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Occupy Nation

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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15
Occupy Nation

news@sfbg.com

The Occupy movement that spread across the country last fall has already changed the national discussion: It’s brought attention to the serious, systemic problem of gross inequities of wealth and power and the mass hardships that have resulted from that imbalance.

Occupy put a new paradigm in the political debate — the 1 percent is exploiting the 99 percent — and it’s tapping the energy and imagination of a new generation of activists.

When Adbusters magazine first proposed the idea of occupying Wall Street last summer, kicking off on Sept. 17, it called for a focus on how money was corrupting the political system. “Democracy not Corporatocracy,” the magazine declared — but that focus quickly broadened to encompass related issues ranging from foreclosures and the housing crisis to self-dealing financiers and industrialists who take ever more profits but provide fewer jobs to the ways that poor and disenfranchised people suffer disproportionately in this economic system.

It was a primal scream, sounded most strongly by young people who decided it was time to fight for their future. The participants have used the prompt to create a movement that drew from all walks of life: recent college graduates and the homeless, labor leaders and anarchists, communities of colors and old hippies, returning soldiers and business people. They’re voicing a wide variety of concerns and issues, but they share a common interest in empowering the average person, challenging the status quo, and demanding economic justice.

We chronicled and actively supported the Occupy movement from its early days through its repeated expulsions from public plazas by police, particularly in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. We supported the right of the protesters to remain — even as we understood they couldn’t and shouldn’t simply stay forever. Occupy needed to evolve if it was to hold the public’s interest. The movement would ultimately morph into something else.

That time has come. This spring, Occupy is poised to return as a mass movement — and there’s no shortage of energy or ideas about what comes next. Countless activists have proposed occupying foreclosed homes, shutting down ports and blocking business in bank lobbies. Those all have merit. But if the movement is going to challenge the hegemony of the 1 percent, it will involve moving onto a larger stage and coming together around bold ideas — like a national convention in Washington, D.C. to write new rules for the nation’s political and economic systems.

Imagine thousands of Occupy activists spending the spring drafting Constitutional amendments — for example, to end corporate personhood and repeal the Citizens United decision that gave corporations unlimited ability to influence elections — and a broader platform for deep and lasting change in the United States.

Imagine a broad-based discussion — in meetings and on the web — to develop a platform for economic justice, a set of ideas that could range from self-sustaining community economics to profound changes in the way America is governed.

Imagine thousands of activists crossing the country in caravans, occupying public space in cities along the way, and winding up with a convention in Washington, D.C.

Imagine organizing a week of activities — not just political meetings but parties and cultural events — to make Occupy the center of the nation’s attention and an inspiring example for an international audience.

Imagine ending with a massive mobilization that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the nation’s capitol — and into the movement.

Occupy activists are already having discussions about some of these concepts (see sidebar). Thousands of activists are already converging on D.C. right now for the Occupy Congress, one of many projects that the movement can build on.

 

DEFINING MOMENTS

Mass social movements of the 20th Century often had defining moments — the S.F. General Strike of 1934; the Bonus Army’s occupation of Washington D.C.; the Freedom Rides, bus boycotts and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington; Earth Day 1970; the Vietnam War teach-ins and moratoriums. None of those movements were politically monolithic; all of them had internal conflicts over tactics and strategies.

But they came together in ways that made a political statement, created long-term organizing efforts, and led to significant reforms. Occupy can do the same — and more. At a time of historic inequities in wealth and power, when the rich and the right wing are stealing the future of generations of Americans, the potential for real change is enormous.

If something’s going to happen this spring and summer, the planning should get under way now.

A convention could begin in late June, in Washington D.C. — with the goal of ratifying on the Fourth of July a platform document that presents the movement’s positions, principles, and demands. Occupy groups from around the country would endorse the idea in their General Assemblies, according to procedures that they have already established and refined through the fall, and make it their own.

This winter and spring, activists would develop and hone the various proposals that would be considered at the convention and the procedures for adopting them. They could develop regional working groups or use online tools to broadly crowd-source solutions, like the people of Iceland did last year when they wrote a new constitution for that country. They would build support for ideas to meet the convention’s high-bar for its platform, probably the 90 percent threshold that many Occupy groups have adopted for taking action.

Whatever form that document takes, the exercise would unite the movement around a specific, achievable goal and give it something that it has lacked so far: an agenda and set of demands on the existing system — and a set of alternative approaches to politics.

While it might contain a multitude of issues and solutions to the complicated problems we face, it would represent the simple premise our nation was founded on: the people’s right to create a government of their choosing.

There’s already an Occupy group planning a convention in Philadelphia that weekend, and there’s a lot of symbolic value to the day. After all, on another July 4th long ago, a group of people met in Philly to draft a document called the Declaration of Independence that said, among other things, that “governments … deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed … [and] whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

 

ON THE ROAD

If the date is right and the organizing effort is effective, there’s no reason that Occupy couldn’t get close to a million people into the nation’s capital for an economic justice march and rally.

That, combined with teach-ins, events and days of action across the country, could kick off a new stage of a movement that has the greatest potential in a generation or more to change the direction of American politics.

Creating a platform for constitutional and political reform is perhaps even more important than the final product. In other words, the journey is even more important than the destination — and when we say journey, we mean that literally.

Occupy groups from around the country could travel together in zig-zagging paths to the Capitol, stopping and rallying in — indeed, Occupying! — every major city in the country along the way.

It could begin a week or more before the conference, along the coasts and the northern and southern borders: San Francisco and Savannah, Los Angeles and New York City, Seattle and Miami, Chicago and El Paso, Billings and New Orleans — Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine.

At each stop, participants would gather in that city’s central plaza or another significant area with their tents and supplies, stage a rally and general assembly, and peacefully occupy for a night. Then they would break camp in the morning, travel to the next city, and do it all over again.

Along the way, the movement would attract international media attention and new participants. The caravans could also begin the work of writing the convention platform, dividing the many tasks up into regional working groups that could work on solutions and new structures in the encampments or on the road.

At each stop, the caravan would assert the right to assemble for the night at the place of its choosing, without seeking permits or submitting to any higher authorities. And at the end of that journey, the various caravans could converge on the National Mall in Washington D.C., set up a massive tent city with infrastructure needed to maintain it for a week or so, and assert the right to stay there until the job was done.

The final document would probably need to be hammered out in a convention hall with delegates from each of the participating cities, and those delegates could confer with their constituencies according to whatever procedures they prescribe. This and many of the details — from how to respond to police crackdowns to consulting of experts to the specific scope and procedures of this democratic exercise — would need to be developed over the spring.

But the Occupy movement has already started this conversation and developed the mechanisms for self-governance. It may be messy and contentious and probably even seem doomed at times, but that’s always the case with grassroots organizations that lack top-down structures.

Proposals will range from the eminently reasonable (asking Congress to end corporate personhood) to the seemingly crazy (rewriting the entire U.S. Constitution). But an Occupy platform will have value no matter what it says. We’re not fond of quoting Milton Friedman, the late right-wing economist, but he had a remarkable statement about the value of bold ideas:

“It is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly, but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arrive, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.”

After the delegates in the convention hall have approved the document, they could present it to the larger encampment — and use it as the basis for a massive rally on the final day. Then the occupiers can go back home — where the real work will begin.

Because Occupy will wind up spawning dozens, hundreds of local and national organizations — small and large, working on urban issues and state issues and national and international issues.

 

WASHINGTON’S BEEN OCCUPIED BEFORE

The history of social movements in this country offers some important lessons for Occupy.

The notion of direct action — of in-your-face demonstrations designed to force injustice onto the national stage, sometimes involving occupying public space — has long been a part of protest politics in this country. In fact, in the depth of the Great Depression, more than 40,000 former soldiers occupied a marsh on the edge of Washington D.C., created a self-sustaining campground, and demanded that bonus money promised at the end of World War I be paid out immediately.

The so-called Bonus Army attracted tremendous national attention before General Douglas Macarthur, assisted by Major George Patton and Major Dwight Eisenhower, used active-duty troops to roust the occupiers.

The Freedom Rides of the early 1960s showed the spirit of independence and democratic direct action. Raymond Arsenault, a professor at the University of South Florida, brilliantly outlines the story of the early civil rights actions in a 2007 Oxford University Press book (Freedom Rides: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice) that became a national phenomenon when Oprah Winfrey devoted a show and a substantial online exhibition to it.

Arsenault notes that the rides were not popular with what was then the mainstream of the civil rights movement — no less a leader than Thurgood Marshall thought the idea of a mixed group of black and white people riding buses together through the deep south was dangerous and could lead to a political backlash. The riders were denounced as “agitators” and initially were isolated.

The first freedom ride, in May, 1961, left Washington D.C. but never reached its destination of New Orleans; the bus was surrounded by angry mobs in Birmingham, Alabama, and the drivers refused to continue.

But soon other rides rose up spontaneously, and in the end there were more than 60, with 430 riders. Writes Arsenault:

“Deliberately provoking a crisis of authority, the Riders challenged Federal officials to enforce the law and uphold the constitutional right to travel without being subjected to degrading and humiliating racial restrictions … None of the obstacles placed in their path—not widespread censure, not political and financial pressure, not arrest and imprisonment, not even the threat of death—seemed to weaken their commitment to nonviolent struggle. On the contrary, the hardships and suffering imposed upon them appeared to stiffen their resolve.”

The Occupy movement has already shown similar resolve — and the police batons, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets have only given the movement more energy and determination.

David S. Meyer, a professor at U.C. Irvine and an expert on the history of political movements, notes that the civil rights movement went in different directions after the freedom rides and the March on Washington. Some wanted to continue direct action; some wanted to continue the fight in the court system and push Congress to adopt civil rights laws; some thought the best tactic was to work to elect African Americans to local, state and federal office.

Actually, all of those things were necessary — and Occupy will need to work on a multitude of levels, too, and with a diversity of tactics.

Single-day events have had an impact, too. Earth Day, 1970, was probably the largest single demonstration of the era — in part because it was so decentralized. A national organization designed events in some cities — but hundreds of other environmentalists took the opportunity to do their own actions, some involving disrupting the operations of polluters. The outcome wasn’t a national platform but the birth of dozens of new organizations, some of which are still around today.

There’s an unavoidable dilemma here for this wonderfully anarchic movement: The larger it gets, the more it develops the ability to demand and win reforms, the more it will need structure and organization. And the more that happens, the further Occupy will move from its original leaderless experiment in true grassroots democracy.

But these are the problems a movement wants to have — dealing with growth and expanding influence is a lot more pleasant than realizing (as a lot of traditional progressive political groups have) that you aren’t getting anywhere.

All of the discussions around the next step for Occupy are taking place in the context of a presidential election that will also likely change the makeup of Congress. That’s an opportunity — and a challenge. As Meyer notes, “social movements often dissipate in election years, when money and energy goes into electoral campaigns.” At the same time, Occupy has already influenced the national debate — and that can continue through the election season, even if (as is likely) neither of the major party candidates is talking seriously about economic justice.

That’s why a formal platform could be so useful — candidates from President Obama to members or Congress can be presented with the proposals, and judged on their response.

Some of the Occupy groups are talking about creating a third political party — a daunting task, but certainly worth discussion.

But the important thing is to let this genie out of the bottle, to move Occupy into the next level of politics, to use a convention, rally, and national event to reassert the power of the people to control our political and economic institutions — and to change or abolish them as we see fit.

OCCUPY AMERICA IS ALREADY UNDERWAY

All across the country, Occupy organizers are developing and implementing creative ways to connect and come together, many of which we drew from for our proposal. We hope all of these people will build on each other’s ideas, work together, and harness their power.

From invading the halls of Congress to “occutripping” road trips to ballot initiatives, here is a list of groups already working on ways to Occupy America:

 

OCCUPY CONGRESS

Occupy Congress is an effort to bring people from around the country — and, in many cases, from around the world — to Washington DC on Jan. 17. The idea is to “bring the message of Occupy to the doorstep of the capital.” The day’s planned events include a “multi-occupation general assembly,” as well as teach-ins, idea sharing, open mics, and a protest in front of the Capitol building.

A huge network of transportation sharing was formed around Occupy Congress, with a busy Ridebuzz ridesharing online bulletin board, and several Occupy camps organizing buses all around the country, as well as in Montreal and Quebec.

There are still two Occupy tent cities in DC, the Occupy DC encampment at McPherson Square and an occupation called Freedom Plaza, just blocks from the White House. Both will be accepting hundreds of new occupiers for the event, although a poster on the Occupy Congress website warns that “the McPherson Square Park Service will be enforcing a 500 person limit.”

www.occupyyourcongress.info

 

OCCUPY BUS

The Occupy Bus service was set up for Occupy Congress, but organizers say if the idea works out, it can grow and repeat for other national Occupy calls to action. They have set up buses leaving from 60 cities in 28 U.S. states as well as Canada’s Quebec province. The buses are free to those who can’t afford to pay, and for those who pay, all profits will be donated to Occupy DC camps.

If all goes to plan, buses will be packed with passengers, their gear, and bigger donations for the event, as the “undercarriages of a bus are voluminous.” What gear do they expect each occupier to bring? “One large bag, one small bag, and a tent.”

congress.occupybus.com

 

DENVER OCCUTRIP

Many occupations have put together car and busloads of people to road trip to other occupations, hoping to learn, teach, network, and connect the movement across geographic barriers. One example is the Denver Occutrip, in which a handful of protesters toured West Coast occupations. The tenacious Occupy Denver recently made headlines when, rather than allow police to easily dismantle their encampment, a couple of occupiers set the camp on fire. It sent delegates to Occupations in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sacramento.

Sean Valdez, one of the participants, said the trip was important to “get the full story. What I’d been told by the media was that Occupy Oakland was pretty much dead, but we got there and saw there are still tons of dedicated, organized people working on it. It was important to see it with our own eyes, and gave a lot of hope for Occupy.”

