by the efforts of CEO David McCloskey.

“The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project created this map to expose how large and interconnected the Urban Green and McCloskey network is,” said Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. “We have been shocked at how many tenants they have pushed out and in how many cities they are flipping properties.”

Urban Green’s website advertises the company as a “fully integrated real estate company with brokerage, property management and development capacities.” The company’s strategy is to acquire property, then add value by “increasing efficiencies, enhancing entitlements, and employing carefully calibrated green renovations.”

In recent years, Urban Green has been busy displacing tenants, including in October 2012, when it purchased a multi-family portfolio with 130 units in San Francisco. According to the Mapping Project, the company is involved in around 40 LLCs, “many of which they use to evict tenants and then flip buildings.”

“Companies like Urban Green wouldn’t be evicting tenants like Mary Phillips if we stopped the profiting of buying up then evicting whole buildings just to sell them quickly,” San Francisco Tenants Union Director Ted Gullicksen said in a statement. “We need to pass a surtax on transfers of apartment buildings within five years of last sale this November if we are to stop these displacement practices of speculators like Urban Green.”

Gullicksen referred to the anti-speculation tax that tenant activists and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors has place on the November ballot. Representatives of Urban Green have not returned Guardian calls for comment, but we’ll update this post if and when we hear back.

Even residents outside the Bay Area have not escaped the reach of the McCloskey family, which has a long history of evictions. Urban Green is currently a subsidiary of the business run by David McCloskey’s Thomas McCloskey: Cornerstone Holdings. The family owns property in Colorado (where Cornerstone is based), New York, Hawaii, and California, according to the Mapping Project. Perhaps most controversially, the family owns 300 acres of land in Hawaii, called Kealia Kai, which greatly angered the Kaua`i people in the 1990s. After buying the land for $17 million, McCloskey unsuccessfully attempted to build a private beach community with his land.

More than 2,000 miles of sea separate Hawaii from Phillips’ apartment, but the residents of both areas are suffering similar fates at the hands of the McCloskeys. And though Urban Green stated last week that it would not continue its attempt to evict Phillips, attorney Steve Collier of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic issued a statement making it clear that the company’s efforts are not over. According to Collier, Urban Green’s new strategy is to force out Brant, which would remove Phillips by default because she relies on Brant’s care.

“This has been my home for over 40 years and I don’t want to leave. . . I am just too old,” said Phillips, according to the Mapping Project’s website. “I didn’t sit down and cry, I just refused to believe it. They’re going to have to take me out of here feet first. Just because of your age, don’t let people push you around.”

Jimmy Cliff high-kicks his way through 50 years of music at the Fillmore

Steven T. Jones

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July 21, 2014

18

Jimmy Cliff high-kicks his way through 50 years of music at the Fillmore

Jimmy Cliff is a goddamn maniac. It’s about 45 minutes into his 90-minute set at the Fillmore on Saturday night [July 19], and while the sheer volume of ganja smoke in the packed room is making real movement — beyond the standard shuffle/sidestep, white reggae fan head-bob, and occasional 30-second pogo accompanied by the triumphant fist-in-the-air move — seem an insurmountable challenge for most everyone on the dancefloor, 66-year-old Jimmy Cliff is onstage in matching bright yellow-and-red pants, a robe, and a hat, quite literally running circles around everyone.

He’s high-kicking. He’s goose-stepping. He’s pouring buckets of sweat, but his stage presence is magnetic, his control of the room masterful. He never stops grinning. And, supported by a guitarist, a drummer, a bass player, a saxophone player, two keyboard players, two backup singers, and the Fillmore’s very dialed-in sound system, Jimmy Cliff sounds better than the last dozen 25- to 34-year-old rock stars I’ve heard live. He definitely has more energy.

His voice is strong and somehow heartbreakingly clear, whether on songs from his most recent album, 2012’s Tim Armstrong-produced Rebirth — like “Afghanistan,” an update on the classic “Vietnam,” or the upbeat, surprisingly modern-sounding “One More” — or on theclassics, which are almost too many to list: “The Harder They Come,” of course, “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” a chill-inducing “Many Rivers To Cross,” “Sitting In Limbo,” etc., etc., etc. — Cliff stomped and shouted through the last 50 years, darting back and forth not only throughout, you know, linear time and political movements, but the evolution of reggae and Jamaican music itself, tracing the genre from from ska to rocksteady to dancehall. Forget your knowledge of or even affinity for these genres; the weight of the air feels different in the presence of an artist who’s been through, and influenced, so much of what you take for granted as musical history. And I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just the ganja.

Jimmy Cliff “One More” from dan sampson on Vimeo.

In between songs, he bantered (fan: “We love you Jimmy!” Jimmy: “I love you more!” Another fan two minutes later: “We still love you Jimmy!” Jimmy: “I love you double!”), gave history lessons (focused mostly on artists he claims responsibility for discovering: Sam Cooke, Bob Marley), led an audience-participation section for a new song he’s working on, and pretended the show was over and he wouldn’t be coming back on at least three times. And then he came back, three times. The encore fake-out was such that by the time the band walked off stage for real and the house music came over the speakers, the stoned, smiling masses didn’t believe it, chanting “one more,” for a good 10 minutes, until a stage hand who looked like she hated life at that moment walked on to unplug something; she was greeted with a collective groan.

It should be said here: I do not generally identify as a “reggae fan.” Having grown up in the Bay Area and having gone to Reggae on the River once when I was 10 (long story) and having attended a public California university full of dudes with board shorts and blacklight posters, I do not have fantastic associations with large throngs of mainly white people dancing to reggae music.

And yet: I found it difficult to dislike the bro-y, backward cap-sporting contingent at this show, which is a really weird feeling for me. They all just seemed too damn happy. Whatever Jimmy Cliff’s doing at age 66 to keep on doing what he did on Saturday, it’s keeping him healthy, and joyful, and it’s clearly catching. We should all be so lucky.

San Franciscans could make death penalty ruling stick

Sasha Cuttler

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July 17, 2014

24

San Franciscans could make death penalty ruling stick

In the wake of yesterday’s [Wed/16] judicial ruling that California’s death penalty system is unconstitutional — with federal District Judge Cormac Carney calling it arbitrary and so subject to endless delay that it “serves no penological purpose” — San Franciscans could play a key role in converting the ruling into an abolition of capital punishment.

Right now, the ruling applies only to the execution of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for a rape and murder, and not all 748 inmates now on Death Row in California. But yesterday’s ruling would end the death penalty in California if appealed to and upheld by the SF-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The decision about whether to file that appeal and possibly a subsequent appeal to the US Supreme Court falls to Attorney General Kamala Harris, who has maintained her opposition to capital punishment since her days as San Francisco’s district attorney, where she bravely endured lots of political heat for refusing to file capital murder charges in the death of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi today issued a public statement praising yesterday’s ruling and calling for Harris not to appeal it: “Today’s ruling, which found California’s death penalty unconstitutional, is a monumental victory for justice. I commend U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney for his courage and wisdom. Not only is the death penalty arbitrarily imposed, as the judge noted, its history is fraught with racial bias and haunted by the hundreds of death row inmates who were later exonerated. I am hopeful that California Attorney General Kamala Harris will choose not to appeal this decision.”

Harris spokesperson David Beltran told the Guardian that she hasn’t yet made a decision whether to appeal the case: “We are reviewing the ruling.”

Yet former Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, who worked with SF-based Death Penalty Focus on the 2012 initiative campaign to repeal the death penalty (losing by less than 4 percentage points), told the Guardian that Harris has a tough choice to make.

“It’s an interesting decision. If the Attorney General doesn’t appeal it, then it applies just to this case, period,” Garcetti told us.

Although appeals in other cases could cite the logic of yesterday’s ruling, it has no precedent value unless affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. And Garcetti called Carney’s ruling “a pretty persuasive decision” that could be easily be affirmed, depending on which judges are assigned to the case. If so, that ruling would end the death penalty in California, just as 17 other states have already done.

“The more interesting question is whether she would then appeal that ruling [to the US Supreme Court],” Garcetti said.

California voters have affirmed their support for the death penalty three times at the ballot, but those results and public opinion polling show that support for executions has been steadily eroding, in much the same way that generational change has led to overturning bans on same-sex marriage across the country.

Garcetti said he regularly speaks publicly about capital punishment, often to very conservative groups, and he said that the arguments against it have become so strong — including its high cost, racial and class bias, and lack of deterrent effect — that “over 95 percent of [death penalty supporters] change their opinions by the end of my talks.”

As for why the 2012 initiative fell about 250,000 votes short of success, Garcetti said, “We simply ran out of money to get the facts out. Once people hear the facts, it wins them over.”

Carney’s ruling reinforced many of the arguments that opponents have been made against the death penalty, noting that federal guarantees of due process create such long delays that a death sentence has become something “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Aside from this ruling, California is also currently under a federal moratorium on executing prisoners until it can reform its lethal injection procedures, which a federal judge has said now amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

“Justice requires that we end this charade once and for all,” Death Penalty Focus Executive Director Matt Cherry said in a prepared statement. “It’s time to replace California’s broken death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole. That’s the best way to ensure that convicted killers remain behind bars until they die, without wasting tens of millions of tax dollars every year on needless appeals. That’s justice that works, for everyone.”

Security officers target Apple over contractor’s unfair labor practices

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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July 17, 2014

4

Security officers target Apple over contractor’s unfair labor practices

Next time you head to your neighborhood Apple store to get that smooth and harmonious feel that can only comes with the gentle touch of an iPad air, you might be greeted by an unhappy security officer picketing outside. The officer might share some choice words about the working conditions at Apple’s security guard contractor, Security Industry Specialists.

Over the next few weeks, the SEIU United Service Workers West has organized a series of actions with security guards to demand Apple choose a more responsible security contractor.

Currently, Apple, Google, and Ebay all have contracts with SIS, a firm the SEIU claims has unfairly terminated employees and surveiled union meetings. The SIS denies these allegations, devoting an entire page on its website to confronting what it’s termed “SEIU lies and distortion.”

“The contrast between Apple’s boom times and worker’s decrease in wages is incredibly startling,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for SEIU. “You would think that a company that has benefited so much from what Silicon Valley has to offer would support the jobs for workers – not just in their engineering department, but at all levels.”

Since the launch of the iPod in 2007 to 2012, Apple saw a 600 percent growth in its stock. Meanwhile, from 2008 to 2012, average worker wages in Santa Clara County dropped by 3 percent. On average, Silicon Valley’s security officers make $15 an hour through SIS.

But the actions SEIU has organized aren’t just about wages, nor are they just about Apple. Walter Redding, for instance, was one security officer working for SIS through Google. He’ll be attending some of the actions, because he’s angry. He was fired for taking a phone call from his girlfriend while she was in labor.

“I thought I was doing great,” Redding said. “But I got screwed. I only got two checks since I got fired. It’s been almost a year. My friends got fired for things, too. Everybody gets treated unfairly. I love the products. I’d buy them everyday. But when it comes to working for Google or Apple, I don’t know about that.”

Bryce Miller-Williams, an organizer for SEIU’s Stand for Security campaign, says that the SIS is harsh everywhere, but Apple is where security officers really don’t want to work.

“There’s a very militaristic atmosphere there,” he said. “One gentleman sat down to tie his shoe. Guards are supposed to be standing at all times, and so he was let go because of that.”

Although Apple doesn’t employ the security guards directly, Fletes said the tech company still has the power to select a better security guard contractor. To him, changes at Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, offers proof. When labor activists launched an outcry following a series of suicides at Foxconn, Apple stepped in. According to a report from the Fair Labor Association last December, working conditions at Foxconn have since steadily improved.

“I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to ask Apple to look into workplace issues for security officers in the Bay Area,” Fletes said. “Or, at the very least for them to meet with security officers who, despite working for one of the most valuable companies in the world, are still struggling to survive.”

Apple does at least give the appearance of wanting to do good. The Cupertino company requires its suppliers meet a “code of conduct” and issues a Supplier Responsibility report to document its progress each year. This past December, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about his company’s code of conduct in a video message sent in a company-wide email urging employees to behave like good, righteous Apple employees.

“As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, the time is always right to do what’s right,” Cook proclaimed. “At Apple, we do the right thing. Even when it’s not easy. If you see something that doesn’t meet our standards, speak up. Whether it’s a quality issue or a business practice, if it affects Apple’s integrity, we need to know about it.”

Fletes said that when SEIU members protested outside an Apple shareholder meeting last February, Cook said he would look into job quality issues. The allegations of unfair treatment by SIS’ security officers have since continued. Apple did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

The actions will continue throughout the Bay Area throughout the summer, ending in San Francisco on August 28th.

The age of the brogrammer

Michael Redmond

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July 15, 2014

52

“Die techie scum.” Those words are sprayed ominously on sidewalks throughout San Francisco. They’re plastered on stickers stamped on lampposts. They’re even scrawled in the bathrooms of punk bars, the very establishments now populated by Google-Glass-wearing tech aficionados.

Journalists from San Francisco to New York have opined on the source of the hate: Is it the housing crisis? Tech-fueled gentrification? Rising inequality? Those same journalists later parachute into the tech industry to periodically peer at its soul: Is tech diverse enough? Is it sexist? Is it a true meritocracy?

Those issues are often looked at in a vacuum, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. Perhaps those problems are all interconnected, and solving tech’s diversity problem is also part of solving income inequality in San Francisco, giving longtime San Franciscans a chance to join the industry many now view as composed of outsiders and interlopers.

The average Silicon Valley tech worker makes about $100,000, according to Dice Holdings Inc., which conducts annual tech salary surveys. Opportunity in the tech sector may bolster San Francisco’s middle-income earners, vanishing like wayward sea lions from the city’s landscape. Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 66 percent of the city is either very poor or very rich, showing a hollowing out of the middle class.

Some tech CEOs are addressing their employment needs with a foreign workforce. Mark Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech CEOs have lobbied Senate and House Republicans to reform immigration in their favor, hoping to lure out-of-country workers to fill tech’s employment vacancies. Politico reported Sean Parker gave upwards of $500,000 to Republicans in 2014, all for the cause of immigration reform.

Conversely, a movement is already underway to bring San Franciscans into tech’s fold, based on the idea of a win-win scenario: San Francisco’s public school students are overwhelmingly diverse and lower income, while the tech industry is not.

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released their diversity numbers, showing the companies are mostly white and male. This accusation has long haunted Silicon Valley.

Two years ago, Businessweek heralded the “Rise of the Brogrammer.” The stereotype is as follows: He preens as he programs in his popped collar, his startup funds fuel the city as he hunts “the ladies,” and he is insensitive toward women in the workplace in the most fratboy-like way imaginable.

Biz dev VP of @path just cracked lame jokes re: “nudie calendars,” frat guys + “hottest girls,” “gangbang” at #swsx talk. Cue early exit.

— Tasneem Raja (@tasneemraja) March 11, 2012

But while outlier brogrammer douche-bros certainly exist, whose classist opinions ignite widespread ire (think Greg Gopman’s statement comparing homeless people to “hyenas”), the real brogrammer threat is more insidious, more systemic.

“The brogrammer is always someone else,” wrote Kate Losse, a freelance journalist, in an April blog post. “He is THOSE Facebook guys who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30 percent more because of his race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of [venture capitalists].”

The overarching point of Losse’s article was this: There is a subtle sexism, and also racism, in the tech sector, which shuts out women and people of color. The looming stereotype of a douchey brogrammer can obscure the smaller, more indirect ways in which minorities and women are shut out of the industry.

Tech’s disturbing (but unsurprising) lack of diversity is being highlighted amid an economic backdrop that has resulted in widespread displacement of San Francisco’s working class and minorities.

Some are seeking to create opportunities for Bay Area communities of color within tech, as a way to even the scales. A swell of new applicants with programming skills — including people of color and women — may soon come knocking. But in the time it will take school-age coders to cycle through the first generation of new computer science classes, Silicon Valley is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror.

Some of the Bay Area’s hate toward tech may be rooted in a perceived lack of access. Longtime residents see a sea of newcomers, often white, often male, who aren’t pulling up a seat for minorities to join the new gold rush.

The age of the brogrammer is now, and it’s as socially progressive as the paleolithic era, meaning: not at all.

FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT

Talk to anyone in the realm of new technology companies and startups, and they’ll surely tell you this: Tech is an inspiring, creative field, where pure skill is the key to unlocking any job you’d like. The dress style is casual (hoodies, of course) and the perks flow like wine (or energy drinks).

When the Guardian visited the CloudCamp social good hackathon, we saw video game arcade machines in the ground floor and beer flowing throughout. Another company, Hack Reactor, had desks attached to treadmills and a life coach on hand to mind employee health. These are accoutrements de rigeuer, stunningly standard. But tales of true Silicon Valley excess abound: One CEO offers employees free helicopter rides, many offer in-house chefs and extravagant travel.

Interns in Silicon Valley are enjoying huge perks like free meals, massages, swimming pools, nap pods: http://t.co/BdaaOdC95P

— Manufacturing.net (@MnetNews) June 10, 2014

Skill and ability alone are the keys to unlocking this lifestyle, the tech industry says. Workers’ fervor can take on an almost cult-like zeal.

“I think the sharing economy is addictive,” said Rafael Martinez-Corina, a panelist at the Share2014 sharing economy conference in May, touting tech’s biggest stars like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber. “Once you get it, you want more and more. You get into car sharing, you want to get into food sharing, time sharing.”

He asked the audience, “Who else is addicted to sharing?”

Almost every hand went in the room shot right up. Cheers immediately followed. Hallelujah!

Mars Jullian, an engineer at AdRoll, told the Guardian that employees of tech companies with name-brand apps tend to exhibit more ego. AdRoll is a big player, but more behind the scenes, she said, giving her perspective on the attitudes of her fellow tech workers.

“Sometimes it seems tech people feel like they own the city,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have. Sometimes it’s more important to be humble.”

One might forgive the tech workers for their enthusiasm. The industry, after all, has ushered in widespread transformation in business and communications, resulting in dramatic economic shifts. But with such a high concentration of wealth and influence in the Bay Area, the question of who gets to participate is key.

Google’s diversity numbers rocked the world outside Silicon Valley, but surprised few in the Bay Area. The behemoth is 70 percent male and 60 percent white, with Asians making up 30 percent of the company’s ethnic representation.

Soon after Google’s numbers were revealed, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn followed suit with their own diversity reports. Their numbers differ a bit from Google, showing more Asian employees, and slightly more women. The numbers look worse, however, when only technology jobs are factored in. The tech worker population among these companies is about 15 percent female.

Hadi Partovi, an early Facebook investor, now adviser, and ex-chief of Microsoft’s MSN, told the Guardian that despite the industry’s challenges, tech’s doors are open to people with skills, regardless of background.

“The computer doesn’t know if it’s being programmed by someone rich or poor, black or brown,” he told us in a phone interview. “A lawyer, for instance, is looked at more explicitly. Tech has the opportunity to be more meritocratic.”

But the tech sector’s pious belief that it functions as a world-changing meritocracy ignores a host of factors that serve to hinder inclusion.

Many have touted the education pipeline as the root cause of tech’s lack of diversity. The number of women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is stunningly low, 24 percent, according to the US Department of Commerce. African Americans and Latinos also lag far behind their white and Asian counterparts in completing their computer science degrees, according to studies by the East Bay nonprofit Level Playing Field Institute.

Considering Asian groups is important: the Level Playing Field Institute draws a distinction between represented and underrepresented minority groups, acknowledging that ethnicity, income and class intermingle in complex ways. It’s those underrepresented groups like women, Latinos and African Americans LPFI identifies as groups lacking in tech.

But the pipeline is only one part of the problem. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny and racism, often labeled micro-aggressions, pervade hiring.

Level Playing Field is focused on creating opportunity for people of color and women in STEM fields. In an extensive tech-industry study conducted in 2011, called “Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces,” researchers concluded: “Despite widespread underrepresentation of women and people of color within the sector, diversity is not regarded as a priority.”

Surveying more than 645 engineers, the study’s authors found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector. The study also found that underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.

Sometimes, these instances blow up for the world to see.

THE MIRROR-TOCRACY

The workday text messages between Tinder’s co-founder Justin Marteen and former VP Whitney Wolfe went public after Wolfe sued Tinder, revealing the ugly waters women must sometimes navigate in tech. Marteen was allegedly harassing Wolfe over her new love interest, and Wolfe asked him to stop.

“Stop justin [sic]. Were at work,” Wolfe asked of Marteen, to which he replied, “Ur heartless… go talk to ur 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I’ll shit on him in life.”

He should have ended there. But he continued his rage at his ex-girlfriend.

“Hagsgagahaha so pathetic I even imagined a life w u. I actually thought u would be a good mother and wife. I have horrible judgement. He can enjoy my left overs,” he allegedly wrote. “You’re effecting my work environment,” she replied, “and this is very out of control. Please don’t do this during work hours.”

Besides an awful command of rudimentary spelling, the squabble showed the very real harassment women in tech are exposed to every day. When Wolfe went to Tinder CEO Sean Rad for help, she found herself out of a job.

Tinder is not an outlier, according to studies by Level Playing Field. Nor is it the only company to see its harassment go public. Earlier this year, GitHub’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a former employee, Julie Ann Horvath, alleged she was harassed by him, his wife, and engineers.

While Github denied the allegations, Horvath was defiant: “A company can never own you. They can’t tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck. And they can’t take away your voice.”

But for every example of outright sexism or racism, there are multitudes of more subtle biases in the workplace. Level Playing Field’s studies found these biases are pervasive. They start as early as the hiring process.

Carlos Bueno is a former Facebook engineer, now tinkering behind the scenes at memSQL. He is of mixed ethnicity, Irish and Mexican, among others. “My father called us ‘Leprechan-os’,” he told us.

Bueno trained interviewers at Facebook, and like many there, he also conducted interviews. He said Facebook’s interview process was probably one of the best in the industry for screening out biases of the interviewer, but other companies were not as aware of bias as a problem.

“Every startup wants to be a big dog,” he said, describing the process. “But the point of a startup is to grow very large, very quickly. They don’t have time to learn. Some people take rules of thumb or investor advice and run with it.”

Paypal co-founder Max Levchin is looked to as a thought leader in the startup world. He touts the idea that diversity of perspective in a startup’s early phases can actually hurt its chances of success, hindering its speed in “endless debates.”

Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel once famously put it this way: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

Bueno pointed to a real estate startup, 42Floors, as an example of a company adopting Levchin’s philosophy. It looks for potential hires who are a “cultural fit,” i.e., making sure the candidate and employer think alike.

One 42Floors interviewer explained this on the company blog: “I asked her how she was doing in the interview process and she said, ‘I’m actually still trying to get an interview. Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.’ I chuckled. She was clearly confused with the whole matter. I told her, ‘Look, you just made it to the third round.'”

So the interview process for tech may involve coffee dates or “beer with the guys,” and the onus is on the interviewee to figure all of this out. Similar blog posts from 42Floors go on to call out interviewees who wear suits, or act too stodgy for their liking.

Is “pattern recognition” just sexism and racism?

Bueno refers to these hiring trends collectively as the “mirror-tocracy,” where startup founders hire people they like, people who remind them of themselves.

We spoke to Bueno extensively over burgers, but he put it best in his blog.

“You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” he wrote. “What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”

Founders back up their faulty hiring practices with faulty logic. “It’s so hard to get in, if you get in you must be good,” Bueno said. “But those two statements don’t support each other.”

Some students of color training to code have already caught a glimpse of how the mirror-tocracy functions.

OPENING THE DOOR

Eight years ago, Kimberly Bryant moved to San Francisco to work in biotech. She moved to the city because she believed it to be more racially and economically diverse. She worked adjacent to Bayview Hunters Point, and has since revised her view of the city as a welcoming multicultural environment.

Instead, she found a city with an African American population dwindling below six percent in a city of over 800,000, and a gutted middle class. Latinos are moving out in greater numbers too. Over the last decade, 1,400 Latinos left the Mission District, according to a recent report on displacement by Causa Justa / Just Cause. In the same time, 2,900 white residents flooded in.

The displacement data reveals a significant parallel: The diverse ethnic groups Silicon Valley lacks in its employed ranks are the very same ethnic groups being priced out of San Francisco.

Seeking to mitigate the ethnic and gender disparity in tech, Bryant formed Black Girls Code, a student mentor and workshop program. It first opened up shop in the Bayview, but has sinced moved on.

“I really saw and experienced the true diversity of the community in Oakland,” Bryant told the Guardian, of the nonprofit’s new home. “It’s just an amazingly incredibly diverse community in terms of race and economy. What San Francisco used to be,” she added, “but is no longer.”

Black Girls Code teaches K-12 students rudimentary coding skills, providing instruction in Ruby and Python. Although companies like Google and others have opened their doors with welcoming arms, she said, convincing her students that the tech world is ready for them has been challenging.

When she brought her young students to an industry event, TechCrunch Disrupt, she dodged a minefield of fratboy-like behavior that made her students feel unwelcome, she said. This is the same event that heralded a prank app called “titstare,” which invited users (presumably male) to upload photos of themselves staring at women’s breasts.

The app was displayed on a stage before some of the most influential players in the tech industry, but Bryant’s students were in the audience too.

