Castro

SFIFF, day seven: Home, Towne, and Leigh love

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Well, I wasn’t able to catch up with Errol Morris this time around, and I’m bummed, but I secured an interview with screenwriter extraordinaire Robert Towne, which I will share with you later in the week.

I did catch up with Touching Home, the feature debut by local twins Logan and Noah Miller, and after watching it I suspect that their future may lie more in the realm of producing than directing or acting; their meetings may be more interesting than their movies.

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Touching Home touches upon Christmas

Apparently the Millers accosted Ed Harris outside the Castro Theater in 2006, when the actor received the festival’s Peter J. Owens award. They pitched him their project and even showed him a trailer. The movie itself shows similar marketing smarts. It’s the story of twin brothers, both baseball players, who dream of making the big time. One loses his scholarship and the other is fired from his bush league position, so they slink home, get jobs in the local quarry and hope for a chance in the spring in Arizona. Meanwhile, one brother reconnects with their alcoholic, gambling-addicted father (Harris) and finds a cute new girlfriend, leading to fights between the brothers.

Black, white, and color

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Clip this article. Put it on your refrigerator to remind yourself, your roommates, your friends and family to see Medicine For Melancholy.

The story seems simple. In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence with no attempt to reconnect. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance. Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world.

It’s always enriching to see talented artists at work. In mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. The city he sees is the city we know. From the grassy lands of Noe Valley to the quiet hush of the Tenderloin at dawn, Laxton’s eye makes the nearly deserted SF that the two main characters inhabit lush, promising, and sinister.

Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF’s changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways.

Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America’s major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF’s black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie’s couple: Micah doesn’t do SFMOMA; Jo hadn’t known that MoAD existed. Micah sees himself as black first and a man second. Jo refuses to define herself.

At Micah’s apartment, a poster with a 1962 quote from the Redevelopment Agency sparks a conversation. Jo wants to let go of the past. Micah, the native, sees the poster as relevant to Mission Bay.

"Why is everything that is ‘indie’ mean ‘not black?’" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them.

Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF’s soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

Wed/30, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/4, 8:15 p.m., PFA; May 7, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

SFIFF, weekend one: city songs and auteur-itis

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The first Saturday of the SF International Film Festival is usually loaded. This year, the broad array of movies included some disappointments: the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts showed that Phil’s a genius with wide-ranging talents and interesting friends, but it lacked drama; Ermanno Olmi’s One Hundred Nails was a letdown from the director of the masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).

The Castro had the day’s best films, starting with Carlos Saura’s magical Fados, so far one of my favorites in the festival. Fado has recently come back in a big way and Saura does little more than stage several music videos back-to-back with no commentary. But each segment overflows with its own narrative and emotional power, aided by Saura’s expert staging and cinematography (the screen fills with huge squares of bold colors).


Carlos Saura’s Fados completes a trilogy by the director

Highway 51: The 51st SFIFF, week one

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THURS/24
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The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, the entitled, Mick Jagger-lipped Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decade-long affair with the magnetic mistress to his fiancées grandmother (she’s rapt). Locked into place by an attraction at once destructive and indestructible, they’re not star-crossed lovers so much as fatal accomplices. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)
7 p.m. Castro
FRI/25
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Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra’s seventy-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven — Alexandra wanders about the vast compound and war-torn nearby town, trying to re-instill a little humanity between weary, wary occupiers and occupied — but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role (and a non-singing one), veteran opera singer Vishnevskaya etches a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)
7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., PFA
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Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles and a stripped and ripped discipline that allows for only one or two evil cackles from warlord villains, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a brink-of-WWII parable about the uses of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. The year is 1932 and an imperialist Japan has just invaded Manchuria. The next takeover: a peaceful Kyushu karate dojo where the students — arrogant and aggressive Taikan (Tatsuya Naka), dutiful and gentle Giryu (Akihito Yagi), and peacemaker Choei (Yuji Suzuki) — are not quite ready to go quietly into the armed forces. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: the fact that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)
8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki
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Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane — which takes it’s name from a London street on which many immigrants reside — is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. After her mother commits suicide, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is forced to leave Bangladesh in order to marry Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who lives in London, England. There, she submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair with Karim. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)
7:15 p.m., Kabuki
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“The Golem with Black Francis” (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it, this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing in a promised beautiful archival print. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Co-directed by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the Golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history and political commentary. (Harvey)
9:30 p.m., Castro

Area 51

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I agree with my cohort Dennis Harvey — it is always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. There’s something so special about the bodiless head trapped under a glass jar in that movie. As Jan Compton, a.k.a. "Jan in the Pan," actress Virginia Leith seethes and cackles, bringing across pure existential pain more forcefully than any French philosopher with a perma-creased brow. The fact that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die figures in local mad magician Craig Baldwin’s new antic investigation Mock Up on Mu is just one of at least 51 reasons why I’m excited to see it premiere at the 51st SF International Film Festival.

The Guardian‘s deluxe coverage of SFIFF 51 kicks off with a portrait of Baldwin. Elsewhere, Cheryl Eddy discusses blood ties with the sickest father-daughter team around, Dario and Asia Argento. Our stories this week also scope out a pair of life-and-death documentaries; a mod, mod, mod war movie; some new Mexican filmic journeys; the merits of festival awardees; and, last but not least, the eternally fatal allure of the late Gene Tierney. So, before you drown in the dark, before hours of unmapped SFIFF excursions have you feeling like the son or daughter of the brain that wouldn’t die, read all about it here. In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, "we should see cinema as a separate continent" — and we should be cheered by what we see. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

>>For more reviews, previews, news, and daily coverage of SFIFF 51, check out SFBG’s Pixel Vision blog.

>>Highway 51
A road map to SFIFF 51 — films to ride with (and some speed bumps)

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>>Explosive stuff!
Craig Baldwin turns space junk into magickal treasure with Mock Up on Mu
By Dennis Harvey

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>>Blood ties
Asia and Dario Argento go go for a SFIFF trifecta
By Cheryl Eddy

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>>Ashes to ashes
A dance between Dust and Profit motive and the whispering wind
By Matt Sussman

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>>On tour
Mod auteur Serge Bozon makes the war go pop in La France
By Kimberly Chun

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>>Critic’s choice
In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia
By Max Goldberg

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>>Apolitical animal
Mexico’s SFIFF thrillers aren’t thrilling, but Cochochi turns loss into victory
By Jason Shamai

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>>Fierce perm
Robert Towne still knows how to give an award-winning Shampoo
By Maria Komodore

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>>Color her deadly
Leave Her to Heaven‘s strange allure will pull you under
By Johnny Ray Huston

SFIFF: Highway 51

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THURS/24

• The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, Mick Jagger–lipped Ryno de Maginy (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decades-long affair with the magnetic mistress — telling the tale to his fiancée’s grandmother, who is rapt. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra‘s 70-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role, opera veteran Vishnevskaya doesn’t need to sing to etch a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

• Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a parable, set on the eve of World War II, about the use of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)

8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair alone. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki.

• The Golem with Black Francis (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Codirected by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history, and political commentary. (Harvey)

9:30 p.m., Castro.