Like lots of road-tripping Occupiers, they made it to Oakland for the Dec. 12 West Coast Port Shutdown action there. In fact, “occutrippers” from all around the country have flocked to Bay Area occupations in general, and especially the uniquely radical Occupy Oakland.

www.occupydenver.org/denver-occutrip-road-trip/

 

OCCUPY THE CONSTITUTION

An Occupy Wall Street offshoot — Constitution Working Group, Occupy the Constitution — argues that many of the Occupy movements concerns stem from violations of the constitution. They hope to address this with several petitions on issues such as corporate bailouts, war powers, public education, and the Federal Reserve bank. The group hopes to get signatures from 3-5 percent of the United States population before the list of petitions is “formally served to the appropriate elected officials.”

www.givemeliberty.org/occupy

 

THE 99% DECLARATION

This is a super-patriotic take on the Occupy movement, described on its website as an “effort run solely by the energy of volunteers who care about our great country and want to bring it back to its GLORY.” The group’s detailed plan includes holding nationwide elections on the weekend of March 30 to choose two delegates from “each of the 435 congressional districts plus Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Territories.”

These delegates would write up lists of grievances with the help of their Occupy constituents, then convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia for a National General Assembly. They plan to present a unified list of grievances to Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. If the grievances are not addressed, they would “reconvene to organize a new grassroots campaign for political candidates who publicly pledge to redress the grievances. These candidates will seek election for all open Congressional seats in the mid-term election of 2014 and in the elections of 2016 and 2018.”

www.the-99-declaration.org/

 

MOVE TO AMEND/OCCUPY THE COURTS

Move to Amend is a coalition focusing on one of the Occupy movement’s main concerns: corporate personhood. The group hopes to overturn the Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission ruling and “amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.”

The group has drafted a petition, signed so far by more than 150,000 people, and established chapters across the country. Its next big step is a national day of action called Occupy the Courts on Jan. 20. On the anniversary of the Citizens United ruling, the group plans to “Occupy the US Supreme Court” and hold solidarity occupations in federal courts around the country.

www.movetoamend.org/

 

THE OCCUPY CARAVAN

The Occupy Caravan idea originated at Occupy Wall Street, but the group has been coordinating with occupations across the country. If all goes according to plan, a caravan of RVs, cars, and buses will leave Los Angeles in April and take a trip through the South to 16 different Occupations before ending up in Washington DC.

Buddy, one of the organizers, tells us that the group already has “a commitment right now of 10 to 11 RVs, scores of vehicles, and a bio-diesel green machine bus. This caravan will visit cities, encircle city halls, and visit the local Occupy groups to assert their presence, and move on to the next, not stopping for long in each destination.”

This caravan is all about the journey, calling itself a “civil rights vacation with friends and family” and planning to gather “more RVs, more cars, more supporters…and more LOVE” along the way.

occupycaravan.webs.com

OCCUPY WALL STREET WEST

The Occupy movement in San Francisco has been relatively quiet for the past few weeks, but it’s planning to reemerge with a bang on Jan. 20, with an all-day, multi-event rally and march that aims to shut down the Financial District.

The protest is an effort to bring attention to banks’ complicity in the housing crisis plaguing the United States, and how that process manifests itself here in San Francisco.

At least 20 events are planned, centered in the Financial District. The plans range from teach-ins at banks to “occupy the Civic Center playground” for kids to a planned building takeover where hundreds are expected to risk arrest. A list of planned events can be found at www.occupywallstwest.org/wordpress/?page_id=74.

The day is presented by the Occupy SF Housing Coalition, which includes 10 housing rights and homeless advocacy groups. Dozens of other organizations will be involved in demonstrations throughout the day. “We’re asking the banks to start doing the right thing,” said Gene Doherty, a media spokesperson for the Occupy SF Housing Coalition. “No more foreclosures and evictions for profits. On the 20th, we will bring this message to the headquarters of those banks.”

 

 

Residents slam proposal for more parking meters

Sasha Cuttler
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65

Nothing makes people more angry than when the city tries to take away their free street parking. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency was reminded of that fact at a City Hall hearing this morning when residents and business owners unleashed a storm of angry criticism over a proposal to install new parking meters in Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Mission Bay, and parts of the Mission District.

The plans for this pilot program, which were released on Dec. 20, are intended to address the increased demand for parking in the “Mission Bay Parkshed” from development now underway in the area, as well as concerns about increased demand for street spaces once the parking lot at Folsom and 17th Street is converted into a park.

As with previous SFMTA proposals for extended parking meter hours – which were also met with angry criticism – the idea is to encourage increased use of transit and to free up more street parking space for business customers by discouraging local residents from taking up street parking spots for extended periods of time.

But even people who support that idea in concept say that the SFMTA plans are badly designed and don’t take into account the conditions on the ground, largely because they say planners did an abysmal job of outreach and gathering community input before creating the plans.

“I’m urging a cooling off period,” said Tony Kelly, president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association. He wants to see more active parking management of that neighborhood, but said planners need to better consult local residents. “We’ve earned that right in our neighborhood and you have not earned our trust.”

And that was among the more mild criticisms at this sometimes raucous hearing, where there were standing room only crowds in the main hearing room and an overflow room showing the hearing on television. Officials were accused of hostility to working families, incompetence, arrogance, and with trying to drive businesses out of town.

“Are you insane?” asked one commenter, while another asked, “How do you look at yourself in the mirror?” Several business owners said they would leave the city in the plans were implemented, and one said half of his employees were driven to tears over the proposals. “I don’t hear anyone asking for meters,” said one commenter. “I don’t hear anyone saying this is good.”

But there are those who say the city shouldn’t be expected to supply free parking to residents who choose to own cars, particularly given the SFMTA’s tight budget situation and the role that drivers searching for limited street parking spaces play in increasing traffic congestion in the city, thus slowing down Muni.

“On behalf of Livable City (and as a Mission District resident), I want to express our support for the expansion of SFpark meters into the Mission Bay, 12th and Folsom, and 17th and Folsom neighborhoods,” Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich wrote in a recent letter to the SFMTA. “Each of these areas is seeing intensified activity – new residents, new businesses, and new restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues – and each is badly in need of intelligent parking management. The expansion of metered spaces will provide the parking turnover that neighborhood-serving businesses need. SFpark metering and pricing will also reduce cruising for parking in these neighborhoods.”

But the opinions expressed at the hearing were almost uniformly critical, saying the plans actually call for meters on streets that are mostly residential and that they need more work. We’ll have more detailed analysis of the proposals and related issues in upcoming issues of the Guardian.

Obstructions of justice

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Obstructions of justice

The uneasy relationship between OccupyOakland and the Oakland Police Department has resulted in a troubling spate of controversial arrests recently.

At a press conference last month, Police Chief Howard Jordan stated, “The plaza area outside of City Hall is a public area. We do not have any legal right to remove you if you’re standing there, at any time during the day, if you’re exercising you’re First Amendment rights. If you’re not breaking the laws, we’re not concerned about your presence.”

But now, Oakland police have arrested dozens of people who were doing little more than “standing there, exercising their First Amendment rights” — and one man even faces life in prison for it.

There have been 40 arrests in the last couple weeks, including two incidents at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. In each episode, police say they were just doing their job, enforcing laws surrounding permit violations. But many supporters and lawyers associated with OccupyOakland say that police have created a targeted and discriminatory campaign to wipe out the movement.

 

VIGIL TURNS VIOLENT

About 100 protesters were present at a permitted vigil on Dec. 30. An OccupyOakland participant had been issued a permit for a teepee and one table, but police showed up at noon to explain that they were in violation of that permit, claiming people were sleeping, eating, bringing in trash cans, and storing belongings in the teepee

Protesters say they were cleaning up the plaza when police started making arrests; police say they refused to comply. But both parties say that the scene turned violent.

“Who instigates the violence? I don’t know,” Matt Perry, a movement supporter, told us. “A cop tells you to back up and you don’t back up, he’s gonna use his baton on you.”

But many of the arrests and citations had nothing to do with assault. Carly says she was arrested for “having a yoga mat under her arm.” She was later charged with obstruction of justice. In an even more puzzling case, 23-year-old Tiffany Tran was arrested and charged with “lynching.”

“The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer is a lynching,” reads California Penal Code 405a, a felony charge punishable by two to four years in prison.

The law attempts to prevent white mobs from forcibly taking African Americans from police custody to kill them, but police have a history of using it against protesters, stating that anyone trying to stop an arrest is guilty of lynching.

Tran says she was held in a pitch-dark police van for seven hours before she was booked at Santa Rita Jail, where she was held in 22-hour daily lockdown due to overcrowding. She was held for four days without being told why.

On the fourth day, she was finally arraigned, but prosecutors opted not to file charges and she was released. But Tran said the tactic left her uneasy because prosecutors said charges could still be filed until the statute of limitations expires in a year. As she told us, “Now I feel I can’t go out and express myself as I should be able to.”

 

ON THE GROUND

When I arrived at 10pm on Jan. 4 to investigate the situation at the vigil, the scene was calm. About 40 people sat and talked, a few worked on computers.

“Some of the people here were arrested mainly for contempt of cop, or being against the government. And then charges of lynching or obstruction of justice were brought after the fact to substantiate an unlawful arrest, to allow the wheels of so-called justice to turn a few more times,” Svend La Rose, an ordained minister and member of OccupyOakland’s tactical action committee, said of the Dec. 30 arrests.

Suddenly, the cry of “riot police!” rang out.

Police cars had pulled up on 14th street, and a line of police exited. In unison, they started advancing, brandishing batons. Many who were at the scene grabbed their possessions and fled. Most just backed away as the cops advanced. A handful stood in front of the teepee, and were arrested on the spot.

Twelve were arrested, including La Rose. Also arrested was Adam Katz, a photographer from the media committee who was documenting events. Katz said that police told him to back up, and when he complied and backed up “probably 50-60 feet,” he was still arrested.

“I took one picture and I was told to back up,” he said. “I repeatedly asked ‘Back up to where?’ as an army of police pushed me out of the plaza. They said, ‘Back up behind the line.’ I kept saying, ‘What line? I don’t see a line.'”

Then there’s Chris, another occupier arrested Jan. 4. According to Katz and other witnesses, Chris had already left the plaza and gone across the street when he was arrested for somehow delaying the police who were trying to clear the plaza.

 

DISCRETION

On Jan. 7, OccupyOakland held an “anti-repression march,” claiming that recent arrests are an overt attempt to repress the movement. The National Lawyers Guild issued a statement demanding an end to the “ongoing violence, harassment, and unconstitutional arrests of Occupy Oakland protesters.”

“There is evidence that would go to show that they were targeting people based on First Amendment activity, and not for illegal activity,” said attorney Mike Flynn, president of the NLG-SF. “Police charged into the plaza and grabbed whoever they could, and also targeted selective people who withdrew and didn’t even linger there.”

But OPD spokesperson Johnna Watson told us these arrests were perfectly legal. “The law allows us to use our discretion,” she said.

A person’s history with the movement is factored into this discretion. Many of those Perry deems “regulars” are, according to the police, “repeat offenders.” As Watson said, “There may be knowledge of a past history, like a repeat offender. If an officer has knowledge that a crime is occurring, has occurred, or is about to occur, we have the right to issue a citation or arrest. If we have someone constantly continuing to break the law, we may not issue a citation.”

In other words, involvement with this political movement can get people arrested who might otherwise not be.

“That police have escalated their attacks on people is pretty disturbing. It looks like they really think they can drive this movement out of Oakland with violence and repression,” said Dan Siegel, a former legal advisor to Mayor Jean Quan who resigned over her handling of OccupyOakland.

Siegel is now representing Marcel Johnson, aka Khali, one of the several protesters arrested Dec. 30, who faces life in prison. A homeless man who became an OccupyOakland regular, Khali was arrested when he tried to hold on to his blanket, which police wanted to throw away, saying that it was unpermitted property.

While in jail, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, his third strike. A protester called Black Angel who knows Khali said he was transformed by the movement. “He came here and found a family,” he said. “He was like, I’m going to protect this. It gave me some sense of myself.”

But now, Siegel said, “He faces life in prison because of his status of being poor, homeless, and with mental health issues.”

Juries may decide whether OccupyOakland defendants are guilty, but Siegel said the arrests aren’t just: “You still have to ask yourself, why are the police doing this when we have 100 unsolved murders in Oakland?”

Live Shots: Phonte and 9th Wonder at New Parish

Tony Robles
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0

I’ve heard complaints that the Occupy movement doesn’t have a clear message, but Saturday night you could read it from a passing car. At an intersection off of Broadway, where a large crowd had gathered, a few people held up a giant banner on the corner that read “FUCK THE POLICE.” And as we passed groups of officers in riot gear and searched for parking among  the cop cars on nearly every block, it was also obvious that a confrontation was brewing.

It may have been N.W.A. out on the streets, but inside the New Parish where a show was taking place, it was strictly no beefing. Rapper Phonte and DJ/producer 9th Wonder, formerly members of North Carolina’s alternative hip-hop group Little Brother, were finally performing together after settling some outstanding public grievances.

Addressing the crowd midway through the show, Phonte — in a playfully straight-forward manner — explained that he’d done a lot of growing in the last year, and that he’d learned that mistakes have a way of  living on the Internet. Recalling some Southern gospel preaching, he asked the audience to repeat the word “perpetuity” after him, on top of turning to their neighbors and saying “You got to own up to your own shit.”

Support included local openers including Richmond’s Locksmith and D.U.S.T. from Zion I’s crew as well as tour mates Median and Rapsody, but the focus of the show was definitely Phonte and 9th, who ripped through a set of material including both LB and more recent solo work. Part of their speed was necessity. “Grown man rap time,” Phonte called it, explaining that being an aging artist meant that you have an aging audience, with children, bills, and responsibilities, well past the point where “you can spend the whole god damn night at the rap show.”

On the plus side, having an older audience means that they are also likely to be more familiar with your work. When the beat dropped on “Lovin’ It,” a major track from LB’s 2005 concept album, The Minstrel Show, the whole crowd went off.  

But what really surprised me was to see a couple upstairs singing to each other the call and response section of “Make Me Hot,” a short proto-soul/Percy Miracles from LB’s 2003 debut The Listening. There was a sense of coming together (if you put the civil unrest an police action going down half a mile away out of mind.).