“They were shocked, like everyone there. It was disconcerting for the parents and the girls,” she said. Though she’s careful not to overplay the damage done (the girls “laughed awkwardly,” she said), the takeaway of the conference was that women and girls were not the intended participants. “It’s like a frathouse. I thought, ‘oh my god, this is like college all over again. This sucks.'”

Latino students at the Mission Economic Development Agency face similar barriers.

At Mission and 19th streets sits MEDA, a nonprofit that has long worked to help Mission residents gain a foothold in San Francisco workplaces. This begins even in the lobby, where a small kitchenette in the corner plays host to a chef who mixes up a mean ceviche, with spices admittedly leaving this reporter in tears. He aspires to open his own restaurant, and MEDA is helping him get there.

The upstairs houses a group of students called the Mission Techies. They seek support in their aspirations to enter the tech industry, but for them the dream may be further off than the chef’s.

Gabriel Medina, policy manager at MEDA, doesn’t mince words. These are the “challenge” kids, he said, but they’ve done him and program manager Leo Sosa proud.

The Mission Techies pull apart computers to learn about their innards.

Sosa described a visit from Google and Facebook engineers who taught his students rudimentary coding skills. One student, Jamar, was so engrossed in programming that one engineer asked: “Is he okay?!”

“Jamar is on the coding program, [and he’s] on fire,” Sosa told the Guardian, while sitting in a MEDA office.

But students like Jamar, an African American San Franciscan, face an uphill battle before they ever get to the step of applying for a job like one at Google.

After visiting some tech offices, the students felt less sure of themselves.

“They were like ‘I don’t see no black guys, I don’t see no Latinos. Leo, do you really think I can get a job here?'” Sosa told us. For them, the mirror-tocracy did not reflect an image they recognized.

By many measures, MEDA’s Mission Techies program is a success, taking kids of modest means and equipping them with digital skills that can aid their employment prospects. Mission Techies, Black Girls Code, and other programs such as Hack Reactor and Mission Bit all nip at the heels of the education pipeline leading to tech industry employment. They also share a common focus: They’re educating largely minority populations, often low-income, and located in the Bay Area.

The solution to tech’s diversity problem and to San Francisco’s displacement may spring from the same well: educate the people who live here to work in the local industry. But in order to do that effectively, afterschool and summer programs alone won’t do the trick.

The schools themselves need disruption.

WORKING TOGETHER

In the midst of the tech hub, the San Francisco Unified School District finds itself surrounded by tech allies. Still, change comes slowly.

Only five of SFUSD’s 17 high schools have computer science courses. Ben Chun, an MIT graduate and former computer science teacher at Galileo High School, told us the outlook is bleak without digital training in schools. Though kids sometimes teach themselves programming at home, most low-income students don’t have that opportunity.

“It’s a privilege thing,” he told us. If you have access to computers at home, you’re more likely to tinker and teach yourself. Those kids are more likely to be the Bill Gates of the future, he said, the self-starters and early computer prodigies.

“If you don’t have those things in place,” he said, “there’s a zero chance it will be you.”

When he first got to Galileo, his computer teacher predecessor taught word processing. But a lot has changed since 2006.

Partovi took his successes at Facebook and Microsoft and parlayed his money into a nonprofit called Code.org. The organization created its own coding classes for kids as young as 6, and compelled 30 school districts nationwide to create computer science courses based on its work.

Code.org’s tutorials have been played by millions of students.

Now it has its sights set on SFUSD’s 52,000 students, potentially solving tech and the school’s problems at once.

“It would for sure level that diversity gap,” Partovi told the Guardian. “All of the data released from Google, Yahoo, and others show a male-dominated industry. The pipeline of educated kids is actually much more diverse.”

Salesforce.com, whose CEO Marc Benioff is a San Francisco native, is also working with the school district on a tech solution, donating $2.7 million to spur that change.

But integrating tech in the district is slow, and likely years away. The district needs state standards to require computer science, something SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza has already lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to change.

“The demand [for computer science classes] is coming from everywhere,” Carranza told us, including parents, students, the tech industry, and city leaders.

“What makes it a game changer is the partnership with our tech partners,” he said. “It gives our students the opportunity to interact elbow to elbow with people doing computer science out in the real world.”

But the tech workers those students are interacting with, though well meaning, remain the domain of the brogrammers. Will they hire SFUSD graduates with computer science skills when and if they’re ready? Will they be the right “culture fit?”

“There’s definitely a libertarian thread, a free market, red-toothed nature of things [in tech],” Bueno told us. “Talking to people in unguarded moments, that definitely leaks out. You’re not going to convince anyone by singing kumbaya and holding hands.”

But logical tech workers need look no further than the current numbers facing Silicon Valley to see the need to reach beyond their in-groups: 1.2 million new tech jobs will be created by 2020, studies from the US Department of Labor show. At the same time, 40 percent of the United States will be Latino and black by 2040.

When the minority is the majority, the brogrammers may become a dying species.

Rep Clock: July 16 – 22, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 15, 2014

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Schedules are for Wed/16-Tue/22 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. Free-$10. “Periwinkle Cinema:” “Dip Me in Honey’s Video Show #1,” multimedia works, Wed, 8. “Works by Marya Krogstad,” art opening and screening, Fri, 7:30. “Starvelab,” multimedia screening with Michael Triglio’s SUGAR, plus guests Patrice Scanlon and Raja the Resident Alien, Sat, 8.

BALBOA 3630 Balboa, SF; cinemasf.com/balboa. $10. “Thursday Night Rock Docs:” The Swell Season (August-Perna, Dapkins, and Mirabella-Davis, 2011), Thu, 7:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), Wed, 5, 8:30. •Young & Beautiful (Ozon, 2013), Thu, 7, and Swimming Pool (Ozon, 2003), Thu, 8:50. •The Girl Can’t Help It (Tashlin, 1956), Fri, 7, and The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980), Fri, 8:55. Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013), Sat-Sun, 1. Presented sing-along style; advance tickets ($11-16) at www.ticketweb.com. •The Dance of Reality (Jodorowsky, 2013), Sat, 7, and Jodorowsky’s Dune (Pavich, 2013), Sat, 5:10, 9:30. •The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969), Sun, 7, and The Long Riders (Hill, 1980), Sun, 5, 9:30. “The Prince of Darkness: Gordon Willis (1931-2014):” •Pennies from Heaven (Ross, 1981), Tue, 7, and The Landlord (Ashby, 1970), Tue, 9:05.

COURTHOUSE SQUARE 2200 Broadway, Redwood City; www.redwoodcity.org. Free. Turbo (Soren, 2013), Thu, 8:45.

EXPLORATORIUM Pier 15, SF; www.exploratorium.edu. Free with museum admission ($19-25). “Off the Screen: Madison Brookshire, Selected Works,” Thu, 7. “Saturday Cinema: Seeing Sounds,” Sat, 1, 2, 3.

FLIGHT DECK 1540 Broadway, Oakl; www.matatufestival.org. $12. “Matatu Film Festival,” international docs and narratives, Wed-Sat.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.net. Free. “Science Film Night:” Thin Ice: The Inside Story of Climate Science (Sington and Lamb, 2013), Wed, 6:30. Also Thu, 7pm, free, Belvedere-Tiburon Library, 1501 Tiburon, Tiburon; http://bel-tib-lib.org. Both screenings followed by discussions with executive producer Peter Barrett, a geologist.

KALA ART INSTITUTE 2990 San Pablo, Berk; www.sfcinematheque.org. $5-20 suggested donation. “Gravity Spells: Bay Area New Music and Expanded Cinema Art, Program 3,” performances by Zach Iannazzi, Thad Povey and Mark Taylor, Steve Dye and Anthony Iamurri, and Paul Clipson and Tashi Wada, Sat, 7.

NEW PEOPLE 1746 Post, SF; www.jffsf.org. $13. “Japan Film Festival of San Francisco,” presented in conjunction with the 2014 J-Pop Summit, July 19-27.

NIMBY 8410 Amelia, Oakl; www.brainwashm.com. $12. “Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In/Walk-In Movie Festival,” “weird, unusual and just plain great movies for audience enjoyment and edification,” Fri-Sat and July 25-26.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Rude Awakening: American Comedy, 1990–2010:” The Big Lebowski (Coen and Coen, 1998), Wed, 7; Galaxy Quest (Parisot, 1999), Sun, 6. “Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema:” The Promised Land (Wajda, 1975), Thu, 7. “Kenji Mizoguchi: A Cinema of Totality:” Miss Oyu (1951), Fri, 7. “A Theater Near You:” Godzilla (Honda, 1954), Fri, 8:55. “The Brilliance of Satyajit Ray:” The World of Apu (1958), Sat, 6:15. “Derek Jarman, Visionary:” Caravaggio (1986), Sat, 8:30. “Picture This: Classic Children’s Books on Film:” “Sustainable Stories,” Sun, 3:30. “Alternative Visions: Animation:” “Films by John and Faith Hubley” (1956-2012), Tue, 7.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Cold Lands (Gilroy, 2014), Wed, 7. “Nippon Nights:” “Short Peace,” animated shorts from Japan, Wed, 7. Love Child (Veatch, 2014), Thu, 7. History of Future Folk (Mitchell and Walker, 2012), Thu, 7:15. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band (Halpern and Quilty, 2014), July 18-24, 7 (check website for weekend matinee times). Video Games: The Movie (Snead, 2014), July 18-24, 8, 10 (also Sat-Sun, 2:30, 4:30). SF Frozen Film Festival, docs, animation, and shorts, Fri-Sat. Complete schedule at www.frozenfilmfestival.com. “John Hubley at 100,” animated shorts by John and Faith Hubley, Sun, 2, 4, 6, 8. “Portrait of the Living Sky,” short films, Mon, 7. Inland Empire (Lynch, 2006), July 22-23, 7:15.

SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-$10.75. “John Hubley Animation: A Centennial Tribute,” animated shorts by John and Faith Hubley, Wed, 7. The Last Sentence (Troell, 2012), Wed-Thu, call for times. Siddharth (Mehta, 2013), July 18-24, call for times. Video Games: The Movie (Snead, 2014), Sun, 7.

SOMARTS CULTURAL CENTER 934 Brannan, SF; www.sfcinematheque.org. $12-35. “Night Light: Multimedia Garden Party,” luminous art installations, digital and cinematic projections, and more, Sat, 9.

TANNERY 708 Gilman, Berk; http://lostandoutofprintfilms.blogspot.com. Donations accepted. “Berkeley Underground Film Society:” Godzilla vs. Gigan (Fukuda, 1972), Fri, 7:30; “Cartoon Carnival #5: Kids and Pets,” short films, Sat, 7:30; The Kid (Chaplin, 1921), Sun, 7:30.

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. “Thursday Night Film Cult: Bad Vibrations”: •Blue Sunshine (Lieberman, 1976), Thu, 9, and One Night Stand (Duigan, 1984), Thu, 11.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “Invasion of the Cinemaniacs:” The Hole (Tsai, 1998), Sun, 2. *

Film Listings: July 16 – 22, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 15, 2014

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

OPENING

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s latest was filmed over 12 years (from 2002 to 2013) and charts the adolescence of a boy (Ellar Coltrane) and his relationship with his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke). (2:40) Embarcadero.

Closed Curtain Embattled Iranian director Jafar Panahi made 2011 diary-style doc This is Not a Film as a reaction to, and in defiance of, his touchy legal situation: His fondness for “anti-government propaganda” has him currently banned from filmmaking for 20 years. Of course, that ain’t stopping him. Closed Curtain addresses similar issues of imprisonment and paranoia, but its meta-film ambitions don’t quite transcend a certain aura of self-indulgence. It begins like a thriller, as a writer (frequent Panahi collaborator Kambozia Partovi) conceals himself in a large house (Panahi’s beach villa), hanging blackout curtains on every window. At first, it seems he’s trying to finish an overdue project, while also keeping his beloved dog hidden from Islamic authorities determined to exterminate “unclean” pets. When a strange woman appears and begins asking aggressive questions, the writer becomes unsettled — partially because of her erratic behavior, but also because he’s never sure if she’s real or imaginary. As Closed Curtain progresses, Panahi also shows up to bumble around, and another angle emerges: perhaps the combative pair exist only in the mind of a filmmaker who’s beginning to crumble under the strain of creative oppression. An intriguing set-up, but it never quite coheres, and the viewer is left to fill in too many blanks. (1:46) Four Star. (Eddy)

K Missing Kings A big-screen extension of the anime TV show K — about a high schooler named Shiro whose average-dude life is interrupted when he’s accused of a murder, and subsequently realizes his true, top-secret identity — K Missing Kings deploys the expected juxtaposition of mystical elements (vengeful clans named for colors, psychic warfare, ninjas, sword battles, etc.) and teenage awkwardness. The female characters are, naturally, drawn with exaggerated proportions and skimpy costumes. As the film begins, Shiro has vanished after a big rumble ‘twixt clan kings known as the “Academy Island Incident,” and his friends and allies are desperate to track him down. Noobs beware: K Missing Kings is aimed squarely at fans, since it begins mid-adventure and shares precious little background about its many characters, all of whom seem to have complicated back stories and loyalties. (1:13) New People. (Eddy)

Llyn Foulkes One Man Band See “Blurry Portrait.” (1:22) Roxie.

Mood Indigo After animated Noam Chomsky doc Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013), naturalistic teens-on-a-bus drama The We and the I (2012), and, uh, The Green Hornet (2011), Mood Indigo reps a return to form of sorts for Michel Gondry. That said, its romantic angst is way less convincing than that of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), while its surreal whimsy feels way more forced. It’s based on Boris Vian’s 1947 cult novel Froth on the Daydream — which has already been adapted a few times, including into 2001 Japanese entry Chloe — and concerns a quirky man of means (Romain Duris) who falls in love with a quirky sprite (gamine-4-lyfe Audrey Tautou) who soon develops a quirky illness (a flower grows in her lungs), and things soon shift from quirky to bummer, dude. The plot is practically irrelevant, however, since Gondry’s plan of attack is to cram every frame with crafty frippery (has the mundane practice of getting a prescription filled ever been so lavishly twee?) Sometimes this works, as when the blushing couple takes a first-date ride on a floating swan boat across Paris. Mostly, though, it’s exhausting. (1:34) (Eddy)

Planes: Fire & Rescue What is it about machines with wheels and boys of a certain age? Disney obviously has its peepers on a very specific demographic with this sequel spin-off to Pixar’s Cars franchise — this time with a more heroic, less individualistic fire-fighting twist. The irony of fossil-fuel-guzzling vehicles saving trees is lost on nearly everyone, which tells you about where this entry is pitched: easy, not-too-clever good times with plenty of good-looking, technically on-point, 3D fire-fighting flight scenes. Dusty (voiced by Dane Cook) — the trusty crop duster who achieved his dream of becoming a champion racing aircraft — is back, but this time he must overcome not only a faulty, impossible-to-replace, life-threatening gear box but also train as a fire-fighting aircraft in order to save his hometown airstrip. Dusty’s teacher is gruff fire-and-rescue copter Blade Ranger (Ed Harris), but he also has to dodge the advances of swoony cohort Lil’ Dipper (Julie Bowen) and try to penetrate the mystery yarns intoned by American Indian-styled helicopter Windlifter (Wes Studi). And that’s exactly when Fire & Rescue starts to fall apart for me: the multiple facile jabs poked at Windlifter’s mysterious native ruminations reads as borderline offensive, especially for a global conglomerate like Disney that purports to reach out to a “small world,” while the fact that the film’s most prominent female character is portrayed as threateningly stalker-esque keeps everything at a prepubescent girls-are-icky level. Is it too much to ask Planes to grow up a little — or at the very least, match its 21st century computer animation (one prominent exception: the vehicles’ distractingly static massive white windshield-eyes, inert like windows to dead souls) with equally up-to-date values? (1:24) Cerrito, Presidio, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Purge: Anarchy Lock your doors! This sequel takes place one year after the surprise 2013 hit about a futuristic America that allows one lawless night per year. (1:44)

Sex Tape Belonging in the category of Hangover-style comedies that supposedly dare to “go there,” while also providing date-night fodder for mom and dad, Sex Tape might have been all about how a cute married couple (Cameron Diaz and Jason Segal) parlays sex tape infamy into reality TV stardom and social-media-drenched branding success of Kim Kardashian proportions. Alas, it’s just about as dim, dated, and unimaginative as a How I Met Your Mother rip-off — meaning that despite the charm of its leads and particularly their married friends, played by Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper, Segal’s sitcom is reliably wittier than this much-ado-about-nothing blowout. Blogger Annie (Diaz) and DJ Jay (Segal) had been falling into a rut as parents who aren’t quite sure they even like the little jerks they are killing themselves to raise, so when they get a rare celebratory night in, they grab the chance to refresh their sex life by drunkenly attempting to document their tries at all the positions in The Joy of Sex. A “Franken-app” sync leads to an inadvertent sex video upload to the cloud and out to every iPad Jay has ever owned and given away — as well as a mildly wild night down the rabbit hole as they attempt to stop the spread of the video. That proves as easy as doing a bump with Annie’s boss (Rob Lowe) and tracking down the server of an online porn peddler (Jack Black), both of which set off Sex Tape‘s few funny moments. Too bad you can’t fast-forward through the rest. (1:30) Marina, Shattuck. (Chun)

Siddharth Richie Mehta’s Siddharth is an all too real tale about India’s poverty that emphasizes the stark divisions between emerging materialistic markers (exemplified by a reliance on — or ignorance of — mobile phones) and ramshackle slums. Though he’d prefer to remain his family’s sole breadwinner, Mahendra Saini (Rajesh Tailang) sends his 12-year-old son to work in a factory in hopes of earning more rupees. When the boy goes missing, the forlorn man sets out to find him, launching a frustrating search amid the cacophony of everyday life in Delhi. The sounds of car horns and distant conversations are overlaid with the film’s beautifully melancholic score. The film isn’t flashy like a cookie-cutter Bollywood blockbuster, but its frankness (and subtle insights into Indian culture, such as the roles of women and street children, intertwined with the dialogue) resonates. It’s no surprise that the film was inspired by a real-life experience, and in turn, represents the other untold and countless stories of child trafficking victims. (1:37) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Amy Char)

Video Games: The Movie Jeremy Snead’s slick documentary charts the evolution of an entertainment form by now much bigger (in annual revenue at least) than music or movies, starting with a game created at MIT in 1962 to showcase a new computer with the then-novel feature of a display screen. A decade later came Pong, followed soon by such early hits as Pac-Man and Space Invaders as gaming began migrating from arcades to home formats. A nostalgic parade of increasingly sophisticated graphics illustrates a path in which complexity of interactivity, story elements, character rendering and so forth continues to grow. So far, so entertainingly good. But anyone looking for more than a glorified industry plug will be disappointed in the film’s later progress, when it briefly touches on other areas it fails to investigate even halfway seriously. How are games developed? (“It’s movie making times 1,000!” we’re told, but little else.) Can violent games foster real-world violence? (Nah, that’s silly, right? But just in case, let’s change the subject really fast!) On the other hand, there’s all too much BS about the “global society” comprised by those with a “shared passion” — world peace, thy name is evidently World of Warcraft — which lets you “live the dream.” (Really? The dream is slaying dragons and shooting gangbangers?) Add lofty, poker-faced onscreen quotes from the likes of JFK and Gandhi, and you’ve got a movie too blindsided by fandom to actually say anything interesting about its subject. (1:40) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Wish I Was Here More power to the crowd for funding director-cowriter Zach Braff’s follow-up of-sorts to Garden State (2004). His flailing actor and family man Aidan is a slightly older, only slightly wiser, more pretentious, and way more spiritually minded variation on Garden State‘s Andrew, and as with his previous film, Wish I Was Here feels personal, shaggily shambolic, and somewhat oddly shaped for sometimes the right reasons — as when Braff turns the camera on Aidan’s almost impossibly MILF-y wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) and father Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and lets ’em rip like performance thoroughbreds. Aidan himself is a bit misshapen and stunted: he’s been relying on his father to finance the private Hebrew school education of his daughter (Joey King) and son (Pierce Gagnon), until dad breaks the news that he’ll have to stop payments and start funneling his funds toward experimental cancer treatment. Aidan has to give up his somewhat foundering dream of acting and home school the kids, while trying to make peace with his ailing, cantankerous dad and card-carrying-geek brother Noah (Josh Gad). Deep waters, especially for a Peter Pan character like Aidan, and despite a cast of lifesavers à la Kickstarter and Braff’s adept cast, Wish I Was Here never gets to where it wishes to go, beyond its talky attempts to grapple with fatherhood, identity, spirituality, and its hopes to teach one’s children well. Maybe think on it for another decade. (1:46) (Chun)

ONGOING

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Begin Again Begin Again does indeed resemble writer-director John Carney’s Once (2007): It’s another musical tale of a romantically-challenged artist whose life is changed by a chance encounter. One miserable night, very recent dump-ee Greta (Keira Knightley) takes the stage at an open mic night, crooning a song she’s just written about jumping in front of a subway train. (Knightley does her own singing, but careful camerawork ensures we never get a good look at her guitar skills.) Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck music-biz professional whose career status is nearly as dismal as his personal life, is drunkenly enthralled by her performance. Clearly, there’s nothing for these two depressed souls to do but record an album together on the streets of NYC; for her, it’s a way to get even with her cheatin’ ex (Adam Levine, playing a rock star not unlike … Adam Levine); for him, it offers hope for creative rebirth. Carney’s point of view is abundantly clear: tailoring one’s music to please the basic-bitch demographic is bad; while penning personally meaningful tunes and recording them on one’s own terms is good … even if those tunes happen to be forgettable folk-pop. Fortunately, Begin Again fares better with its explorations of complicated relationships. Nobody does rumpled and wounded better than Ruffalo, and Knightley is surprisingly likable as a hipster scorned, determined to figure out her next move even as her world crumbles around her. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Chef Not to take anything away from the superhero crew, but Chef feels like the closest thing to a labor of love from writer, director, and star Jon Favreau in many a day. As a director, he may have been making doughnuts — fun-filled and teeming with CGI eye candy, but doughnuts nevertheless — when it came to effects-driven blockbusters like 2008’s Iron Man, but this well-meaning play for the heart, by way of the stomach, shows you where Favreau’s head is really at. Chef revolves around Carl Casper (Favreau), a onetime food star, now reduced to serving up predictable crowd-pleasers at the behest of his restaurant’s overbearing owner (Dustin Huffman). It takes the barbs of an influential critic (Oliver Platt) — and an ensuing Twitter war — to set Carl off and send him away on his own, at the coaxing of his glam ex Inez (Sofia Vergara). Hooked up with a dilapidated food truck and former kitchen staffer Martin (John Leguizamo), and aided by ably Tweeting son Percy (Emjay Anthony), Carl ties his dreams — and lost passion — to the classic Cuban sandwich. The ensuing road trip from Miami to LA, and Carl’s journey toward self and a renewed relationship with his son, is a fun (if, in the end, a bit too speedily sketched) vault through the joys of eating your way through America’s new culinary heartland. Amid the volley of sign-of-the-times social-media swinging and cameos by the uncostumed Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, and the like, Favreau’s main dish is that a family that eats, cooks, and runs a business together, stays together — child labor laws or no. (1:55) Elmwood, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Chun)