• Just Like Home (Lone Scherfig, Denmark, 2007) Dogme95 filmmaker Scherfig hones her flair for bittersweet comedy with this goofily enjoyable ensemble piece about a misfit small town that falls into chaos. Much of the film’s story is seen through the eyes of a newcomer who has escaped from a bizarre religious cult; in accordance, Scherfig records the earnest bumbling of town folk through a unique lens, sometimes smeared with streaks of overexposed or double-exposed shapes and colors. The result is only as deep as a standard-issue Hollywood romantic comedy, but it’s deftly handled and slyly endearing. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

• Lady Jane (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2007) Lean and mean as a killer B-movie, Lady Jane shows that the French noir still possesses a powerful measure of chilly fire. Its namesake, played by the 50-ish, formidable, and fierce Ariane Ascaride, perfectly embodies the genre. Roused from bourgeois slumber when her son is suddenly snatched, Lady Jane reconnects with two old partners in crime to raise a ransom. Director Guédiguian is overly fond of his flashbacks but redeems himself with the care he puts into imagery that avoids Bogart-by-way-of-Belmondo clichés. (Chun)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/ 27, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

• You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007) There is one thing wrong with Swede Roy Andersson’s movies: there aren’t enough of them. His fourth feature in 30 years is another almost indescribable gizmo that strings together absurdist tableaux to increasingly hilarious and elaborate effect. From an incongruous Louisiana brass band to unhappy barflies forever facing last call, the characters here are comic Scandinavian-miserabilist pawns in a cosmic joke told largely through music — and painted a fugly shade of lime green. Bizarre and delightful. (Harvey)

6:15 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/27, 8:30 p.m., PFA; Tues/29, 7 p.m., Kabuki

SAT/26

Fados (Carlos Saura, Portugal/Spain, 2007) Attempting to do for the Portuguese torch song what he once did for Spain’s gypsy blues with Flamenco (1995), Saura soars and stumbles with Fados, presenting wonderful performances and a few unfortunately dated modern-dance treatments. Chico Buarque, Mariza, Lila Downs, and Césaria Évora lend their varied styles and impassioned voices to the form. But one wishes Saura would have stepped aside further for the effervescent, soulful lilt of Caetano Veloso; the plush, liquid tones of Lura; the arch, curled-lip warble of Ana Sofia Varela; and old world narrative grace of Carlos do Carmo. (Chun)

2:45 p.m., Castro. Also Mon/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

Ice People (Anne Aghion, USA/France, 2007) The movies have long made the Antarctic the terrain of terrifying monsters and cute creatures, but the beings discovered by Anne Aghion in this documentary bare fatigue, not fangs, and they are far more prickly than cuddly. Aghion’s portrait of the inhabitants of the McMurdow Research Station spends most of its time with a satellite group of four geologists looking for 20-million-year-old leaf fossils. There’s more depth in the fantastic landscapes, which Aghion lenses far more flatteringly than she does her human subjects. (Sussman)

6:45 p.m., Kabuki. Mon/28, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki

Mataharis (Icíar Bollaín, Spain, 2007) Charlie’s Angels this ain’t: these investigators and would-be Mata Haris of an all-female Madrid detective agency have the unwashed hair, sensible shoes, and bad marriages of everyday wage slaves. Actress-director Bollaín’s skillful, empathetic knack for capturing the grubby, low-light details of working women’s lives glimmers through the pale haze of this promising film. But she falters with the application of narrative-flattening sentiment, predictably reassuring story arcs, and the occasional cheesy slo-mo effect. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 7:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 1:15 p.m., Clay

Walt & El Grupo (Theodore Thomas, USA, 2007) In 1941, Walt Disney and a band of animators, writers, and other artists — which came to be known as El Grupo — journeyed to South America on a goodwill tour. This documentary, codirected by the son of one voyager, gathers wonderful photos, home movies, and a dazzling collection of drawings and cartoon clips to re-create the trip. The trouble is that there’s no real drama. The cumulative view is as sharply Eurocentric as Disney’s was when he went on to make cartoons such as 1942’s Saludos Amigos. (Anderson)
1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 6 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/27

• Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowksi, Australia, 2007) Norma Khouri made headlines and toured the talk show and lecture circuit as a crusading heroine when her 2003 international bestseller Forbidden Love highlighted the phenomenon of honor killings in pockets of the Muslim world. Trouble was, her heartrending story turned out to be a fabrication. As filmmaker Anna Broinowski grows increasingly exasperated with her subject’s fibbing and evasiveness, this documentary develops from an exposé into a portrait of a serial con artist one would be quite happy to see writing her next book from behind bars. (Harvey)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also April 30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 4, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

• Picking Up the Pieces (various, 2007) The most intriguing piece in this shorts program about things lost and found is Death Valley Superstar, Michael Yaroshevsky’s half-hour documentary focusing on Marc Frechette, who was picked off the street to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. Taking his role as a student revolutionary into real life, he subsequently tried robbing a bank, was arrested, and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Also excellent is Radu Jude’s 25-minute Romanian drama Alexandra and John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative revolving around a FEMA worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Harvey)

11:45 a.m., Kabuki. Also April 30, noon, Kabuki.

A Stray Girlfriend (Ana Katz, Argentina, 2007) Writer-director-actress Katz maps out post-breakup transience with a wandering handheld camera and oblique dialog. As her titular character explores a rural township on Argentina’s coast, each scene teeters between bewilderment and menace. Lynne Ramsay covered similar terrain in her minor masterpiece Morvern Callar (2002), though with a dream-inducing soundtrack and enigmatic ellipticism far beyond Katz’s more vanilla approach. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:15 p.m., PFA

MON/28

• Cachao: Uno Más (Dikayl Rimmasch, USA, 2008) Actor, would-be bongo player, and Cuban music fanatic Andy Garcia does right by his idol, the late Cuban musical great Israel "Cachao" Lopez, in this passionate tribute sprinkled with SF sights and centered around a Bimbo’s 365 Club concert. The show was apparently a hot one — it also showcased Bay Area Latin music scholar John Santos, timbalero Orestes Vilato, and vocalist Lazaro Galarraga — and director Rimmasch does it justice by using the performance as a narrative framework for a history that parallels that of contemporary Cuban music. (Chun)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki.

TUES/29

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008) After profiling Robert McNamara in 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris jumps down the chain-of-command to summon US soldiers punished for the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. Ever the showman, he cuts from burnished interviews and photos to reenactments and slow-motion rumbles — we "see" Saddam’s egg frying, giant prison ants, and an exploding helicopter. Such obsessive visualizations seem misplaced and morally confused. The Abu Ghraib story is, among other things, about the unstable, delicate nature of photographic representation. Yet Morris can’t resist auteur-stamped fireworks — how else to explain the typically nutty (and utterly incongruous) Danny Elfman score? (Goldberg)

Part of "Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award: An Evening With Errol Morris," 7:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Color her deadly

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It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains at least one, and arguably two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Blood ties

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

You can keep those classy, highbrow Coppolas. I’ll play the low card with the Argentos any day. This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival is a feast for fans of the father-daughter team: Dario directs Asia in Mother of Tears, his long-awaited final entry in the cultishly beloved "Three Mothers" series, which includes 1977’s Suspiria and 1980’s Inferno. Asia also stars in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, as well as the fest’s opening-night film, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress.

I first encountered the duo under the least relaxing of circumstances at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Press interviews for Mother of Tears were held in a hectically crowded hotel restaurant. Waiting for my turn, I watched as team Argento chowed down a quick lunch, chattering together in Italian about who knows what (witches, ancient artifacts, the weather?). I clutched my tape recorder, feeling possibly the same mixture of fear, awe, and excitement that filled Suspiria’s Suzy Bannion when she arrived at a certain cursed ballet school.

Fortunately, my chat with the pair was devoid of ceiling maggots, underwater zombies, or — as featured in Mother of Tears — demonic monkeys. Probably the most frequent question Dario Argento has had to answer is the most obvious: why did he decide to finish the trilogy now, nearly three decades post- Inferno? "We have a time for everything," he told me, because of course that’s exactly what I asked him first off. "You wait until the idea comes."