And considering that Phonte said it was his first sold out “solo” show in the Bay Area, definitely a long time coming. Which may have been why, despite expressing a plan to “Come to the show, spit these raps, take my ass home,” he didn’t seem to be rushing it.

Bikes and sailboats

Andrew Lam
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OPINION I’m not much of a sailor. In fact, I’ve been known to turn more than a little green when venturing out on the bay under sail. So it may seem a little odd that I am excited about the America’s Cup regatta coming to San Francisco. This high-profile international yacht race has the potential to accomplish even more impressive feats on land than on water, ultimately leaving a legacy of safer streets and more accessible neighborhoods.

An anticipated five million spectators will put the city’s transportation infrastructure to the test. It starts this summer with the qualifying races, then ramps up in summer, 2013, when upward of a half million people are expected to travel to the waterfront on peak race days.

There’s no possible way to move all of these people around this tightly packed city in cars. For proof, talk to anyone who’s been near the waterfront during Fleet Week, a traffic nightmare at a fraction of the size of the America’s Cup.

The Mayor’s Office plan for the America’s Cup wisely puts bicycle transportation front and center. Event planners and politicians know that traffic and parking constraints will preclude many from driving, and transit capacity can be stretched only so far so fast.

Event organizers propose investing in a robust bike share program, park-and-ride lots where visitors can ditch their cars on the edge of the city and pedal the last few miles, and plenty of secure valet bike parking lots.

The most important component is ensuring that the city also invests in safe, comfortable routes welcoming the wide diversity of people who will be trying out two wheels — people who are likely to continue biking long after the events if they have a good experience.

A top priority must be the Embarcadero. Already an enormously popular — and overcrowded — bike route for locals and visitors, the Embarcadero should be made more welcoming to the huge numbers of people who will be drawn there on bikes and by foot.

On big event days, the plan calls for temporarily designating an existing travel lane as bicycle-only space and freeing up the pathway for walking — a more comfortable set-up for everyone.

I urge city leaders to take advantage of this opportunity to pilot a permanent, dedicated bikeway on the waterside of the roadway — the EmBIKEadero. It’s a low-cost, easy way to reconnect people with the waterfront and offer an unparalleled biking experience.

Imagine riding on a mini-version of Sunday Streets on the Embarcadero any day of the week. Imagine a New York City-style high line for S.F.’s waterfront, from Mission Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. Imagine a way to connect diverse neighborhoods and draw people to local businesses…long after the yachts have left the bay.

The city should also use the momentum behind the America’s Cup to test other opportunities for safe, more welcoming streets, including Polk Street, a major connector to the northern waterfront and already an important route for the growing number of people biking in San Francisco.

Market Street should continue to be a site for innovation. Recent pilot programs prioritizing biking, walking, and transit are already proving to save bus riders time and the Muni system big dollars.

The America’s Cup is our opportunity not only to stage a world-class event, but to build toward a world-class bicycling city.

Leah Shahum is executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. To learn more about the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s vision for the EmBIKEadero, see connectingthecity.org

8 Mile blues

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8 Mile blues

There have been a number of documentaries lately reflecting a fascination with Detroit as a ruined giant, our very own (barely) living Pompeii. Local residents have made films lamenting the extreme poverty and the bungled public-corporate policies that largely created it. Non-locals, particularly those state-funded Europeans, have made others whimsically extolling the environ’s pockets of reversion to agrarian culture — seeing utopian futurism there rather than a grimly comic last resort. Or they’ve exploited its accidental status as the world’s largest open-air gallery for the aesthetics of extreme urban decay.

James R. Petix’s It Came From Detroit is like none of the above. In fact the movie it most resembles in some ways is Doug Pray’s 1996 Hype!, which documented the still-fresh boom and bust of grunge — a phenom you may have thought about recently given the, er, hype attendant around Nevermind‘s 20th anniversary. About a decade after Seattle flew the flannel flag high, Detroit too had a musical moment that conquered the nation … or at least was supposed to.

Motor City’s answer to grunge — as framed by a media finally certain it had found the ever-elusive "next Seattle" — was garage, a term that had already gained some new traction from the 1980s Paisley Underground and related ’60s revivalist movements. Sporting chops barely above the Shaggs level when they started out, turbulent trio the Gories’ willfully primitive abandon triggered something, igniting a DIY scene that would eventually encompass such stellar acts as the Wildbunch, the Hentchmen, the Go, Detroit Cobras, the Dirtbombs, Electric Six, and more.

The scene was primed to explode, and when the White Stripes became Cover Boy and Girl on music mags ’round the world, their improbable success seemed sure to spread. A publicity frenzy peaked in 2003, when the Stripes vs. Von Bondies "feud" reached maximum impact via Jack White’s fist on Jason Stollsteimer’s face. But the rough-edged, rootsy focus of Detroit’s disparate new music stalled short of making further commercial inroads; while their sounds ranged from punk blues to goth bluegrass and beyond, nearly all the bands had the kind of live dynamic that can only be muted in the recording studio.

The label-signing frenzy fast over, for most it was back to the drag queen bars, bowling alleys, and coffee shops that had served as Gories venues early on, back to the lowly dayjobs (when found) and sleeping in cars when even rock bottom rent is too much. But the myriad interviewees in It Came don’t seem particularly disillusioned. As more than one points out, when you’re from Detroit you keep your expectations low and make music for love, because nobody’s gonna become a star. Almost nobody, that is.

IT CAME FROM DETROIT

Thurs/5, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., $6.50-$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

Police foot patrols help with crime drop in SF

Sasha Cuttler
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Police foot patrols help with crime drop in SF

The Mayor’s Office and San Francisco Police Department this morning sent out a press release announcing a decrease in violent crime in 2011, citing a number of factors for the drop but failing to mention an important and once-controversial one: increased police foot patrols.

But Police Chief Greg Suhr told us that foot patrols are a big part of the community policing techniques – and “community policing” was indeed mentioned in the release – responsible for the drop.

“They’re big. When we talk about increasing community involvement, that definitely includes foot patrols,” Suhr told the Guardian, explaining his policy of having a visible police presence in high-crime corridors like mid-Market, 3rd and Palou streets, and parts of the Mission District. “People should always see a cop on foot or on a bike in some places.”

For a long time, the SFPD resisted getting cops out of their cars and onto the streets – even in the first couple years of then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s tenure, when the city had almost twice the 50 murders it experienced each of the last two years — until it became a pitched political battle in the city.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and other progressives on the Board of Supervisors and the Police Commission locked horns with Newsom and then-Police Chief Heather Fong over the issue in 2010. After Newsom vetoed legislation to require foot patrols, Mirkarimi and Sup. David Campos co-authored a ballot measure requiring them, Measure M, which was narrowly defeated after SFPD began to implement them on its own.

“I believe that any analysis will eventually show – and they should really do this study – that community policing and foot patrols have a lot to do with this drop,” Campos, a former Police Commissioner, told us. “Community policing and foot patrols are the most pro-active way to reduce crime in any given neighborhood.”

Suhr agrees, something that Campos recognizes and praises the new chief for, saying he’s much better than his predecessors on the issue. “Chief Suhr has been very supportive of community policing,” Campos said. “He’s been very good about working with us to make it happen.”

Suhr said that the department needs to have enough personnel in the stations to take calls, do investigations, and otherwise process information. “Everyone else should be on the street trying to get in front of this stuff,” he told us.

He does still defend the department’s opposition to Prop. M, noting that it would have micromanaged SFPD in a way that he didn’t think was appropriate. But he’s also a true believer in foot beats and other community policing techniques, and he said things are better today than “years ago, when there wasn’t as much open communication as there is now.”

As for the Mayor’s Office and its failure to give credit directly to foot patrols, Press Secretary Christine Falvey told us, “Foot Patrols, the Ambassador Program and other efforts are all critical pieces of Community Policing, which is referenced as part of the success we have seen in getting the crime rate down in San Francisco.”

Her office’s press release follows:

MAYOR LEE & CHIEF SUHR ANNOUNCE SAN FRANCISCO’S CONTINUED HISTORIC CRIME RATE DROP
Year End Statistics Show Continued Historic Lows for Homicides & Violent Crime Rates Overall Since 1960s

San Francisco, CA— Today Mayor Edwin M. Lee and Police Chief Greg Suhr released the year end crime statistics showing continued historic low crime trends for the City. Mayor Lee and Chief Suhr announced that 2011 violent crime rates in San Francisco are down 6 percent from last year.

“Violent crime in San Francisco remains at historic lows because of stronger community partnerships, targeted approaches to violent crime and aggressive crime prevention strategies,” said Mayor Lee. “Despite some tough economic times, Chief Suhr and the San Francisco Police Department are working to make our City the safest big city in the United States through the best use of 21st century technology, strategic deployment of police resources, the use of innovative crime fighting strategies and successful partnerships with our diverse communities and neighborhoods.”

Homicides were at their second lowest annual rate of any year in San Francisco since the 1960s again in 2011.

In 2011, total violent crime in San Francisco was down six percent from 2010 and shows a reduction of 18 percent compared to 2008:
·        Homicide showed no statistical change; there were 50 homicides in both 2011 and 2010;
·        Aggravated Assault is down nine percent in 2011 from 2010;
·        Robbery is down two percent in 2011 from 2010;
·        Rape is down 12 percent in 2011 from 2010; and
·        Burglary is down five percent in 2011 from 2010.

In 2011, total property crime in San Francisco was up three percent from 2010.

The SFPD continues to pursue innovative crime reduction strategies including a “task force style” response to all crimes of violence. Increased community policing efforts, improved approach in assisting those suffering from mental illness and those with limited English proficiency, town hall community meetings and the decentralization of traffic officers and Beach/Park Patrols for safer streets and neighborhoods are also critical to the reduction of crime in San Francisco. In addition, the formation of the new Special Victims Unit allows our City’s most vulnerable populations the compassion and consideration they deserve.

“The year end crime statistics are an indication to the people of San Francisco of how well the men and women of the San Francisco Police Department are serving this City,” said Chief Suhr. “Our goal is for San Francisco to be the safest big city in America, and the men and women of the SFPD in partnership with our communities are committed to this end. We will achieve this goal by reducing crime and the perception of crime through the use of innovative crime fighting strategies, accessing the best technology available, predictive policing, strategic planning, and working collaboratively with all those concerned. There is nothing we cannot achieve when we all work together for the common good.”

OFFIES 2011

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OFFIES 2011

It was the year of the Rapture (oh, wait, maybe not), the year of the great Republican resurgence (oh wait, maybe not), the year of Anthony Weiner’s penis and Gerard Depardeiu’s piss, the year of the Kardashians and Charlie Sheen … and the Offies in-basket overflows. Here are our favorite choice moments of 2011.

 

 

ACTUALLY, HIS THUMBS ON THE PHONE WERE THE ONES DOING DAMAGE

Anthony Weiner, in a sexting conversation with a middle-aged Nevada Democratic volunteer, described his penis as “ready to do some damage.”

 

 

AT LEAST SOMEBODY’S DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt offered Weiner a job

 

 

GOOD THING EXPERTISE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS NEVER BEEN A PREREQUISITE OF THE JOB

Presidential candidate Herman Cain, in an interview, said he didn’t know the name of the president of Uzbekistan, which he called UBEKE BEKI KEIE BAH BAH STAND O BAN STAN SO WHAT WHAT?

 

 

CERTAINLY NOT THE KIND OF FOOD FOR A MIGHTY MAN WHO SEXUALLY HARASSES HIS SUBORDINATES

Cain said that too many vegetable toppings make a “sissy pizza.”

 

 

BECAUSE AN ELECTRIFIED CARTOON MOUSE IS AN INSPIRATION TO US ALL

Cain blamed “elites” for derailing his campaign, then quoted from the Pokemon theme song.

 

 

NICE TO SEE HERMAN CAIN HAS COMPANY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF QUALITY POLITICAL CANDIDATES

Joe the Plumber announced he would run for Congress

 

 

COULD IT BE — THE STUPIDEST REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE EVER?

Rick Perry couldn’t remember which federal agencies he wanted to shut down.

 

 

EXCEPT THAT THE ALMIGHTY HASN’T BEEN ABLE TO TELL US WHICH DEPARTMENTS HE WOULD CUT, EITHER

Michelle Bachman said that the East Coast earthquake and hurricane were signs that God thought the country was spending too much money on government services.

 

 

IT APPEARS THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT CAN’T GET ITS STORIES STRAIGHT

Rush Limbaugh said that the power of Hurricane Irene, which caused 53 deaths and $15 billion in property damage, was blown out of proportion to promote “the leftist agenda.”

 

 

HMMM… SINCE HERS MAKES A BUSINESS OF “CONVERTING” GAY PEOPLE, WE HAVE TO WONDER WHAT HE TELLS HER TO DO

Bachman said wives should be obedient to their husbands

 

 

BUT HEY — THOSE GUYS ALL LOOK ALIKE

Bachman praised Waterloo, Iowa as the home of John Wayne, when it’s actually the home of serial killer John Wayne Gacy

 

 

 

AN EXCEPTIONAL NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT

Sarah Palin insisted that Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells.”

 

 

 

UM, RICK, THE SCHOOLS ARE CLOSED ON CHRISTMAS

A Rick Perry campaign ad said that “something’s wrong with America” because “gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

 

 

DAMN — THAT MEANS HE REALLY IS A DUMB AS HE LOOKS

Perry insisted he wasn’t drunk when he delivered a rambling speech in New Hampshire

 

 

OR MAYBE A LITTLE LIKE FINDING OUT THAT SHE WAS JUST USING YOU ALL ALONG

Sup. David Chiu said meeting Mayor Lee — who he helped put in office — after he broke his promise not to run was “a little like meeting an ex-girlfriend after a breakup.”

 

 

AND TALK ABOUT BEING USED

Ed Lee said he didn’t want to run for mayor, but he had trouble saying no to Rose Pak and Willie Brown

 

 

IT DOESN’T MATTER — AS THE GREAT RONALD REAGAN ONCE SAID, “FACTS ARE STUPID THINGS.”

Sen. John Kyle announced that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business was abortions, and when it turned out he was wrong by a factor of 30, he said his allegation “wasn’t meant to be factual.”