Le Chef Before you fire up Twitter to alert Jon Favreau that he’s been ripped off, know that this French comedy came out in 2012. Also, it’s highly unlikely to garner even a quarter-teaspoon of the praise racked up by Favreau’s food-truck tale. Even the formidable presence of Jean Reno can’t save Le Chef; he plays veteran celebrity chef Lagarde, who’s about to have his professional reputation toppled by the money-hungry mogul who owns his signature restaurant. (Yuppie scum wants him to switch to uber-trendy molecular cuisine; traditionalist Legarde ain’t having it.) Enter eager apprentice Jacky (Michael Youn), whose Rain Man-like ability to recall all of Legarde’s recipes makes him a valuable secret weapon in this high-stakes gastronomical battle, which will culminate when a food critic decides whether to dock one of the stars in Legarde’s rating — thus opening a contract loophole that’ll allow his boss to kick him out of the kitchen. BYO food clichés to describe this too-lightweight yet overly hammy affair, which also folds domestic dramas (Jacky’s exasperated, heavily pregnant GF doesn’t understand his cooking dreams! Legarde’s neglected daughter might as well be named Sullen McEyeroll!) into the batter. And if you can’t figure out the ending within the first act, no dessert for you. (1:24) Elmwood, Four Star, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Code Black This documentary by first-time director Ryan McGarry would be impressive enough even without McGarry doing double duty as one of its subjects — which is to say, a stressed-out physician-in-training at LA County Hospital, “the birthplace of emergency medicine in the United States.” Working at a public hospital (much like SF General or Oakland’s Highland Hospital, the latter the subject of another excellent doc, Peter Nicks’ 2012 The Waiting Room), LA County docs struggle to stay on top of the daily chaos, which ironically becomes amplified when earthquake safety regulations demand the operation move to a sparkling new facility. A major concern is the huge volume of patients; the ER waiting room frequently operates under “code black” conditions, where the ill and injured — mostly uninsured working poor who don’t have access to preventative care — wait for 10 or more hours to be treated. Unfortunately, the hospital’s tight budget means woeful understaffing, and strict regulations require physicians who’d rather be seeing the sick to spend time poring over “protocols, policies, rules, checklists, and forms.” The end result is a worrisome look at the state of American health care from the front lines. (1:22) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes As usual, a heady hybrid of anticipation and dread accompanies all Planet of Apes installments: you brace yourself for the abused, righteously rebellious apes; the apocalyptic mise-en-scène laden with symbolism; and more overt messaging concerning animal testing, civil rights, and gun control. But why worry? In line with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the PG-13 high-fives go to new Apes director Matt Reeves (2008’s Cloverfield) for sparing us animal kills, gore, and graphic violence, despite its Dawn of the Dead-evoking title. Really, this Dawn is all about the bitterly fought beginnings of a civilization among the primates north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Muir Woods, complete with community building, social structure, and alas, a burgeoning war with the humanoids amid vaguely familiar SF ruins, setting off an epic showdown that challenges not only the oft-repeated commandment “ape shall not kill ape” but takes advantage of our anthropomorphized pals’ ability to swing with the C4 explosions. The viral drug ALZ 113 that led to super-intelligent primates like chimp hero Caesar (motion-captured Andy Serkis) has decimated the human population, leaving the field wide open for enterprising and vengeful creatures like scarred lab survivor Koba (motion-captured Toby Kebbell). Neither quite trusts the band of desperate human survivors — including friendly Jason Clarke, nurturing Keri Russell, and token asshole Kirk Acevedo — that ventures into the apes’ woods to harness the power of nature, namely a dam, to electrify their SF compound. You know what side of the evolutionary span we’re on when the humans seem much more interchangeable than the chimps, and the movie can barely wait to end on its contemporary version of a Touch of Evil (1958) crane shot, as it zooms to an extreme close-up of a certain chimp’s carefully crafted eyes. (2:10) Balboa, Cerrito, Metreon, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Deliver Us From Evil Eric Bana can swelter and flex in the foreground and the Catholic propaganda machine can worry and whirr in the rear, but really Deliver Us From Evil is all about the smokin’ hot priest, as in Édgar Ramírez of Carlos (2010) fame. Styling as a long-tressed Serpico-esque padre, his Father Mendoza glowers, broods, lights up sulkily beside doorways, and then, gloriously, sings the demons out of the afflicted! Get thee to a nunnery, indeed. Evil is nominally based on the real-life journey of Ralph Sarchie (Bana), a good yet overbearing NYC cop and lapsed Catholic who neglects his family (Olivia Munn, Lulu Wilson). Life takes on new paranormal dimensions when Sarchie and his wise-cracking partner Butler (Joel McHale, who looks like he’d rather be roasting than knife-fighting with the devil) encounter a series of inexplicable crimes: a woman tosses her infant into a lion enclosure at the zoo, a painter is found bundled in tarp in a family’s basement beside cryptic tags on a wall. But really Sarchie’s working-dad angst pales a bit beside the charismatic Mendoza, who inevitably sets the officer on the straight and not so narrow. The fallible are forgiven, though lord knows, director Scott Derrickson (2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose) shouldn’t be given a pass for failing to deviate from doctrine when it comes to this otherwise uninspired exorcism exercise. And even Ramírez doesn’t get to have as much fun as the possessed, in particular Olivia Horton, who as the baby-hurling Jane, spits, foams, and gnashes her teeth with more fury than a certain Uruguayan soccer star. (1:58) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Earth to Echo It’s not easy being a Goonie — or riding the coattails of E.T. even 30-plus years along. But that feeling of discovery and interstellar friendship forged in the face of a formidable establishment still calls out, like the insistent bleep of a long-forgotten intergalactic transmission. That appears to be the MO behind Earth to Echo, a decidedly clunkier outing than the aforementioned, despite its nods to a gadget-happy, geekier generation. This time, developers ostensibly want to drive a freeway through the suburban tract homes of wiseacre Tuck (Brian “Astro” Bradley), sensitive foster kid Alex (Teo Halm), and sweet science nerd Munch (Reese Hartwig). A bout of mysterious cell phone interference leads the kids to spend their last night in the ‘hood following the map that appears on their screens. What might have been another crowd-sourced game leads to a weird little piece of space junk that turns out to be the pod for an adorable, owl-like little brother from another planet. Naturally everything they discover needs to be documented for sharing later, though at first they’re hesitant to disclose their find with a popular classmate (Ella Wahlestedt) and a particularly snoopy engineer (Jason Gray-Stanford). But why bother when it’s all been seen before (with the exception of having an African American kid as the first-person narrator of this kids sci-fi adventure)? Director Dave Green is definitely counting on his audience being born yesterday, though parents who remember the source material will recognize that Green has considerably less finesse than Steven Spielberg. There’s only so much that special effects can accomplish when the initial camerawork looks so blown out and crappy, even if it’s supposed to have been documented on a phone. And Green’s slovenly direction, combined with way-too-roughed-out storytelling — how do a kid and alien managed to slip out of evil-empire governmental control, with zero effort, exactly? — do little to mark Earth as more than a knock-off. (1:29) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Edge of Tomorrow Is it OK to root for Tom Cruise again? (The Oprah thing was almost a decade ago, after all.) The entertaining Edge of Tomorrow, crisply directed by Bourne series vet Doug Liman, takes what’s most irritating about Cruise’s persona (he’s so goddamn earnest) and uses it to great advantage, casting him as military PR guru Cage — repping our armed forces on talk shows amid battles with alien invaders dubbed “Mimics” — whose oiliness masks the fact that he’s terrified of actual combat. When he’s forced to fight by a no-nonsense superior (Brendan Gleeson), he’s gruesomely killed, along with nearly every other human soldier. But wait! Thanks to a particularly close encounter with outer-space pixie dust, he awakens, unharmed, to re-live the day, over and over again (yep, shades of a certain Bill Murray comedy classic). Each “reset” offers Cage a chance to work his way closer to changing the course of the war in humanity’s favor, with key help from a badass (Emily Blunt) whose heroics on the battlefield have earned her the nickname “Full Metal Bitch.” Nothing groundbreaking here — but Edge of Tomorrow manages to make its satisfying plot as important as its 3D explosions, which means it automatically rises above what passes for popcorn fun these days. (1:53) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Godzilla Bearing the weight of a 1998 American debut so stinky that devotees of the Japanese original dubbed it “GINO” (for “Godzilla in Name Only”), the King of the Monsters returns for a do-over that smells more like generic summer entertainment than anything else. We begin in 1999, when a pair of scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a giant skeleton of sorts in the Philippines — just as a deadly accident (or was it?) devastates a Japanese nuclear power plant. Fifteen years later, the scientists are still on the trail of Whatever That Was, while guilty power-plant survivor Bryan Cranston has become a greasy-haired conspiracy theorist, much to the annoyance of his San Francisco-based Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The humans in Gareth Edwards’ film don’t actually matter much; aside from Cranston and to a much lesser extent Watanabe, none of the characters are interesting or memorable, and the plot — which has Big G lumbering after a pair of “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms” who decide to incubate their eggs in downtown SF — is also a low-stakes affair. (If you believe for a second that Taylor-Johnson’s doe-eyed wife and son won’t survive the monster attack, I have a busted-up Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.) But the monster design is plenty satisfying, and really, it’s just fine that Godzilla — who wrinkles his snout in annoyance at those pesky MUTOs — is this film’s one and only charismatic presence; dude’s going on a 70-year career at this point. (2:03) Metreon. (Eddy)

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (1:42) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Four Star, Piedmont. (Eddy)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. For an interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:14) SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Last Sentence This latest from 85-year-old Swedish master Jan Troell (2008’s Everlasting Moments, 1971’s The Emigrants) is a straightforward biopic about a figure well-remembered on his home turf if rather obscure here. Torgny Segerstedt (played by Jesper Christensen) was the editor in chief of Gothenburg’s liberal newspaper, and from the early 1930s to his death he used that podium to rail against the National Socialist menace to the south. That made him increasingly controversial, even imperiled, as his government made more and more dicey compromises to maintain the nation’s alleged neutral status in the wake of escalating Nazi aggression in Scandinavia and elsewhere. It was an extraordinarily brave stance. But this long slog of a historical drama spends way too much time detailing just how much of a selfish, arrogant prick Segerstedt apparently was in other departments, not least his carrying on a long-term affair with the equally overbearing Maja (Pernilla August), his own publisher’s Jewish wife, to the grief of that spouse (Björn Granath), his own long-suffering wife (Ulla Skoog), and their children. He and Maja are like lovers in an Ayn Rand novel, only with leftist political views and homelier middle-aged looks. Taking place largely in the rooms where power is brokered and marriages are broken, The Last Sentence keeps the big picture almost entirely offscreen, rendering history a very talky affair among disagreeable people. Some balm amidst the well-acted, well-produced boredom is provided by Troell and Mischa Gavjusjov’s handsome black and white photography. (2:04) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Life Itself Paying back the critic who championed his Hoop Dreams 20 years ago, and then some, Steve James’s documentary about the late Roger Ebert is the kind of tribute that sometimes feels like an authorized biographical video played at a testimonial dinner. If he were alive, and it were about someone else, I suspect Ebert himself would be more polite than enthused. It traces his love of newspaperdom from an early age (he started writing for one at age 15); his semi-accidental falling into being the Chicago Sun-Times’ film reviewer in 1967 (a post he’d hold for 46 years); his Pulitzer win; the huge impact of TV’s Sneak Previews, aka At the Movies; his very rocky relationship with co-host Gene Siskel; and his happy first/last marriage at age 50. Ebert was prolific, gregarious, a friend to rising filmmakers (so long as he liked their work, of course), and someone who saw no conflict in being friends with established ones (like Scorsese and Herzog, both interviewed here). But Life Itself — “the only thing he loved more than the movies,” a statement that might strike you as profound or kinda “duh” — assesses his cultural impact as the most popular-movie-critic-probably-ever without really addressing his taste or style. As a result, it has the slightly pat quality of a movie content to admire its subject without digging very deep into the work that defined him. (Nor do the blown-up-video-quality clips from films do justice to his love of that medium.) Instead, the primary focus is on his later struggles with cancer, which took his lower jaw and speech before claiming his life. That stuff is tough to watch. Most entertaining are insights into his long-running ego war with Siskel, who brought out (often on camera) irritable, petty, competitive, and bullying sides to Ebert the public otherwise seldom saw. (1:58) Albany, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Maleficent Fairytale revisionism is all the rage these days, what with the unending power of Disney princesses to latch into little girls everywhere and bring parental units (and their wallets) to their knees. Yet princesses almost seem beside the point in this villain’s-side-of-the-story tale — Maleficent (Angelina Jolie), the queen of the fairies in the magical moors, wronged by Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who saws off her wings in order to win a crown. Accompanied by her shape-shifting minion, crow Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent attends the christening of King Stefan’s first-born daughter, Aurora, hot on the heels of three clownish good fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple), and delivers a curse that will have this future Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning) prick her finger on a spindle and sink into a deathlike coma until her true love’s kiss. Will that critical smooch be delivered by Prince Bieber, er, Phillip (Brenton Thwaites)? Considering the potential for Disney’s trademark, heart-tugging enchantment to get magically tangled up in girl power, it’s tough to suck up the disappointment in the ooey-gooey, gummy-faced troll-doll aesthetics of the art direction and animation, as well as first-time director Robert Stromberg’s choppy, dashed-through storytelling. Part of the problem is that there’s almost zero threat here, despite its antihero’s devilish presence — is there ever any doubt that a healthy resolution will win out, even at the expense of blood ties? Best to find dangerous pleasures where one can — namely in the vivid Jolie, cheekbones honed to a razor edge, who spits biting remarks at her accursed charge, beneath Joan Crawford-esque eyebrows and horns crying out for club-kid Halloween treatments. (1:37) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Obvious Child We first encounter the protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s funny, original film — a Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething named Donna (Jenny Slate), who works at a lefty secondhand bookstore and makes regular (if unpaid) appearances at a local comedy night — onstage mining such underdiscussed topics as the effects of vaginal discharge on your garden-variety pair of underwear. This proves a natural segue to other hefty nuggets of embarrassment gold concerning her love life, to the dismay of boyfriend Ryan (Paul Briganti), auditing from the back of the club. He pretty much deserves it, however, for what he’s about to do, which is break up with her in a nasty, well-populated unisex bathroom, taking time to repeatedly glance at the texts coming through on his phone from Donna’s good friend, with whom he’s sleeping. So when Donna, mid-drowning of sorrows, meets a nice-looking fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) at the bar, his post-fraternity-presidency aesthetic seems unlikely to deter her from a one-night stand. The ensuing trashed make-out dance-off in Max’s apartment to the Paul Simon song of the title is both comic and adorable. The fractured recap of the evening’s condom-free horizontal events that occurs inside Donna’s brain three weeks later, as she hunkers down with her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), in the bookstore’s bathroom after peeing on a stick, is equally hilarious — and unwanted-pregnancy jokes aren’t that easy to pull off. Robespierre’s treatment of this extended windup and of Donna’s decision to have an abortion is a witty, warmhearted retort to 2007’s Knocked Up, a couple generations’ worth of Hollywood rom-com writers, and an entertainment industry that continues to perform its sweaty contortions of storytelling in the gutless cause of avoiding the A-word. (1:15) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious set piece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer‘s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) Elmwood, Metreon, Presidio. (Harvey)

Tammy There’s an Easter egg for Thelma and Louise (1991) diehards tucked amid Tammy‘s many jokes at the expense of co-writer and star Melissa McCarthy: when Tammy and her boozy grandmother (a gray-wigged Susan Sarandon) set out on a spontaneous road trip to escape their miserable lives, Grandma flashes a wad of cash. The sum ($6,700) is exactly what Louise brought to the table during that long-ago flight to Mexico. It might not be a coincidence that Tammy also features the star of 1991’s other girl-power drama, Fried Green Tomatoes, with Kathy Bates playing a lesbian family friend who finally talks some sense into the clueless, reckless Tammy — basically standing in for the audience. We wanna cheer for this newly dumped, recently fired, perpetually rumpled heroine, if only she weren’t so willfully lacking in self-awareness, and so frequently obnoxious — traits that are all the more mystifying since McCarthy wrote this character for herself, and because we know what she’s capable of (see: her outrageous, hilarious, Oscar-nominated turn in 2011’s Bridesmaids). Tammy — co-written and directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone — has its moments, but it’s overall an uneven comedy that yields few belly laughs. It also shoehorns in a stilted romantic subplot (with Mark Duplass, of all people) because … why? Why can’t this be a movie about a woman who figures out how to manage her chaotic life, without landing a man as a reward? Even the ol’ Grand Canyon plunge offers more fresh satisfaction, nearly 25 years on. (1:37) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Think Like a Man Too (2:02) SF Center.

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) Metreon, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction In Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment a villainous Black Ops leader (Kelsey Grammer) allies with a snarky Steve-Jobs-alike (Stanley Tucci) to build Transformers de coeur: designer impostor robot-cars they hope will reinvent the face of war. In IMAX 3D, “TransFOURmers” is packed with relentless rock-’em-sock-’em action, spectacular property destruction, and about as much sense as a bucket of worms. After 60 minutes, you think you’re getting more than your money’s worth. At 90 minutes, you’re tired. At two hours, confusion sets in: If Autobots get stronger together how could Optimus be in so much trouble? Who is the bounty hunting Terminator look-alike? HOW MUCH MORE COULD THERE BE? And then … the action shifts to China, Optimus rides a Dinobot, and chaos reigns. I’ve always liked the working-class poetry of the Transformers themselves — the leader is a trucker and the cast is stacked with ambulances, tanks, and the metal workforce that preserves American lives. If that’s not traditional hero worship, I don’t know what is. But Age of Extinction is the soulless designer imposter it lampoons — the whole sequel-snarking ordeal makes you long for Buzz Lightyear, who saw a thousand Buzz Lightyears on a store shelf and survived that existential crisis heroically — while also riding a dinosaur and fighting Frasier. This Transformers movie (sadly, it won’t be the final one) starts with a thesis: Mark Wahlberg walks through an abandoned movie theater and a Wilford Brimley twin (Ron Shedd) bellows: “Movies today! Sequels! Remakes! Crap!” Age of Extinction follows that moment with nearly three hours of evidence that the cause of extinction is redundancy. (2:30) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

22 Jump Street In this TV-inspired sequel, “Previously on 21 Jump Street…” is all the backstory we get. 22 wastes no time sending Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) back to school to solve another case. A few details have changed (they’re in college now, where the drug of choice is “Why Phy”), but the situation is self-consciously boilerplate, which lets the filmmakers cast (ironic) judgment on sequels — and imply the TV show was redundant. College proves hilarious, from the rundown of dorm room essentials to Schmidt’s walk of shame, and the touchstones are sharp and embarrassing. An extended fight between Schmidt and a girl (Jillian Bell, fabulous) twists gender issues and sexual assault into gloriously absurd politics. Best of all is a fairly understated joke in front of the Benjamin Hill School of Film Studies. I laughed as much at 22 as I did at 21, but 22 spends so much time calling out its number-two status that it almost becomes performance art. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

Venus in Fur Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is the writer-director preparing to stage his new adaptation of the titular kinky 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose work (and name) inspired the term “masochism.” After a long day’s fruitless auditions, he’s about to go home when in barges actress Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), very late for an appointment she might not have actually made in the first place. Doffing coat to reveal an “in character” costume of leather bustier and dog collar, while unconvincingly noting “I’m usually demure and shit,” she bullies him into letting her proceed. To his shock, she’s very, very good. With him taking the submissive male role in their reading, text and real life soon blur into one major mindfuck for the alternately bemused, appalled, and bewitched Thomas. Roman Polanski’s French-language version of David Ives’ hit two-character play can hardly escape theatricality (nor should it), but it’s fluidly cinematic within its limits, and maximizes the material’s gimmicky charms. Mostly it’s a worthy showcase for two terrific performances. Amalric, as ever, rings infinite subtle variations on the comedy of exasperation. More surprising is the director’s longtime wife Seigner, whom he hasn’t made much use of onscreen since 1992’s deliciously satirical (though few got the joke) “erotic thriller” Bitter Moon. Blowsy, vulgar, sexy, aristocratic, finally a mocking Gorgon man-eater, she’s having just as much fun here as we have watching her. (1:36) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

X-Men: Days of Future Past Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-Men films (2000’s decent X-Men; 2002’s meh X2) returns to helm this latest franchise entry — the fourth sequel in a series that also includes two movies focusing on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. That fan-favorite character is front and center in both of Days of Future Past‘s time frames: the present, a bleak dystopia in which robot assassins have wiped out nearly every mutant (save Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellan’s Magneto, and a few others), and most humans along with them; and the past, a key moment in the polyester-laden 1970s in which mutant avenger Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) inadvertently sets the disastrous future events in motion by killing robot designer Trask (Peter Dinklage). Wolverine time-travels to convince younger versions of the Professor (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to put aside their Himalayan-sized differences to stop her. (Speaking of avengers, there’s a capital-A one here: Quicksilver, a character from both comic-book worlds; he’s portrayed here with giddy mischief by American Horror Story‘s Evan Peters, and is the film’s high point.) Yes, that’s a heady plot, and there are a zillion other characters, but Future Past manages, for the most part, to avoid feeling like an overloaded mess. It’s most entertaining in scenes that show off its characters’ superpowers — clearly, the CG artists had a blast working on this one — which are plentiful enough to make slogging through the ennui-laden moments of downtime worth it. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

Yves Saint Laurent Ah, one can only imagine the remnants left on the cutting room floor. Much like the designer’s sumptuous, envelope-pushing fashion, Yves Saint Laurent provides a lot to love, starting with a convincing performance by Pierre Niney, who plays the man as a sensitive-as-a-filament artist who nonetheless succumbs to ’60s excesses and learns to deliver the kind of cruelties one can only level at a spouse who’ll never leave. That partner, in love and business, is Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), the commercial brains behind the YSL brand — first shown as the couple’s astonishing collection of artwork, furniture, and objets d’art are carted away to be auctioned off and serving here as witness and voice-over narrator. Director Jalil Lespert focuses primarily on Saint Laurent’s early career at Dior, Saint Laurent and Bergé’s relationship, and then the formidable task of establishing the house, amid a critical, chaotic social circle involving Karl Lagerfeld (Nikolai Kinski) and model muse Victoire (Charlotte Le Bon). What comes next arrives via the loving, amused, albeit calculative lens of Bergé, who has given this film his blessing: he looks on with disapproval at Saint Laurent’s sweetly stoned Moroccan hippie milieu, as he cavorts alongside muses Betty Catroux (Marie de Villepin) and Loulou de la Falaise (Laura Smet) and communes with Bergé’s rival Jacques De Bascher (Xavier Lafitte). You definitely feel the lovers’ pain — and Saint Laurent’s exhaustion on both the party circuit and the taxing treadmill of producing seasonal collections — and you are given snatches of the luxurious, decadent, epoch-defining Saint Laurent looks, like the still-relevant Le Smoking tux and opulent Russian ensembles, the latter an untrammeled triumph that this good-looking biopic abruptly ends with. Fashion lovers, especially, would have appreciated feeling more of the heat that pushed Saint Laurent to create, and to see more of the actual brilliant designs behind that legendary logo. (1:45) Clay, Shattuck. (Chun) *

Blurry portrait

Michael Redmond

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July 15, 2014

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Time is money, making both things usually in short supply when it comes to moviemaking. Ergo, a movie that takes forever to make is often a novelty — an extreme conceptual luxury. (On the other hand, movies that never actually get finished are probably more common than you’d expect; there’s a whole invisible history of films abandoned mid-production, usually because the money ran out.) This week sees the theatrical release of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an unusual and by all accounts wonderful experiment shot over a 12-year course, so its actors (particularly Ellar Coltrane’s titular youth) could grow older naturally within the story’s time span.

Unfortunately, the by-all-accounts wonderfulness of Boyhood didn’t screen in time for this particular column — necessitating an attention shift to the Roxie, which just happens to be opening a movie also shot over several years’ course. If Boyhood is obviously about life’s formative early years, Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty’s Llyn Foulkes One Man Band leaps forward decades to that point where an individual life no longer seems to change very much. Not nearly as much as they’d like, in this case. Foulkes is a veteran of that fabled Los Angeles art scene briefly and famously (albeit mostly in retrospect) centered around the Ferus Gallery. He was such a prodigy he dropped out of the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as CalArts) to go professional, then got kicked out of Ferus for (he says) dissing another, better-entrenched resident “rebel,” Bob Irwin.

Of course, no one since approximately 1900 has ever met a “serious” painter who wasn’t also a “rebel.” After that parting of ways, Foulkes became quite a popular artist for a while via large paintings derived from vintage landscape (in particular, rocks) photography. Such popularity chafed, so he turned toward what he calls his “bloody heads” period, gory portraiture that made his “macabre edge” very plain to anyone who somehow hadn’t sussed it already. Suddenly he was no longer the US artist invited to international biennales and handed prestigious prizes. One Man Band follows him some time later (2004-2012, to be exact), when he passes age 70 with no ebbing of lust — for acclaim, that is, for the sales and exhibitions and critical raves he possibly bypassed in “going out of his way to turn his back on the proprieties of the art world,” as one bemused observer notes.

We see him prepping for shows that force him into the position he most resists: actually finishing a work. At least that’s his problem with two notable pieces. Intense surreal landscape The Lost Frontier was started in 1997. It has grown so thick in places that he’s periodically used saw and hammer to excise a section he wants to rework. It duly includes a representation of Mickey Mouse, the pop culture icon he worshipped early on (in high school he’d aimed at working for Disney), then increasingly used as the perfect symbol of all things corrupt, exploitative, and American. A gallery deadline finally forces him to sign off on it, following a typical final frenzy of tinkering all-nighters.

There’s no similar happy ending for The Bedroom Painting, aka The Awakening, which depicts himself and his second ex-wife (she wasn’t “ex” when he started it) in bed — she in a near-fetal position, alone, the very definition of neglect. “The one thing I’ve failed at in my life is being a good husband. I’m too self-centered. My marriage was falling apart, I was trying to solve it in the painting,” Foulkes says here. We hear from this wife, and the prior one — albeit so briefly and tactfully it’s as if the subject forbade the filmmakers from digging into the psychological truths his art so often bares nakedly. (That second wife mentions realizing he could “not be a nurturing partner,” a terribly polite way of describing what must have been a colossal disappointment.) His grown children also appear, fleetingly. Why does their tone invariably hit the “long-suffering” note? Viewers would like to know.

Foulkes himself is spry, petulant (“If something doesn’t happen with this show, I feel like quitting art”), quite possibly brilliant, admittedly obsessive (“My process is kind of make and destroy and make again”), random (“I think vegetables are overrated”), and self-indulgently juvenile in that way of men who once got away with it by being very handsome. (When we see an archival clip of him clowning on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1974 as part of a joke band, he looks like a delighted prankster passing among actual misfits.)

Foulkes’ proclaimed alternative second career is as a “one-man band” whose bizarre stream-of-consciousness autobiographical lyrics (sum: he’s bad with women) are accompanied by the often delightful racket of his “monkey on my back” — a massive sculptural whatzit composed of myriad cowbells, bicycle horns, and other gizmos. He’s the ultimate Incredibly Strange Music ironicist, goin’ all primitive as an art project. You can exit One Man Band thoroughly intrigued, yet still so puzzling over its subject’s overall personal history or impact on contemporary art. *

LLYN FOULKES ONE MAN BAND opens Fri/18 at the Roxie.