There’s no doubt Mother of Tears sprang from Argento’s brain; his signature occult themes, glorious violence, and attention to style (instead of, say, plot) are all accounted for. He cowrote the film’s script with a pair of Americans he met while working on Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (Simona Simonetti and Mother of Tears editor Walter Fasano are also cocredited). The film, which opens theatrically in San Francisco in June, received mixed reviews on the festival circuit. Variety critic Dennis Harvey, who also writes for the Guardian, called it a "hectic pileup of supernatural nonsense." True enough, but I would argue that while Mother of Tears is flawed, it’s enjoyably flawed.

The story revolves around a museum worker named Sarah (Asia Argento) who must summon previously dormant spiritual powers (inherited from her late mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother and Dario’s former partner, Inferno star Daria Nicolodi) to defeat an evil witch’s plot to take over Rome and eventually the world. Eyes are gouged out. Cleavers make short work of necks. Underground pools of muck must be navigated. Udo Kier, playing an exorcist, very nearly reprises his Suspiria role as Exposition Guy. Characters, including witches, take the time to use public transportation. Silly? Yeah, a bit.

Waiting to make Mother of Tears enabled Argento to take advantage of CG, one of his favorite cinematic inventions. His 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome (which also starred Asia) was reportedly the first Italian release that used CG. In Toronto, Argento told me the film has more than 180 visual effects — including a church on fire — which were created in conjunction with Lee Wilson, another Masters of Horror veteran.

The freedom Argento has enjoyed with CG (now, he says, "it’s possible to fly high!") is matched by another door that has opened since the releases of Suspiria and Inferno: the censorship that plagued his early career is less of an issue in these accustomed-to-gore times.

"I hate censors," Argento assured me in our second interview, conducted over the phone in late March. "For Mother of Tears, I talked to the producer, the distributor, the financier [and told them], ‘I want to be free. I want to show my natural reality after so many years.’ And I did that."

In Rome prepping for his next film, simply titled Giallo (sorry, fellow horror nerds, I couldn’t get him to spill any dirty details), Argento reflected on working with his daughter. Stateside, Asia Argento is known chiefly as an actor (she tangled with Vin Diesel in 2002’s XXX and pissed off corpses in 2005’s Land of the Dead). But she’s also directed a handful of films, including 2000’s Scarlet Diva (which Dario co-produced) and the 2004 J.T. LeRoy adaptation, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things.

"She understands what it means to be in the project — not just thinking about her character, but the other parts of the film," Argento said. "Since she was a child, she’d follow me on the shooting of many of my films. She grew up on the sets of my films. She’s very comfortable in this world, this show business."

In Toronto, Asia Argento stepped in as translator for both my questions and her father’s answers. She said that when she heard about the Mother of Tears script, she asked to be a part of the film. As in previous Argento-Argento collaborations like The Stendhal Syndrome, the part called for some grueling physical scenes. Still, the pair seem to have an easy rapport, laughing over the aforementioned underground pool of muck ("That was really gross to do," Asia remembered. "He prepared that for three days, this horrible soup. I would watch him prepare that soup, but I wouldn’t say anything!") Later, over the phone, Dario described he and his daughter as "big friends."

Onscreen, Asia Argento has a certain magnetism that few other performers can claim. In Go Go Tales, she appears in only a few scenes, playing a surly dancer who drags her giant Rottweiler with her everywhere, including into her stripper dance routine. Abel Ferrara, who also directed her in 1998’s New Rose Hotel (she directed him in the 1998 short doc Abel/Asia), calls her a "very, very special actress."

"She’s courageous, she gets out there, and she’s not afraid to take chances with the character or with herself," he said, calling from New York, where he’s working on a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. "When you write a script like [Go Go Tales] obviously you’re looking for the women to bring it to life. We knew we needed people who could really bring something to the table. She’s got that something — it’s indescribable."

Mother of Tears offers Argento a juicier part as a woman who may or may not be totally crazy. But it’s her role as the titular character in The Last Mistress that ranks among her best work to date. It’s a dramatic, passionate period film about an upper-class man’s insurmountable attraction to his moody, impulsive woman on the side (guess who?). Her character pinballs from ecstatic howls to anguished wails, glamorous salon-lolling to beachside pipe-smoking, and dinner table stare-downs to horseback smackdowns. Indeed, it’s a bit over the top, but she pulls it off. As a pair of striking careers can attest, it’s an ability that’s surely imprinted on the Argento genes.

GO GO TALES Sat/26, 11:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/28, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki

THE LAST MISTRESS Thurs/24, 7 p.m., Castro

MOTHER OF TEARS Fri/25, 10:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

7 spring flings

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San Francisco is such a gosh darn charming place, it often seems as if there are more romantic dining options than available dates. To which we say: Never! Spring has sprung and frisky hormones are back in motion after cozy hibernation. Grab the nearest eligible and hit up the following delightfully intimate (and reasonably priced) eateries, if only to test-drive the menu.

BAR BAMBINO


Mouth-watering charcuterie for your cutie, an extensive wine list to revel in, and an atmosphere that, while occasionally heavy on the decibel level, will douse any diminished conversation expectations in attractive lighting — so at least the potential partner across the table will look irresistible. Factor in a nifty little patio in back and an olive oil tasting menu to lubricate the cooing (plus a plethora of lip-smacking Italian dishes) and the mood is set for, if not love, then perhaps a memorable evening in the Mission.

2931 16th St., SF. (415) 701-8466, www.barbambino.com

CAFÉ ANDRÉE


You, of course, have absolutely no problem "closing the deal" — but it’s always good to have a secret weapon on hand, just in case. Café Andrée is mine. Every time I usher a hottie into Andrée’s intimate, well-appointed librarylike setting in the Rex Hotel downtown (bookshelves line the walls and there are globes galore), I know the rest of the evening will be silky smooth. Executive chef Evan Crandall creates incredible pan-global dishes that never fail to tickle. And his new spring menu is on fire. The best part: if your date bores you to tears, you don’t have to bring a book. Café Andrée does it all!

562 Sutter, SF. (415) 217-4001, www.jdvhotels.com/dining/sanfrancisco_cafeandree

COULEUR CAFÉ


Perfect for a leisurely luncheon prelude to any early-evening nuzzling, this Portrero Hill café’s generous outdoor patio and savory dishes may be responsible for more than a few calls into work begging for the afternoon off. The theme is laidback French with some Mediterranean kick, which is actually the description of many a dream date as well. A come-hither combo that always works for me: assiette de merguez with harissa for starters, followed up by the mussels mariniere and pommes frites. Enjoy.

300 De Haro, SF. (415) 255-1021, www.couleurcafesf.com

1550 HYDE CAFÉ AND WINE BAR


Nob Hill: the dating double-entendres are endless. So is the romance, especially if you duck into the intensely cozy 1550 Hyde for an adventurous wine flight and delectable cheese plate or main dish. (If 1550 is featuring its wondrous Provençal fish stew while you’re there, try it and thank me later). The emphasis here is on locally produced goods — the better to draw you closer — and the restaurant discourages cell phones, so your tête-à-tête is guaranteed to be restricted to sweet nothings.

1550 Hyde, SF. (415) 775-1550, www.1550hyde.com

L’ARDOISE


I can’t lie to you. I’m eating a can of Campbell’s tomato soup while I write this, but I’m dreaming of the escargots in garlic parsley sauce and almond-crusted barramundi at this brand-spanking new French delight near Duboce Park. Needless to say, I’ve already spent many a cherished hour there with my lover-of-the-moment. The space is warm and inviting, and the friendliness of the service puts any haughty stereotypes of the French to rest. "L’Ardoise" means chalkboard, so be sure to check the specials, which usually include a number of creamy cheeses as well as unique entrées that’ll have you’re your date shouting "oui, monsieur."