 

 

THE U.S. HAS DEPOSED PEOPLE FOR LESS THAN THAT. OH, WAIT …

Moammar Gadafi said his political opponents were on LSD and kept a stash of photos of Condoleeza Rice.

 

 

OH WELL, YOU KNOW HOW GOD IS; HE FLAKES OUT ON DATES ALL THE TIME

Oakland radio minister Harold Camping announced that the end of the world would come Oct. 21.

 

 

TOO BAD THAT WILL ONLY COVER THE FIRST SESSION OF THE POOR KID’S THERAPY

A woman who created a media frenzy when she said that she had given her young daughter botox admitted she made the story up so a tabloid would pay her $200.

 

 

WHEREAS, OBAMA HAS NEVER DEMANDED THAT TRUMP SHOW HIS REAL HAIR

Donald Trump demanded that Barack Obama show his birth certificate.

 

 

IF THE JAPANESE WOULD ONLY CUT GOVERNMENT SPENDING SOME MORE, THIS SORT OF THING WOULDN’T HAPPEN

Rush Limbaugh made fun of Japanese people after the earthquake and tsunami, saying “where Gaia blew up is right where they make all these electric cars.”

 

 

THE SCHOOL’S ESTEEMED NAMESAKE, ON THE OTHER HAND, HAD 27 WIVES, SOME AS YOUNG AS 15, AND AT LEAST 64 CHILDREN, SO HE WOULD NEVER HAVE APPROVED OF SUCH A THING

Brigham Young University suspended basketball star Brandon Davies because he sex with his girlfriend.

 

 

IT’S AWFUL, THE SACRIFICES OUR POLITICAL LEADERS HAVE TO MAKE IN THE NAME OF THE COUNTRY

Newt Gingrich told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he’d cheated on his wife because he loved America so much.

 

 

ON THE OTHER HAND, IF YOU WEREN’T SO FULL OF SHIT THE PLUMBING MIGHT FUNCTION A BIT BETTER

Sen. Rand Paul complained to an energy department official that he didn’t like appliance efficiency standards because “we have to flush the toilet 10 times before it works.”

 

 

NATURALLY — CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS. SORT OF LIKE MARITAL FIDELITY

Gingrich told Occupy protesters to take a bath.

 

 

WHAT — HE DOESN’T CONSIDER HIMSELF A “FROTHY MIX OF FECAL MATTER AND LUBE THAT IS SOMETIMES THE BYPRODUCT OF ANAL SEX?”

Former Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum complained about what turns up when you put his name in a Google search.

 

 

AND NEXT, WE’LL REDEFINE “POOR” AND ELIMINATE FOOD STAMPS

House Republicans tried to redefine “rape” to eliminate funding for abortions

 

OH WELL, THERE GOES THE SEASON

Stanford University stopped giving student athletes special lists of easy classes

 

DONALD — YOU’RE FIRED

Donald Trump tried to host a presidential debate but gave up when nobody wanted to be there.

 

THIS FROM A MAN WITH “INVENTED” INTEGRITY

Gingrich called the Palestinians an “invented” people.

 

GOOD THING ABOUT THE CRACK — THAT SHIT FUCKS UP YOUR BRAIN

Charlie Sheen opened his Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour in Detroit, where he burned a Two and A Half Men T-shirt, told the crowd that he was “finally here to identify and train the Vatican assassin locked inside each and every one of you,” demanded “freedom from monkey-eyed&ldots;sweat-eating whores,” and said he doesn’t do crack anymore.

 

AT LEAST HE’S GOT ONE THING GOING FOR HIM: HE JOGS WITH A GUN AND SO FAR HASN’T SHOT HIS OWN BALLS OFF

Rick Perry told the Associated Press that he shot a coyote that had threatened him on his morning jog.

 

KILL ‘EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT

The crowd at a Republican debate cheered after moderator Brian Williams noted that Rick Perry had overseen 234 executions.

 

ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN THE ANNALS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT

A Davis police officer pepper sprayed a group of peaceful protesters who were sitting on the ground.

 

SINCE THERE’S NO NEWS IN THE WORLD OF THE 1 PERCENT

The New York Post investigated sex at Occupy Wall Street

 

GOOD THING IT DIDN’T WORK — THE WATER FROM HEAVEN WOULD HAVE MADE THE BUNS ALL SOGGY

Perry held a religious rally to pray for rain at Reliant Stadium in Houston, and urged people to fast, although the concession stands sold hot dogs.

 

BUT WAIT — IF WE SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT, AREN’T WE … OH, NEVER MIND

Michelle Bachman said she opposes same-sex marriage because “the family is the fundamental unit of the government.”

 

THE FACT THAT WE’RE EVEN WRITING ABOUT A TEENAGER WHO CALLS HER TITS “SNOWBALLS” IS A SIGN OF THE END OF CIVILIZATION

Child bride Courtney Stodden was kicked out of a pumpkin patch for dressing in daisy dukes and making out with her 53-year old husband, Doug Hutchinson, and she madly tweets things like “Squeezing my snowballs inside of a seasonal sexy little lingerie as I begin to swing around the Christmas tree to hot rock ‘n roll hits!”

 

IT SELLS, BABY, IT’S SELLS

Kim Kardashian made $12 million for doing essentially nothing.

 

A NEW DEFINITION OF TERROR: WATCHING A 63-YEAR-OLD MAN WHIP OUT HIS DICK

Gerard Depardieu pissed on the floor of an Air France jet after flight attendants told him he’d have to wait to use the bathroom.

 

WE’RE GOING TO TAKE A BUNCH OF STEROIDS AND THEN LIE ABOUT IT AND MAYBE WE CAN SPEND A MONTH THERE, TOO

The U.S. Justice Department spent millions of dollars and eight years to convince a judge to sentence Barry Bonds to spend a month at his Beverly Hills estate.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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tredmond@sfbg.com

My gut response to the America’s Cup was always like this: I love a party. I love a big party, and a party that brings lots of visitors and money into San Francisco is a great thing. But you have to remember that at some point the party will be over, and somebody’s got to clean up the mess and pay for the damage.

And right now, in San Francisco, when the party’s over, the big winner will be a multibillionaire named Larry Ellison, and the rest of us will be paying for it.

That said, the party’s going to happen. There may be a little bluster about the Environmental Impact Report, but the 34th America’s Cup race will take place in the waters of the San Francisco Bay, and a whole lot of people will be coming into town to see it.

So we better be ready, and I’m not sure we are.

I read the draft EIR section dealing with transportation and traffic, and it’s kind of crazy. The planners are projecting about 25,000 new vehicle trips a day — and that’s just into San Francisco. Sausalito and the East Bay cities will have their own issues. There are pictures of projected parking areas along the waterfront, including Crissy Field. There are plans to close the Embarcadero, but only the northbound lanes.

Additional Muni service will be able to handle about 1,200 riders a day. That’s way less than five percent of the number of people who are projected to be getting around by car.

So maybe San Francisco should try something radical that would last way beyond the sailing event. Why don’t we see what it would look like if we banned cars from the entire waterfront, closed all the streets and created a real transit-first city — at a time when the whole world will be watching?

No cars at all. Buses for seniors and people with disabilities. Everyone else walks, bikes, or takes a pedicab (that’s a whole lot of jobs, by the way, particularly for young people who can pedal). Could one of the most environmentally conscious cities in the world pull that off? It’s worth a try.

A bad incentive for pot busts

Zelda Bronstein
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3
A bad incentive for pot busts

The Bay Citizen ran, without comment or perspective, a Bay City News item Dec. 23 noting that the Hayward Police Department and other local law-enforcement agencies picked up some $1.2 million when the feds disbursed the money that was seized from a marijuana dispensary that was busted in 2006.

This is a dirty side of the drug war that doesn’t get enough discussion or attention: When the cops bust dealers who have cash (or even fancy cars) on hand, the money doesn’t go to the general fund of a city or to the federal treasury (to fund, perhaps, alternatives to incarceration, drug treatment or education). It goes directly to the police agencies that made the arrests.

That’s a huge incentive — a direct cash incentive — for police to focus on arresting drug dealers (in this case, an operation that was selling marijuana, which everyone with any sense knows ought to be legal anyway).

In an era of diminshed resources, if you’re a police chief and you have a choice — send your officers to raid a pot club, or send them onto the streets to try to prevent violent crimes — there’s a financial incentive to go after the pot club. That skews law-enforcement priorities in a bad way.

I’m hardly the first one to make this point, but it’s worth thinking about when we see this kind of story celebrating the “true holiday gift” of drug money.

 

The bottom of the top

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The bottom of the top

YEAR IN GAMER One of the most exciting release windows in recent memory, this year’s fall gaming onslaught is officially behind us. And while most gamers are quick to rank the marquee experiences — battling dragons (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), thwarting diabolical clowns (Batman: Arkham City), and riding giant birds in a green tunic (The Legend of Zelda: The Skyward Sword), it’s only when you approach the bottom half of a critic’s top 10 that the real debate begins.

So let’s skip ahead, past Uncharted 3 and Portal 2, which round out the established top five games of the year, and delve into the bottom half of the top 10. Any one of the following games might have taken home top honors in years past. As it stands, you may have overlooked one or two. And that’s what Christmas is for.

6. Rayman Origins

2D platforming in 2011 takes place in one of two venues: the games marketplace, like PSN or XBLA, or on your phone. Rayman Origins‘ greatest disadvantage is that it looks like something you can get on your phone for a buck but it costs full price. Don’t be fooled, a dollar will never get you as much content as you’ll find in Rayman, with its more than 60 levels of hand-drawn animation, four-player co-op, and star limbless thingamajig. Rayman isn’t just a re-skinned Mario; it’s a brighter, sillier and more rhythm-based experience than the Italian plumber, with a similar level of polish.

7. Dark Souls

It feels strange to be recommending a game that I’m often too afraid to play. Dark Souls is a brutal action RPG wherein you play a sort of zombie that most enemies can kill with a single hit. Save points are sparse and taking a break respawns any enemies that you might have killed already. (If you’re an old-school gamer, you’re screaming “all games used to be like this!”) Dark Souls employs an amazing level design that intricately connects its diverse dungeons and features a unique multiplayer system that allows other players to either leave tips for you or invade your game and make life even harder. You know that snotty friend who says today’s games are too easy or too much like movies? Get him this game.

8. L.A. Noire

Dismissed by some as a hackneyed attempt to marry Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto with a point and click adventure, L.A. Noire may not be the perfect joining of genres we all hoped it would be, but it’s a wonderful homage for aficionados of 1940s crime movies. A sordid tale of an ex-Marine turned policeman rising through the ranks of the LAPD, L.A. Noire is well paced and acted, with a fully fleshed-out story — which can be hard to find in video games. Though it ultimately made more headlines for the developers’ harsh working environment, L.A. Noire remains a unique and expansive take on an under-represented genre.

9. Driver San Francisco Do you like driving fast cars but find yourself overwhelmed with the intricacies of real-life simulations? More racing games are contextualizing their in-game courses with a bit of drama and back story, and Driver San Francisco takes the cake when it comes to unique storytelling. You play an SF cop in a coma who can enter the bodies of other drivers on the road and drive like a maniac without consequence. He uses this amazing power to help teenagers win street races, freak out driver’s ed instructors and save the city from a terrorist attack that may or may not exist at all. Driver SF is less than polished, and local residents will notice some discrepancies in the city’s geography, but for pure entertainment few games take risks like these.

10. Super Mario 3D Land

After a bit of an embarrassing year for Nintendo, and the 3DS in particular, Super Mario 3D Land marks the first game to make the troubled console truly worth owning. A jump-in-and-play good time, Mario 3D highlights both the 2D platforming of New Super Mario Bros. and the fluid 3D exploration of Mario Galaxy, creating something that’s more than a throwback, it’s a refinement of everything that makes the 25-year franchise so popular. It’s not innovative enough to be worth buying a 3DS for, but early adopters finally have a game to call their own.

Marco De La Vega’s top 10 substances that have influenced music in 2011

Tony Robles
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3

For so many more year-end music lists, click here and pick up this week’s paper.

120 Minutes’ Marco De La Vega (@S4NTA_MU3RTE) lists his top 10 substances that have influenced music in 2011:      

1. Adderall: Not just because Bay-local comeup, Kreayshawn, spits bout slangin’ em (“gnarly, radical, on the block I’m magical… see me at your college campus baggie full of Adderalls” or even because of Kendrick Lamar’s thoughtfully spaced out track “A.D.H.D.” but mostly because of its association with hyperactive, creative, and willfully scattered children. Odd Future blew up, Tyler the Creator dropped Goblin, A$AP Rocky put out one of the strongest releases of the year with LIVELOVEA$AP. All kinds of kids were spittin’ up mixtapes right outta high school and then signing multimillion dollar contracts.

2. DMT: Dimethyltryptamine is some fucked up shit, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible. A small glimpse behind the fabric of reality. There were a few releases this year that resemble and reflect this completely alien and confusing greater truth. Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, and Laurel Halo’s flawless EP, Hour Logic (Hippos In Tanks).

3. Nitrous Oxide: whippets are back and that shit makes everything sound like you’re living in a vacuum cleaner. As much as I despise the hyperwobbly, fist pumpin’ sounds of brosteppers like Rusko, and (cringe) Skrillex, I can’t deny that that shit is selling cars; dubstep car commercials. Also, to be fair, real dubstep and what is often called post-dubstep is some amazing music and some of its less commercially viable/more critically acclaimed artists have put out some beautiful work. Zomby dropped Dedication this year on 4AD and that shit is sick. James Blake’s debut album is also impossibly good.

4. Pills: maybe it’s just the kids I roll with, but I assume that most sensitive, well thought, independent rock is made by people on pills (think old Brian Jonestown Massacre or Jesus and Mary Chain). The second I heard that track “Vomit” off of friends and local heroes Girls new album Father, Son, Holy Ghost, I had to raid my own medicine cabinet, take a couple Vicodin, and listen to a stack of records including that, Tamaryn, King Dude, Chelsea Wolfe, and Zola Jesus.’Bout as close to heaven as a guy like me can get.