Revitalized

Michael Redmond

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July 15, 2014

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rebecca@sfbg.com

Although the mid-Market Street headquarters of Twitter was targeted with protests by the city’s largest employee union this spring, Zendesk was technically the first company to take advantage of what came to be known as the Twitter tax break.

Crafted by Mayor Ed Lee along with Sups. David Chiu and Jane Kim in 2011, that controversial policy lured the elite tech sector to the central core with the promise of payroll-tax exclusion — leading progressives to deride it as corporate welfare, served up to an industry already soaked in venture capital.

In the years since, the property values around mid-Market have swelled — ushering in the revitalization fervently desired by Lee and his political allies, but also putting the squeeze on long-term tenants who couldn’t keep pace with rising rents.

Some area nonprofits have been sent packing for the East Bay, while a group of relatively low-income tenants residing at nearby 1049 Market Street continue to float in a state of limbo, having been threatened with evictions that haven’t been carried out yet but also haven’t been rescinded.

When members of the media were invited to survey Zendesk’s sprawling new corporate headquarters July 9, spanning eight floors of newly renovated office space, I took the opportunity to witness firsthand the mid-Market facelift ushered in by the Twitter tax break.

What we found was a meticulously crafted corporate space populated by hip, well-intentioned employees, who seemed as if they inhabit an altogether different city — maybe a different world — than that of low-income residents living in the surrounding neighborhood.

MAYORAL LOVE

“My, how things change so rapidly,” Mayor Lee said when he took the stage at Zendesk. “Two years ago, [Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane] and I, and Sup. Kim, were celebrating the expansion from one floor to two floors. And just in literally two years, we’re celebrating a fantastic IPO.”

Zendesk’s May 15 IPO was hailed by investors as a sign that cloud computing stocks could perform well, raising just under $100 million on its first day of public trading.

Lee thanked Zendesk for its contributions to the community. The company had just announced its intention to open up its basement space for community programs and dinners for neighborhood groups, in partnership with area nonprofits and childcare providers. Under its community benefit agreement with the city, a required tradeoff for the tax break, the company commits volunteer service to activities like serving hot lunch to destitute clients at the St. Anthony’s Foundation.

“Already, being a major resident in mid-Market, I congratulate you on working so closely with our Office of Economic Development staff, our … nonprofits, our arts community,” the mayor said. “This building compliments so much of what I’ve envisioned for Market Street — to bring it back as a grandiose place. “

“The sense of being part of San Francisco reverberates with all your employees,” he added with an approving smile.

Zendesk, which sells customer-service software that’s widely used even if not well known outside the tech industry, has more than tripled in size in just a few years, expanding from 80 employees to more than 360 since 2011.

The grand opening bash was held on the basement level, equipped with a stage, amphitheater, and bar, with natural light filtering through the first floor. The mood was celebratory, with catering staff circulating through with trays of hors d’oeuvres and fresh-baked treats. Lee and Sup. Kim mixed with the crowd and delivered short speeches. Zendesk staff even presented Kim with a birthday cake, candles ablaze.

The unveiling of Zendesk’s crisp new headquarters was paired with the launch of a new initiative, the Mid-Market Business Association. With membership including Zendesk, Spotify, Zoosk, Benchmark Capital, WeWork, Silicon Valley Bank, and Koch Ventures, the newly formed group aims to spur even more business activity along Market Street between 5th and 10th streets.

It “came about organically,” explained Zendesk’s Tiffany Apczynski, who heads up the company’s corporate responsibility programs. “We’re all neighbors.” The Mid-Market Business Association “is mainly going to be focused on getting ground-floor retail space filled,” she added.

I asked Svane about working in the neighborhood. “The week we moved in, there was a murder,” right across the street from its first Mid-Market space, he said. “We did this thing, like if you’re working after dark, just take a cab — we’ll pay for it.” Three years later, “we’ve had no incidents,” Svane said, adding that he was glad to have Zendesk staff engage in community volunteer work. “It’s great to get people out there,” he said. “Like it’s really changed people — it makes them smarter, more well-rounded.”

RAGS TO RICHES

Mid-Market used to be the type of neighborhood that middle-class white people might refer to as “gritty.” Years ago, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom bemoaned the stubborn blight of the area, vowing to do better, and Lee echoed that sentiment in the early days of his administration.

A few short years later, some long-term nonprofits and businesses have found it tough to adjust to the new market forces. And with venture-capital firms and tech companies flooding in, the contrast between rich and poor is jarring. In the area surrounding Zendesk’s gleaming new headquarters, it’s typical to see homeless people rummaging through shopping carts, or curled up in sleeping bags in storefront doorways.

Not far from Zendesk’s new headquarters, on Golden Gate Avenue, the Tenderloin Outpatient Clinic has found it must relocate due to a steep rent increase. Cindy Gyori, executive director of the clinic’s parent organization, Hyde Street Community Services, said she’s hoping to move the clinic to medical offices on Nob Hill but it has run into neighborhood resistance. The clinic, which has been in operation since 1975, serves about 1,200 clients per year. If the pending move doesn’t go as planned, then the clinic could be forced to shut its doors, Gyori said.

A city analysis from several years ago showed that a full 31 percent of the households in the densely populated Mid-Market neighborhood, mostly single-room occupancy hotels, earned less than $15,000 a year, making it three times as poor as the citywide average.

A Central Market Economic Strategy for revitalizing the area, published by the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development in November 2011, listed guiding principles voiced by community stakeholders at the time. Among them was: “Prevent displacement of existing residents and businesses.”

But in the face of market forces, revved up by the high interest in mid-Market created by the payroll tax exclusion zone, those guiding principles haven’t exactly panned out.

Last fall, a mass eviction facing long-term tenants at 1049 Market made headlines. Attorney Steve Collier, of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, continues to represent some of those tenants. While the eviction notices they received have long since expired, they haven’t been kicked out, but they also haven’t been given assurance that they can stay.

“For some reason the landlord hasn’t been accepting rent,” Collier said. “The tenants know to save the rent money. But it’s always hard for people who are low income to save.”

Just before he left after touring Zendesk, we caught up with Mayor Lee to ask him a few questions, including whether he thought enough was being done to assist nonprofits being displaced from the area.

“We have a lot of focus on how to help nonprofits,” Lee responded, adding that he thought a solution was to “create even more public-private partnerships between nonprofits and tech,” and that “we need to bridge that more quickly.”

DANISH MODERN-SLASH-NIRVANA

Zendesk’s new headquarters is a veritable fortress, housed in a 1909 building at 1019 Market that was once a department store. Renovations were completed in June, exposing historic wood beams and brick walls to complement the spacious workspaces, all featuring white and green hues for consistent corporate branding.

The building renovations cost $9.5 million, the same amount as the 2012 purchase price. When a reporter asked Jay Atkinson, a managing partner at building owner Cannae Partners about the sale price, Atkinson gave the number and then quipped, “Less than it’s worth today.”

Compared against the recently surging property values, that $19 million investment might now be considered small potatoes.

Just across the street, the recent flip of Zendesk’s other Mid-Market office space, at 989 Market, underscores the dramatic commercial property value increase in what the buyer termed the “rapidly-evolving Mid-Market district.”

ASB Real Estate nabbed the six-story building — which Zendesk shares with Zoosk, a social dating service — for $61.3 million. As the San Francisco Business Times reported, that’s more than double what the building sold for in 2011.

“Led by Twitter, Spotify, Yammer, and Intuit, new and expanding technology companies have made the Mid-Market District a location of choice,” ASB President Robert Bellinger said in a prepared statement, “leading to a market renaissance, from which our investors can take advantage.”

Back at 1019 Market, side office nooks and conference rooms were interspersed throughout the new space, with signs taped into the windows bearing enigmatic labels such as S’MORES, or FEATHER.

Ainsley Hill, a Zendesk staffer, led reporters on tours of the newly renovated space, describing how it had been configured “to our core brand values: airy, humble, valued, uncomplicated.” The aesthetic, Hill explained, might be described as “Danish Modern,” true to the company’s Scandinavian roots.

Danish Modern with a splash of California-style zen, you might say. The corporate logo is a cartoon Buddha wearing a telemarketers’ headpiece. Ergonomic workspaces are highly prioritized at Zendesk: That means adjustable desks, which can be lowered to the point where “you can actually sit on an exercise ball, and still be ergonomic,” Hill noted. Some choose to raise their desks and stand upon memory-foam pads (priced at $100 a pop) to support spinal health while working.

Svane, Zendesk’s genuinely approachable and gregarious CEO, could not express enough appreciation for the mayor. “Ed Lee has just been such a fantastic supporter,” he said. “I got his number, he got my number. He’s very hands-on with these things. Ultimately, we all have the same goal — to see mid-Market become a fantastic space.”

I asked Svane what he thought about the trend of displacement that had been affecting some long-term tenants in the area, particularly nonprofits. “As this neighborhood becomes more popular, it’s really hard to keep rents down,” he said. “There will be change. It’s hard to avoid.”

San Jose cracks down on pot clubs after eschewing SF’s regulatory approach

Sasha Cuttler

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July 9, 2014

16

San Jose cracks down on pot clubs after eschewing SF’s regulatory approach

San Jose’s current (and harsh) crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries contrasts with San Francisco’s decade-old (and still working well) regulations.

Over the last five years, cannabis club after cannabis club sprouted throughout San Jose while the city’s local government debated, wavered, and faltered over the best way to regulate their pot clubs. But last month, San Jose City Council members, citing an abundance of pot clubs as the cause of a surge of marijuana use in schools, got tough. They voted to enact regulations that would make it too costly for more than 70 of their pot clubs in the city to operate. Only about 10 would survive.

Meanwhile, San Francisco pot clubs rest easy, undisturbed, and untouched — at least by the San Francisco officials who pioneered regulations in the city early on. In fact, the city’s Planning Department has recently recommended expanding the so-called Green Zone where dispensaries are allowed to operate by allowing dispensaries closer to schools.

As it stands, getting a permit to open a dispensary in San Francisco is no easy task. San Francisco regulations mean dispensaries are limited to less than 10 percent of all of San Francisco.

“Because zoning is so limited, the biggest struggle is finding a location,” Shona Gochenaur, director of Axis of Love SF Community Center, told the Guardian. “I’ve known collectives that have searched for over two years for a space correctly zoned. If you get through all those mindfields and to your Planning Commission hearing, it’s smoother. Very few permits have been denied if they survive to that point.”

But San Jose’s proposed regulations take it a step farther: they would limit pot shops to industrial areas that make up roughly 1 percent of San Jose. Plus, under San Jose’s proposal, San Jose’s pot shop owners will have to grow their own cannabis and produce any topicals and edibles in house. For that, they’ll need kitchens, labs, health inspections, and a host of costly equipment. Also unlike San Francisco, no concentrates will be allowed, causing many marijuana patients to suffer from lack of access to the medicine they need.

After San Jose approved the relegations, Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to enact a temporary moratorium on the establishment of medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated Santa Clara County. David Hodges, a member of the Silicon Cannabis Coalition and owner of the All American Cannabis club, says he has until July 18 to put forth a referendum that would undo San Jose’s vote.

“I want regulations that work,” he said. “We want to remove the language that makes it impossible for dispensaries to operate and to keep everything else.”

The problem, he said, is that San Jose hadn’t enacted regulations soon enough. San Francisco was way ahead of them.

Gochenaur worked on some of San Francisco’s early regulations, recognizing that the feds would step in if cannabis activists didn’t act first.

“[The] San Francisco movement came with the AIDS crisis with city electeds that were both empathetic and personally affected by watching loved one’s suffering, our ZIP code being hit the hardest,” said Gochenaur .“We had the risk takers and the trail blazers willing to open their doors.”

Risk taking for San Francisco included regulating dispensaries in ways the state has since failed to do. Since San Francisco began regulating dispensaries in 2004, anyone wanting to open up a dispensary in San Francisco has had to jump through a series of tough bureaucratic hoops while also garnering neighborhood support.

San Jose, instead, opted for the laissez faire approach, allowing their dispensaries to grow, and then regretting it later.

When San Jose attempted to enact similar regulations back in 2011, Hodges used a referendum to stop the council’s plans. But, once he succeeded in defeating San Jose’s proposal, no new regulations were proposed.

“The cannabis movement in San Jose is back at square one,” Hodges wrote on his website after his referendum succeeded.

John Lee, director of the Silicon Valley Cannabis Coalition, said his organization’s biggest mistake was repealing, rather than revising, San Jose’s proposal 3 years ago. “We just knew that we couldn’t do with what they were proposing,” he said. “We just wanted to stop their relegations. But we had no idea how to regulate this back then. Now we want to.”

Having narrow relegations to begin with leaves San Francisco with room for revision later. For instance, Sup. John Avalos is working with the Planning Commission to help expand the Green Zone by bringing dispensaries 600 feet away from schools rather than 1,000 feet now. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Santa Clara Deputy County Executive Sylvia Gallegos has claimed before that San Jose’s dispensaries, totalling over 90 at the time, caused a 106 percent increase in drug abuse-related suspensions of students in East San Jose schools in 2011-2012.

“I was smoking pot in high school before I even knew what a cannabis club was,” Hodges said. “Keeping dispensaries away from schools won’t stop that.”

If Hodges referendum fails, he says he’ll leave the cannabis industry for good.

“Right now, this could happen anywhere. There’s no safe place,” he said. “Save for Oakland – kind of. And San Francisco. But they have the territory well-covered in those areas. There’s no need for me there.”

San Francisco dispensaries may have local support, but without statewide regulations, they’re not immune to federal crackdowns, either, as the closures of Vapor Room and HopeNet made clear back in 2012. For years, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has been trying to create statewide regulatory framework for California to help limit the crackdowns. In May, his most recent bill to address statewide regulation failed to pass the Assembly Floor. Since then, Ammiano has backed a bill from Senator Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) that would force dispensaries to obtain local approval prior to obtaining state approval.

David Goldman, a former member of the San Francisco Medical Marijuana Task Force, told us, “It’s basically the only sensible approach towards state framework. The US Attorney is less likely to go after states with a strong structure. The tighter the regulations, the less the feds will go after dispensaries.”

For now, cannabis owners in San Jose must focus on their own, local battle to save themselves. As for the San Francisco cannabis owners who’ve passed their bureaucratic tests and received their golden permits, business resumes as usual.

Facebook messes with our emotions

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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July 8, 2014

18

The Facebook data scientist who served as lead author in a controversial study that set out to manipulate the emotional states of 689,003 Facebook users, sparking outrage and a federal complaint last week, lists his current city as San Francisco on his Facebook page. He also calls himself “Danger Muffin.”

Adam D.I. Kramer, who works for Facebook’s core data science team, conducted the research in partnership with two co-authors he publicly described as friends – Jeffrey Hancock, a communication and information science professor at Cornell University, and Jamie Guillory, a postdoctoral scholar previously at Cornell and now affiliated with the University of California San Francisco.

The trio’s research, conducted for one week in January of 2012, sought to determine whether Facebook users would be emotionally impacted by exposure to positive or negative content on their news feeds. They published their findings, edited by a psychology researcher from Princeton University, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with the title: “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.”

“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion,” the study notes, “leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” A press release issued by Cornell in mid-June hailed the experiment as “the first to suggest that emotions expressed via online social networks influence the moods of others.”

People exposed to more negative content “used more negative words in their status updates,” Hancock explained in the Cornell press statement, while “significantly more positive words were used” by users who saw an increase in positive content.

In this 2011 video on internal experimentation using Facebook data, Kramer gives an in-depth presentation on how users’ total word sets – everything they’ve ever posted on Facebook – can be digitally analyzed with the use of a matrix that can ultimately show “how users differ from each other.”

The emotional contagion study has prompted a major backlash, prompting the Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing Facebook of engaging in deceptive trade practices. As EPIC put it, “the company purposefully messed with people’s minds.”

Julia Horwitz, EPIC’s consumer protection counsel, noted that Facebook signed a consent order at the direction of the FTC in 2012 following “a several-year investigation about other data sharing charges.”

As a result, “Facebook is now under this consent order that requires it to comply with various data protection provisions,” meant to safeguard the information that its users provide. “Facebook’s use of the information submitted into the data feeds, that was then processed through the psychological manipulation algorithm, is a violation of the consent order,” Horwitz explained.

To comply with the federal order, the company should have solicited express consent from users granting permission to be subjected to experimentation, she noted.

“One of the things we are hoping to gain from this complaint,” Horwitz added, “is to have Facebook publicize the news feed algorithms, so that users can understand the basis by which they’re given information.”

Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns the Future?, railed against Facebook for its recklessness in experimenting on people’s emotional states in a New York Times OpEd, saying:

“The manipulation of emotion is no small thing. An estimated 60 percent of suicides are preceded by a mood disorder. Even mild depression has been shown to increase the risk of heart failure by 5 percent; moderate to severe depression increases it by 40 percent.

Research with human subjects is generally governed by strict ethical standards, including the informed consent of the people who are studied. … The subjects in the study still, to this day, have not been informed that they were in the study. If there had been federal funding, such a complacent notion of informed consent would probably have been considered a crime. Subjects would most likely have been screened so that those at special risk would be excluded or handled with extra care.”

While Facebook seems to be bearing the brunt of public outrage over the study, the social media giant’s partnership with academic sector has also raised questions. Guillory became affiliated with UCSF only after her involvement with the study, but in the angry aftermath of the publication of this experiment, Cornell has sought to distance its researchers from the controversy.

Jamie Guillory, formerly at Cornell and now at the University of California San Francisco, was a co-author of the study.

In an official statement, Cornell noted, “Professor Hancock and Dr. Guillory did not participate in data collection and did not have access to user data. … Because the research was conducted independently by Facebook and Professor Hancock had access only to results – and not to any individual, identifiable data at any time – Cornell University’s Institutional Review Board concluded that he was not directly engaged in human research and that no review by the Cornell Human Research Protection Program was required.”

Syl Kacapyr, a Cornell spokesperson, forwarded the canned statements to the Bay Guardian and said none of the study’s authors would be granting media interviews. Nevertheless, we reached out to Kramer and Guillory individually to request interviews. If we hear back, we’ll update this post.

Kramer, a.k.a. Danger Muffin, did publicly address the study on his Facebook page.

“The reason we did this research,” he wrote, “is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

He went on to note that the research “very minimally” deprioritized News Feed content, adding that “we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses [it].

“The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service,” Kramer concluded. “Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

This Week’s Picks: July 9 – 15, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 9

‘A Hard Day’s Night’

In 1964, Beatlemania thoroughly swept America. Fifty years after the Fab Four’s stateside and film debuts, San Francisco’s celebrations seem like a blast from the past. Aside from Paul McCartney’s August concert at Candlestick Park — coming full circle to where the Beatles played their last official show — the band’s 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night returns to U.S. theaters this month. Old age may be sneaking up on Macca, but the Liverpudlian boys’ moptops, music, and mockery of Paul’s grandfather are timeless. Stay in your seat for the second feature — the 1978 film I Want to Hold Your Hand chronicles some fans’ Beatlecentric shenanigans. (Amy Char)

5:30pm, 7:30pm, $11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

THURSDAY 10

Nicole Kidman Is Fucking Gorgeous at ‘Gorgeous’

Arty art-pop-performance-party mavens Nicole Kidman Is Fucking Gorgeous (John Foster Cartwright, Maryam Rostami, and Mica Sigourney) show up at the Asian Art Museum this week to host one night’s worth of grand gorgeosity on the occasion of the museum’s current exhibit — Gorgeous (June 20–September 14) — which delves into its permanent collection as well as that of SF MOMA for a cache of 72 fabulous pieces ranging across more than two millennia. Who better to “activate the spaces” of the museum with dance and performance than special guests Fauxnique (Monique Jenkinson), Fatima Rude, La Chica Boom, and DJ Hoku Mama Swamp. Casual dress? I don’t think so. But TopCoat Nail Studio will handle the mani with designs inspired by the artwork. (Robert Avila)

6–9pm, free with museum admission, $5 after 5pm

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF

(415) 581-3500

www.asianart.org

FRIDAY 11

Cynic

The world was not ready for Cynic when they first emerged in the late ’80s. The band’s jazzy prog-metal and anti-macho stage presence (inspired in part by members Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert’s sexuality — Reinert calls their music “some gay, gay metal”) made them equal parts influential and reviled. On their first national tour opening for Cannibal Corpse, the extreme audience hostility they experienced was enough to make them call it quits for 12 years — during which time their reputation and influence grew. Since the crew’s 2006 reunion, they’ve enjoyed success and reverence, releasing two more albums and playing major festivals in the U.S. and Europe. Their upcoming Fillmore gig is a chance to see one of metal’s coolest influences rock a venue as comfortably and thoroughly as they deserve to. (Daniel Bromfield)

9pm, $22.50

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

Lia Rose

Formerly of Or, the Whale, San Francisco singer-songwriter Lia Rose has the kind of voice that seems like it could cut steel with its clarity — but instead, she’s going to pick up a guitar and carve you a lovesick, honey-and-whiskey-coated lullaby, with pedal steel or upright bass or banjo or all three helping to lull you under her spell. The timeless quality of her indie-folk pairs well here with opener We Became Owls, an East Bay Americana outfit that’s been gaining devotees like a steam train for the past year, despite not having an album out (this is their record release show). Gritty, Guthrie-esque sing-alongs are a distinct possibility here; maybe do some vocal warm-ups? (Emma Silvers)

9pm, $15

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

Hot Chip (DJ set)

Hot Chip’s catchy brand of electro-funk has buoyed the group’s five critically acclaimed albums. Their most recent release, 2012’s In Our Heads, is perhaps their best yet — “Don’t Deny Your Heart,” a harmony-heavy party anthem with irresistible vocals from Alexis Singer that capture all the melody of the Britpop era, was one of the most unique and danceable singles of its year. The group comes to the glitzy Mezzanine for a DJ set that promises to be full of mixing, subtle live instrumentation, and mash-ups of prior releases. The band has a penchant for debuting new music at their gigs (or else subverting their old tunes to an extent that they’re effectively entirely new tracks) and a smaller-scale dance club provides the perfect location for them to run wild. Also performing is local legend and Lights Down Low host Sleazemore and DFA records mainstay The Juan Maclean, who just dropped a stinging new single called “Get Down (With My Love).” (David Kurlander)

8pm, $16-$25

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

SATURDAY 12

Sonny and the Sunsets

San Francisco’s Sonny Smith is a scattered man. He is a singer-songwriter, playwright, author, and curator who honed his musicianship in piano bars and travelling between the Rocky Mountains, the West Coast, and Central America. The music of Sonny and the Sunsets, his SF-based pop outfit with a revolving-door lineup, reflects the patchwork nature of Smith’s mind and talents, melding aspects of pop, doo-wop, indie rock, surf, and folk. Smith is a gifted storyteller and his compelling and wonderfully strange lyricism lends itself well to the demure Ocean Beach vibes of his music. The Sunsets’ most recent album, Antenna to the Afterworld, reflects on Smith’s experiences with the paranormal, and presents some of his strongest and most wonderfully weird material to date. Tonight’s show will feature a brand new lineup and material that’s never been heard before. (Haley Zaremba)

With The Reds, Pinks, and Purples, Bouquet

9pm, $15

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

The U.S. Air Guitar Championship Semifinals

The times, they are a-changin’. Now you can put “professional air guitarist” on your LinkedIn profile and actually justify the position. Unlike most artists who usually take the stage at the Independent, tonight’s stars left their instruments at home, but they’re ready to shred. Hear — or see, rather — contestants breathe new life into some of your favorite songs, including hits from years past. It’s time for a classic rock revival. AC/DC’s and Van Halen’s riffs inspire fans to rock out, sans guitars, as past contestants can attest to. No offense to Bob Dylan, but his brand of folk just isn’t that conducive to replicate on air guitar. (Amy Char)

9pm, $20

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Xavier Rudd

Xavier Rudd is a music festival’s wet dream. He’s a handsome, frequently shirtless, habitually barefoot Australian surrounded by dozens of instruments over which he has complete mastery —and he plays them all at once. Since debuting in 2002 with the album To Let, the one-man band has had a platinum album in Australia (Solace, released in 2004) and gigs at festivals across the Anglophone world, in addition to slots opening for fellow stage hounds like Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews, and Ben Harper. Though he’s been sticking more to indoor venues on this leg of his American tour, his style should be well suited to the Fillmore — home to all manner of hippie-leaning, improv-happy artists since the heyday of the Dead. (Daniel Bromfield)

9pm, $25

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

SUNDAY 13

Darryl D.M.C. McDaniels

Neck of the Woods becomes a time machine on Sunday as Darryl McDaniels, better known as D.M.C., drops in for a nostalgic journey through the annals of 1980s rap. One third of the explosive rap innovators Run-D.M.C., McDaniels has kept busy since the dissolution of the group more than ten years ago, playing a full festival circuit, doing extensive charity work, and covering Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp” with Talib Kweli, Mix Master Mike, and Ahmet Zappa for a pulsating track on a birthday compilation put out by the Zappa Family Trust. It’s hard to say whether D.M.C. will pull out anything quite as wild during this set, but expect zeitgeist-defining songs like “It’s Tricky” and “Walk This Way,” and hopefully some deeper cuts from the group’s later work (2001’s Crown Royal has some underrated tracks) and D.M.C.’s only solo album, Checks, Thugs, and Rock and Roll. Joining McDaniels on the mic are local groups the Oakland Mind and Jay Stone, each of whom have decidedly D.M.C.-inspired beats and flows and will offer up both politicized and party-themed bangers centered around the Bay. If you’re feeling like “Raising Hell,” then head over. (Kurlander)