151 Noe, SF. (415) 437-2600, www.lardoisesf.com

TANGERINE


"Tangerine — she is all they claim / With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame." So begins the famous jazz song, "Tangerine" — and the Castro restaurant of the same name seduces with an equal amount of yummy crepuscular abandon. Asian influences dot chef Sean Pattansuvoranun’s menu — and a recent pairing of the lemongrass lamb lollipops appetizer with a drunken duck entrée had me begging for Pattansuvoranun’s home phone number. But he knows better. Tangerine’s decor is crisp-yet-amiable, and the service is fluid, allowing you enough privacy to lick each other’s plates.

3499 16th St., SF. (415) 626-1700, www.tangerinesf.com

BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE CAFÉ


If "bittersweet" describes the tenor of your evening together so far, tune up the ol’ heartstrings with a chocolate-flavored valentine at this cute café, with locations in Upper Fillmore and Oakland. A cocoa cornucopia of tastings, pastries, and specialty drinks — hello, hot steaming cup of chocolate chai — Bittersweet stays open pretty late, and will end any evening on a sumptuous note (even if your sheets remain uncrumpled).

2123 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-8715; 5427 College Ave, Oakl. (510) 654-7159, www.bittersweetcafe.com *

7 spicy suppers

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It’s true. Sometimes I can’t help but crave the unforgettable feeling of burning my lips and tongue with my food. Some people call it masochism, but I can’t help it. Eating real spice that makes my glands swell is heavenly — it’s all I could ask for in a meal. Need a better reason? There’s a saying that eating spicy food gives you a fiery personality. Follow that logic and fiery people make for spicy relationships. And what do you suppose comes from spicy relationships? I’ll let you decide. Mmm, tasty. So what are you waiting for? Amp up your life and get your fire on at one of these gems.

SPICES II


Fire fiends all over the Bay Area will tell you that one of the spiciest cuisines is Sichuanese, which is what Spices II in the Richmond District specializes in. They’ll have your sweat glands working on overload with their mapo tofu, cumin lamb, and spicy Chinese bacon. Beware, though. Sichuanese dishes are made with a special tongue-numbing peppercorn. Don’t be surprised if you leave a bit teary.

291 Sixth Ave., SF. (415) 752-8885

MY TOFU HOUSE


If you’re more in the mood for something hearty to fill you up, then move on from the flames of southern China and to My Tofu House’s Korean delights, like its whip-ass kimchi, soondubu, or an order of kalbi. While it can be tough to get a table during peak hours, waiting guarantees a great meal that warms you from the inside out. The stewlike soft tofu soup is especially adept at combating those foggy, wet city nights.

4627 Geary, SF. (415) 750-1818

INDIAN OVEN


Every fire-lover knows that a staple mascot for spiciness is curry, and there’s no better place to find it than at Indian Oven in Hayes Valley. Tikka masalas of all kinds will bowl you over with their exquisite balances of tongue-searing and flavorful. Also be sure to sample its tandoori and samosas. You can even bring friends with mild palates here; just make sure you specify the level of heat when you order.

237 Fillmore, SF. (415) 626-1628

CHABAA THAI


Thai cuisine makes a strong showing in the ring of fire with Chabaa Thai in the Sunset District. Taking no prisoners, Chabaa’s tom yum soup, pad see yu, or any of its curries leave lasting impressions. I admit this is one cuisine I was cowed by after asking for "as spicy as possible," and was soon brought close to tears as I feebly attempted to lift the chili oil–covered chopsticks to my lips. You win, Chabaa. You win.

2123 Irving, SF. (415) 753-3347

EL CASTILLITO


Not in the mood for Eastern-influenced fare? Mosey over to El Castillito in the Castro, which boasts some murderously hot avocado salsa. Add its gigantic super burritos and mouth-wateringly good quesadillas to the other noteworthy tongue sensations of its many meat selections — the carne asada is a winner — and you’ll be begging for more, even with a food-baby ready to be birthed as you walk out the door.

136 Church, SF. (415) 621-3428

CAFÉ COLUCCI


If you’re looking for a more hands-on approach to your spice adventures, Café Colucci offers a kick in the pants with its spicy green lentil soup; the chicken, shrimp, and lamb tibs; and injera for some doughy goodness to balance out the flames. Ethiopian cuisine also gives you a chance to really dig in, using your manos to scoop up the goodies. Vegetarians will find plenty to satisfy their cravings and given such huge portions, consider bringing friends.

6427 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 601-7999

CHINA VILLAGE


East Bay residents rally around this fabulous addition to the Bay Area spice race. An ideal location for large dining parties, China Village excels at all the typical provincial goodies that make hotheads ecstatic. Their water-boiled beef, appetizer beef tripe and flank (featuring the tongue-numbing peppercorns), and the West-style fish soup with "1,000" chilies will have you crossing the bridge again and again.

1335 Solano, Albany. (510) 525-2285 *

8 spots for outdoor dining

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San Francisco and dining al fresco aren’t necessarily allies. But they’re not exactly enemies. We do have those gorgeous sunny spring days and plenty of places to enjoy them while we drink and dine. If you’ve been heartbroken over the closed kitchen at Zeitgeist, or if the rooftop deck at Medjool feels more like a frat party gone wrong than an afternoon social gathering, you can rest assured there are even places outside of the Mission that serve food and cocktails outside. So hop on your Yamaha, Bianchi, or Muni and check out some of these fabulous places to catch some sun with your buzz. Keep in mind these spots are best for brunch and lunch. And bring a hoodie in case the sun subsides — San Francisco fog is about as forgiving as a hangover.

PIER 23 CAFE


Check out views of the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower from this waterfront café with surfboard decor. Rain or shine, this dive gets packed with beer guzzlers and sunbathers. Enjoy buckets of Pacificos and top-shelf margaritas alongside pub grub like burgers, nachos, and the best fish tacos in town, until your vision’s blurred and skin is blistered. Then enjoy the live music on warmer nights and heat lamps on cooler ones.

The Embarcadero, SF. (415) 362-5125, www.pier23cafe.com

CAFÉ FLORE


The faint of heart need not attempt Café Flore — sharking a table here takes more nerve than buying booze underage. But there’s a reason to steel one’s resolve: this Castro hotspot, voted Best Café in our 2004 Readers’ Poll, is ideal for any occasion, be it brunch, coffee, or an afternoon brew. With breakfast served daily until 3 p.m. and a full bar, there’s no better spot for sun-drenched boozing and cruising.

2298 Market, SF. (415) 621-8579, www.caféflore.com

LA NOTE


The garden patio at La Note is worth the wait — and wait you will, because they don’t take reservations for weekend brunch. Grab a java beforehand to stave off caffeine withdrawal as you watch other patrons enjoy their succulent crème fraîche pancakes. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. Complete with blue-and-white checkered tablecloths, this is the perfect spot for brunch bliss or an afternoon assiette de charcuterie.

2377 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-1535, www.lanoterestaurant.com

PARK CHALET


If bike rides through Golden Gate Park leave you craving a wet one to quench your thirst, this spot — located behind the oceanfront Beach Chalet and just steps from Queen Wilhelmina’s Windmill — offers the perfect spot to rest on your laurels and soak up some sun. Choose from an extensive list of beers from the onsite brewery, and when the fog rolls in, head inside to cozy up to the stone fireplace in the glass-ceilinged dining room. On weekends you can nurse a hangover and get a head start on your day’s drinking with crab benedict and a Bloody Mary.