5. Coke: coke always has and always will rule the dancefloor. It goes further than that though; coke rap is alive and well. Trap rap (rap about drug dealing) in general is continuing to run shit. And when you got Lex Luger droppin’ some of the illest beats around for songs that are 90 percent chorus, how can you go wrong? This is a very serious statement — the Ferrari Boyz (Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame) mixtape that came out about a week before that overhyped, tired, abomination that is Watch the Throne, has some of the best tracks this year.

6. K: club drugs in general are back, and nothing says party like as strong debilitating dissociative. I mentioned this album earlier when I was talking about DMT, but it’s good and weird enough that it needs to be mentioned twice. James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual.

7. Acid: my favorite substance. LSD is an extended barrage of overwhelming sensory input, particularly sight and sound, and should therefor be discussed in those terms. Sight: this year has been all about projections, lasers, and smoke — there are a lot of amazing producers playing live right now, and a dude with a laptop ain’t a show, so it’s important to add some flare. Sound: from mixtapes like White Ring’s tranced out Chaind and Nike7up’s crazy melted-pop gem 33:33 to Araabmuzik’s breathtakingly unfuckwithable album Electronic Dream, this has been the strongest showing dosed out music has had since the mid ’90s.

8. MDMA: like I was saying earlier, club drugs are huge right now. Best part about the ecstasy thing though is that we’re not talking pressies here, just pure crystalized love. You can hear it in the work of groups like Sleep 8 Over and (of course) Pure X. But I think it’s most evidenced by song’s like The Weeknd’s “High for This” and on Pictureplane’s brilliantly positive album Thee Physical (Lovepump United).

9. Weed: not that weed ever goes away, but it’s had a really strong year. Seems like everybody’s smoking blunts and flipping pounds these days. Wiz Khalifa, A$AP, Lil B, Lil Wayne, Miley fucking Cyrus. and of course Zip and a Double Cup himself, Juicy J., which brings us to our big winner…

10. Promethazine: Lean, purple drank, double cup, sizzurp — codeine cough syrup has a lot of names, and it’s been an important factor in rap, particularly Southern rap, for a very long time. But that influence is spreading. Bands like Salem have created whole new subgenres of music built off applying the late great DJ Screw’s production sensibilities as liberally as possible. New York Rappers like A$AP Rocky are singing the praises of Screw and Pimp C while repping Harlem and putting New York back on the map. I think 2012 is gonna be all about double cup dinner parties and art walks. Do yourself a favor, call your doctor and fake a cough, pop in Clams Casino’s Instrumental mixtape and/or LIVELOVEA$AP and chill for a bit.

 

“Vomit” blew minds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze6rg4ixjOI&ob=av2e

The tops of 2011

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

 

CHERYL EDDY, GUARDIAN

 

TOP 10 METAL SHOWS OF 2011 (CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Feb. 2: Motörhead, Clutch, and Valient Thorr at Warfield

2. March 11: Weedeater, Zoroaster, Kvelertak, and Begotten at Thee Parkside

3. March 12: Slough Feg, Christian Mistress, and Witch Mountain at Hemlock

4. April 3: Saint Vitus, Red Fang, and Howl at Mezzanine

5. June 7: Orange Goblin and Gates of Slumber at Bottom of the Hill

6. Aug. 12: Eyehategod, Impaled, Laudanum, and Brainoil at Oakland Metro

7. Aug. 16: Pentagram at Mezzanine

8. Oct. 13: Enslaved at Slim’s

9. Nov. 3: Mastodon and Red Fang at Warfield

10. Nov. 19: Kyuss Lives! and Black Cobra at Regency Ballroom

 

JOSH CHEON, DARK ENTRIES RECORDS

 

TOP 10 NEW RELEASES OF 2011

1. Container, S/T LP (Spectrum Spools) 2. Staccato du Mal, Sin Destino (Weird Records) 3. Bronze, Copper (RVNG Intl.) 4. Grouper, Dream Loss/Alien Observer (Yellow Electric) 5. White Fence, Is Growing Faith (Woodist) 6. Belong, Common Era (Kranky) 7. Widowspeak, S/T LP (Captured Tracks) 8. Total Control, Henge Beat (Iron Lung) 9. Iceage, New Brigade (What’s Your Rupture?) 10. Brotman & Short, Heights (Cold Dick)

 

GEORGE CHEN, MUSICIAN AND WRITER

 

2011: MAN, MOST OF IT WAS SHITTY. BUT HERE WERE THE GOOD THINGS

1. Helm. Luke Younger from Birds of Delay, Halloween weekend in London. Best noise set I’ve seen in a while, it helped that there was a fan blowing his bangs out of his hoodie. He has an album called Cryptography out on Kye. 2. White Lung. Youngins from Vancouver B.C. playing sick, straight forward punk. Saw them in a bowling alley. 3. Village of Spaces’ Alchemy and Trust album. It took a village to put this out, or at least four labels working in conjunction. Dan Beckman’s (Uke of Spaces Corners) quiet folk masterpiece. 4. Divorce. A band from Glasgow that exists in kind of a cultural vacuum there, a bit like the early ’00s trapped in amber, but then cracked open and given adrenal supplements. They are coming to America in July 2012. 5. Trash Kit put out an album in 2010, but I only got to see them once in 2011. Sadly, they have broken up. Finger-picky jaunty punk with weird rhythms. 6. Andrew W.K. This was not particularly “good”, but distinct encapsulation of the zeitgeist. My band played a show with him at Dem Passwords. He didn’t actually watch us or anything, he showed up right before going on with an entourage. Fans started force-feeding him bananas, Redbull, and whiskey and it turned into a freakish spectacle. I took a nap during his set, came back in, and he was still going for like two and a half hours, driving his fans away. Respect, the modern Andy Kaufman. 7. This Invitation. Chen Santa Maria went on a California tour with Warren in April and it was sparsely attended, but perhaps we’re to blame for that. It’s nice to see one of your oldest friends get some recognition for their work, which Aquarius did by giving their stamp of approval to his three (!) double CDs. 8. Cacaw from Chicago, a few ex-Coughs peeps project. They are now broken up, but this summer they came through and it was a monstrous sludge engine. Dark and fierce. 9. Anika. Technically a 2010 release, but she played at the Independent in October. The lady herself has a passive stage presence, but the music of the whole group (members of Portishead and Beak>) is best described as “Nico fronting PiL” (someone at the LA Times can claim that one). 10. SF Comedy. I still feel like an outsider at all this, but holy shit, there’s good stuff going on right now. Perhaps it is a national, even international renaissance in comedy, but the energy and talent going on here feels as exciting to me as the music scene used to feel. I actually don’t want to name names although the free show at the Rite Spot is a good place to start. I also noticed that none of the music I put on this list has anything to do with the Bay Area. Sorry, music. I just listen to podcasts now.

 

 

JHAMEEL, MUSICIAN

 

TOP 10 SONGS FOR 2011

1. “Cruel” by St. Vincent 2. “Don’t Fuck with my Money” by Penguin Prison 3. “Holocene” by Bon Iver 4. “Bam Bam” by King Charles 5. “King of Diamonds” by Motopony 6. “Don’t Move” by Phantogram 7. “5 O’Clock” by T-Pain 8. “White Lie” by Jhameel 9. “Love U More” by Sunday Girl (RAC Mix) 10. “Imprint” by Amtrac

 

MARC RIBAK, TOTAL TRASH FEST

 

TOP 10 RECORDS I AM DIGGING DURING THANKSGIVING WEEK

1. The Fall, Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall (particularly the tape that includes singles)

2. The Spits, Kill the Cool (demos and rarities, LP on In the Red)

3. Reigning Sound, Time Bomb High School and Too Much Guitar (LPs on In The Red)

4. The Ronettes, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes featuring Veronica, and Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You.

5. Devo, Workforce to the World (early live bootleg)

6. The Marvelettes, Greatest Hits (LP on TAMLA)

7. Coachwhips, Bangers Versus Fuckers (LP on Narnack)

8. South Bay Surfers, Battle of the Bands (LP on Norton)

9. Tav Falco and the Unaproachable Panther Burns, Panther Phobia (In the Red Records)

10. Jonathan Richman, Rockin’ and Romance (LP on Twin/Tone)

 

FRANCES CAPELL, GUARDIAN

 

TOP TEN SELF-RELEASED ALBUMS OF 2011

1. WU LYF, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain Recorded in an abandoned church, the full-length debut from British heavy pop quartet WU LYF was funded by membership fees for the band’s deviant fan club, the Lucifer Youth Foundation.

2. Death Grips, Ex Military The sinister debut mixtape from Sacramento’s Death Grips is an explosion of dark, twisted shout-rap and noisy, industrial beats.

3. Nick Diamonds, I Am An Attic Former Unicorn and current member of Islands and Mister Heavenly, Nick Diamonds (a.k.a. Nick Thorburn) released his understated, haunting solo album via Bandcamp.

4. Clams Casino, Instrumental Mixtape Clams Casino’s collection of swirling, synth-laden instrumentals crafted for the likes of Lil B and Soulja Boy reveals the genius of this visionary New Jersey producer.

5. Big K.R.I.T, Return of 4Eva Of all the exciting rap mixtapes released in 2011, Southern heavy-hitter Big K.R.I.T.’s Return of 4Eva is my favorite.

6. Frank Ocean, nostalgia, Ultra. This R&B pop gem presents Frank Ocean as, perhaps, the only member of the OFWGKTA family who proved worthy of the hype in 2011.

7. Fort Lean, Fort Lean (EP) Though it’s only 12 minutes long, Fort Lean’s infectious, summery debut EP is a promising glimpse of things to come for this indie five-piece from Brooklyn, NY.

8. Friendzone, Kuchibiru Network II I chose East Bay duo Friendzone’s Kuchibiru Network 2 over Main Attrakionz’s 808’s & Dark Grapes II, as it showcases Main Attrakionz at its best along with tasty selections from Oakland’s Shady Blaze and Finally Boys, Japanese producer Uyama Hiroto, and more.

9. Small Black, Moon Killer In addition to some of Small Black’s catchiest electronic pop songs to date (like the Nicki Minaj-sampling “Love’s Not Enough”), this mixtape features two appearances by Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri, and some inspired remixes from Star Slinger and Phone Tag.

10. The Weeknd, House of Balloons This is a no brainer. Canadian-Ethiopian R&B prodigy the Weeknd’s debut mixtape House of Balloons is the best album of the year, period. (Frances Capell)

 

LAURA GRAVANDER, DIRTY CUPCAKES

 

TOTALLY NEPOTISTIC LIST OF THE TOP TEN LIVE BANDS OF 2011

1. ELECTRO: This is the band of 8-year-old girls I mentored this summer as a volunteer at Bay Area Girls Rock Camp. After learning two chords from scratch, they wrote a droney, unintentionally avant-garde five-minute anti-bullying opus with a rap breakdown that blew my mind at their July showcase at the Oakland Metro. This is the future.

2. Uzi Rash: Swamp reptile Max Nordile and his band of trashy weirdos play music that is both grating and catchy, and deceptively complex. See them live and they will freak you out, and possibly hit you in the eye socket with an empty 40 oz. (it happened to me).

3. Shannon and the Clams: Seeing the Clams live feels like being magically reunited with your childhood dog — happy and nostalgic, a little bit sad. This metaphor is especially apt if you and your childhood dog loved to DANCE! 4. Younger Lovers: Killer guitar parts, dance-crazy beats, and singer-drummer-songwriter Brontez’s onstage bitching makes Younger Lovers’ shows unpredictable and exciting. Plus, their guitarist is super-cute!

5. King Lollipop: Elfin hillbilly plays bubblegum rockabilly (or something like that!) backed by six drummers who sound like a marching band meets drum circle, minus the lame.

6. Human Waste: Freaky spacesuited dystopian moog-punk from the Moon. Rumored to consist of members of Uzi Rash, Shannon and the Clams, and Dirty Cupcakes. More space waste to come in 2012.

7. Glitter Wizard: Intricate, impressive glam rock. And once, mid-song, I saw frontman Wendy Stonehenge light his hand on fire!

8. PIGS: This three-piece plays metal for people who love metal. Ripping it up soon in a scummy warehouse near you.

9. Knifey Spoony: Oakland punk rockers with impressive live show and unexpectedly melodic hooks. Singer-guitarist Steve Oriolo studied music in college but uses his powers for good (rock), not evil (anything that doesn’t rock).

10. Sweet Nothing: I’m a sucker for two-piece bands and girl drummers, and Ian and Melissa always rock my face off.

 

KUSH ARORA AND THE INGROOVES OFFICE STAFF

 

TOP 10 RELEASES OF 2011

1. Los Rakas, Chancletas Y Camisetas (Soy Raka Inc.) 2. Am and Shawn Lee, Celestial Electric (ESL Records) 3. People Under The Stairs, Highlighter (Piecelock 70 ) 4. Toddla T, Watch Me Dance (Ninja Tune) 5. Boris, New Album (Sargent House) 6. Kendrick Lamar, Section.80 (Top Dawg Entertainment/Section 80) 7. Youth Lagoon, The Year of Hibernation (Fat Possum) 8. Little Dragon, Ritual Union (Peacefrog Holdings Ltd) 9. Jay Rock, Follow Me Home (Strange Music) 10. Vybz Kartel, Colouring Book EP (Tad’s Records)

 

MARCO DE LA VEGA (@S4NTA_MU3RTE), 120 MINUTES

 

TOP 10 SUBSTANCES THAT HAVE INFLUENCED MUSIC IN 2011

1. Adderall: Not just because Bay-local comeup, Kreayshawn, spits bout slangin’ em (“gnarly, radical, on the block I’m magical… see me at your college campus baggie full of Adderalls”) or even because of Kendrick Lamar’s thoughtfully spaced out track “A.D.H.D.” but mostly because of its association with hyperactive, creative, and willfully scattered children. Odd Future blew up, Tyler the Creator dropped Goblin, A$AP Rocky put out one of the strongest releases of the year with LIVELOVEA$AP. All kinds of kids were spittin’ up mixtapes right outta high school and then signing multimillion dollar contracts.