9pm, $18

Neck of the Woods

406 Clement, SF

(415) 387-6343

www.neckofthewoodssf.com

MONDAY 14

BAASICS.5: Monsters

These aren’t the monsters that haunted your childhood nightmares. No, these monsters have matured alongside you, escaping their fantasy story homes and creeping into the minutiae of everyday life. A group of scientists and artists serve as their caretakers tonight, enthralling audiences with accounts of honey bees’ transformation into “ZomBees,” vampires’ affinity for the best coast (namely, California), Sasquatch sightings (guaranteed to be more terrifying than the music festival), and glow-in-the-dark plants (mundane, yes, but at least you won’t wet your pants in fear). Still, the multi-media presentation finds the delicate balance between artistic and hair-raising, while maintaining a somewhat spooky aura to keep you on your toes until Halloween. (Amy Char)

7pm, free

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

TUESDAY 15

The Dwarves

The Dwarves came into the world as we all do, screaming and covered in blood. Formed in Chicago in the mid-’80s as The Suburban Nightmare, the hardcore punk outfit has since relocated to our fine city to wreak havoc. In their three decades of existence, the Dwarves’ lineup and sound have shifted from hardcore to shock rock. The twin pillars of the Dwarves, singer Blag Dahlia and guitarist He Who Cannot Be Named, however, have stood the test of time, and continue to deliver some of the most insane live shows and stunningly tasteless lyrics punk rock has to offer. Infamous for their short, bloody, and often nude live shows, the Dwarves are a legendary part of punk history and the San Francisco rock scene. Also featuring the equally notorious Queers, this show is going to be a doozie. (Zaremba)

With the Queers, Masked Intruder, the Atom Age

9pm, $20

Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St., SF

(415) 626-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Liz Grant

Local stand-up comedian Liz Grant has gotten divorced twice and gone on an astonishing number of dates in the interim. Additionally, she has served as a “ghost online dater” for a busy executive. In her show “Dating Is Comedy,” she breaks down the contemporary SF dating scene and gets brutally honest about her various misadventures and heartbreaks along the way. While the show isn’t expressly designed for singles, Grant hopes that her words of wisdom will resonate with those who “have dated, are dating, or want to date.” With a thematic scope that large, Grant is sure to strike a funny bone (or perhaps a more fragile Achilles’ Heel) for anyone who has survived the rough seas of the dating world. Fresh off a 23-week run of another dating rumination, “Deja Wince: Lessons From a Failed Relationship Expert,” Grant is no stranger to baring her soul about the most universally distressing of all societal practices. (Kurlander)

8pm, $15

Punch Line

444 Battery, SF

(415) 397-7573

www.punchlinecomedyclub.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 835 Market Street, Suite 550, SF, CA 94103; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Rep Clock: July 9 – 15, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

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Schedules are for Wed/9-Tue/15 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. “Cyber Beach Party” and “nanobytes,” works by Gary Fembot and others, Fri, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •A Hard Day’s Night (Lester, 1964), Wed, 5:30, 7:30, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Zemeckis, 1978), Wed, 9:35. •The Servant (Losey, 1963), Thu, 7, and Accident (Losey, 1967), Thu, 9:15. •Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2013), Fri, 7:30, and Addiction, Fri, 9:45. Peaches Christ presents: The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939), with pre-show starring Peaches Christ and Sharon Needles in The Wizard of Odd, Sat, 3, 8. This event, $30-105; tickets at www.peacheschrist.com. Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013), Sun, 1. Presented sing-along style. •The Ladykillers (Mackendrick, 1955), Sun, 7:10, and The Lavender Hill Mob (Crichton, 1951), Sun, 5:30, 9. •Manhattan (Allen, 1979), Tue, 7, and Klute (Pakula, 1971), Tue, 8:50.

COURTHOUSE SQUARE 2200 Broadway, Redwood City; www.redwoodcity.org. Free. E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982), Thu, 8:45.

ELLEN DRISCOLL PLAYHOUSE 325 Highland, Piedmont; http://diversityfilmseries.org. Free. Louder Than a Bomb (Jacobs and Siskel, 2010), Thu, 6:30.

EXPLORATORIUM Pier 15, SF; www.exploratorium.edu. Free with museum admission ($19-25). “Saturday Cinema: One Click at a Time,” Sat, 1, 2, 3.

JACK LONDON FERRY LAWN Clay and Water, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. Free. “Waterfront Flicks:” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes, 1986), Thu, sundown.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Kenji Mizoguchi: A Cinema of Totality:” My Love Has Been Burning (1949), Wed, 7; The Life of Oharu (1952), Fri, 7:30. “Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema:” The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Has, 1973), Thu, 7. “The Brilliance of Satyajit Ray:” Pather Panchali (1955), Sat, 6; Aparajito (1956), Sun, 6. “Derek Jarman, Visionary:” Jubilee (1978), Sat, 8:30. “Picture This: Classic Children’s Books on Film:” “My Other Self,” shorts program plus presentation by author and illustrator Julie Downing, Sun, 3:30.

PARAMOUNT 2025 Broadway, Oakl; www.ticketmaster.com. $5. The Goonies (Donner, 1985), Fri, 8.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. •Apocalypse: Bill Callahan (Blanks, 2012), and In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey (Cullingham, 2012), Wed, 7:15. This screening, $12. 20,000 Days on Earth (Forsyth and Pollard, 2014), Thu, 7:15. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (Knappenberger, 2014), Wed-Thu, 7, 9:15. “A Special Weekend with Actor Don Murray:” A Hatful of Rain (Zinneman, 1957), Fri, 7:30; The Bachelor Party (Mann, 1957), Fri, 9:45; Shake Hands With the Devil (Anderson, 1959), Fri, 11:30; “The Outcasts: The Long Ride” (Butler, 1969), Sat, noon; Call Me By My Rightful Name (Shurtleff, 1972), Sat, 1; A Man is Ten Feet Tall (Mulligan, 1955), Sat, 3:30; Sweet Love, Bitter (Danska, 1967), Sat, 4:30; Endless Love (Zefferelli, 1981), Sat, 7:15; The Confessions of Tom Harris (Derek and Nelson, 1968-72), Sat, 10:15; “Police Story: The Big Walk” (Day, 1973), Sun, noon; Deadly Hero (Nagy, 1976), Sun, 1; The Hoodlum Priest (Kershner, 1961); Advise and Consent (Preminger, 1962), Sun, 6:30; Bus Stop (Logan, 1956), Sun, 9:15. With additional short films and Don Murray in person at selected events. Following the Ninth (Candaele, 2013), Tue, 7.

SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-$10.75. American Mustang (Price, 2014), Wed, 7. Life Itself (James, 2014), Wed-Thu, call for times. The Last Sentence (Troell, 2012), July 11-17, call for times.

TEMESCAL ART CENTER 511 48th St, Oakl; www.shapeshifterscinema.com. Free. “Shapeshifters Cinema:” works by performer and sound artist Elise Baldwin, Sun, 8.

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. “Thursday Night Film Cult: Bad Vibrations”: •Island of the Damned (Serrador, 1976), Thu, 9, and Blood Beach (Bloom, 1980), Thu, 11.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “Brakhage, Brakhage, Brakhage!:” “Sound Films” (1962-74), Thu, 7:30; “Hand-Painted Films” (1993-2002), Sun, 2. *

Film Listings: July 9 – 15, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

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

OPENING

Code Black This documentary by first-time director Ryan McGarry would be impressive enough even without McGarry doing double duty as one of its subjects — which is to say, a stressed-out physician-in-training at LA County Hospital, “the birthplace of emergency medicine in the United States.” Working at a public hospital (much like SF General or Oakland’s Highland Hospital, the latter the subject of another excellent doc, Peter Nicks’ 2012 The Waiting Room), LA County docs struggle to stay on top of the daily chaos, which ironically becomes amplified when earthquake safety regulations demand the operation move to a sparkling new facility. A major concern is the huge volume of patients; the ER waiting room frequently operates under “code black” conditions, where the ill and injured — mostly uninsured working poor who don’t have access to preventative care — wait for 10 or more hours to be treated. Unfortunately, the hospital’s tight budget means woeful understaffing, and strict regulations require physicians who’d rather be seeing the sick to spend time poring over “protocols, policies, rules, checklists, and forms.” The end result is a worrisome look at the state of American health care from the front lines. (1:22) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Direct sequel to 2011’s surprisingly great series reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with Andy Serkis reprising his motion-capture role as evolved chimp Caesar, and San Francisco reprising its role as Ape Revolt Central. (2:10) Balboa, Presidio.

The Last Sentence This latest from 85-year-old Swedish master Jan Troell (2008’s Everlasting Moments, 1971’s The Emigrants) is a straightforward biopic about a figure well-remembered on his home turf if rather obscure here. Torgny Segerstedt (played by Jesper Christensen) was the editor in chief of Gothenburg’s liberal newspaper, and from the early 1930s to his death he used that podium to rail against the National Socialist menace to the south. That made him increasingly controversial, even imperiled, as his government made more and more dicey compromises to maintain the nation’s alleged neutral status in the wake of escalating Nazi aggression in Scandinavia and elsewhere. It was an extraordinarily brave stance. But this long slog of a historical drama spends way too much time detailing just how much of a selfish, arrogant prick Segerstedt apparently was in other departments, not least his carrying on a long-term affair with the equally overbearing Maja (Pernilla August), his own publisher’s Jewish wife, to the grief of that spouse (Björn Granath), his own long-suffering wife (Ulla Skoog), and their children. He and Maja are like lovers in an Ayn Rand novel, only with leftist political views and homelier middle-aged looks. Taking place largely in the rooms where power is brokered and marriages are broken, The Last Sentence keeps the big picture almost entirely offscreen, rendering history a very talky affair among disagreeable people. Some balm amidst the well-acted, well-produced boredom is provided by Troell and Mischa Gavjusjov’s handsome black and white photography. (2:04) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Venus in Fur Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is the writer-director preparing to stage his new adaptation of the titular kinky 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose work (and name) inspired the term “masochism.” After a long day’s fruitless auditions, he’s about to go home when in barges actress Wanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), very late for an appointment she might not have actually made in the first place. Doffing coat to reveal an “in character” costume of leather bustier and dog collar, while unconvincingly noting “I’m usually demure and shit,” she bullies him into letting her proceed. To his shock, she’s very, very good. With him taking the submissive male role in their reading, text and real life soon blur into one major mindfuck for the alternately bemused, appalled, and bewitched Thomas. Roman Polanski’s French-language version of David Ives’ hit two-character play can hardly escape theatricality (nor should it), but it’s fluidly cinematic within its limits, and maximizes the material’s gimmicky charms. Mostly it’s a worthy showcase for two terrific performances. Amalric, as ever, rings infinite subtle variations on the comedy of exasperation. More surprising is the director’s longtime wife Seigner, whom he hasn’t made much use of onscreen since 1992’s deliciously satirical (though few got the joke) “erotic thriller” Bitter Moon. Blowsy, vulgar, sexy, aristocratic, finally a mocking Gorgon man-eater, she’s having just as much fun here as we have watching her. (1:36) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Begin Again Begin Again does indeed resemble writer-director John Carney’s Once (2007): It’s another musical tale of a romantically-challenged artist whose life is changed by a chance encounter. One miserable night, very recent dump-ee Greta (Keira Knightley) takes the stage at an open mic night, crooning a song she’s just written about jumping in front of a subway train. (Knightley does her own singing, but careful camerawork ensures we never get a good look at her guitar skills.) Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck music-biz professional whose career status is nearly as dismal as his personal life, is drunkenly enthralled by her performance. Clearly, there’s nothing for these two depressed souls to do but record an album together on the streets of NYC; for her, it’s a way to get even with her cheatin’ ex (Adam Levine, playing a rock star not unlike … Adam Levine); for him, it offers hope for creative rebirth. Carney’s point of view is abundantly clear: tailoring one’s music to please the basic-bitch demographic is bad; while penning personally meaningful tunes and recording them on one’s own terms is good … even if those tunes happen to be forgettable folk-pop. Fortunately, Begin Again fares better with its explorations of complicated relationships. Nobody does rumpled and wounded better than Ruffalo, and Knightley is surprisingly likable as a hipster scorned, determined to figure out her next move even as her world crumbles around her. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Four Star, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Chef Not to take anything away from the superhero crew, but Chef feels like the closest thing to a labor of love from writer, director, and star Jon Favreau in many a day. As a director, he may have been making doughnuts — fun-filled and teeming with CGI eye candy, but doughnuts nevertheless — when it came to effects-driven blockbusters like 2008’s Iron Man, but this well-meaning play for the heart, by way of the stomach, shows you where Favreau’s head is really at. Chef revolves around Carl Casper (Favreau), a onetime food star, now reduced to serving up predictable crowd-pleasers at the behest of his restaurant’s overbearing owner (Dustin Huffman). It takes the barbs of an influential critic (Oliver Platt) — and an ensuing Twitter war — to set Carl off and send him away on his own, at the coaxing of his glam ex Inez (Sofia Vergara). Hooked up with a dilapidated food truck and former kitchen staffer Martin (John Leguizamo), and aided by ably Tweeting son Percy (Emjay Anthony), Carl ties his dreams — and lost passion — to the classic Cuban sandwich. The ensuing road trip from Miami to LA, and Carl’s journey toward self and a renewed relationship with his son, is a fun (if, in the end, a bit too speedily sketched) vault through the joys of eating your way through America’s new culinary heartland. Amid the volley of sign-of-the-times social-media swinging and cameos by the uncostumed Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, and the like, Favreau’s main dish is that a family that eats, cooks, and runs a business together, stays together — child labor laws or no. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Chun)

Le Chef Before you fire up Twitter to alert Jon Favreau that he’s been ripped off, know that this French comedy came out in 2012. Also, it’s highly unlikely to garner even a quarter-teaspoon of the praise racked up by Favreau’s food-truck tale. Even the formidable presence of Jean Reno can’t save Le Chef; he plays veteran celebrity chef Lagarde, who’s about to have his professional reputation toppled by the money-hungry mogul who owns his signature restaurant. (Yuppie scum wants him to switch to uber-trendy molecular cuisine; traditionalist Legarde ain’t having it.) Enter eager apprentice Jacky (Michael Youn), whose Rain Man-like ability to recall all of Legarde’s recipes makes him a valuable secret weapon in this high-stakes gastronomical battle, which will culminate when a food critic decides whether to dock one of the stars in Legarde’s rating — thus opening a contract loophole that’ll allow his boss to kick him out of the kitchen. BYO food clichés to describe this too-lightweight yet overly hammy affair, which also folds domestic dramas (Jacky’s exasperated, heavily pregnant GF doesn’t understand his cooking dreams! Legarde’s neglected daughter might as well be named Sullen McEyeroll!) into the batter. And if you can’t figure out the ending within the first act, no dessert for you. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Deliver Us From Evil Eric Bana can swelter and flex in the foreground and the Catholic propaganda machine can worry and whirr in the rear, but really Deliver Us From Evil is all about the smokin’ hot priest, as in Édgar Ramírez of Carlos (2010) fame. Styling as a long-tressed Serpico-esque padre, his Father Mendoza glowers, broods, lights up sulkily beside doorways, and then, gloriously, sings the demons out of the afflicted! Get thee to a nunnery, indeed. Evil is nominally based on the real-life journey of Ralph Sarchie (Bana), a good yet overbearing NYC cop and lapsed Catholic who neglects his family (Olivia Munn, Lulu Wilson). Life takes on new paranormal dimensions when Sarchie and his wise-cracking partner Butler (Joel McHale, who looks like he’d rather be roasting than knife-fighting with the devil) encounter a series of inexplicable crimes: a woman tosses her infant into a lion enclosure at the zoo, a painter is found bundled in tarp in a family’s basement beside cryptic tags on a wall. But really Sarchie’s working-dad angst pales a bit beside the charismatic Mendoza, who inevitably sets the officer on the straight and not so narrow. The fallible are forgiven, though lord knows, director Scott Derrickson (2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose) shouldn’t be given a pass for failing to deviate from doctrine when it comes to this otherwise uninspired exorcism exercise. And even Ramírez doesn’t get to have as much fun as the possessed, in particular Olivia Horton, who as the baby-hurling Jane, spits, foams, and gnashes her teeth with more fury than a certain Uruguayan soccer star. (1:58) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

Earth to Echo It’s not easy being a Goonie — or riding the coattails of E.T. even 30-plus years along. But that feeling of discovery and interstellar friendship forged in the face of a formidable establishment still calls out, like the insistent bleep of a long-forgotten intergalactic transmission. That appears to be the MO behind Earth to Echo, a decidedly clunkier outing than the aforementioned, despite its nods to a gadget-happy, geekier generation. This time, developers ostensibly want to drive a freeway through the suburban tract homes of wiseacre Tuck (Brian “Astro” Bradley), sensitive foster kid Alex (Teo Halm), and sweet science nerd Munch (Reese Hartwig). A bout of mysterious cell phone interference leads the kids to spend their last night in the ‘hood following the map that appears on their screens. What might have been another crowd-sourced game leads to a weird little piece of space junk that turns out to be the pod for an adorable, owl-like little brother from another planet. Naturally everything they discover needs to be documented for sharing later, though at first they’re hesitant to disclose their find with a popular classmate (Ella Wahlestedt) and a particularly snoopy engineer (Jason Gray-Stanford). But why bother when it’s all been seen before (with the exception of having an African American kid as the first-person narrator of this kids sci-fi adventure)? Director Dave Green is definitely counting on his audience being born yesterday, though parents who remember the source material will recognize that Green has considerably less finesse than Steven Spielberg. There’s only so much that special effects can accomplish when the initial camerawork looks so blown out and crappy, even if it’s supposed to have been documented on a phone. And Green’s slovenly direction, combined with way-too-roughed-out storytelling — how do a kid and alien managed to slip out of evil-empire governmental control, with zero effort, exactly? — do little to mark Earth as more than a knock-off. (1:29) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Edge of Tomorrow Is it OK to root for Tom Cruise again? (The Oprah thing was almost a decade ago, after all.) The entertaining Edge of Tomorrow, crisply directed by Bourne series vet Doug Liman, takes what’s most irritating about Cruise’s persona (he’s so goddamn earnest) and uses it to great advantage, casting him as military PR guru Cage — repping our armed forces on talk shows amid battles with alien invaders dubbed “Mimics” — whose oiliness masks the fact that he’s terrified of actual combat. When he’s forced to fight by a no-nonsense superior (Brendan Gleeson), he’s gruesomely killed, along with nearly every other human soldier. But wait! Thanks to a particularly close encounter with outer-space pixie dust, he awakens, unharmed, to re-live the day, over and over again (yep, shades of a certain Bill Murray comedy classic). Each “reset” offers Cage a chance to work his way closer to changing the course of the war in humanity’s favor, with key help from a badass (Emily Blunt) whose heroics on the battlefield have earned her the nickname “Full Metal Bitch.” Nothing groundbreaking here — but Edge of Tomorrow manages to make its satisfying plot as important as its 3D explosions, which means it automatically rises above what passes for popcorn fun these days. (1:53) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Fault in Our Stars I confess: I’m no card-carrying, vlog-flogging Nerdfighter in author John Green’s teen-geek army. But one can admire the passion — and teary romanticism — of the writer, readers, and the breakthrough novel that started it all. Much has been made over the cinematic tweaks to the best-selling YA book, but those seem like small beefs: OK, male romantic lead Gus’s (Ansel Elgort) perhaps-understandable brattiness seems to have been toned down a touch, but we’ll all get the somewhat-subversive push and pull of Green’s love story centered on two cancer-stricken innocents. Sixteen-year-old Hazel (a radiant Shailene Woodley) has been battling cancer almost all her life, fighting back from the brink, and now making her way every day with an oxygen tank and her devoted parents (Laura Dern, Sam Trammel) by her side. Her mordant wit, skeptical attitude, and smarts attract Gus, a handsome teen with a prosthetic leg, at a cancer support group, and the two embark on what seems like the most normal thing in the world — sweet, sweet love — albeit cut with the poignancy of almost-certain doom. Would the girl who calls herself a grenade dare to care for someone she will likely hurt? That’s the real question on her mind when the two reach out to the solitary author (Willem Dafoe) of their favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. The journey the two make leaves them both open to more hurt than either ever imagined, and though a good part of Fault‘s denouement boils down to a major puddle cuddle — with solid performances by all, but particularly Dern and Woodley — even a cynic is likely to get a bit misty as the kids endure all the stages of loss. And learning. (2:05) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

Godzilla Bearing the weight of a 1998 American debut so stinky that devotees of the Japanese original dubbed it “GINO” (for “Godzilla in Name Only”), the King of the Monsters returns for a do-over that smells more like generic summer entertainment than anything else. We begin in 1999, when a pair of scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a giant skeleton of sorts in the Philippines — just as a deadly accident (or was it?) devastates a Japanese nuclear power plant. Fifteen years later, the scientists are still on the trail of Whatever That Was, while guilty power-plant survivor Bryan Cranston has become a greasy-haired conspiracy theorist, much to the annoyance of his San Francisco-based Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The humans in Gareth Edwards’ film don’t actually matter much; aside from Cranston and to a much lesser extent Watanabe, none of the characters are interesting or memorable, and the plot — which has Big G lumbering after a pair of “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms” who decide to incubate their eggs in downtown SF — is also a low-stakes affair. (If you believe for a second that Taylor-Johnson’s doe-eyed wife and son won’t survive the monster attack, I have a busted-up Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.) But the monster design is plenty satisfying, and really, it’s just fine that Godzilla — who wrinkles his snout in annoyance at those pesky MUTOs — is this film’s one and only charismatic presence; dude’s going on a 70-year career at this point. (2:03) Metreon. (Eddy)

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (1:42) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Eddy)

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz The current debate over net neutrality’s potential demise makes this a perfect moment for Brian Knappenberger’s documentary, which chronicles a dismal prior instance of government interference in online information access. Chicago native Aaron Swartz was such a programming prodigy that he was known internationally by age 13, though few realized how young he was until they met him at conferences. Years later, increasingly politicized about web freedom, he became a target for post-9/11 federal paranoia. His specific “crime” was mass-downloading academic journal materials that by strict legal terms should be freely available to all — but instead are used as a commercial cash cow without benefiting their actual authors. Seeking to use him as an example to other “hacktivists,” the Justice Dept. threatened Swartz with outrageously high prison sentencing and monetary fines. But in driving the 26-year-old to suicide, they created a martyr, one sacrificed at the altar of dubious, overzealous fears over commercial piracy and classified-intel leakage. Poignant and dramatic, The Internet’s Own Boy doesn’t canonize its subject — like many prodigies, he often seemed high-strung and socially awkward — but conveys his personal tragedy while using it to illuminate complex larger issues as urgent as they are often (as our government hopes) confoundingly difficult to understand. (1:45) Roxie. (Harvey)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. For an interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:14) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Life Itself Paying back the critic who championed his Hoop Dreams 20 years ago, and then some, Steve James’s documentary about the late Roger Ebert is the kind of tribute that sometimes feels like an authorized biographical video played at a testimonial dinner. If he were alive, and it were about someone else, I suspect Ebert himself would be more polite than enthused. It traces his love of newspaperdom from an early age (he started writing for one at age 15); his semi-accidental falling into being the Chicago Sun-Times’ film reviewer in 1967 (a post he’d hold for 46 years); his Pulitzer win; the huge impact of TV’s Sneak Previews, aka At the Movies; his very rocky relationship with co-host Gene Siskel; and his happy first/last marriage at age 50. Ebert was prolific, gregarious, a friend to rising filmmakers (so long as he liked their work, of course), and someone who saw no conflict in being friends with established ones (like Scorsese and Herzog, both interviewed here). But Life Itself — “the only thing he loved more than the movies,” a statement that might strike you as profound or kinda “duh” — assesses his cultural impact as the most popular-movie-critic-probably-ever without really addressing his taste or style. As a result, it has the slightly pat quality of a movie content to admire its subject without digging very deep into the work that defined him. (Nor do the blown-up-video-quality clips from films do justice to his love of that medium.) Instead, the primary focus is on his later struggles with cancer, which took his lower jaw and speech before claiming his life. That stuff is tough to watch. Most entertaining are insights into his long-running ego war with Siskel, who brought out (often on camera) irritable, petty, competitive, and bullying sides to Ebert the public otherwise seldom saw. (1:58) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Maleficent Fairytale revisionism is all the rage these days, what with the unending power of Disney princesses to latch into little girls everywhere and bring parental units (and their wallets) to their knees. Yet princesses almost seem beside the point in this villain’s-side-of-the-story tale — Maleficent (Angelina Jolie), the queen of the fairies in the magical moors, wronged by Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who saws off her wings in order to win a crown. Accompanied by her shape-shifting minion, crow Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent attends the christening of King Stefan’s first-born daughter, Aurora, hot on the heels of three clownish good fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple), and delivers a curse that will have this future Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning) prick her finger on a spindle and sink into a deathlike coma until her true love’s kiss. Will that critical smooch be delivered by Prince Bieber, er, Phillip (Brenton Thwaites)? Considering the potential for Disney’s trademark, heart-tugging enchantment to get magically tangled up in girl power, it’s tough to suck up the disappointment in the ooey-gooey, gummy-faced troll-doll aesthetics of the art direction and animation, as well as first-time director Robert Stromberg’s choppy, dashed-through storytelling. Part of the problem is that there’s almost zero threat here, despite its antihero’s devilish presence — is there ever any doubt that a healthy resolution will win out, even at the expense of blood ties? Best to find dangerous pleasures where one can — namely in the vivid Jolie, cheekbones honed to a razor edge, who spits biting remarks at her accursed charge, beneath Joan Crawford-esque eyebrows and horns crying out for club-kid Halloween treatments. (1:37) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Neighbors It’s a mystery why Neighbor‘s marketing teams are intent on creating some kind of social media battle between this comedy’s family and frat: The college boys are clearly outclassed when it comes to uninhibited physical comedy daring, thanks to Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. They play young parents Kelly and Mac, who are still basking in their new craftsman home and settled state, trying to figure out sex in front — or is it behind? — baby, and how to get to the rave before bedtime, when a frat, led by oft-shirtless hottie Teddy (Zac Efron) and pal Pete (Dave Franco), moves into the house next door. How do you ask them to “keep it down” yet still be cool? The pretzels Mac and Kelly wrap themselves into, in order to still hang with the kids, are about as hilarious as the inevitable battles that break out over the hearts and minds of college administrators (Lisa Kudrow), pals (the hilarious Ike Barinholtz), and wannabe brothers like the loyal Assjuice (Craig Roberts). Still, despite some memorable gags, Neighbors feels like a bit of a squandered opportunity as one fidgets through many of the frat house scenes. Part of the problem is, why would Kelly, Mac, or anyone want to be in good with such an uninteresting group of Greeks? (1:37) Metreon. (Chun)