1000 Great Highway, SF. (415) 386-8439, www.beachchalet.com

CAFÉ CLAUDE


Located in a secluded alley between Union Square and the Financial District, Café Claude is a scrumptious substitute to the crowded Belden Lane. This quaint sidewalk café is reminiscent of Parisian bistros, and is therefore the perfect spot to nosh on a Niçoise salad and sip Sancerre. Plus there’s jazz on weekends.

7 Claude, SF. (415) 392-3505, www.cafeclaude.com

EL RIO


For those days in deep summer when everywhere but the Mission District is covered in heavy fog, there’s no reason to look farther than El Rio for a bit of sunny respite. Its multilevel back deck, barbeques, margaritas, and live salsa bands draw a mostly gay male crowd on Sundays, but you can get down with the ladies every fourth Saturday of the month, when the line to get in snakes down the block.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

SAM’S ANCHOR CAFE


If the summer fog has taken even the Mission captive, escape to Sam’s via the Tiburon ferry. From here, you can sip margaritas on the waterfront deck while viewing the cloud-engulfed city. Snack on fried calamari or head inside post-sunset for fine dining and seafood.

27 Main, Tiburon. (415) 435-4527, www.samscafe.com

PILSNER INN


The Pilsner doesn’t serve food, but its state-of-the-art cooling system, which keeps draft beers chilled to 31 degrees, makes this Park Chow neighbor a Castro gem for gay and straight clientele. Expect to throw back a few on the garden patio with cleated patrons just back from the fields, because Pilsner Inn supports a handful of sports teams, including softball, soccer, bowling, and pool.

225 Church, SF. (415) 621-7058, www.pilsnerinn.com *

Eat these queens’ meats

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It’s time to raise a knife and spoon to end AIDS, as restaurants throughout our fair berg are flooded on the evening of Thurs/24 for Dining Out For Life — a benefit in which 25 percent of all food and drink sales will be donated to StopAIDS. Oh yes, there will be drag queens. Perhaps even breaded and baked. Below are three choice happenings hosted by thirsty trannies aching to shove their meat in your mouth. Reservations strongly encouraged (Click here for 100 more participating restaurants!)

The Crispy Classic
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Miss Juanita More dishes out her famous fried chicken with honey goo (plus carrot cake dessert!) at Mars Bar. her scrumptious (and possibly underaged) More Boys will wait on you, hostess Candi Gurl will look stunned but glamorous, and DJ James Glass –= the hottest straight boy into underground disco — will help it all go down easy.

5-9pm
Mars Bar
798 Brannan, SF
(415) 621-MARS

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The Skewered Newbie
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No one skewers the reigning queens of the scene like Monistat — so appropriately she’ll be hostessing, along with Castro Shawn, at the Castro’s deliciously healthy skewered meat wonderland Asqew Grill. Don’t forget to shishkabob your hair, lady.

6pm
Asqew Grill
3583 16th St., SF
(415) 626-3040

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Just a Plain Ol’ Saucy Mess
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The fiendishly fingerlickin’ Felicia Fellatio — pictured here with cutie leatherboy cohost Jorge — will hold glutton court at Memphis Minnie’s BBQ in Lower Haight. (Did you know that Memphis Minnie’s features a sake tasting menu with it’s plethora of roasted flesh? Well now you know!)

7pm
574 Haight, SF
(415) 864-7675
www.memphisminnies.com

PS: It’s rumored that Felicia can down a whole rack of ribs without swallowing. Here’s proof, at least, that she can down a whole racket:

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Anyone for seconds?

Buggin’ in the Attic with DJ Primo

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Justin Juul caught up with DJ Primo , of Attic, Ferrari, West Add Radio, Knockout, and Mods vs. Rockers fame – and lived to tell the tale.

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I met Primo a couple of years ago when we were both waiting tables at a small restaurant near The Castro. I resented the job because I knew that every hour I spent working meant an equal amount of time away from writing. As a result, I really sucked. I was always late and cranky and tired and I had a really hard time being nice to customers. Primo seemed to be going through the same stuff. He tried to act happy, but he couldn’t hide his fatigue or general loathing for the work, and it was obvious he’d rather be spinning records or sleeping. It was no surprise, then, that neither of us lasted more than three months.

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I forgot about the dude for a while until I noticed him spinning records at The Attic on 24th and Mission one night. Then I started bumping into him everywhere I went. The last time it happened, we sat in the park for an hour and talked about obscure soul music, the mod scene, graffiti, and hard times. Check it out.

Primo: Whatcha reading there?

SFBG: Oh it’s the new Juxtapoz, I think I stole it from the gym last week. Pretty cool shit in here, sometimes.

Primo: Yeah, the dude who did the cover, Parra, I like his stuff. It’s like French Old School, graffiti-based stuff, taken from weird pop and mod art, with this strange New York influence. It kinda reminds me of this writer named REES. Just like hand drawn letters with this weird, like, metaphysical, “fuck-you,” Daffy Duckness to them.

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SFIFF: Color her deadly

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It’s a mug’s game determining the correct genre of John M. Stahl’s 1945 Leave Her to Heaven — especially since a true shorthand pitch should dodge the question entirely to note instead that it contains not one, but two, of the most unsettling murder scenes in movie history. Stahl’s adaptation of a million-selling potboiler by Ben Ames Williams is both a film noir and a melodrama. But even those two genres scarcely cover its facets: it’s also a revealing antecedent to some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most esteemed or idiosyncratically baroque suspense films.

Modern-day responses to Leave Her to Heaven often invoke melodrama yet rarely explore the ironic historical relationship between Stahl and Douglas Sirk, the oft-worshipped master of that genre’s ’50s Technicolor peak. It was Stahl who — between 1934 and 1935 — directed the original black-and-white versions of two crucial volumes in the Sirk library, Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959). Because Leave Her to Heaven predates the first of those remakes by close to a decade, it’s safe to assume that Sirk took a look at Stahl’s movies and liked what he saw. Many Sirk trademarks — an uncharacteristically dramatic use of shadow within Technicolor; a fondness for otherworldly shades of blue evening light; staging that heightens the artificiality of mid-20th century American society; set decoration that turns dream homes into prisons — are to the fore of Leave Her to Heaven.

The harsh visual symbolism one associates with Sirk is also present in Stahl’s most famous movie. Disabled young Danny (Darryl Hickman) is first glimpsed by viewers and by Ellen (Gene Tierney) with his eyes closed in slumber. Later in the film, when another character’s offhand remark gives Ellen the idea to become pregnant, a staircase looms behind her. These foreboding touches are the type of morbid rewards that await anyone who returns to Leave Her to Heaven after experiencing the film’s strange mix of slack stretches and stunning moments a first time.

A unique tension stems from one aspect of Leave Her to Heaven that separates Stahl’s movie from the cinema of Sirk: Stahl gives his anti-heroine Ellen an almost mythic power that even infects the film’s nature scenes, which are so eye-piercingly vibrant they verge on surrealism. At one point glimpsed through binoculars like an approaching enemy in a war film, Ellen’s family are too intimidated by her to enforce suffocating social niceties or break free from them. Instead, they alternately resemble statues or nervous animals that sense the presence of a predator. Ellen meets her soon-to-be husband Richard (Cornel Wilde) at high altitudes on that favorite Hitchcock existential vehicle, a train. His (and Stahl’s) love-at-first-sight gaze into her green eyes — and a later scene in which Ellen rises from beneath green waters — has the uncanny doomed allure that Hitchcock somehow sustained throughout 1958’s still-matchless Vertigo. (A notorious scene from 1981’s Mommie Dearest also tips its bathing cap to Ellen’s swim.)