2. DMT: Dimethyltryptamine is some fucked up shit, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible. A small glimpse behind the fabric of reality. There were a few releases this year that resemble and reflect this completely alien and confusing greater truth. Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, and Laurel Halo’s flawless EP, Hour Logic (Hippos In Tanks).

3. Nitrous Oxide: whippets are back and that shit makes everything sound like you’re living in a vacuum cleaner. As much as I despise the hyperwobbly, fist pumpin’ sounds of brosteppers like Rusko, and (cringe) Skrillex, I can’t deny that that shit is selling cars; dubstep car commercials. Also, to be fair, real dubstep and what is often called post-dubstep is some amazing music and some of its less commercially viable/more critically acclaimed artists have put out some beautiful work. Zomby dropped Dedication this year on 4AD and that shit is sick. James Blake’s debut album is also impossibly good.

4. Pills: maybe it’s just the kids I roll with, but I assume that most sensitive, well thought, independent rock is made by people on pills (think old Brian Jonestown Massacre or Jesus and Mary Chain). The second I heard that track “Vomit” off of friends and local heroes Girls new album Father, Son, Holy Ghost, I had to raid my own medicine cabinet, take a couple Vicodin, and listen to a stack of records including that, Tamaryn, King Dude, Chelsea Wolfe, and Zola Jesus.’Bout as close to heaven as a guy like me can get.

5. Coke: coke always has and always will rule the dancefloor. It goes further than that though; coke rap is alive and well. Trap rap (rap about drug dealing) in general is continuing to run shit. And when you got Lex Luger droppin’ some of the illest beats around for songs that are 90 percent chorus, how can you go wrong? This is a very serious statement — the Ferrari Boyz (Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame) mixtape that came out about a week before that overhyped, tired, abomination that is Watch the Throne, has some of the best tracks this year.

6. K: club drugs in general are back, and nothing says party like as strong debilitating dissociative. I mentioned this album earlier when I was talking about DMT, but it’s good and weird enough that it needs to be mentioned twice. James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual.

7. Acid: my favorite substance. LSD is an extended barrage of overwhelming sensory input, particularly sight and sound, and should therefor be discussed in those terms. Sight: this year has been all about projections, lasers, and smoke — there are a lot of amazing producers playing live right now, and a dude with a laptop ain’t a show, so it’s important to add some flare. Sound: from mixtapes like White Ring’s tranced out Chaind and Nike7up’s crazy melted-pop gem 33:33 to Araabmuzik’s breathtakingly unfuckwithable album Electronic Dream, this has been the strongest showing dosed out music has had since the mid ’90s.

8. MDMA: like I was saying earlier, club drugs are huge right now. Best part about the ecstasy thing though is that we’re not talking pressies here, just pure crystalized love. You can hear it in the work of groups like Sleep 8 Over and (of course) Pure X. But I think it’s most evidenced by song’s like The Weeknd’s “High for This” and on Pictureplane’s brilliantly positive album Thee Physical (Lovepump United).

9. Weed: not that weed ever goes away, but it’s had a really strong year. Seems like everybody’s smoking blunts and flipping pounds these days. Wiz Khalifa, A$AP, Lil B, Lil Wayne, Miley fucking Cyrus. and of course Zip and a Double Cup himself, Juicy J., which brings us to our big winner…

10. Promethazine: Lean, purple drank, double cup, sizzurp — codeine cough syrup has a lot of names, and it’s been an important factor in rap, particularly Southern rap, for a very long time. But that influence is spreading. Bands like Salem have created whole new subgenres of music built off applying the late great DJ Screw’s production sensibilities as liberally as possible. New York Rappers like A$AP Rocky are singing the praises of Screw and Pimp C while repping Harlem and putting New York back on the map. I think 2012 is gonna be all about double cup dinner parties and art walks. Do yourself a favor, call your doctor and fake a cough, pop in Clams Casino’s Instrumental mixtape and/or LIVELOVEA$AP and chill for a bit.

Man/machine

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Man/machine

arts@sfbg.com

Year in Music "Here in my car / I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors / It’s the only way to live in cars." — Gary Numan, "Cars"

Are friends electric? In 2011, synthpop sounded like a safe vehicle with which to whirl forward, one wheel in the quickly receding past and the other in the fast-coming future.

As the light turned green on ’11 and roared on through 11/11/11, those binary 1’s pointed to the synthetic pleasures harking back to Human League, Yazoo, and Depeche Mode. Early in the year, La Roux’s Elly Jackson took home a Grammy for her eponymous debut — signifying the U.S. music mainstream’s approval.

You could detect the synths popping beneath the beckoning, bright textures of Vetiver’s "Can’t You Tell," the Paisley Park-meets-"Enola Gay" washes of Nite Jewel’s "One Second of Love," and the Doppler effect textures of Toro y Moi’s "Talamak," while the much lamented departure of James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem from the intersection of synth beats and rock squall threw up yet another sign that synthpop was on the move. Tellingly, Holy Ghost!, on Murphy’s DFA imprint, cast its eyes back longingly to the chilly dreamtime of the Ministry’s "I Wanted to Tell Her," lodging it in a busy thicket of bumping, rumbling bass and keys.

Don’t fear the ’80s: Yesteryear synth populists the Cars released its first LP with Ric Ocasek since its ’88 split, and the year closed with Gary Numan getting the avant seal of approval as an honored guest at the recent Battles-curated ATP show. Adding fuel to the firing pistons, locally, was a look back at the real Bay underground article: this year’s comp BART: Bay Area Retrograde (Dark Entries) wiped the "Clean Me" messages written in dust from tracks like Voice Farm’s "Voyager." The latter almost seemed to lend its synth tone directly to the sinewy, eerily sensual "Nightcall" by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx off the Drive soundtrack (Lakeshore).

Much like that violently dreamy film’s Danish-American hybrid, "Nightcall" and College’s "A Real Hero" teetered between the almost OTT strain of romanticism and superchilled detachment embodied by the best of synthpop— the simple hooks and breathy, girlish vocals perfectly complementing the propulsive, forward-thrust mechanism of the tracks. You can’t drive those songs from your head.

In one of the strongest contenders for (double) album of the year, M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (Mute), synthpop was only one component of the deep, ambitious, magnificent sprawl, a recording much like French transplant Anthony Gonzalez’s adopted L.A. home. Its breakout single, "Midnight City," tapped both the brooding nihilism of Grand Theft Auto and the noirish retro-epics of Michael Mann in collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, as leader Anthony Gonzalez emotes wistfully, "Waiting in a car /Waiting for a ride in the dark / Drinking in the lounge / Following the neon signs / Waiting for a roar / Looking at the mutating skyline / The city is my church / It wraps me in the sparking twilight."

Cue the orchestral, rollercoaster synths, faux bird calls, and reclaimed-from-the-cheese-bin skywalking sax. It may say as little as Numan’s "Cars"—making it the perfect tabula-rasa fodder for both Victoria’s Secret commercials and capitalism-happy How to Make It in America —but like a European native finding inspiration in the simultaneously alienating and freeing highways of El-Lay or J.G. Ballard, both songs prove that you needn’t rely on language to move a listener.

Rearview mirror

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Rearview mirror

emilysavage@sfbg.com

Year in Music “Out of all the records I’ve recorded, that was the worst experience,” says prolific Dinosaur Jr. bassist and Sebadoh guitarist Lou Barlow. He’s speaking of Bug, the classic, feedback opening alternative rock album Dinosaur Jr. released on SST in 1988.

Why then, did the band tour the East Coast during the spring of 2011, playing the album start to finish, and why does it continue to play it now — appearing at the Fillmore this week? “All the negative associations I had with it are gone. What I hear now is a really great batch of songs that J [Mascis] wrote.” He goes on to describe the early days of Dinosaur Jr., “when we formed it was my first textured, creatively ambitious band — and that was at the age of 17 — so it’s a real part of my DNA now. Musically, it’s a very familiar spot to be at.”

There, in a history-rich bed with a familiar texture, is the spot where aging rock fans crave to be. According to Simon Reynold’s exhaustive and polarizing 2011 tome Retromania, it’s also the space in which we all now inhabit, new listeners and old. His introductory words are harsh, if provoking. “The 2000s [was] the decade of rampant recycling: bygone genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material, reprocessed and recombined. Too often with new young bands, beneath their taut skin and rosy cheeks, you could detect the sagging grey flesh of old ideas.” Brutal.

In some sections, Reynolds is dead on, and his methodology applies equally to the year in rock that was 2011 (though the book was written in the summer of 2010). We couldn’t possibly look back at these twelve months without including the grander trail of rock’n’roll, and how it was again repackaged throughout the year.

Given the retro-crazed times we live in, to judge the year, we must also fall deeper down the nostalgia inkwell, in part due to the onslaught of monster reunion tours, complete album trips, rereleased records, anniversary celebrations, and retro reverential new rock/garage/punk acts of 2011. One point Reynolds makes, is that the span of time elapsed between creative endeavor and nostalgia for said endeavor is rapidly fading.

Just recently the Weakerthans — which formed in 1997 — spent four power-pop nights at the Independent, playing one whole album from its catalogue each night. Earlier this year, Archers of Loaf launched a reunion tour (13 years after its demise) and the reissue of four of its studio albums on Merge. There were also reunion shows and tours from the Cars, Kyuss, Pulp, Cibo Matto, Masters of the Hemisphere, Death From Above 1979 (big up to Treasure Island Music Festival), and strangely, J. Geils Band, the Monkees, and System of a Down.

There were rereleased Smashing Pumpkins albums, a Throbbing Gristle greatest hits, and a Hot Snakes one-off (at press time) at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ Nightmare Before Xmas in Minehead, England — a fest also headlined by Archers of Loaf.

There was Nirvana’s Nevermind 20 year anniversary celebration, and Metallica’s 30 years strong, though the output for these celebrations was obviously disparate given the nature of the acts. Nirvana’s label released a series of singles and special edition anniversary batches. Metallica took perhaps the most surprising turn a no-frills metal act could — it paired with Lou Reed and released a confusing collaboration, Lulu, though the real anniversary celebration was yet to come — a four-night, devil-horned, juicy guest-starred tête-à-tête for hardcore fans at the Fillmore.

There were also the bands that just felt retro, or at least, stood with one foot in rock’s not-so-distant past. But the good ones were more reverent than carbon vintage copy, acts like Dum Dum Girls and Cults, played on romantic ideals of ’60s garage and slipped in some doo-wop and girl group-esque vocals, but neither directly mimics a particular era. In its debut follow-up, Only In Dreams (Sub Pop), Dum Dum Girls also referenced a distinct ’90s Mazzy Star vibe. Meanwhile, Canadian chanteuse Austra looped back to the ’80s with prominent synth and operatic love songs, and the Beets happily alluded to its own ’60s garage-meets-Ramones influences on fourth album Let The Poison Out (Hardly Art), like something out of a Nuggets boxset; a modern, bilingual Seeds.

Locally, longtime Ty Segall band member Mikal Cronin finally made the move to San Francisco in 2011. Raised on surf and garage rock down south, he brought with him a distinctive nostalgic sound; his solo self-titled record — released this year on Trouble in Mind — was one of the most intriguing of the year. Like many now living and playing in SF, he’s drawn to vintage rock’n’roll and garage, but his style stands out above the pack.

This year he released a multifarious record of crusted garage-punk and swirling psych-pop, glamorized with the hazy, sand-swept beach days pictured in vintage Polaroids. Opening track “Is It Alright” could be plucked from a psychedelic Beach Boys LP, laid thicker with grime. And Cronin, when pressed, reveals a long history of influences — along with current bands such as Thee Oh Sees and Strange Boys — mentioning longtime favorites “Emitt Rhodes, Del Shannon, the Beatles, the Beach Boys,” adding “I’ve been trying to relisten to the classics” And yes, the remaining Beach Boys were said to be planning yet another reunion for next year, a thrill for likely a few young fans (though the same can not be said for Brian Wilson’s 2011 Disney covers album).

Here’s another spot where Reynolds and I tend to split: I’m an unabashed rearview mirror fan. And while I agree that the “re-s” in our sonic world are sometimes overwhelmingly dull, the opportunity to see live bands that broke up before I was cognizant has just too strong a pull on my psyche. Even Reynolds seems to consent to that last bit, stating in Retromania, “The exceptions to my ‘no reunions’ policy are a few bands that I loved as a youth but never managed to see live.” So wouldn’t that be the case for someone in every audience? The giant pink headphones-wearing toddler I saw at the Iggy Pop show undoubtedly missed the punk singer’s first 40 odd years of shows. Now, will somebody please reunite Operation Ivy, Minor Threat, and Neutral Milk Hotel for complete album tours, or is that too sacrilegious for your precious memories? It’d just be for my own comfort, obviously. *

 

 

EMILY SAVAGE’S TOP 10 SHOWS OF 2011

Feb. 26: No Age, Grass Widow, and Rank/Xerox at Rickshaw Stop

April 27: Steve Ignorant plays Crass songs at Slim’s

June 1: Gayngs at Independent

July 13: King Khan & Gris-Gris, Shannon & the Clams, King Lollipop/1-2-3-4 Go! Records Showcase at Oakland Metro Opera House

Sept. 22: Hightower, Black Cobra, and Walken at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Oct. 6: CSS at Fillmore

Oct. 13: Gardens & Villa at Bottom of the Hill

Nov. 5: Wild Flag at Great American Music Hall

Dec. 4: Iggy Pop at Warfield

Dec. 10: Tycho at Independent

That high-priced high-speed rail

Zelda Bronstein
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20
That high-priced high-speed rail

Even Democrats in the state Legislature are starting to get nervous about continuing the high-speed rail program. After all, the price has gone up to close to $100 billion. That’s such a vast sum of money; the state can’t possibly afford that, right?

Well, let’s think about that and put it in a little historical perspective.

The Golden Gate Bridge was constructed during the worst years of the Great Depression. Cost in today’s dollars: $1.2 billion. That’s for one bridge.

BART was built in the 1960s. Cost in today’s dollars: $6.4 billion. For a transit system serving (at the time) three counties.

The California Aqueduct was also built in the 1960s. Cost in today’s dollars: $31 billion.