Obvious Child We first encounter the protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s funny, original film — a Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething named Donna (Jenny Slate), who works at a lefty secondhand bookstore and makes regular (if unpaid) appearances at a local comedy night — onstage mining such underdiscussed topics as the effects of vaginal discharge on your garden-variety pair of underwear. This proves a natural segue to other hefty nuggets of embarrassment gold concerning her love life, to the dismay of boyfriend Ryan (Paul Briganti), auditing from the back of the club. He pretty much deserves it, however, for what he’s about to do, which is break up with her in a nasty, well-populated unisex bathroom, taking time to repeatedly glance at the texts coming through on his phone from Donna’s good friend, with whom he’s sleeping. So when Donna, mid-drowning of sorrows, meets a nice-looking fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) at the bar, his post-fraternity-presidency aesthetic seems unlikely to deter her from a one-night stand. The ensuing trashed make-out dance-off in Max’s apartment to the Paul Simon song of the title is both comic and adorable. The fractured recap of the evening’s condom-free horizontal events that occurs inside Donna’s brain three weeks later, as she hunkers down with her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), in the bookstore’s bathroom after peeing on a stick, is equally hilarious — and unwanted-pregnancy jokes aren’t that easy to pull off. Robespierre’s treatment of this extended windup and of Donna’s decision to have an abortion is a witty, warmhearted retort to 2007’s Knocked Up, a couple generations’ worth of Hollywood rom-com writers, and an entertainment industry that continues to perform its sweaty contortions of storytelling in the gutless cause of avoiding the A-word. (1:15) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious set piece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer‘s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) Metreon, Presidio. (Harvey)

Tammy There’s an Easter egg for Thelma and Louise (1991) diehards tucked amid Tammy‘s many jokes at the expense of co-writer and star Melissa McCarthy: when Tammy and her boozy grandmother (a gray-wigged Susan Sarandon) set out on a spontaneous road trip to escape their miserable lives, Grandma flashes a wad of cash. The sum ($6,700) is exactly what Louise brought to the table during that long-ago flight to Mexico. It might not be a coincidence that Tammy also features the star of 1991’s other girl-power drama, Fried Green Tomatoes, with Kathy Bates playing a lesbian family friend who finally talks some sense into the clueless, reckless Tammy — basically standing in for the audience. We wanna cheer for this newly dumped, recently fired, perpetually rumpled heroine, if only she weren’t so willfully lacking in self-awareness, and so frequently obnoxious — traits that are all the more mystifying since McCarthy wrote this character for herself, and because we know what she’s capable of (see: her outrageous, hilarious, Oscar-nominated turn in 2011’s Bridesmaids). Tammy — co-written and directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone — has its moments, but it’s overall an uneven comedy that yields few belly laughs. It also shoehorns in a stilted romantic subplot (with Mark Duplass, of all people) because … why? Why can’t this be a movie about a woman who figures out how to manage her chaotic life, without landing a man as a reward? Even the ol’ Grand Canyon plunge offers more fresh satisfaction, nearly 25 years on. (1:37) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Think Like a Man Too (2:02) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) Metreon, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction In Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment a villainous Black Ops leader (Kelsey Grammer) allies with a snarky Steve-Jobs-alike (Stanley Tucci) to build Transformers de coeur: designer impostor robot-cars they hope will reinvent the face of war. In IMAX 3D, “TransFOURmers” is packed with relentless rock-’em-sock-’em action, spectacular property destruction, and about as much sense as a bucket of worms. After 60 minutes, you think you’re getting more than your money’s worth. At 90 minutes, you’re tired. At two hours, confusion sets in: If Autobots get stronger together how could Optimus be in so much trouble? Who is the bounty hunting Terminator look-alike? HOW MUCH MORE COULD THERE BE? And then … the action shifts to China, Optimus rides a Dinobot, and chaos reigns. I’ve always liked the working-class poetry of the Transformers themselves — the leader is a trucker and the cast is stacked with ambulances, tanks, and the metal workforce that preserves American lives. If that’s not traditional hero worship, I don’t know what is. But Age of Extinction is the soulless designer imposter it lampoons — the whole sequel-snarking ordeal makes you long for Buzz Lightyear, who saw a thousand Buzz Lightyears on a store shelf and survived that existential crisis heroically — while also riding a dinosaur and fighting Frasier. This Transformers movie (sadly, it won’t be the final one) starts with a thesis: Mark Wahlberg walks through an abandoned movie theater and a Wilford Brimley twin (Ron Shedd) bellows: “Movies today! Sequels! Remakes! Crap!” Age of Extinction follows that moment with nearly three hours of evidence that the cause of extinction is redundancy. (2:30) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

22 Jump Street In this TV-inspired sequel, “Previously on 21 Jump Street…” is all the backstory we get. 22 wastes no time sending Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) back to school to solve another case. A few details have changed (they’re in college now, where the drug of choice is “Why Phy”), but the situation is self-consciously boilerplate, which lets the filmmakers cast (ironic) judgment on sequels — and imply the TV show was redundant. College proves hilarious, from the rundown of dorm room essentials to Schmidt’s walk of shame, and the touchstones are sharp and embarrassing. An extended fight between Schmidt and a girl (Jillian Bell, fabulous) twists gender issues and sexual assault into gloriously absurd politics. Best of all is a fairly understated joke in front of the Benjamin Hill School of Film Studies. I laughed as much at 22 as I did at 21, but 22 spends so much time calling out its number-two status that it almost becomes performance art. (1:45) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

X-Men: Days of Future Past Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-Men films (2000’s decent X-Men; 2002’s meh X2) returns to helm this latest franchise entry — the fourth sequel in a series that also includes two movies focusing on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. That fan-favorite character is front and center in both of Days of Future Past‘s time frames: the present, a bleak dystopia in which robot assassins have wiped out nearly every mutant (save Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellan’s Magneto, and a few others), and most humans along with them; and the past, a key moment in the polyester-laden 1970s in which mutant avenger Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) inadvertently sets the disastrous future events in motion by killing robot designer Trask (Peter Dinklage). Wolverine time-travels to convince younger versions of the Professor (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to put aside their Himalayan-sized differences to stop her. (Speaking of avengers, there’s a capital-A one here: Quicksilver, a character from both comic-book worlds; he’s portrayed here with giddy mischief by American Horror Story‘s Evan Peters, and is the film’s high point.) Yes, that’s a heady plot, and there are a zillion other characters, but Future Past manages, for the most part, to avoid feeling like an overloaded mess. It’s most entertaining in scenes that show off its characters’ superpowers — clearly, the CG artists had a blast working on this one — which are plentiful enough to make slogging through the ennui-laden moments of downtime worth it.(2:10) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

Yves Saint Laurent Ah, one can only imagine the remnants left on the cutting room floor. Much like the designer’s sumptuous, envelope-pushing fashion, Yves Saint Laurent provides a lot to love, starting with a convincing performance by Pierre Niney, who plays the man as a sensitive-as-a-filament artist who nonetheless succumbs to ’60s excesses and learns to deliver the kind of cruelties one can only level at a spouse who’ll never leave. That partner, in love and business, is Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), the commercial brains behind the YSL brand — first shown as the couple’s astonishing collection of artwork, furniture, and objets d’art are carted away to be auctioned off and serving here as witness and voice-over narrator. Director Jalil Lespert focuses primarily on Saint Laurent’s early career at Dior, Saint Laurent and Bergé’s relationship, and then the formidable task of establishing the house, amid a critical, chaotic social circle involving Karl Lagerfeld (Nikolai Kinski) and model muse Victoire (Charlotte Le Bon). What comes next arrives via the loving, amused, albeit calculative lens of Bergé, who has given this film his blessing: he looks on with disapproval at Saint Laurent’s sweetly stoned Moroccan hippie milieu, as he cavorts alongside muses Betty Catroux (Marie de Villepin) and Loulou de la Falaise (Laura Smet) and communes with Bergé’s rival Jacques De Bascher (Xavier Lafitte). You definitely feel the lovers’ pain — and Saint Laurent’s exhaustion on both the party circuit and the taxing treadmill of producing seasonal collections — and you are given snatches of the luxurious, decadent, epoch-defining Saint Laurent looks, like the still-relevant Le Smoking tux and opulent Russian ensembles, the latter an untrammeled triumph that this good-looking biopic abruptly ends with. Fashion lovers, especially, would have appreciated feeling more of the heat that pushed Saint Laurent to create, and to see more of the actual brilliant designs behind that legendary logo. (1:45) Clay, Shattuck. (Chun) *

New classics

Leo Herrera

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July 8, 2014

1

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE It took Los Angeles-born Melody Takata, founder and artistic director of Japantown’s GenRyu Arts, four years to convince her parents to let her study dance. It was her older sister’s “fault” — she had studied ballet for a while but didn’t like it and stopped. “So my parents didn’t want to go through that experience again,” Takata remembered. But Takata was living in a Japanese American community that embraced traditional arts, and ballet wasn’t what she had in mind.

When she finally got her way, she went all out, starting at eight with Odori (Japanese dance), including Bon Odori, a popular circular community dance integral to the Odon festival that honors the ancestors. At 10, she began studying Nihon Buyo (Japanese classical dance) and did so for a decade. During that time, she acquired a repertoire of some two dozen solos drawn from Kabuki. “Some of them, I perform excerpts only; they are too long for an audience to sit through,” she observed. They are also expensive to perform because they have to be licensed, and the elaborate costumes (up to $10,000 a piece) are costly, even on loan. Yet recently, Takata reprised her studies with her 93-year-old Nihon Buyo teacher, wanting to deepen her insight into this noble art.

So what attracted her to this rigorous and highly stylized form that includes — besides dancing from within heavy costumes — an intricate gestural vocabulary of fans, swords, scarves, umbrellas, and even canes? “I just liked becoming all these different characters,” she smiled.

Adding to her dance studies, at 13 she started on the shamisen (“three-stringed”) instrument; at 15 she joined the Taiko group Los Angeles Matsuri. “Dance is my first love, and music is part of that,” she explained. Taiko sharpens rhythmic acuity, but for Takata, it’s also part of a communal experience.

She creates multifaceted works in which she wants “to explore our story” through Taiko, spoken word, contemporary movement, music, traditional Japanese dance, and video. Regular collaborators include Francis Wong and Asian Improv aRts, as well as actor-comedian Todd Nakagawa and Chicago filmmaker, bassist, shamisen expert, and Taiko drummer Tatsuo Aoki.

Though steeped in tradition, Takata doesn’t want these practices to become enshrined as museum pieces. In 2012, as part of Chicago’s annual Taiko Legacy festival, Takata — dressed in a black evening gown and elbow-length white gloves — performed her solo Yodan, which melded dance and Taiko. Her works may examine issues particular to her community, but they also resonate with broader audiences. In 2010, Tsuki no Usagi (Rabbit in the Moon) was created to mark the centennial of the Angel Island Immigration Center, where 60,000 Japanese passed through 1910-1940. The work is rooted in a popular myth in which a rabbit was willing to sacrifice its life for others. As a reward it was lifted to the moon where, Takata said, “it can be seen on either side of the ocean.”

The themes of 2011’s Fox and Jewel — which added jazz, animation, and poetry into the dance-and-Taiko mix — no doubt resonated with Bay Area audiences. Fox is a magical shape-shifting being who comes to the aid of humble folks; in this piece, it’s a mochi-shop owner who takes on real estate speculators who continue to threaten the existence of the local Japantown.

Takata’s newest work, Shadow to Shadow, premieres Sat/12 as part of this year’s Japan Week. The hourlong piece draws inspiration from Junichiro Tanizaki’s poetic In Praise of Shadows, in which he wistfully looks at Japan’s increasing Westernization and the essential differences between two cultures that are still learning to coexist.

BE THERE

Physically, Enrico Labayen may be small, but in importance, he stands tall. Faced with multiple physical challenges and exorbitant medical bills, the choreographer and artistic director of Labayen Dance/SF is in the fight of his life. So the dance community is stepping up with “Encore for Enrico,” a benefit performance to help one of its own. Though he was an early member of Lines Ballet and a longtime ballet teacher, Labayen may best be known as a prolific and wide-ranging choreographer for his own company. But he also is a generous supporter for those who come here from other places, as he did. Recent arrivals like Victor Talledos and Daiane Lopes da Silva found an early home in his company. Health permitting, Labayen will perform a new solo, Will You Still Be There? *

SHADOW TO SHADOW

Sat/12, 2 and 7:30pm, free (donations accepted; sign up for free tickets at brownpapertickets.com/event/704453)

Tateuchi Hall

1830 Sutter, SF

www.genryuarts.org

“ENCORE FOR ENRICO”

Sat/12, 7:30pm, $25-$30

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St, SF

http://labayendancecompany.com

Recycle-pocalypse

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

16

Joe@sfbg.com

Red explosions and yellow starbursts lit the sky, accompanied by the requisite oohs and aahs.

San Franciscans sat by the beach at Aquatic Park celebrating our nation’s independence, eyes fixed upwards. But all around them, a team of independent scavengers, mostly ignored, methodically combed the wharf, plucking cans and bottles from the ground and overflowing trash bins.

Often derided as thieves or parasites, these workers are cogs in a grand machine instituted by California’s Bottle Bill in 1986, forming a recycling redemption economy meant to spur environmentalism with market principles.

The concept is simple. Taxpayers pay an extra five cents when they buy a can or bottle, and may redeem that nickel by trading the used can or bottle in at a recycling center. Thus, more recycling is spurred.

But now a wave of recycling center evictions is causing San Francisco’s grassroots recycling economy to crumble, and newly released numbers reveal just how much stands to be lost by the trend.

San Franciscan recyclers may miss out on millions of dollars in redemption, local mom-and-pop stores could wind up on the hook for millions of dollars in state fees, and neighborhoods stand to be besieged by recyclers flocking to the few remaining recycling centers.

Recycling activists and local businesses are pushing for change, but NIMBY interests are pushing for more of the same.

SOLUTION IS THE PROBLEM

San Francisco Community Recyclers is on the parking lot of Safeway’s Church and Market location, and after months of legal entanglement, the recycling center’s eviction draws near. Still, SFCR is making a show of resistance.

The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department is set to evict the recycling center within a week or so, as the rebel recyclers have so far refused to vacate voluntarily.

Sup. Scott Wiener says he’ll be glad to see them gone.

“This recycling center caused enormous problems in our neighborhood,” he told the Guardian. This particular Safeway lies within the boundaries of his district, and Wiener says his constituents complain the recycling centers draw too many unruly patrons, who are often homeless.

“There is problem behavior around the center in terms of camping and harassing behavior, defecation, urination in a much more concentrated way,” he said.

This animation shows the areas around San Francisco where recycling centers remain, which are often overburdened with customers as other centers close. The red zones indicate areas where supermarkets are mandated by state law to host recycling centers, but have chosen to pay fees instead.

But others say the not-in-my-backyard evictions only serve to create a ripple effect. The catalyst is a story we’ve reported on before: As well-heeled Golden Gate Park neighbors complained of homeless recycling patrons and waged a successful campaign to shutter the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center two years ago, the clientele adjusted by flocking to the Church and Market recycling center. New numbers illustrate this outcome.

Susan Collins is the president of the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit that conducts analysis on recycling data. On average nationwide, Collins said, one recycling center serves about 2,000 people.

But since 2012 the number of recycling centers in San Francisco has been reduced from 21 to 7, causing Church and Market’s service population to boom closer to 40,000, a difference that has more to do with the closures than the density of the area. Data from CalRecycle shows almost half of the city’s populace lacks a recycling center within close proximity, forcing patrons to overwhelm the few remaining centers.

“This makes it a chicken and egg process,” Collins told us. “For people to have the perception that the site is attracting so many people, they have to realize it’s because there are so few sites to begin with.”

Late last month, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano wrote to Safeway Chief Executive Officer Robert L. Edwards, urging the grocery chain to reverse its decision to evict San Francisco Community Recyclers from the Church and Market Safeway.

“Safeway has such a long history of supporting sustainability efforts,” Ammiano wrote, “and I truly believe that it can do so again.” Safeway, however, has other concerns.

“As curbside recycling has increased in San Francisco and around the state,” Safeway Director of Public Affairs Keith Turner wrote to Ammiano, “Safeway’s focus on recycling has evolved as well.”

Safeway is now also flouting local and state laws to throw recyclers off its back. CalRecycle, the state’s recycling agency, performed an inspection in April of the Diamond Heights Safeway. It found that the grocer failed to accept recyclables and offer state guaranteed redemption, despite signing an affidavit with CalRecycle pledging to do just that. CalRecycle cited that location and two other San Francisco Safeways for noncompliance with the bottle bill.

And that’s just the violations CalRecycle has documented so far. Ed Dunn, owner and operator of San Francisco Community Recyclers, has initiated his own investigation into Safeway statewide, filing complaints with CalRecycle alleging that as many as 75 Safeway stores aren’t following the mandates of their affidavits and offering redemption for recyclables.

On the other side of the fence, Safeway and other recycling-center critics (such as Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius) are essentially saying, who cares? Don’t we all just use blue bins nowadays?

The short answer: Nope.

MAKING GREEN, GOING GREEN

“Why do we need recycling centers if we have curbside recycling?” Sup. Eric Mar asked the deputy director of recycling at CalRecycle, point blank.

Jose Ortiz responded in less than a beat. “While some communities think curbside operations ensure the state’s goals of collecting [recyclables], the reality is that 90 percent of recycling volume is collected through recycling centers, not curbside programs,” he said from the podium.

That number came as a shock to many at the Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee June 19, including Sups. Mar, David Campos, and Norman Yee. Only 8 percent of recycling statewide comes through blue bins, CalRecyle confirmed to the Guardian.

Nor is that limited to California: Data from the Container Recycling Institute shows that the 10 states with recycling redemption laws produce such a high rate of return that they account for 46 percent of the nation’s recycling. And since California Redemption Value recycling is pre-sorted, experts note, the bottles are often recycled whole (as opposed to broken) which can be used for higher-grade recycling purposes.

So for the city with a mandated goal of zero waste by 2020, the case for keeping recycling centers open is an environmental one. It’s also fiscal.

San Franciscans make $18 million a year selling back recyclables, Ortiz said, most of which went directly into the pockets of recyclers. Those scavengers at the Fourth of July festivities may have only collected five cents per can, but that’s enough to buoy the income of many poor San Franciscans.

At the recycling hearing, David Mangan approached the podium to speak. His red hat was clean and his grey sweatshirt was ironed, but his face was worn with worry-lines and creases.

“I can’t walk more than about eight blocks at a time, and I’m unemployable because of my disabilities,” he told the committee. Recycling centers are a lifeline, he added. “I need this job, I’m on a limited income. I need the help they offer. I need them to stay open, please.”

Critics say some poor and homeless depend on a black market of recycling truck drivers who trade drugs for cans and bottles, then turn to recycling centers to make a profit. But those at the hearing said the extinction of recycling centers actually helps the mobile, black market recycling fleets bloom, as motorists have an easier time shuttling recyclables across the city.

So recyclers are increasingly forced to rely on these so-called “mosquito fleets” for far-flung trips to cash in their bottles.

SMALL BUSINESS BUST

Meanwhile, recycling center evictions are becoming a source of anxiety within the small business community.

State law establishes a half-mile radius called a “convenience zone” around any supermarket that annually makes more than $2 million. The supermarket is mandated to provide recycling on-site, accept recyclables in-store, or opt to pay a $100 a day fee.

With the eviction of SFCR from Church and Market, Safeway may opt to pay the fee. But that gap would leave surrounding businesses inside that convenience zone with the same options: accept recyclables in-store or pay $36,000 a year.

Miriam Zouzounis of the Arab-American Grocer Association said those options are daunting for liquor stores and mom-and-pop grocers.

“We just don’t have the space for [recycling],” she said at the hearing. If SFCR were to close, the total of small businesses shouldering the burden of state recycling fees would jump from 100 to more than 360, said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business.

All told, San Francisco small businesses would be made to send $12.96 million in annual fees to California coffers because a few supermarkets didn’t want to handle recyclables. Mar is now calling upon all involved to step up and solve this glaring problem.

SOLUTIONS ON THE WAY

This week the Board of Supervisors is tentatively set to vote on a moratorium of recycling center evictions, introduced by Mar on June 24. The pause would give Mar time to form a work group with those involved: Department of the Environment, Department of Public Works, CalRecycle, local supermarkets, grocers, the Coalition on Homelessness, and others to come together to form a compromise solution.

Department of the Environment proposed a mobile recycling center, which Wiener called an equitable solution that would help distribute recycling responsibility evenly across the city. While that agency did not provide a timeline on the creation of a mobile recycling center before our deadline, it’s been in the works since 2012, when then-District 5 Sup. Christina Olague said it was the answer to the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center’s closure.

It’s been a long wait for a solution. And in the meantime, many more stand to lose.

A farewell to Death Grips: The Sacramento hip-hop group’s most memorable moments

Steven T. Jones

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July 3, 2014

1

A farewell to Death Grips: The Sacramento hip-hop group’s most memorable moments

“We are now at our best and so Death Grips is over,” announced a napkin posted to Death Grips’ Facebook page yesterday afternoon. The sudden dissolution of one of the most controversial, confrontational, and influential hip-hop groups of the 2010s so far spurred an outpour of dismay among music fans. But anyone who’s been keeping a tab on Death Grips shouldn’t have been too surprised.
Since forming in 2010, their career has been a non-stop parade of curveballs and out-of-the-blue decisions. They’ve failed to show up for their own shows, dropped not one but three surprise albums, and left the major label they were briefly signed to after a single record. Yet this isn’t mindless rebellion; it’s a calculated plan, and it makes sense that their farewell letter should refer to them as a “conceptual art exhibition.” No group since the Sex Pistols has been so irreverent in such a calculated manner — and it’s thus fitting they should dissolve at their peak, as that band did 35 years ago.

In keeping with this trend, it makes sense that Death Grips should choose now to disband. Last month saw the surprise release of niggas on the moon, the first half of a double album entitled The Powers That B. Keeping fans anticipating a second installment seemed incongruous with the band’s unpredictability. But leaving The Powers That B as a posthumous artifact to remind the world of the band’s painfully short lifespan was the best decision the band could have made at this point. They ended with a bang, but the fallout will linger.

And there’s no doubt they will be remembered. Whether you love them or hate them, they’re undeniably one of the most influential acts of the 2010s so far. Traces of their harsh, industrial style can be found all over Kanye’s Yeezus, which has already influenced countless rising artists — collaborators Arca, Evian Christ and Gesaffelstein, plus acolytes like Quirke and Beyonce producer Boots. That’s right, Death Grips’ sound has made its way to a million-selling record by arguably the greatest pop star of the modern era–and perhaps it’s no coincidence she chose to drop that album by surprise.

Here are 10 of the moments that Death Grips will be remembered for.

“Guillotine” (2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orlbo9WkZ2E&feature=kp

This served as many people’s introduction to the group and its lunatic frontman, MC Ride. If you’ve never seen this video, go in blind, as I did when it blew my mind open as a high-school junior and nascent rap fan.