A place in 20th century film history is a rich reward for Leave Her to Heaven. When Ellen rides horseback through New Mexico’s arid landscape at dawn, coldly tossing her father’s ashes to and fro before hurling the urn with true abandon, the wild horses psychodrama of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) steeplechase-jumps through a film buff’s mind. The symbolism of a high-strung woman riding a horse isn’t unique to those films, but in his adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Hitchcock even goes so far as to echo, with a slight reversal, Leave Her to Heaven‘s competitive relationship between Ellen and her adopted cousin — "not my sister," she makes clear — Ruth (Jeanne Crain).

Leave Her to Heaven is a true downer — and feel free to add an extra r to that description. In the 1967 survey Films and Feelings, critic Raymond Durgnat cites it as an example of its era’s penchant for "tightlipped misogyny," suggesting Durgnat wasn’t a film noir fanatic or a Freudian. The movie’s melodrama is classically cruel in the Joan Crawford tradition, built on a story almost sadistically entwined with the lead actress’s autobiography. A year or two before shooting, Tierney gave birth to a deaf, blind daughter after contracting measles from someone whom, years later, she discovered was a fan. The film’s screenplay grazes this experience with a reference to the mumps — watch Ellen tense up and turn ice-cold when it occurs — and through the character of Danny. If Ellen is one of filmdom’s most tragic characters, aspects of Tierney’s real life miseries are more unsettling. She underwent shock treatment at least 27 times.

Not exactly funny — and yet there is a truly hilarious coda to Leave Her to Heaven‘s story. In 1988, the same scenario was remade as TV movie Too Good to Be True, with a lineup too amazing to be believed: Loni Anderson plays the Ellen role, with Patrick Duffy from Dallas as her long-suffering husband, Neil Patrick Harris from Doogie Howser, M.D. as swim-happy Danny, and Julie Harris, a Baldwin brother (Daniel), and Larry "Dr. Giggles" Drake rounding out the cast. If that weren’t enough, the teleplay goes so far as to exaggerate the original’s most vicious scene by turning what looks like a rescue attempt from above the surface into an act of murder underwater.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Sat/26, Castro, and Sun/27, PFA.

Tom’s jones

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Last year, after he was "fired" by Paramount for becoming the new Wacko Jacko, Tom Cruise bought United Artists. As the company prepares to Cruise into an uncertain future, the Castro Theatre is presenting a retrospective of its oft-glorious middle period. It kicks off with some Woody Allen (1977’s inevitable Annie Hall and 1975’s rare Love and Death). The lineup includes once-celebrated films (1955’s Marty, 1971’s The Hospital); classics that gained that stature after their initial release (1955’s Kiss Me Deadly and Night of the Hunter); and newly-struck 35mm prints. The 35 mm batch includes 1961’s West Side Story, whose hothouse palette makes it one of the greatest-ever testaments to old-school Technicolor.

Plus, Tom Cruise will personally introduce every screening and shake each patron’s hand as they leave. OK, we made that part up. But you never know.

UNITED ARTISTS 90TH ANNIVERSARY FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/3 through May 4; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Clubs: Acieeed on Sfire

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Gurl, I was brought to. The inimitable DJ Jeffrey Sfire from NYC (2 cute!)

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blasted classic Bam Bam acid house track “Give It To Me” from 1988 at Sunday’s Honey Soundsystem Dancer From the Dance party at 103 Harriet — underneath 1015 Folsom, and the new party hotspot — and the roof burnt down. Yes, I’m ancient/legendary enough to have been there when this was originally tearing up the floors (at London’s Second Summer of Love, no less), but the kids went wild last weekend as well. Time for another acid revival? (DJs Derek B and Silence Fiction tried this a few years back with their Jack the Club night in 2005, and it was awesome, bring it back). No real vid, but song below:

Sfire, who also specializes in gritty Italo Disco and slinky rare Euro tracks, will be on local-hottie DJ Josh Cheon‘s West ADD Slave to the Rhythm show tonite 9pm-11pm, www.westaddradio.com and then live tonite at Booty Call, an actually pretty great party at Bar on Castro (I know, gag, but go! Juanita More hosts!)

PS Rumor has it Sfire will also be making many guest appearances throughout the weekend at select Portland underground venues …

Superlist: Queer partner dancing

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Just ’cause we’re queer doesn’t mean we can’t tango, swing, and salsa with our partners. Sure, there are great places to shimmy and shake while trying not to spill our mojitos. But for those of us who wish we could work the graceful angle a little more, well, there’s hope for us yet. Parties abound where knowledgeable teachers provide a preparty lesson, then let us float (or flop) our way around the dance floor. If we’re lucky, we’ll have so much fun we won’t even remember the awkward trauma inflicted by our high school prom. No experience or partners needed for any of the parties below — just flash a smile, make a friend, and get your ass on the dance floor.

Every fourth Saturday, the Metronome Dance Center becomes Baila Conmigo (1830 17th, SF; 415-252-9000, www.metronomedancecenter.com), a Latin dance party for all. Lessons are from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., with dancing until around 11:30 p.m. Pay $15 for the lesson and party or $8 for the party only.

On the last Saturday of the month, the monthly women’s Latin dance party, Mango (El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 415-282-3325, www.elriosf.com), boasts great food to go with your salsa. Show up at 3:30 p.m. for a salsa lesson, pay your $8 at the door, and let the DJ move you.

The Queer Jitterbugs (Magnet, 4122 18th St., SF; 415-581-1605, www.queerballroom.com) present a free dance party the third Saturday of each month at the Castro’s healthy-living hang out. A lesson on the basics begins at 7 p.m. and lasts for an hour, with social dancing from 8 to 9:30 p.m.

Boot, scoot, and boogie, people. Country-and-western dancing is what Sundance Saloon (Space 550, 550 Barneveld, SF; 415-820-1403, www.sundancesaloon.org) is all about every Sunday (5–10 p.m., $5) and Thursday (6:30–10:30 p.m., $5). So practice your "yee-haw!" and shine your belt buckle. Lessons start when doors open on Sunday and shortly thereafter on Thursdays and Fridays. Everyone welcome, but be over 21.

At Trip the Light Fantastic Friday Night Women’s Dance (Lake Merritt Dance Center, 200 Grand, Oakl.; 510-763-1343, www.tripthelightfantastic.org), gay games silver medalist Zoe Balfour will lead you through a different dance style at 7:30 p.m. each Friday — salsa, country, West Coast swing, waltzes, nightclub two-step, ballroom, and line dances. The party, which costs $10–$20 on a sliding scale, starts after the lesson is over and lasts until 11 p.m. Don’t be afraid, no experience is necessary. Just be brave.

Superlist: One buck shuck

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› superlists@sfbg.com

Oyster fanatics, rejoice: you can fulfill your fresh-Kumamoto cravings on a canned-tuna budget, thanks to a slough of restaurants in the city that offer an early-evening happy hour of one-dollar oysters. Show up early because the suckers go fast. And if you can’t do shooters without a chaser, keep in mind that most places offer house wines, well cocktails, and domestic beers at happy-hour discounts, so you can also catch a buzz without breaking the bank.

The Marina’s Cafe Maritime (2417 Lombard, SF; 415-885-2530, www.cafemaritimesf.com) gets an honorable mention for serving up a dozen oysters for $13. Mon.–Fri., 5:30-7 p.m.

The cozy lounge atmosphere of Circolo (500 Florida, SF; 415-553-8560, www.circolosf.com) features a cascading waterfall, and the restaurant transforms into a club after 11 p.m. Bamboo walls and low lighting offer the right ambience for an evening of aphrodisiacs. Tues.-Fri., 5-7 p.m.