I can’t find good figures on the historical cost of building the California freeway system, but in 2006 dollars, highway construction runs between $3 million and $19.5 million per lane-mile. That is, a four-line highway costs between $12 million and almost $80 million a mile. If you take just the ten biggest highways in the state (a total of 3,547 miles) and figure a middle-of-the-road average of $40 million a mile, building the backbone of the state’s freeway system would cost $141 billion today.

High-speed rail, of course, gets cars off the road, reduces pollution and fossil-fuel dependence, and offers a much better transportation experience for people moving around California.

Sounds like a bargain to me.

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2

tredmond@sfbg.com

I want to take a few Republicans on a road trip.

A few days after the GOP-led Congress cut off funding for high-speed rail in California, I drove to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving. I wish the critics of the project were with me in the car, with two kids fighting in the back seat, constant traffic delays, and about as unpleasant an automobile excursion as you can imagine.

I hate driving. When I was 16, in the New York suburbs, all I wanted to do was drive; now I can’t stand it. But when you’re invited to a friend’s house 380 miles away and flying is too expensive and the one rail line that lumbers along the north-south corridor takes 14 hours and is always three or four hours late, there’s not much of an option.

And even by my standards, I-5 is a miserable experience. It’s crowded, it stinks like the piss of 5,000 doomed cows, and it goes on forever. On and on and on, through fields where big agricultural corporations using heavily subsidized water grow cotton in the desert, up the grapevine, down the grapevine, fighting trucks and too many cars, no place to stop and stretch your legs … I-5 isn’t a working road like 101, where people commute to work and go shopping and get on and off after a few miles. Most of the way from Sacramento to L.A., there’s nowhere to go — 40 miles or more between exits. Everybody on the road — all 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 or however many gasoline-powered steel boxes were crammed onto the concrete ribbon Thanksgiving week — were in it for the long haul. People drive I-5 to get from one end of the state to the other; that’s why the thing exists.

And that’s why it’s about the best place in the country to run a high-speed rail line.

Seriously: I bet 90 percent of the people on that wretched roadway Thanksgiving week would have been thrilled to take a train directly from downtown San Francisco (or Sacramento) to Union Station in L.A. — particularly if the ride took half the time of the drive and cost about the same.

I can talk forever about fossil fuels and climate change and air pollution and all the reasons people should get out of their cars. But all you have to do to convince any reasonable person that driving from S.F. to L.A. is a bad idea is to do it.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

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

OPENING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONGOING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh oh … feds raid pot clubs in Seattle

Zelda Bronstein
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Uh oh … feds raid pot clubs in Seattle

The feds have launched a coordinated series of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in the Pacific Northwest. The Stranger in Seattle has extensive coverage:

Federal agents and local law enforcement are executing a volley of raids on medical-marijuana disperses throughout Western Washington this afternoon, according to several sources, who say some of the proprietors are being handcuffed and taken away in squad cars. Thus far, we’ve received reports of busts in Olympia, Lacey, Tacoma, Puyallup, and Seattle.

The Cannabis Defense Coalition has posted a tally of 14 dispensaries raided today.

The raids are leaving patients empty handed and it’s not clear what comes next or whether any of the Western Washington clubs will survive.

This is very bad news, and you have to wonder:

The feds have threatened pot clubs across California and shut down at least two in San Francisco. They’re trying to shut down a lot more in the Seattle area. At least 14 mayors have been on a conference call to coordinate strategy against the Occupy movement. Are the feds involved in that, too?

Is November the month that governments across the country, working together, are going to strike back at medical pot and Occupy? What possible reason could the Obama administration have to do that, one year before an election that he won’t win without the support of the people who are getting arrested, evicted, abused and forced to lose their medical suppliers?

What the fuck is going on?

 

 

 

Dick Meister: Mucho car!

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based former sports car driver.

It’s gone forever, my beloved Triumph Spitfire, that classic, marvelous looking British sports car that never ran anywhere near as well as it looked. Pearl white it was, with black trim. Pretty. But noisy, roaring sports-car-like down streets and highways to disturb my neighbors and who knows how many others.

For more than 30 years my 1979-model British beauty served me, going everywhere I wanted it to go, drawing approving glances and remarks from pedestrians and other drivers. It was, as one Spanish-speaking admirer exclaimed, “mucho car!”

The Spitfire also gave me the chance to spend lots of time with John, an extremely able, pleasant and sympathetic mechanic. Not to mention the tow truck drivers I often called on to get the car to John’s place of business for fixing,

It also won me the acquaintance of Anthony, the attendant in the garage of the radio station where I regularly recorded commentaries. Whenever I drove in, his eyes lit up. And on those frequent occasions when the Spitfire was being cared for by John, and I arrived in my wife’s humble Toyota sedan, Anthony was clearly disappointed and concerned. He sincerely wanted to know right away whether something bad had happened to “the little car?”

But the Spitfire and I have both become too old to remain together – though the car’s looks don’t reveal its advanced age. My wife Gerry and I were reminded of that recently by two teenage boys who were walking by on the street adjacent to where we had just parked and were sitting with the car’s vinyl top pulled back.

“What,” one boy loudly asked, “is that funny old couple doing in that slick-ass car?”

So now we have parted for good. The memories, however, remain.

It seems not everyone is familiar with Triumph Spitfires, which don’t have brand name labels affixed to their bodies like most other cars. The rarity of the unlabeled Spitfires became frighteningly evident soon after we began our long relationship. My wife Gerry and I were purring along, a mild summer breeze flowing gently around us, brilliant sky above, and not a highway patrolman in sight. Sixty, seventy . . .

Suddenly, a car roared up behind us and then pulled alongside. The driver waved and shouted. What was he saying? “Flat? Flat? “

My God, and we were going close to 80! Gerry didn’t panic. She never does. But me, well . . . “Look! Look! Which tire! Find it! Watch out! Hang on!”

The car next to us slowed as we slowed, and the driver repeated his message. Only now I could see that he was smiling – and hear that he was not saying “flat” at all. The word was “Fiat” as in, “Is that a Fiat, or what?”

And there were those kids staring intently from the rear of cars in front of us on freeways, demanding to know what they were looking at. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on the road with two, three, maybe four kids mugging and waving and pointing as we rolled full tilt down the road.

Coming upon suspicious characters hovering about the car in darkened parking lots and alongside the curb on dark city streets was exciting, too. They always said things like, “Just trying to figure what make car you got here, mister.” But life in the big city being what it is, I was never sure about that.

Yet it was quite nice to be approached in garages and parking lots by young women anxious to learn the identity of “that great looking car.”

Some people didn’t even bother asking the question. One day, for instance, there was a couple crossing the street in front of us, eyeing my magnificent unlabeled machine.

“What?” asked the man, smirking most knowledgably. “A Fiat, of course.” Imagine. My unlabeled British gem being taken again for an Italian.

Then there was the time after I came out of a building in which I had been transacting some important business, quite aware the time had expired on the parking meter. A meter maid in no–nonsense navy blue was slowly circling my unlabeled Spitfire, peering quizzically at the front, side and rear.

“Ah,” said I. “Just in time.”

“No,” said she. “Ticket’s written up. Just looking to see what make to put on it.”

“Oh, ho. And what happens if I don’t tell you?”

“Nothing. I’ll just write it up, ‘Make unknown.’ Actually, you know, it doesn’t really matter to me what it is.”

The final insult to the Spitfire came on its very last day in my possession. It was in one of its frequent non-operating moods, so I yet one more time called AAA for a tow. Out came a truck in four hours – four hours! – a truck equipped to carry, not a beautiful sports car, but a mere motorcycle. The dispatcher had assumed that my Triumph Spitfire was – you guessed it – a Triumph-brand motorcycle.

I tried to drive the car out of the garage and onto the flatbed tow truck’s ramp. Click! Click! Click! Over and over I turned the key and pumped the gas pedal, expecting the usual roar. But the car refused to start. I could only conclude that my beloved Spitfire didn’t want to leave me after all our years together. Finally, the reluctant car was pushed up and onto the truck.

What a humiliating way to go for the Spitfire. For me, too. At least I was able to send the car off to a very good home – John the mechanic’s garage, where it will be on display with a half-dozen other bright, shiny, aged and I assume happy classic British sports cars.

I’ll miss the excitement and feeling of adventure that came with driving what I freely to concede was a highly undependable auto. Despite the fondness I now feel for the departed car, I can’t quite forget the feelings of genuine panic it too often caused me. Too many times, I’d be driving along happily, when, suddenly, the engine would fail me. “Sputter! Sputter! Sputter!” I panicked as I searched desperately for a safe place to park my temperamental machine.

The greatest adventure was my last. I was driving up a very steep San Francisco hill, cars moving in a steady stream in both directions. Then, suddenly, no brakes! Down I plunged, backwards, at ever-accelerating speed, until, finally, I smashed into a neighbor’s parked car. I had no other choice.

I also had no choice but to spend lots to get the brakes replaced. I was used to that, however. I calculate that over the 32 years of our life together, I spent more than $14,000 on repairs for the car that I bought new for $6200.

It’s taken lots of very hard thinking, but I’m finally reconciled to losing what has been my attractive daily companion for three decades. That’s all there is to it.

It’s gone. Gone!

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based former sports car driver.

The Performant: Revenge of the nerds

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Gaiman and Palmer, the Bay Area Science Festival, and a live game of Frogger

Nerd might still be a four-letter word in high school locker rooms (assuming these are still high school locker rooms to be found), but there’s really never been a better time in history to be an adult nerd. No matter if your inclinations lie in language, linux, or the laws of thermodynamics, a nerdish life lived well is truly the best revenge for all those real or imagined slings and arrows of awkward youth.

Epitomizing this truism, geek-elite power couple Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer launched a joint mini-tour across the West Coast entitled simply “An Evening with Neil Gaimna and Amanda Palmer,” which turned out to be exactly that, no more and no less.


Though shades of goth tinge both artists’ output, their overall aesthetic is more playful than grim. Neil Gaiman, a prolific writer in many mediums, will perhaps always be best known for his long-running graphic novel series The Sandman, while Amanda Palmer, first hit international acclaim as co-founder of the antique punk/Weimer cabaret act The Dresden Dolls. During a pleasurably meandering three-hour evening at the Brava Theatre (two days before their appearance at The Palace of Fine Arts), the two performed bits of their own work—Neil reading from his 2006 collection of short stories Fragile Things, she playing the ukulele and piano with her singular panache. The songs that they performed together were naturally the highlights. Who knew that Neil Gaiman had a torch singer tucked within his black garb and quiet English reserve? He also penned the lyrics for some of the more notable tunes, including a lovelorn lament “I Google You,” plus one of opening act The Jane Austen Argument’s tunes: “Holes.”

It was a brainiac weekend all around, thanks to the Bay Area Science Festival, which hosted a plethora of walking tours, lectures, exhibitions, and hands-on activities for all. Ducking into my friendly neighborhood Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror fiction bookshop, Borderlands, I got an earful from science fiction authors Scott Sigler, Mira Grant, and Jeff Carlson about the “Science of Science Fiction,” primarily about how much research goes into being able to create with a mostly scientific justification for “melting faces” and “zombification”.

Last but not least, the Come Out and Play Festival, wrapped up a week’s worth of street games with an intensely-packed weekend of battle-scaled dodgeball, cardboard tube fighting, city-wide scavenger hunts, and labyrinths. In Everett Middle School’s vast playground, about forty adults plus a handful of kids, showed up to play a few rousing rounds of Field Frogger, a completely analog twist on the classic arcade game of yore. Participants playing “froggers” sat on giant yoga balls and bounced through an obstacle course of banner-carrying “cars,” “turtles,” and ”logs.” By the end of the morning, there were six froggers hopping through the roads and rivers at the same time, which gave the playing field more of an appearance of a collision course than in the original Konami version, combining innovation with chaos and homage with humor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDgqJjht2vQ

Rat trap

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Rat trap

news@sfbg.com

The contents of the ubiquitous bright yellow packages of a common household product are making some local activists go green. Residents are roiling against rats in Berkeley, Marin is trying to attract owls to eat them, and San Francisco is busy persuading stores to stop selling some of the most popular rat baits even before the federal government pulls the plug on pellet-type rodent poisons.

A battle is brewing between the $1 billion pesticide industry that makes D-Con and other common pellet-form rat and mouse poisons and the Environmental Protection Agency, which said June 4 it would either cancel and ban them or, depending on what they contain, require them to be sold with a childproof device.

Several of the makers of the rodenticides have gone to court to fight the proposal, which was supposed to go into effect by now. And four of the companies — Woodstream, Inc., Liphatech, Inc., Reckitt Benckiser, and Spectrum Group — won’t commit to stop making the products during the appeal process. In a press release, Reckitt said its anti-rat pellets are safe and "lawful for sale" unless a court orders otherwise. After the ban announcement, Alan Pryor, Liphatech’s sales director, called the EPA "an agency run wild."

In January, the EPA sued Reckitt in an attempt to instigate misbranding proceedings against the firm’s pellet products instead of canceling them, which could take courts a year or two to decide. But a district court ruled in favor of the company, calling the agency’s bid to speed things up via misbranding "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law."

The stakes are enormous. Rodent pellet products are strong sellers at hardware stores. Rodent prevention "is an issue throughout the year," says Paulino Tamayo, pest control buyer for San Francisco’s Cliff’s Variety. "Customers are constantly inquiring about it."

One reason: up to 4,000 children under the age of five are reportedly bitten by rats, which carry more than 70 known diseases, in large cities in the U.S. per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. It’s not just children who are seeing the rats.

On Sept. 20, disgusted subway workers demonstrated at New York’s Jamaica Central Terminal, where rats were reported multiplying and even infiltrating train cars. Claiming cutbacks by the MTA were contributing to increased trash and waving a banner reading "New Yorkers Deserve A Rat-Free Subway," members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 persuaded thousands of riders to sign a web petition. The New York Daily News reported the MTA is eliminating 254 cleaning jobs.

Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety & Pollution Prevention, said the EPA issued the change to "keep our children and pets safe from these poisons." Every year, the American Association of Poison Control Centers receives 12,000-15,000 reports of kids under the age of six being exposed to rodent bait.