“I’ve Seen Footage” (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DigtCrO77L8&feature=kp

Just when Death Grips threatened to disappear into the pile of careers left behind by the already-waning swag-rap movement, they dropped this pummeling but surprisingly poppy single and won over the hearts of indie bloggers (and introduced the word “noided” to the millennial vocabulary).

The Money Store (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arvtMFpIKs8

A band as aggressive as Death Grips might seem like a poor choice for a major label, but Epic sensed their lasting impact before many of us and released The Money Store. It became a critical hit upon release, placing in Pitchfork’s top 10 of the year and receiving a rare 10 from The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano.

NO LOVE DEEP WEB/Split with Epic (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yhoCvpYePU

Death Grips revealed their irreverent streak after dropping NO LOVE DEEP WEB, their phallus-adorned second album of 2012, for free online without their label’s knowledge. Needless to say, they were promptly dropped.

“Come Up And Get Me” (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOs51Lvhn64

This NO LOVE DEEP WEB track was accompanied by a thirteen-minute, mostly silent black-and-white film that featured, among other things, MC Ride eating a plant. As with the “Guillotine” video, go in blind for the best experience.

No-shows (2013)

In what is easily their most controversial move, Death Grips bailed on two shows in the Chicago area in early 2013. As it turns out, they never planned on showing up to any of their planned tour stops.

“Birds” (2013)

The first single from Government Plates (though nobody knew that at the time) was unlike anything the band had released before, leaning closer to trip-hop than industrial and containing enough one-liners to make Big Sean question his entire career. Many one-time haters of the band were forced to reconsider after this track, and the ambiguity surrounding whether or not it had a parent album caused interest in Death Grips to reach a breaking point.

Government Plates (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eld27iNfepY

Death Grips mania may have hit its absolute peak in the manic hours after the surprise release of Government Plates. Released as a series of YouTube videos, the album turned out to be on par with any of their work, containing “Birds” as well as a host of bizarre songs that leaned closer to ’90s avant-electronica than anything else.

niggas on the moon (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr6OJFyxDuE

“New Death Grips Album Featuring Bjork!” screamed the headlines. Though how much involvement Bjork actually had in this album is debatable, it was Death Grips’ final big curveball before their breakup. Slated as part one of a double album entitled The Powers That B, it was poorly received compared to the band’s prior releases.

Workers’ new website demands: Hey, Tech, do better

Sasha Cuttler

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July 2, 2014

8

Workers’ new website demands: Hey, Tech, do better

Can Silicon Valley tech companies “do better?” With the launch of a new website, the tech industry’s security guards are coming forward with tales of inequality in Silicon Valley, and asking Google and other big tech companies to do just that.

Protesting security guards outside Google’s IO conference last week used the annual developers’ conference to demand tech companies pay them living wages — as well as to broadcast their new website, TechCanDoBetter.org.

“We’re trying to change the conversation, because so much of the narrative is around tech and what good it’s doing,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for Service Employees International Union. “Our website is a safe space to learn more about workers who face the challenge of making it.”

Fletes said a Google spokesperson recently agreed to meet with SEIU to address the security guards’ concerns, but also mentioned this was the first the union heard from the spokesperson since last year.

Google hasn’t yet addressed the issue head on. The tech giant’s spokesperson wrote in press statement: “Thousands of Googlers call the Bay Area home, and we want to be good neighbors. Since 2011 we’ve given more than $70 million to local projects and employees have volunteered thousands of hours in the community. We’re excited to be expanding that work in 2014 with the recent Bay Area Impact Challenge winners – several of them have even joined us at I/O!”

The spokesperson added, in reference to the protestors’ Darth Vader-themed attire, “May the force be with them.”

Google’s Bay Area Impact Challenge means that Hack the Hood, Health Trust, Bring Me a Book, and Center for Employment Opportunities will all be receiving awards of $500,000 each. But donations aren’t the same as fair pay: The average Silicon Valley Security guard, Fletes said, will be receiving $22,000 this year.

Charles Justin Wilson, a security guard in Silicon Valley, speaks out about pay equity at the Google I/O conference last week. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.

In TechCanDoBetter.org’s video game (aptly named Dream Crushers), users are invited to play the role of a struggling security guard. The gameplay forces the player to make tough budget choices. Maybe, for instance, you’d like your security guard to eat. Maybe you’d like him to pay his utility bills. But if you try to do all the basic necessities – transportation, food, utilities, child care – you lose.

“You’re not meant to win. Security officers who played the game said it was frustrating,” Fletes explained. “But they also said their lives were way more difficult.”

It’s not just about wages, either. “Look at at Apple and Google’s security contractor record of harrassment, discrimination, and surveillance,” Fletes said. Those are the kinds of stories security guards are invited to send to TechCanDoBetter.org. Workers can also fill in surveys on the website to help SEIU advocate for them, and sign up to receive text message alerts from SEIU.

Charles Justin Wilson, 31, moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley to build a life for himself. Now he’s a security guard, and he spends his days “dealing with everything from giving someone directions to a [fighting a] knife-carrying nut job.” He said he’d like to see Silicon Valley tech workers “even try to do” what he does. Like many security guards, he makes $12 an hour.

“Anyone who thinks you can survive on $12 in Silicon Valley is either out of touch, really stupid, or just plain evil,” he said.

Google has been the center of a series of protests since January when San Francisco residents began blocking the company’s buses. Google’s profits rose 36.5 percent to $2.9 billion last fall. The average worker wages in Silicon Valley dropped 3 percent even as the cost of basic needs for a family of four in Silicon Valley rose by nearly 20 percent between 2008 and 2012.

“They’re not doing a lot,” Samuel Kehinde, another security guard, said outside Google’s conference. “So, we are just asking them to pay attention to their home and to give back to their community. They cannot turn a blind eye on the community.”

Maybe they can. Or, they could do better. For tech giants, there are options.

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Film Listings: July 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

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

OPENING

Begin Again See “Key of Twee.” (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont.

Le Chef Before you fire up Twitter to alert Jon Favreau that he’s been ripped off, know that this French comedy came out in 2012. Also, it’s highly unlikely to garner even a quarter-teaspoon of the praise racked up by Favreau’s food-truck tale. Even the formidable presence of Jean Reno can’t save Le Chef; he plays veteran celebrity chef Lagarde, who’s about to have his professional reputation toppled by the money-hungry mogul who owns his signature restaurant. (Yuppie scum wants him to switch to uber-trendy molecular cuisine; traditionalist Legarde ain’t having it.) Enter eager apprentice Jacky (Michael Youn), whose Rain Man-like ability to recall all of Legarde’s recipes makes him a valuable secret weapon in this high-stakes gastronomical battle, which will culminate when a food critic decides whether to dock one of the stars in Legarde’s rating — thus opening a contract loophole that’ll allow his boss to kick him out of the kitchen. BYO food clichés to describe this too-lightweight yet overly hammy affair, which also folds domestic dramas (Jacky’s exasperated, heavily pregnant GF doesn’t understand his cooking dreams! Legarde’s neglected daughter might as well be named Sullen McEyeroll!) into the batter. And if you can’t figure out the ending within the first act, no dessert for you. (1:24) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Deliver Us From Evil Eric Bana stars as an NYPD cop who encounters a case that may involve demonic possession. Édgar Ramírez co-stars as the priest who helps him. (1:58) Presidio.

Earth to Echo It’s not easy being a Goonie — or riding the coattails of E.T. even 30-plus years along. But that feeling of discovery and interstellar friendship forged in the face of a formidable establishment still calls out, like the insistent bleep of a long-forgotten intergalactic transmission. That appears to be the MO behind Earth to Echo, a decidedly clunkier outing than the aforementioned, despite its nods to a gadget-happy, geekier generation. This time, developers ostensibly want to drive a freeway through the suburban tract homes of wiseacre Tuck (Brian “Astro” Bradley), sensitive foster kid Alex (Teo Halm), and sweet science nerd Munch (Reese Hartwig). A bout of mysterious cell phone interference leads the kids to spend their last night in the ‘hood following the map that appears on their screens. What might have been another crowd-sourced game leads to a weird little piece of space junk that turns out to be the pod for an adorable, owl-like little brother from another planet. Naturally everything they discover needs to be documented for sharing later, though at first they’re hesitant to disclose their find with a popular classmate (Ella Wahlestedt) and a particularly snoopy engineer (Jason Gray-Stanford). But why bother when it’s all been seen before (with the exception of having an African American kid as the first-person narrator of this kids sci-fi adventure)? Director Dave Green is definitely counting on his audience being born yesterday, though parents who remember the source material will recognize that Green has considerably less finesse than Steven Spielberg. There’s only so much that special effects can accomplish when the initial camerawork looks so blown out and crappy, even if it’s supposed to have been documented on a phone. And Green’s slovenly direction, combined with way-too-roughed-out storytelling — how do a kid and alien managed to slip out of evil-empire governmental control, with zero effort, exactly? — do little to mark Earth as more than a knock-off. (1:29) Shattuck. (Chun)

Hellion Beer drinking and metal tees, shit-talking and shit-kicking, boys and their toys and their broken dreams — the signatures of director-writer Kat Candler are familiar even to those unversed in her 2006 Jumping Off Bridges and the short that this feature is based on. Yet somehow the motocross-fixated Jacob (Josh Wiggins) is finding his own fresh hell amid this testosterone-scape: with the death of his mother, his faded baseball star of a father (Aaron Paul) is struggling to hold the family together and kick his tendency to take refuge at the bottom of a beer can. Meanwhile younger brother Wes (Deke Garner) has been taken away and placed with the boys’ Aunt Pam (Juliette Lewis). Candler makes this hell of hurts fresh with her close attention to detail, relishing the whipped cream sandwiches and sofa bounce-offs of home-alone kids as well as the throttled rage of the Metallica and Slayer soundtrack, and charged performances from all, in particular Paul, also an executive producer here, and Lewis, two small-town castaways just a hair less lost than the kids. (1:33) Roxie. (Chun)

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz The current debate over net neutrality’s potential demise makes this a perfect moment for Brian Knappenberger’s documentary, which chronicles a dismal prior instance of government interference in online information access. Chicago native Aaron Swartz was such a programming prodigy that he was known internationally by age 13, though few realized how young he was until they met him at conferences. Years later, increasingly politicized about web freedom, he became a target for post-9/11 federal paranoia. His specific “crime” was mass-downloading academic journal materials that by strict legal terms should be freely available to all — but instead are used as a commercial cash cow without benefiting their actual authors. Seeking to use him as an example to other “hacktivists,” the Justice Dept. threatened Swartz with outrageously high prison sentencing and monetary fines. But in driving the 26-year-old to suicide, they created a martyr, one sacrificed at the altar of dubious, overzealous fears over commercial piracy and classified-intel leakage. Poignant and dramatic, The Internet’s Own Boy doesn’t canonize its subject — like many prodigies, he often seemed high-strung and socially awkward — but conveys his personal tragedy while using it to illuminate complex larger issues as urgent as they are often (as our government hopes) confoundingly difficult to understand. (1:45) Roxie. (Harvey)

Life Itself Paying back the critic who championed his Hoop Dreams 20 years ago, and then some, Steve James’s documentary about the late Roger Ebert is the kind of tribute that sometimes feels like an authorized biographical video played at a testimonial dinner. If he were alive, and it were about someone else, I suspect Ebert himself would be more polite than enthused. It traces his love of newspaperdom from an early age (he started writing for one at age 15); his semi-accidental falling into being the Chicago Sun-Times’ film reviewer in 1967 (a post he’d hold for 46 years); his Pulitzer win; the huge impact of TV’s Sneak Previews, aka At the Movies; his very rocky relationship with co-host Gene Siskel; and his happy first/last marriage at age 50. Ebert was prolific, gregarious, a friend to rising filmmakers (so long as he liked their work, of course), and someone who saw no conflict in being friends with established ones (like Scorsese and Herzog, both interviewed here). But Life Itself — “the only thing he loved more than the movies,” a statement that might strike you as profound or kinda “duh” — assesses his cultural impact as the most popular-movie-critic-probably-ever without really addressing his taste or style. As a result, it has the slightly pat quality of a movie content to admire its subject without digging very deep into the work that defined him. (Nor do the blown-up-video-quality clips from films do justice to his love of that medium.) Instead, the primary focus is on his later struggles with cancer, which took his lower jaw and speech before claiming his life. That stuff is tough to watch. Most entertaining are insights into his long-running ego war with Siskel, who brought out (often on camera) irritable, petty, competitive, and bullying sides to Ebert the public otherwise seldom saw. (1:58) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Tammy Melissa McCarthy co-wrote (with husband Dan Falcone, who directs) and stars in this comedy about a women in crisis who hits the road with her boozy grandma (Susan Sarandon). (1:37) Cerrito, Four Star, Marina, Shattuck.

Yves Saint Laurent Biopic exploring the early career of the fashion icon. (1:45) Clay.

ONGOING

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 The best thing about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — the sequel to the 2012 reboot that nobody really wanted in the first place — is the achingly cute chemistry between real-life couple Andrew Garfield (Peter Parker/Spider-Man) and Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy, whose fate is no spoiler to anyone who is familiar with the Spider-Man canon). Can’t deny it; those two are adorbs. But since Spider-Man is supposed to be an action movie, not a romantic comedy, it spends most of its time setting up foes for the webslinger (Jamie Foxx as a nerd zapped into the power-mad Electro; Dane DeHaan as bratty rich kid Harry Osborn), as well as rehashing the mysterious deaths of Peter’s parents, and underlining for approximately the zillionth time the disconnect between the media’s perception of Spider-Man (he’s a menace! He interferes with police work!) and the ecstatic love the people of New York have for the guy — understandable, since he’s in the business of saving their butts on a regular basis. This isn’t a crappy movie by any means; it’s entertaining enough, and the 3D swooping-between-skyscrapers FX have gotten quite dazzling. But there’s still a heavy air of “This again?” that hangs over the whole thing. Doesn’t Marvel have enough dough from the Avengers movies to let Spidey take an extended vacation? (2:20) Metreon. (Eddy)

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Breathing Earth: Susumu Shingu’s Dream Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has built his career through his concerted engagement with the natural world. The wise and eternally smiling 75-year-old creates angular and often gargantuan mobiles that harness the power of wind and water to gyrate in ever-changing directions. In Breathing Earth, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer crafts a deliberately paced rumination on Shingu’s life philosophy that, while devoid of the frenetic facts, figures, and trite biographical rehashes that punctuate hyper-informative pop-docs, uses a beautifully simplistic narrative arc to illuminates Shingu’s attempt to create a hilly, open-air collection of windmills. The sculptor’s impassioned narration and charming conversations with potential landlords and investors (who usually entirely miss the point of his mission to raise environmental consciousness through aesthetic beauty) make Shingu impossible not to fall in love with — he is laid-back, funny, and astonishingly youthful. Riedelsheimer’s camera is similarly relaxed, gliding sumptuously over the green and wild landscapes on which Shingu installs his works. Despite his meditative tempo, Riedelsheimer manages to explore a remarkably wide scope; Shingu’s late-life marriage to a fellow sculptor, his appeals to both Japanese and German schoolchildren to care for the earth and help to avoid environmental disasters, and his intricate technical processes all receive intimate and inspiring sections. (1:37) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (David Kurlander)

Chef Not to take anything away from the superhero crew, but Chef feels like the closest thing to a labor of love from writer, director, and star Jon Favreau in many a day. As a director, he may have been making doughnuts — fun-filled and teeming with CGI eye candy, but doughnuts nevertheless — when it came to effects-driven blockbusters like 2008’s Iron Man, but this well-meaning play for the heart, by way of the stomach, shows you where Favreau’s head is really at. Chef revolves around Carl Casper (Favreau), a onetime food star, now reduced to serving up predictable crowd-pleasers at the behest of his restaurant’s overbearing owner (Dustin Huffman). It takes the barbs of an influential critic (Oliver Platt) — and an ensuing Twitter war — to set Carl off and send him away on his own, at the coaxing of his glam ex Inez (Sofia Vergara). Hooked up with a dilapidated food truck and former kitchen staffer Martin (John Leguizamo), and aided by ably Tweeting son Percy (Emjay Anthony), Carl ties his dreams — and lost passion — to the classic Cuban sandwich. The ensuing road trip from Miami to LA, and Carl’s journey toward self and a renewed relationship with his son, is a fun (if, in the end, a bit too speedily sketched) vault through the joys of eating your way through America’s new culinary heartland. Amid the volley of sign-of-the-times social-media swinging and cameos by the uncostumed Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, and the like, Favreau’s main dish is that a family that eats, cooks, and runs a business together, stays together — child labor laws or no. (1:55) Balboa, Elmwood, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Chun)

Citizen Koch After quietly influencing conservative ideology, legislation, and elections for decades, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have found themselves becoming high-profile figures — much to their dismay, no doubt. The relative invisibility they hitherto enjoyed greatly abetted their impact in myriad arenas of public policy and “popular” conservative movements. Look behind any number of recent red-vs.-blue flashpoint issues and you can find their fingerprints: Notably state-level union busting; “smaller government” (i.e. incredible shrinking social services); seeding allegedly grassroots organizations like the Tea Party; furthering the Corporations = People thing (see: Citizens United); and generally helping the rich like themselves get richer while fostering working-class outrage at everybody else. This documentary by Trouble the Water (2008) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen touches on all those matters, while also focusing on Wisconsin as a test laboratory for the brothers’ Machiavellian think-tank maneuvers, following a Louisiana GOP candidate on the campaign trail (one he’s marginalized on for opposing corporate influence peddling), and more. Any one of these topics could support a feature of their own (and most already have). Citizen Koch‘s problem is that it tries to encompass too much of its subjects’ long reach, while (despite the title) leaving those subjects themselves underexplored. (It also suffers from being a movie completed at least 18 months ago, a lifetime in current US political terms.) For the reasonably well-informed this documentary will cover a lot of familiar ground—which is not to say that ground isn’t still interesting, or that the added human interest elements don’t compel. But the film covers so much ground it ends up feeling overstuffed and unfocused. (1:26) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Coffee in Berlin How do you say “mumblecore” in German? Jan Ole Gerster’s debut feature has certain arty pretensions — it’s shot in black-and-white, and scored with peppy jazz — but it’s more or less a rambling day in the life of law school dropout Niko (Tom Schilling). It happens to be the very day Niko’s golf-loving father decides to stop funding his shiftless son’s slacker lifestyle, though that crisis (which, you know, Lena Dunham built an entire HBO comedy around) receives nearly equal heft as a cutesy ongoing gimmick that sees Niko incapable of getting a cup of coffee anywhere in Berlin. Hipster ennui can be compelling if it has some underlying energy and purpose (see: 2013’s Frances Ha, to which this film has been compared), but A Coffee in Berlin comes up short on both. That said, it does offer an intriguing portrayal of Berlin — a city whose modern-chic façade barely contains the history that haunts it — and some of its supporting characters, particularly Friederike Kempter as a former schoolmate of Niko’s who has outgrown him emotionally by about one thousand percent, provide pleasant enough distractions. (1:28) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Edge of Tomorrow Is it OK to root for Tom Cruise again? (The Oprah thing was almost a decade ago, after all.) The entertaining Edge of Tomorrow, crisply directed by Bourne series vet Doug Liman, takes what’s most irritating about Cruise’s persona (he’s so goddamn earnest) and uses it to great advantage, casting him as military PR guru Cage — repping our armed forces on talk shows amid battles with alien invaders dubbed “Mimics” — whose oiliness masks the fact that he’s terrified of actual combat. When he’s forced to fight by a no-nonsense superior (Brendan Gleeson), he’s gruesomely killed, along with nearly every other human soldier. But wait! Thanks to a particularly close encounter with outer-space pixie dust, he awakens, unharmed, to re-live the day, over and over again (yep, shades of a certain Bill Murray comedy classic). Each “reset” offers Cage a chance to work his way closer to changing the course of the war in humanity’s favor, with key help from a badass (Emily Blunt) whose heroics on the battlefield have earned her the nickname “Full Metal Bitch.” Nothing groundbreaking here — but Edge of Tomorrow manages to make its satisfying plot as important as its 3D explosions, which means it automatically rises above what passes for popcorn fun these days. (1:53) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Fault in Our Stars I confess: I’m no card-carrying, vlog-flogging Nerdfighter in author John Green’s teen-geek army. But one can admire the passion — and teary romanticism — of the writer, readers, and the breakthrough novel that started it all. Much has been made over the cinematic tweaks to the best-selling YA book, but those seem like small beefs: OK, male romantic lead Gus’s (Ansel Elgort) perhaps-understandable brattiness seems to have been toned down a touch, but we’ll all get the somewhat-subversive push and pull of Green’s love story centered on two cancer-stricken innocents. Sixteen-year-old Hazel (a radiant Shailene Woodley) has been battling cancer almost all her life, fighting back from the brink, and now making her way every day with an oxygen tank and her devoted parents (Laura Dern, Sam Trammel) by her side. Her mordant wit, skeptical attitude, and smarts attract Gus, a handsome teen with a prosthetic leg, at a cancer support group, and the two embark on what seems like the most normal thing in the world — sweet, sweet love — albeit cut with the poignancy of almost-certain doom. Would the girl who calls herself a grenade dare to care for someone she will likely hurt? That’s the real question on her mind when the two reach out to the solitary author (Willem Dafoe) of their favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. The journey the two make leaves them both open to more hurt than either ever imagined, and though a good part of Fault‘s denouement boils down to a major puddle cuddle — with solid performances by all, but particularly Dern and Woodley — even a cynic is likely to get a bit misty as the kids endure all the stages of loss. And learning. (2:05) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

Godzilla Bearing the weight of a 1998 American debut so stinky that devotees of the Japanese original dubbed it “GINO” (for “Godzilla in Name Only”), the King of the Monsters returns for a do-over that smells more like generic summer entertainment than anything else. We begin in 1999, when a pair of scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a giant skeleton of sorts in the Philippines — just as a deadly accident (or was it?) devastates a Japanese nuclear power plant. Fifteen years later, the scientists are still on the trail of Whatever That Was, while guilty power-plant survivor Bryan Cranston has become a greasy-haired conspiracy theorist, much to the annoyance of his San Francisco-based Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The humans in Gareth Edwards’ film don’t actually matter much; aside from Cranston and to a much lesser extent Watanabe, none of the characters are interesting or memorable, and the plot — which has Big G lumbering after a pair of “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms” who decide to incubate their eggs in downtown SF — is also a low-stakes affair. (If you believe for a second that Taylor-Johnson’s doe-eyed wife and son won’t survive the monster attack, I have a busted-up Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.) But the monster design is plenty satisfying, and really, it’s just fine that Godzilla — who wrinkles his snout in annoyance at those pesky MUTOs — is this film’s one and only charismatic presence; dude’s going on a 70-year career at this point. (2:03) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Grand Seduction Canadian actor-director Don McKellar (1998’s Last Night) remakes 2003 Quebecois comedy Seducing Doctor Lewis, about a depressed community searching for the town doctor they’ll need before a factory will agree to set up shop and bring much-needed jobs to the area. Canada is still the setting here, with the harbor’s name — Tickle Head — telegraphing with zero subtlety that whimsy lies ahead. A series of events involving a Tickle Head-based TSA agent, a bag of cocaine, and a harried young doctor (Taylor Kitsch) trying to avoid jail time signals hope for the hamlet, and de facto town leader Murray (Brendan Gleeson) snaps into action. The seduction of “Dr. Paul,” who agrees to one month of service not knowing the town is desperate to keep him, is part Northern Exposure culture clash, part Jenga-like stack of lies, as the townspeople pretend to love cricket (Paul’s a fanatic) and act like his favorite lamb dish is the specialty at the local café. The wonderfully wry Gleeson is the best thing about this deeply predictable tale, which errs too often on the side of cute (little old ladies at the switchboard listening in on Paul’s phone-sex with his girlfriend!) rather than clever, as when an unsightly structure in the center of town is explained away with a fake “World Heritage House” plaque. Still, the scenery is lovely, and “cute” doesn’t necessarily mean “not entertaining.” (1:52) Albany, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (1:42) Cerrito, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Eddy)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. For an interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:14) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy)