Do not think that the bar at Bacar (448 Brannan, SF; 415-904-4100, www.bacarsf.com) is awash in bright lights and starchy white linens like the main dining area is. The candlelit front area offers a casual environment where you can feast on dollar half-shells and slingback martinis. Fri., 4:30–6 p.m.

The Pier 33 Asian-fusion restaurant Butterfly (Embarcadero and Bay, SF; 415-864-8999, www.butterflysf.com) can nurse that hangover with dollar oyster shooters, sans the vodka. But with a happy-hour menu of $3 bottle beers, $5 selected appetizers, and such $5 libations as the Cherry Blossom and the Sake Sangria, you can shoot your shuck and sip your way to nirvana. Mon.-Fri., 4-7 p.m.

Minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge, Eastside West Restaurant & Raw Bar (3154 Fillmore, SF; 415-885-4000, eastsidewest.ypguides.net) is well known for its 30-something bar scene, American seafood cuisine, and outside patio. Mon.-Fri., 5-7 p.m.

The quaint wine-bar experience at EOS (901 Cole, SF; 415-566-3063, www.eossf.com) — with sake and wine specials, sexy low lighting, and rotating art exhibits — offers the Cole Valley locals a prime date spot, casual elegance, and floor-to-ceiling windows for optimal people watching. Sun., 4:30-7 p.m.; Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–7 p.m.

Tourists and business crowds alike favor the famous Hog Island Oyster Company (1 Ferry Plaza, SF; 415-391-7117, www.hogislandoysters.com), situated in the backside of the Ferry Building. Its shucksters offer dollar Pacific oysters from the restaurant’s own sustainable aqua farm, a view of the bay, and the option to buy unshucked oysters to go. On a sunny day, grab a spot outside on the heated waterfront deck. Mon.-Thurs., 5-7 p.m.

Step inside the Hyde Street Seafood House and Raw Bar (1509 Hyde, SF; 415-931-3474. hydeseafoodhouserawbar.prodigybiz.com), tucked into a quiet Nob Hill neighborhood, and the white tablecloths, captain’s wheel, marine life decor, and fresh-cut flowers will have you feeling as though you’re in a waterfront restaurant on the wharf — even if your wallet doesn’t. Nightly, 5-7 p.m.

Central and casual, O’Reilly’s Holy Grail (1233 Polk, SF; 415-928-1233, www.oreillysholygrail.com) makes rustic European fare a Civic Center treat. Long velvet curtains and a welcoming bar give a reason to stay for the live music long after you’ve thrown back a few on the half-shells or a pint. Nightly, 4:30-7 p.m.

The Castro’s candlelit Mecca (2029 Market, SF; 415-621-7000, www.sfmecca.com) sets the mood for your belle or beau while you cozy up to the oval bar for a slurp of a Beau Soleil or Marin Miyagi. Some nights offer a resident DJ, and Thursdays are ladies’ nights. Tues.-Sat., 5-7 p.m.

Yabbies Coastal Kitchen (2237 Polk, SF; 415-474-4088, www.yabbiesrestaurant.com) in Russian Hill has both a wine and raw bar, casual elegance, and minimal wait time. The crowd is full of urban folk, from families to date-night couples. Sun.-Wed., 6-7 p.m.

Deja vu, times two

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TAKE ONE With his short film Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais introduced the world to his idiosyncratic and esoteric filmmaking, while offering an initial glance at his obsessions with memory, time, and space. He would further elaborate on this trio of fixations in his extraordinary debut feature, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). But his second feature, Last Year in Marienbad (1961), is where Resnais truly allowed himself to grapple with these issues, as well as with cinematic form.

Because of its enigmatic plot, mysterious characters, and various peculiarities, Marienbad has inspired a wide variety of discussions about the nature of time and memory, and about the divisions and links between reality and fantasy. Although such explorations are totally valid, the most striking — and perhaps somewhat neglected — of Marienbad‘s many wonderfully bizarre features is its treatment of space.

Resnais’ choice and use of locations is very imposing. Marienbad‘s two protagonists — including Delphine Seyrig in only her second feature role — encounter each other at a hotel, and try to figure out whether they had met and fallen in love at that same place a year ago. The hotel is actually composed from the interiors and exteriors of various grandiose chateaux in Germany. Impressive scales, strictly geometric gardens, and an exhaustive array of rooms immediately give the impression of a sumptuous maze in which one can get trapped and become lost.

Employing repetitive long pans and dolly shots throughout most of the film, Resnais painstakingly observes the hotel’s interiors, emphasizing their excessive ornamentation. Endless corridors give way to doorways that yield yet more hallways and living rooms. All of them are decorated to perfection; all of them feel terribly empty, cold, still, and asphyxiating. These images are juxtaposed with shots that similarly observe the hotel’s occupants. Clad in their flamboyant Coco Chanel dresses, members of the bourgeoisie are shown aimlessly wondering around the hotel, engaging in commonplace activities and conversations.

By complimenting this visual pattern with eerie organ music, Resnais achieves a striking effect. As film professor and writer Laura Rascaroli puts it: “The [film recalls] one of the main features of baroque architecture, the use of a superabundance of details and decorative elements as a means of filling up the void and repressing the fear of nothingness, of oblivion, of death.”

Few filmmakers manage to treat space as more than mere background. Michelangelo Antonioni is one obvious example. In Marienbad, Resnais moves beyond an exploration of the creative possibilities that a film’s space has to offer. He goes so far as to use space to actually produce meaning. That idea, perhaps more than anything else, is what this ageless masterpiece is all about. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO To begin, a word for Sylvette Baudrot, “script girl” for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s arch postmodernist plaything, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Film critics are often guilty of underplaying contributions by screenwriters and cinematographers, but script girls? You’d better believe it with a film as rigorously mathematical as Marienbad. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s creation defies continuity, but it rests heavily on bridges and echoes, its staging directions endowed with interlocking, psychic value — all impossible, one assumes, without Baudrot’s attentive supervision. Resnais goofily nods to his obsessive predecessor Alfred Hitchcock when he places a cardboard cutout of the master of suspense in an early shot. But Baudrot provides the direct link: she was the script supervisor on Hitchcock’s 1955 Riviera dalliance, To Catch a Thief.

Credentials aside, Last Year at Marienbad is an elegant whirlpool, all the more notable for being made amid the fuck-all bluster of the early French new wave. At a sodden grand hotel, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) implores “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year and agreed to reconvene away from the watchful eye of A’s husband “M” (Sacha Pitoëff). Some of the aspects surrounding these characters seem hopelessly musty, encrusted by decades of swollen undergraduate debate. There is the flattening score, and the famous strategy game that M always wins. Try not to giggle at those scenes in which a character’s bulging eyes conjure so many Universal B-movies — indeed, Pitoëff seems to have been cast for his gaunt shape, evocative as it is of Karloffs and Lugosis past.

And yet, Marienbad‘s distancing front-line of attack remains a radical proposition: erotic obsession defanged of the eros, and further soused in sounds and images that seem, if not deceitful, then at least unverifiable. At the center of this opaque sphere is Seyrig who, as A, has the unenviable task of making something of being more than a marionette. The film is most symphonic — and terrifying — in those moments when Resnais’ camera movements collude with Albertazzi’s direct address, simultaneously conjecturing and ensnaring the imagined A.