Some analysts think the unreported exposure rate could be 10 times as high; the EPA estimates it’s four times as much. A 2006 EPA study found that of 68,005 children under six exposed to rodenticides, 18,084 had to be treated at a health care facility.

And according to the ASPCA’s National Animal Poison Control Center, tens of thousands of pets, livestock, and wildlife are being poisoned by rodenticides per year. "It’s common," says Dr. Camille DeClementi, senior director of the NAPCC. "Dogs frequently get into bait."

The EPA wants to ban 20 products with brodifacoum, which is in D-Con, and three other chemicals (bromadiolone, difethialone, and difenacoum) for use in residences. But pesticides with the chemicals could still be used by exterminators and farm owners. On Sept. 7, the agency said it would meet Nov. 29 to consider "scientific conclusions" supporting its decision; it’s accepting comments through Nov. 15.

One looming question: will the ban work? Some mom and pop shop owners are so desperate for sales in the recession that they’ve turned to offering dirt-cheap but illegal rat poisons, often from China. On Sept. 19, 12 people were arrested in New York City’s Chinatown for selling brodifacoum and sodium fluoroacetate-laced products which, because they look like cookies, could attract children, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said at a news conference. The U.S. has forbidden use of sodium fluoroacetate against rats since 1972.

And while commending the EPA "for trying to reduce the risk of poisoning," DeClementi says that although the new regulations would stop most cats from being poisoned, many dogs will simply chew open the poison-strewn blocks, called "bait stations," that will be required if the regulations take effect. "Dogs," she says, "explore the world with their mouths. The same thing that makes the bait attractive to rodents will make it attractive to dogs. Dogs will seek the stations out."

Worse yet, DeClementi, a veterinarian who’s been with the ASPCA since 1999, predicts that the ban will produce an unintended consequence: if they lose in court, pest control companies will switch to selling a class of other, even more deadly poisons known as "first generation" rodenticides.

And their two most likely choices, believes DeClementi, will be bromethalin, a neurotoxin which causes paralysis or seizures that are almost impossible to treat, and cholecalciferol, a form of vitamin D which, in high doses, induces kidney failure that requires lengthy and expensive treatment.

"I wonder if sterlizing rodents would work better?" she asks. "But would eating rats on birth control also kill birds of prey?"

For now, she favors products that catch rodents "in a little house," such as rat zappers, and telling bird lovers to "keep their bird seed in containers instead of bags."

Others favor more natural approaches. After rats seeking warm places to nest caused a reported $5,000–<\d>$7,000 in damage to vehicles by chewing their carpets and other parts in the garage of the Marin County Civic Center, the county, in cooperation with the Hungry Owl Project, spent less than $1,000 to put up six barn owl boxes adjacent to the San Rafael building September 10. Each owl family can consume up to 5,000 of the voracious vermin per year.

Meanwhile, not everyone is waiting for the EPA’s rules to go into effect. Retailers around the USA are starting to withdraw rat pellet bait products.

Now that the EPA has published its rule change, stores in New York must, under state law, take the rat bait products off their shelves. And after the discovery of four dead Cooper’s hawks, three of which tested positive for rodenticide poisoning, activists in California say they will press for the enactment of a similar law.

"I’m outraged at the makers of these rodenticides for not caring about people or the welfare of animals," says Lisa Owens Viani, who founded Raptors Are The Solution (RATS) this summer after a Cooper’s hawk was found dead on a sidewalk off Berkeley’s Bancroft Street, four years after three other Cooper’s hawks died in her Berkeley neighborhood. Tests by the University of California at Davis showed the sidewalk hawk had ingested the rodenticides brodifacoum and diphacinone; two of the other birds tested positive for brodifacoum.

"The companies that are fighting (the EPA) are some of the same ones that make rodent traps," she says. "They will still have plenty of other products to sell."

Owens Viani, who led a jam-packed organizing meeting of RATS August 26, says part of her motivation to act is "a personal thing. I have lots of animals. My vet told me he’s seen lots of dogs, cats, and horses that have been poisoned by rats."

"A little girl was devastated to come across the young juvenile hawk that had bled to death on the sidewalk," she says.

"At first, I went door to door and passed out fliers, asking if anyone else was finding dead birds, for a five block radius," remembers Owens Viani. She discovered that although most bird books say Cooper’s hawks eat other birds, a local photographer had shot images of them also feeding rats to their young.

RATS plans to urge hardware and chain stores in the San Francisco Bay Area to immediately stop selling the products named by the EPA. "We want to push them along," says Owens Viani. "People are really concerned about this problem. They are tired of relying on poisons."

Meanwhile, on Sept. 9, San Francisco sent letters to about 140 hardware stores, big box stores, and garden centers, asking them to voluntarily "pledge to stop ordering" the affected products by Sept. 15. Signed by Melanie Nutter, director of the city’s Department of Environment, the letter included a list of "alternative rat and mouse baits" that meet the EPA’s standards.

"The EPA is being hamstrung" by the court battle, says Chris Geiger, San Francisco’s green purchasing manager. "The products in question are highly toxic. We think we owe it to the people of San Francisco to let them know about this situation and to encourage them not to sell or buy this stuff."

"The good thing is that there are other things people will buy instead," adds Geiger.

It isn’t the first time San Francisco’s been involved in the rodenticides controversy. In 2007, it virtually banned the use of rodenticides on city-owned properties, except for sewers, "where," says Geiger, "there’s nothing else we know of that can be used" to kill rats.

Sensing a potentially explosive issue that could pit environmentalists against people with health concerns about rats, Geiger says the city is trying to work with store owners in order to avoid trouble. "We want to help vendors not have people picketing outside their hardware outlets," he says. In coming weeks, San Francisco plans to hold community meetings to deal with consumer concerns about rodenticides.

So far, more than 15 stores have complied with the request. Among them: Sloat Garden Centers’ entire chain, including its stores in San Francisco, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Kentfield, Novato, and Danville; Papenhausen Hardware, in West Portal; and Cliff’s Variety, in the Castro.

Says Cliff’s Tamayo: "We’re selling out what little we have left of the old products and have already restocked our shelves with new items." At first, Tamayo considered slashing prices to lure worried customers back to the store. "I thought I might have to put them on sale," he says. But after getting only four complaints, Cliff’s is, at least for now, staying the course.

As for Owens Viani, she says it’s also now time to push the state to do what San Francisco is doing but on steroids, by having the Golden State order harmful rodenticide products removed from stores. "We want California to pass a law, so we are going to approach a legislator to get a bill going," says Viani, who lives in the flatlands of Berkeley, which is a prime breeding area for rats.

For information about the next meeting of RATS or to help the group succeed, please go to www.hungryowl.org/kboib or contact Owens Viani at lowensvi@sbcglobal.net.

Film Listings

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

OPENING

*Bedazzled and The Car After several weeks of delivering some fairly purgatorial cinematic meditations on Mephistopheles, the Vortex Room’s final demonic double bill is da bomb. First up is mother of all cult comedies Bedazzled (1967), in which Goon Show regulars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore ramped up their anticipation of Monty Python-esque absurd sketch-humor outrages by positing themselves as wily Devil and major chump in a not-so-swinging contemporary London. Moore’s besotted (with the divine Eleanor Bron) Wimpy Burger employee gets seven wishes for true happiness in exchange for his soul, but each fantasy granted — ranging from animation to killer pop-star satire to nuns on trampolines — somehow comes with a fly in its ointment. Too ahead of its time for popular success (despite an elongated cameo by reigning sexpot Raquel Welch as Lillian Lust), Bedazzled is now a bit dated, but still bloody marvelous. One doubts that compound adjective was ever applied to The Car (1977), which came out a decade later and sort of managed to couple 1975’s Jaws and 1976’s The Omen (albeit without achieving anywhere near their success). A killer car — a black Continental Mark III, to be precise — trolls around the Southwest edging bicyclists off cliffs, mowing down pedestrians, even attacking potty-mouthed schoolteachers inside their homes. (This last scene alone is definitely worth the price of admission.) What’s more, there appears to be no driver, suggesting this vehicle is fueled by pure evil. James Brolin at his hairiest is the local sheriff whose guns alone can’t save the town. Unquestionably silly, The Car nonetheless remains the Rolls Royce of supernaturally-possessed-automotive-transportation movies. Vortex Room. (Harvey)

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

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

Immortals Tarsem Singh (2006’s The Fall) directs Mickey Rourke and Stephen Dorff in this CG-laden mythology adventure. (1:50) Presidio.

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

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

Jack and Jill Adam Sandler plays a dude who has a Thanksgiving from hell thanks to his twin sister (played by an in-drag Adam Sandler). Somehow Al Pacino is also involved. (runtime not available) Presidio.

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

Octubre This downtempo drama directed by Daniel and Diego Vega follows Clemente (Bruno Odar), a stone-faced moneylender living in a shabby apartment in Lima, Peru. Clemente’s days couldn’t be more bleak. When he’s not dealing with clients over his kitchen table — appraising watches and jewelry, handing out or collecting cash — he’s eating egg sandwiches and paying cold visits to prostitutes. When one of them leaves a baby girl in his apartment, Clemente goes on a search for the mother. Meanwhile, he enlists a client, Sofía (Gabriela Velásquez), as a live-in nanny for the baby. Both Sofía and the baby add some life and color to Clemente’s apartment and ultimately, his reclusive existence. Octubre is a slow rolling and muted film that’s interested in detail. Most of the time, you’re searching Clemente’s stony face (Odar’s acting is superb and unbroken), hoping he might betray a thought or even better, a feeling — he does. (1:23) SFFS New People Cinema. (James H. Miller)

ONGOING

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

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

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

Footloose Another unnecessary remake joins the queue at the box office, aiming for the pockets of ’80s-era nostalgics and fans of dance movies and naked opportunism. A recap for those (if there are those) who never saw the 1984 original: city boy Ren McCormack moves to a Middle American speck-on-the-map called Bomont and riles the town’s inhabitants with his rock ‘n’ roll ways — rock ‘n’ roll, and the lewd acts of physicality it inspires, i.e., dancing, having been criminalized by the town council to preserve the souls and bodies of Bomont’s young people. Ren falls for wayward preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore — whose father has sponsored this oversolicitous piece of legislation — and vows to fight city hall on the civil rights issue of a senior prom. Ren McCormack 2.0 is one Kenny Wormald (prepped for the gig by his tenure in the straight-to-cable dance-movie sequel Center Stage: Turn It Up), who forgoes the ass-grabbing blue jeans that Kevin Bacon once angry-danced through a flour mill in. Otherwise, the 2011 version, directed and cowritten by Craig Brewer (2005’s Hustle & Flow), regurgitates much of the original, hoping to leverage classic lines, familiar scenes, and that Dance Your Ass Off T-shirt of Ariel’s. It doesn’t work. Ren and Ariel (Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough) are blandly unsympathetic and have the chemistry of two wet paper towels, the adult supporting cast should have known better, and the entire film comes off as a tired, tuneless echo. (1:53) Four Star. (Rapoport)

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

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

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

Johnny English Reborn (1:41) Four Star.

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

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

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

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

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

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Oranges and Sunshine At the center of this saga of lives ripped apart by church and state is Margaret Humphreys, the Englishwoman who uncovered the scandalous mass deportation of children from England to Australia. In one of her most rewarding roles since The Proposition (2005), her last foray to Oz, Watson portrays the English social worker who in the ’80s learns of multiple cases of now-adult orphans in Australia who don’t know their real name or even age but remember that they once lived in the UK. She starts to explore the past of victims such as Jack (Hugo Weaving) and Len (David Wenham) and tries to reunite them with their families, including mothers who were told their youngsters were adopted into real families. In the course of her work, and at the expense of her own family life, Humphreys discovers the horrors that befell many young deportees — as child slave-laborers — and the corruption that extends its fingers into government and the Catholic church. In his first feature film, director Jim Loach, son of crusading cinematic force Ken Loach, turns over each stone with care and compassion, finding the perfect filter through which to tell this well-modulated story in Watson, whose Humphreys faces harassment and post-traumatic stress disorder in her quest to heal the children who were lured overseas in the hope that they would ride horses to school and pick oranges off a tree for breakfast. (1:45) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

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

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

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

Real Steel Everybody knows what this movie about rocking, socking robots should have been called. Had the producers secured the rights to the name, we’d all be sitting down to Over The Top II: Child Endangerment. Absentee father Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his much-too-young son Max (Dakota Goyo) haul their remote-controlled pugilists in a big old truck from one underground competition to the next. Along the way Charlie learns what it means to be a loving father while still routinely managing to leave cherubic Max alone in scenarios of astonishing peril. Seriously, there are displays of parental neglect in this movie that strain credulity well beyond any of its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em elements. Fortunately the filmmakers had the good sense to make those elements awesome. The robots look great and the ring action can be surprisingly stirring in spite of the paper-thin human story it depends on. And as adept as the script proves to be at skirting the question of robot sentience, we’re no less compelled to root for our scrappy contender. Recommended if you love finely wrought spectacle but hate strong characterization and children. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness. (Jason Shamai)

Revenge of the Electric Car The timing is right for Chris Paine to make a follow-up to his 2006 Who Killed the Electric Car?, a celebrity-studded doc examining the much-mourned downfall of GM’s EV1 — with gas prices so high and oil politics so distressing, even drivers who don’t consider themselves radical environmentalists are interested in going electric, as choices aplenty flood the marketplace. The aptly-titled Revenge of the Electric Car makes nice with GM’s Bob Lutz as he readies the release of the Chevy Volt. It also profiles Silicon Valley’s own electric car startup, Tesla; tracks Nissan’s top gun Carlos Ghosn as he pushes the Nissan Leaf into production; and even digs up an off-the-grid mechanical wizard known as “Gadget,” who makes his living converting regular autos (if a Porsche is “regular”) into vehicles with plug-in power. The film makes it clear that for most of these folks, business comes first — sure, it’s great to be green, but you have to make green, too — and there’s some tension when the crash of 2008 threatens the auto industry’s enthusiasm for planet-friendly innovations. But there’s far more optimism here than Paine’s first Electric Car film, not to mention a refreshing lack of Mel Gibson. (1:30) Lumiere. (Eddy)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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