Korengal This companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Restrepo — one of the best docs about modern-day warfare to date, offering unfiltered access to an Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — uses previously unseen footage shot during the year filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent shadowing their subjects. Korengal is structured as a more introspective work, with musings on what it feels like to be a soldier in the Korengal, surrounded by rough (yet strikingly beautiful) terrain populated by farmers who may or may not be Taliban sympathizers, not to mention unpredictable, heavily armed opponents referred to simply as “the enemy.” Interviews reveal sadness, boredom, a deep sense of brotherhood, and the frustrating feeling of going from “100 miles an hour to a dead halt” after the surreal exhilaration of a firefight. Korengal also functions as a tribute to Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Not only does his death add a layer of poignant subtext, it also suggests why Junger felt moved to revisit this story. That said, though Korengal‘s footage is several years old, its themes remain distressingly timely. (1:24) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Maleficent Fairytale revisionism is all the rage these days, what with the unending power of Disney princesses to latch into little girls everywhere and bring parental units (and their wallets) to their knees. Yet princesses almost seem beside the point in this villain’s-side-of-the-story tale — Maleficent (Angelina Jolie), the queen of the fairies in the magical moors, wronged by Stefan (Sharlto Copley), who saws off her wings in order to win a crown. Accompanied by her shape-shifting minion, crow Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent attends the christening of King Stefan’s first-born daughter, Aurora, hot on the heels of three clownish good fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple), and delivers a curse that will have this future Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning) prick her finger on a spindle and sink into a deathlike coma until her true love’s kiss. Will that critical smooch be delivered by Prince Bieber, er, Phillip (Brenton Thwaites)? Considering the potential for Disney’s trademark, heart-tugging enchantment to get magically tangled up in girl power, it’s tough to suck up the disappointment in the ooey-gooey, gummy-faced troll-doll aesthetics of the art direction and animation, as well as first-time director Robert Stromberg’s choppy, dashed-through storytelling. Part of the problem is that there’s almost zero threat here, despite its antihero’s devilish presence — is there ever any doubt that a healthy resolution will win out, even at the expense of blood ties? Best to find dangerous pleasures where one can — namely in the vivid Jolie, cheekbones honed to a razor edge, who spits biting remarks at her accursed charge, beneath Joan Crawford-esque eyebrows and horns crying out for club-kid Halloween treatments. (1:37) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Neighbors It’s a mystery why Neighbor‘s marketing teams are intent on creating some kind of social media battle between this comedy’s family and frat: The college boys are clearly outclassed when it comes to uninhibited physical comedy daring, thanks to Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. They play young parents Kelly and Mac, who are still basking in their new craftsman home and settled state, trying to figure out sex in front — or is it behind? — baby, and how to get to the rave before bedtime, when a frat, led by oft-shirtless hottie Teddy (Zac Efron) and pal Pete (Dave Franco), moves into the house next door. How do you ask them to “keep it down” yet still be cool? The pretzels Mac and Kelly wrap themselves into, in order to still hang with the kids, are about as hilarious as the inevitable battles that break out over the hearts and minds of college administrators (Lisa Kudrow), pals (the hilarious Ike Barinholtz), and wannabe brothers like the loyal Assjuice (Craig Roberts). Still, despite some memorable gags, Neighbors feels like a bit of a squandered opportunity as one fidgets through many of the frat house scenes. Part of the problem is, why would Kelly, Mac, or anyone want to be in good with such an uninteresting group of Greeks? (1:37) Metreon. (Chun)

Obvious Child We first encounter the protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s funny, original film — a Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething named Donna (Jenny Slate), who works at a lefty secondhand bookstore and makes regular (if unpaid) appearances at a local comedy night — onstage mining such underdiscussed topics as the effects of vaginal discharge on your garden-variety pair of underwear. This proves a natural segue to other hefty nuggets of embarrassment gold concerning her love life, to the dismay of boyfriend Ryan (Paul Briganti), auditing from the back of the club. He pretty much deserves it, however, for what he’s about to do, which is break up with her in a nasty, well-populated unisex bathroom, taking time to repeatedly glance at the texts coming through on his phone from Donna’s good friend, with whom he’s sleeping. So when Donna, mid-drowning of sorrows, meets a nice-looking fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) at the bar, his post-fraternity-presidency aesthetic seems unlikely to deter her from a one-night stand. The ensuing trashed make-out dance-off in Max’s apartment to the Paul Simon song of the title is both comic and adorable. The fractured recap of the evening’s condom-free horizontal events that occurs inside Donna’s brain three weeks later, as she hunkers down with her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), in the bookstore’s bathroom after peeing on a stick, is equally hilarious — and unwanted-pregnancy jokes aren’t that easy to pull off. Robespierre’s treatment of this extended windup and of Donna’s decision to have an abortion is a witty, warmhearted retort to 2007’s Knocked Up, a couple generations’ worth of Hollywood rom-com writers, and an entertainment industry that continues to perform its sweaty contortions of storytelling in the gutless cause of avoiding the A-word. (1:15) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Rover Future days have never seemed quite so bleak as they are depicted in the wild, wild Aussie west of The Rover — rendered by Animal Kingdom (2010) director David Michod, who co-wrote The Rover with Joel Edgerton. Let’s just say we’re probably not going to see any primo Burner ensembles inspired by this post-apocalyptic yarn: Michod ventures to a plausible future only a decade out, after a global economic collapse, and breaks down the brooding road trip to its hard-boiled bones, setting it in a beauteous, lawless, and unceasingly violent outback. A heist gone wrong leads a small gang of robbers to steal the car belonging to monosyllabic, ruthless mystery man Eric (Guy Pearce). The latter wants his boxy little sedan back, badly, and, in the cat and mouse game that ensues, seems willing to die for the trouble. Meanwhile, one of the gang of thieves — the slow, dreamy Rey (Robert Pattinson), who has been left to die of a gunshot wound in the dirt — turns out to be more of a survivor than anyone imagined when he tracks down the tracker hunting for his brother and cohorts. Michod seems most interested in examining and turning over the ties that bind, in a mean time, an eminently absurdist moment, when everything else has fallen away in the face of sheer survival. Cineastes, however, will appreciate the elemental, existential pleasures of this dog-eat-dog Down Under out-Western, not the least of which include the performances. Pearce’s rework of the Man With No Name exudes intention in the very forward thrust of his stance, and Pattinson breaks his cool — and the confines of typecasting — as a blubbering, babbling, thin-skinned man-child. Clad in the mystic expanses of the South Australia desert, which tip a hat to John Ford Westerns as well as scorched-earth-of-the-mind movies such as El Topo (1970) and Paris, Texas (1984), The Rover is taken to the level of tone poem by the shuddering, moaning cellos of Antony Partos’s impressive, atonal electroacoustic score. (1:42) Metreon. (Chun)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious set piece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer‘s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) Elmwood, Metreon, Presidio. (Harvey)

Think Like a Man Too (2:02) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck.

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) Metreon, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction In Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment a villainous Black Ops leader (Kelsey Grammer) allies with a snarky Steve-Jobs-alike (Stanley Tucci) to build Transformers de coeur: designer impostor robot-cars they hope will reinvent the face of war. In IMAX 3D, “TransFOURmers” is packed with relentless rock-’em-sock-’em action, spectacular property destruction, and about as much sense as a bucket of worms. After 60 minutes, you think you’re getting more than your money’s worth. At 90 minutes, you’re tired. At two hours, confusion sets in: If Autobots get stronger together how could Optimus be in so much trouble? Who is the bounty hunting Terminator look-alike? HOW MUCH MORE COULD THERE BE? And then … the action shifts to China, Optimus rides a Dinobot, and chaos reigns. I’ve always liked the working-class poetry of the Transformers themselves — the leader is a trucker and the cast is stacked with ambulances, tanks, and the metal workforce that preserves American lives. If that’s not traditional hero worship, I don’t know what is. But Age of Extinction is the soulless designer imposter it lampoons — the whole sequel-snarking ordeal makes you long for Buzz Lightyear, who saw a thousand Buzz Lightyears on a store shelf and survived that existential crisis heroically — while also riding a dinosaur and fighting Frasier. This Transformers movie (sadly, it won’t be the final one) starts with a thesis: Mark Wahlberg walks through an abandoned movie theater and a Wilford Brimley twin (Ron Shedd) bellows: “Movies today! Sequels! Remakes! Crap!” Age of Extinction follows that moment with nearly three hours of evidence that the cause of extinction is redundancy. (2:30) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

22 Jump Street In this TV-inspired sequel, “Previously on 21 Jump Street…” is all the backstory we get. 22 wastes no time sending Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) back to school to solve another case. A few details have changed (they’re in college now, where the drug of choice is “Why Phy”), but the situation is self-consciously boilerplate, which lets the filmmakers cast (ironic) judgment on sequels — and imply the TV show was redundant. College proves hilarious, from the rundown of dorm room essentials to Schmidt’s walk of shame, and the touchstones are sharp and embarrassing. An extended fight between Schmidt and a girl (Jillian Bell, fabulous) twists gender issues and sexual assault into gloriously absurd politics. Best of all is a fairly understated joke in front of the Benjamin Hill School of Film Studies. I laughed as much at 22 as I did at 21, but 22 spends so much time calling out its number-two status that it almost becomes performance art. (1:45) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

Violette Taking on another “difficult” woman artist after the excellent 2008 Séraphine (about the folk-art painter), Martin Provost here portrays the unhappy life of Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose fiction and autobiographical writings eventually made her a significant figure in postwar French literature. We first meet her waiting out the war with gay author Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), one of many unrequited loves, then surviving via the black market trade before she’s “discovered” by such groundbreaking, already-established talents as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It is the latter, a loyal supporter who nonetheless retains a chilly emotional distance, who becomes bisexual Violette’s principal obsession over the coming 20 years or so. Devos does her best to portray “a neurotic crazy washed-up old bag” with an “ugly mug” — hardly! — who is perpetually broke, depressed, and awkward, thanks no doubt in part to her mean witch of a mother (Catherine Hiegel). “Screaming and sobbing won’t get you anywhere,” Simone at one point tells her, and indeed Leduc is a bit of a pill. For the most part lacking the visual splendors of Séraphine (this character’s environs weren’t so pastoral), Violette is finely acted and crafted but, like its heroine, hard to love. (2:18) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

X-Men: Days of Future Past Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-Men films (2000’s decent X-Men; 2002’s meh X2) returns to helm this latest franchise entry — the fourth sequel in a series that also includes two movies focusing on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. That fan-favorite character is front and center in both of Days of Future Past‘s time frames: the present, a bleak dystopia in which robot assassins have wiped out nearly every mutant (save Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellan’s Magneto, and a few others), and most humans along with them; and the past, a key moment in the polyester-laden 1970s in which mutant avenger Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) inadvertently sets the disastrous future events in motion by killing robot designer Trask (Peter Dinklage). Wolverine time-travels to convince younger versions of the Professor (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to put aside their Himalayan-sized differences to stop her. (Speaking of avengers, there’s a capital-A one here: Quicksilver, a character from both comic-book worlds; he’s portrayed here with giddy mischief by American Horror Story‘s Evan Peters, and is the film’s high point.) Yes, that’s a heady plot, and there are a zillion other characters, but Future Past manages, for the most part, to avoid feeling like an overloaded mess. It’s most entertaining in scenes that show off its characters’ superpowers — clearly, the CG artists had a blast working on this one — which are plentiful enough to make slogging through the ennui-laden moments of downtime worth it.(2:10) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy) *

Key of twee

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

0

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The joke’s been made elsewhere that Begin Again, the latest from writer-director John Carney (2007’s Once), should have been dubbed Twice. There are undeniable similarities. Though Begin Again takes place in New York City, not Dublin, it’s another musical tale of a romantically-challenged artist whose life is changed by a chance encounter. However, unlike Once, Begin Again has an A-list cast, with Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, and Catherine Keener, plus big-name musicians like Adam Levine and CeeLo Green.

Carney eases us into this tale of Big Apple heartbreak and redemption by playing its opening moments multiple times from different perspectives. Jolly busker Steve (scene-stealer James Corden) puts his bummed-out buddy Greta (Knightley) on the spot at an open-mic night, where she croons a song she’s just written about jumping in front of a subway train. (Knightley does her own singing, but careful camerawork ensures we never get a good look at her guitar skills.) Dan (Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck music-biz professional whose career status is nearly as dismal as his personal life — he’s estranged from his music-journalist wife (Keener) and teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) — happens to stumble into the joint as Greta takes the stage.

He’s enthralled by her performance, and the film does an “earlier that day” rewind to let us know why Dan is so drunk. Truth is, he woke up wasted, to the annoyance of his longtime business partner (Mos Def), who’s laser-focused on keeping their record label profitable (one idea: bands doing “audio commentary” on their own records…ugh). Dan, whose job is in serious danger, dreamily clings to the old-school “fostering talent” model. His ideals may be sky-high, but his dignity’s sloshing at the bottom of the flask he keeps stashed in his aging Jaguar — a status symbol of a lifestyle he hasn’t been able to afford for some time.

After he introduces himself to Greta, certain she’s his ticket to creative rebirth, he’s surprised to learn she’s packing a fully-operational bullshit detector. She also doesn’t take compliments well — “Music is about ears, not eyes,” she insists, when Dan says she has the looks to make it big. But there’s an easy chemistry between them, and once she Googles him and checks his bona fides (Harvard, Grammys), she softens. A little.

We see why Greta is so angry at the world in another rewind. She’s a recent arrival in NYC, tagging along with boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Levine). He’s a hotshot rising star who soon morphs into a lying, cheating, trendy facial hair-growing rock ‘n’ roll cliché. (If you have a built-in aversion to the “Moves Like Jagger” singer, this is, needless to say, perfect casting.) These scenes are so overdone — Rob Morrow cameos as a sleazy record-company exec — that Carney’s point of view is abundantly clear: tailoring one’s music to please the basic-bitch demographic and achieving overnight success is bad; while penning personally meaningful tunes and recording them on one’s own terms is good.

Fine. On principle, who doesn’t agree with that? Of course, it’s rad that Greta and Dan decide to take to the streets, NYPD be damned, and record an entire outdoor album with a rag-tag band that signs on thanks to Dan’s fading reputation and, it would seem, Greta’s talent, although for all its emphasis on musical integrity, Begin Again doesn’t bother fleshing out any of the other musician characters. Playing a former client of Dan’s, Green materializes to command a scene or two and undermine the film’s “it shouldn’t be about the money” message, since he sure makes living in a fancy mansion look like a good time.

Another point of contention: Greta never claims to be a great singer, but Knightley’s wispy pipes hardly suggest the glorious potential that perks Dan’s golden ears. Her tunes are forgettable folk-pop, and while some of the same songwriters worked on Begin Again, there’s nothing here that telegraphs the emotional weight of “Falling Slowly,” Once‘s Oscar winner. Begin Again‘s broader themes of music as a healing balm (the film’s original title, as subtle as an anvil to the skull: Can A Song Save Your Life?) are equally generic, illustrated by a scene that has Dan and Greta soothing their sadness by bopping all over the city with a headphone splitter listening to soul jams.

Begin Again strives, with obvious effort, to Make a Statement about an industry struggling to find its identity amid such troubling inventions as revenue-sapping free downloads, YouTube as a career launching pad, and shows like Levine’s own The Voice, which bring instant stardom to artists without the benefit of record-company nurturing. These are worthy issues, but they also make for some heavy-handed dialogue: “We need vision, not gimmicks!”

Fortunately, Begin Again fares better with its explorations of complicated relationships. Nobody does rumpled and wounded better than Ruffalo, and his connections with Keener and Steinfeld feel lived-in and authentic. Knightley has the most obvious character arc, as well as the biggest burden in having to sing — easily the film’s primo curiosity factor, aside from the stunt casting of Levine — but she’s likable as a hipster scorned, determined to figure out her next move even as her world crumbles around her. (Carney does a good job keeping the breakup storyline from getting too maudlin; witness a musical fuck-you drunk dial to Dave’s voice mail, in which an outpouring of emotion is livened up by an impromptu kazoo solo.) It’s also a surprisingly relaxed performance, given her predilection for films like 2012’s overstuffed Anna Karenina. Bonus: despite those wistful song lyrics, she doesn’t end up jumping in front of a train in this one. *

BEGIN AGAIN opens Wed/2 in San Francisco.

Meta-morphosis

Leo Herrera

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July 2, 2014

1

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Visiting from Los Angeles, the Berkeley-born Arianne MacBean introduced the Bay Area to her Big Show Co. via two works. The elaborately titled The People Go Where the Chairs Are dates from 2012; the more condensed present tense was a world premiere. Both pieces intrigued by putting on stage the process the artists go through trying to give life and shape to something inchoate.

For MacBean, for whom language is integral to her dance-making, the challenge was that words both embody but also confine meaning. This intrinsic but probably unsolvable conundrum is at the base of the quirky, often equally funny and poignant People.

Dancers may well recognize themselves in this depiction of the struggle, frustrations, and rewards that the creative process of their practice involves. The rest of us witnessed an amusing, insightful, and lively performance of the process it takes to make an amusing, insightful, and lively performance.

People is more language-based than movement-oriented, and it did suffer from the same disadvantages as many such works. Dancers in general still are not adequately trained to communicate verbally. People’s dancers for the most part did well, but perhaps some unobtrusive body mics might have helped.

As we walked into the theater, performers blocked the stage into a set of overlapping squares. Somewhere off stage, a pianist plinked down isolated notes. One of the dancers wrote down an Alcoholics Anonymous-style 12-step scenario, whose items were erased as accomplished throughout the evening.

As the lights went down, each dancer grabbed a folding chair; rather than being shaped into a “dance,” the chairs were used to bring about collisions, bad feelings, and chaos. So they started over, chattering heatedly about finding an inspiration. Pina Bausch tops the list; however, she is dead. Something like “the dance” will have to do. This brainstorming session about meaning, inspiration, essence, and genuineness was hilarious, and yet almost unbearable to sit through.

Concrete suggestions fall flat. Angelina Attwell demonstrates “a dance I once saw;” it was fierce and left her spent, which scared the rest of them. Later, she had an I-hate-dance moment in which, assisted by her colleagues, the chairs started flying and crashing around her. All joined Max Eugene’s free-for-all, but they could never actually put a “joyous” dance on stage. Eugene’s lack of comprehension and his colleague’s disdain of spontaneous expression spoke volumes about ingrained attitudes in the dance world.

Genevieve Carson’s witty monologue, shadowed by gesticulating males, took on how choreographers use dancers’ contributions to fill transitions. It probably struck a nerve among the dancers in the audience.

Smaller, quieter moments didn’t need language. Challenged to be “genuine,” Eugene simply stood and looked into the audience until his fearful colleagues joined him. There was also a point when the audience was supposed to “participate,” and the dancers leaned on chairs, whispering, inviting us but knowing full well that nobody would step up.

In the serious yet entertaining People we see the dancers both as performers and the people they are, or at least the personas they assumed. Their bravery, their struggle, their anger, and their sense of being in this together despite the odds was something that spoke clearly and effectively.

present tense was a much quieter but also more tightly constructed work in which each moment seemed full of portent. The title, as an intermission discussion between choreographer MacBean and ODC Deputy Director Christy Bolingbroke pointed out, refers to the present moment, but also to the intense presence that is required in a performance.

Verbal language entered here as fragmentary phrases or single words, which acquired meaning in the way they are spoken, screamed, thrown about, casually chained to each other. At one point they simply disappeared into sound that is part of pure physical frustration.

In the opening passage, both Eugene and Carson seemed encased in their own worlds. He stood, and in Butoh-like fashion incrementally opened his arms and shifted his balance ever so slowly. You had to keep looking to see the moves. In contrast, the robotic Carson jerked herself like a mechanical doll onto the ground and up again. Attwell and Brad Culver slowly worked their way across the stage on their backs. The contrast between vertical and horizontal planes suggested a self-contained space that changed very slowly. But then these isolated beings tried to connect, and raced around trying to catch a hand like a lifeline. In twos, they were restrained even as they reached out. That section went on too long. Despite the constant shifting of partners, these parts did not accumulate. More effective was they way they shouted fragments, or single words that would make a sentence, at each other. It all started with Attwell’s silent scream. *

http://thebigshowco.com/

Painting with more colors

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

6

joe@sfbg.com

Not many plays feature an all-Latino cast, let alone all El Salvadoran. But Paul Flores’ Placas placed brown actors and a brown experience center stage. The 2012 production explored a father and ex-gang member’s struggle, leading his son out of a hard life of drugs, violence, and perhaps death.

The play garnered favorable but mixed reviews from critics, but among Salvadorans, it was a huge hit.

“You had older generations coming to see the play right alongside their grandkids,” Flores told the Guardian. The play’s premiere venue packed its 500-seat capacity, and sold out seven out of its eight nights in San Francisco. “We tapped a community thirsty to hear its stories told.”

Placas is the kind of creative work not being funded often enough by the city’s largest arts grant organization, critics are saying. At a contentious San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 20, artists told supervisors that programs serving diverse communities were severely underfunded, and alleged the city’s major arts funder, Grants for the Arts, awards money disproportionately to art forms favored by white audiences.

Spurred by public outcry and city studies, Sups. Eric Mar and London Breed recommended the transfer of $400,000 in unused funding from GFTA to another city arts funder, the Cultural Equity Grants (which funded Placas), to direct arts money to people of color.

The transfer won’t be approved until it goes before the full Board of Supervisors next month. But as San Francisco studio and housing rents soar, Mar said this was vital to keeping diverse artists in the city.

“I think the crisis for arts groups now is many of them are being displaced,” he told the Guardian. “How can the city subsidize groups with low rent or free rent, and how could we support small groups [to prevent them from] being displaced?”

"Arts inequity": San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst Report by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

Above is a PDF of the Budget Legislative Analyst’s report, as it breaks down lack of funding to diverse programs. The report has relevant sections highlighted.

The Guardian reached out to City Administrator Naomi Kelly for comment (her office ultimately directs arts grants funding). She was unavailable for an interview before we went to press, but her spokesperson Bill Barnes told us, “I don’t think we should be in a position of having governments regulate artistic content.”

But in a way, the government already does. The GFTA funding is made up of city dollars, and for decades its funding priorities have scarcely changed, favoring many of the largest mainstream organizations.

GFTA funds many arts organizations, but a recent report by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office found it awarded about 70 percent of grants to organizations with mostly white artists who mostly cater to white audiences. The San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, City Arts, the Exploratorium, the Museum of Modern Art, and the American Conservatory Theater received over one-third of GFTA funding over the past five years, the report found.

“The Bay [Area] will soon be 70 percent people of color,” Andrew Wood, director of the SF International Arts Festival, told the Guardian. “Why invest so heavily in organizations that are such a minority of the population?”

Taken on its face, the findings show a stark divide between funding for smaller, struggling minority arts groups and large, independently funded arts groups with predominantly white patrons. The report divided the diversity of GFTA arts funding into three categories: people of color (Asians, African Americans, and Latinos), ethnic minorities (Arab/Middle Eastern/Jewish), and LGBT organizations. The funding for these categories remained steady at about 20, 2, and 5 percent of arts funding, respectively, since 1989.

The lack of funding is one thing, but critics say the pattern indicates an outright dismissal of the broader community. In a mass email entitled “The State of the Arts in San Francisco” sent to the arts community from a group calling itself Arts Town Hall Organizing Committee said the outcry against critiques of GFTA’s diversity funding was “advanced by fringe members of the arts community.”

Realizing it called Black, Asian, and Latino artists a “fringe community,” the San Francisco Arts Alliance (a signatory to the email comprised of San Francisco’s symphony, opera, and other GFTA funded organizations) quickly backpedaled. It said the email was sent on their behalf by the public relations firm Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners, a group that often runs astroturf campaigns for mainstream organizations.

One reason for GFTA’s inability to fund diverse arts groups may be a lack of trying: The BLA found the GFTA “does not have a definition or criteria for granting funds to people of color organizations.”

This color blindness is a problem, Wood told us. “[The money] the city invests in the War Memorial Opera House compared to the Bayview Opera House, also city owned, is completely out of whack,” he said. The Bayview Opera House was one among six “cultural institutions” to receive a portion of a $400,000 GFTA award, according to the organization’s 2013/14 annual report. Conversely, GFTA awarded the San Francisco Opera $653,000 the same year.

“They’re two different universes,” Wood said.

Allocating more funding for the Cultural Equity Grants was an oft-mentioned method for better supporting disadvantaged artists, the report found, even though GFTA and CEG share many of the same grantees.

Some say the report’s numbers don’t add up. San Francisco Arts Commission Director of Cultural Affairs Tom DeCaigny, a longtime local artist, disagreed with how the BLA defined which groups were white, ethnic, or otherwise.

“The methodology in the report assigns people an identity, and I know some of our grantees were referred to as white when they’re not,” DeCaigny told the Guardian. “We would want to see organizations self identify.”

Those faults undermine the value of the BLA’s findings, although he said, “I’m hesitant to comment on the value of that report.”

But some in the arts community felt DeCaigny’s opinion aligns suspiciously closely to the mayor’s priorities: funding the preferred arts organizations of his wealthy donors (like the symphony). We reached out to the San Francisco Symphony for comment but its representatives told us it would be unable to respond before our deadline.

DeCaigny defended the symphony, noting its annual Lunar New Year and Day of the Dead concerts serve diverse audiences. For the economically disadvantaged, he said, the symphony offers free concerts open to the public in Dolores Park, and that the symphony’s “artists are very diverse.”

DeCaigny pointed out the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s youth programs (shown above) are notably very diverse.

The donors are mostly white, he said, “but that’s true in other sectors as well. It has more to do with how wealth is distributed in our society.”

But Flores, Placas’ director, explained the need for ethnically diverse art was not just about who consumes it, but what message the art is sending to the audience. Nothing revealed this more, he said, then when he took Placas on tour across the United States. While in New York City, he conducted an informal poll.

“I asked ‘when I say San Francisco, what do you think of?’ They said the 49ers, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t think gangs, pupusa, cumbia,” he said. That’s why Placas, which told the story of gang life among San Francisco Salvadorans, had such impact in the city and even beyond its borders.

“I love telling stories about San Francisco,” Flores told us. “The symphony doesn’t do that, the opera doesn’t do that. What does that? Locally generated art.”

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance committee is tentatively slated to hold a hearing on allegations made in the BLA report on July 16.

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report.