Marienbad‘s chilly core endures despite the extent to which its formalist shock tactics have been assimilated into mainstream productions. In stretching cinematic space-time like so much chewing gum, the film provides a direct link between Louis Feuillade’s shape-shifting serials (1913’s Fantômas, 1915’s Les Vampires), Stanley Kubrick’s gliding horror (1980’s The Shining, in particular) and latter-day brainteasers like Memento (2000), Being John Malkovich and The Matrix (both 1999). If this is Resnais’ unexpected lineage, Seyrig’s A keeps a different company. She’s still lost in Marienbad‘s hall-of-mirrors (the last line, like a curse: “Losing your way in the still night, alone with me”). But while there, she might catch a reflection of some kindred spirits: Kim Novak, of course, but also Rita Hayworth, Laura Dern, and least suspecting of them all, Rose in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936). (Max Goldberg)

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Through March 27

Opens Fri/21; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

Kewl Tun3: Hercules and Love Affair blind us

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NYC socialite Andrew Butler and warble-meister Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons have teamed up with slinky songstresses Nomi and Kim Ann Foxmann to create Hercules and Love Affair — and have produced killer club tune “Blind” that’s been rocking after-dark boxes from the Transfer to Pink lately.

Hercules and Love Affair

(Anyone who caught DJ Frankie Knuckles throwing down his own lush remix of the jam at the final Fag Fridays won’t soon forget it — or Frankie’s entire tearjerking surprise set, either.) When we walked into A Different Light Bookstore in the Castro this weekend to snag a copy of super-faggotty Butt Magazine (featuring local fashion superstar duo Nice Collective showing their junk and the former drummer of local glamsters Mon Cousin Belge pounding the skins naked) and heard this loveliness pumping thru the speakers we knew it had arrived ….

Self-titled album “Hercules and Love Affair” dropped March 10 on EMI/DFA and we can’t get enough of it …

Bombs — and bongs — away!

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Our coverage of the 26th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival kicks off with Marke B writing about Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, a sequel which offers a refreshing change from the stodgy fare that usually receives special presentations from less imaginative festivals. Marke asks star John Cho and screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg to pass though the bullshit detector, and they irreverently oblige. Elsewhere, Kimberly Chun surveys the influence of the late Edward Yang, one of the fathers of modern Taiwanese cinema, not that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – which recently left him out of their annual “In Memoriam” montage – would know. I take a look at Brillante Mendoza, whose brief directorial career to date is adding energy and variety to many-faceted CineManila activity. Keep an eye out for an upcoming interview with Mendoza in Pixel Vision, and check our short reviews of other SFIAAFF — now, that’s an acronym — features. (Johnny Ray Huston)

>> Multiculti cock-meat sandwich
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and invade the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
By Marke B.

>> Are you lonesome tonight?
Edward Yang searches for the personal amid the street gangs of Silicon Island
By Kimberly Chun

>> Manila: the drama
Brillante Mendoza looks at the costs of human lives
By Johnny Ray Huston

>> Take one
A quick guide to some Asian American Fest features

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL runs March 13-23 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF; Clay Theater, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2757 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 South Second St., San Jose. For tickets (most shows $10) and more information, go to www.asianamericanmedia.org.

Saint Peter

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› a&e@sfbg.com

Arguably no modern film director made a better sustained entrance than Peter Bogdanovich, whose first four features were all triumphs. Targets (1968) was a chilling conceit that brought Hollywood pretend terror (Boris Karloff basically playing himself) against a modern real-world horror, the randomly mass-murdering sniper. That critical success led to a major studio deal to adapt (with then wife and collaborator Polly Platt) Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show (1971), a melancholy black-and-white flashback to 1950s rural Texas. It won two Oscars, was nominated for five more, and served as a launching pad for actors including Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd. Next came What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a delightful, San Francisco–set nod to 1930s screwball comedies with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Its huge success was equaled by 1976’s Paper Moon, with O’Neal and daughter Tatum as a Depression-era confidence duo.

That’s a heady four hits in five years — and they’ll all be shown at the Castro Theatre in a tribute to the director presented by Midnites for Maniacs’ Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. Another four films will be seen in director’s cuts different from original theatrical versions. Further, Bogdanovich himself will be on hand at all but the earliest matinees. He’s a great raconteur who’s insightfully frank about the ups and downs of an eventually checkered career.

"Ups and downs" puts it mildly. While Bogdanovich started out on top, Hollywood relished kicking him with each downward step. But he’s still here — and especially visible recently, thanks to his role on The Sopranos as Lorraine Bracco’s shrink. Behind the camera too, he’s gotten love lately from the four-hour DVD documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Bogdanovich, who hasn’t directed a big-screen movie since 2001’s lamentably underseen The Cat’s Meow with Kirsten Dunst, hopes to soon start shooting an adaptation of Tracey Letts’s jet-black stage comedy Killer Joe — and he’s got other irons in the fire.

If it’s thus a fine moment to be Bogdanovich, there have been many not-so-great ones. Phoning recently from Los Angeles, he recalls that before the debut of Daisy Miller (1974), his first commercial failure, critic Judith Crist asked him, "Is it good? It better be … because they’re waiting for you." Catching major flack for that film was Shepherd, the model-turned-actress he left Platt for.

"Peter and Cybill" were inseparable, possibly obnoxious. They cohosted The Tonight Show for a week and were reportedly arch as hell. They occupied the inaugural cover of People, with the headline "Living Together Is Sexy." The director quotes Cary Grant (doing a perfect vocal imitation) advising, "Petah, please stop telling people you’re happy and in love!" Asked why, Grant said, "Because they aren’t happy and in love."

Even those who liked Daisy Miller went Attila on 1975’s At Long Last Love, a lavish tribute to ’30s musicals with Cole Porter songs recorded live by some actors who were trained singers (Madeleine Kahn) and others who weren’t (Shepherd, Burt Reynolds). It was meant to be charming. It got the most vitriolic reviews this side of Battlefield Earth. Bogdanovich now says, "We rushed and fucked it up. The first preview in San Jose was an unmitigated disaster. Then we recut and remixed, and it played quite well. But I made some calamitous changes after that, and didn’t preview it again before release. We were just killed. Later we made a different edit. When Jesse called me to say he was showing it, I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I like it.’ ‘Oh, you’re the one.’<0x2009>"

The Castro will screen that improved edit — which is charming. Although the title is still a pseudonym for "turkey," At Long Last Love has never been released on video or DVD. In a town where success usually excuses all egotism, Bogdanovich had still somehow crossed a line. His failures were blamed on sheer arrogance. "I got a lot of that," he says — though back then a purportedly imperious on-set demeanor and statements like "I’m not modest, I’m not humble, and the more success I have, the more critics will resent me" surely didn’t help. He’d had the temerity to befriend Hollywood legends including Grant, John Ford, and Orson Welles — who was practically a permanent houseguest. Who the hell did he think he was?

Cynics had already interpreted Bogdanovich’s hit homages to Hollywood’s past as evidence he didn’t have an original thought in his head. Then they gloated over his nonhits. Despite the star power of Reynolds and both O’Neals, Nickelodeon was a 1976 Christmas flop. (Forced to shoot in color, Bogdanovich says, "It’s another movie in black and white" — which is how he’ll show it at the Castro.)

Despite excellent reviews, 1979’s Paul Theroux adaptation Saint Jack didn’t find an audience. Ditto 1981’s They All Laughed, an enchanting, ensemble romantic comedy. It was (among other things) a valentine to his new love and protégée, erstwhile Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten — who shortly after filming ended was killed by the thuggish promoter-husband she’d tried to leave amicably. That murder-suicide was followed by more ugliness: a war of words between Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner; "dramatization" of the tragedy in 1983’s Star 80 ("I begged Bob Fosse not to do it") and a TV movie; and distribution problems for They All Laughed that cost him millions. Sympathy soured when Bogdanovich became involved with Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise — who was all of six months older than his own daughter. (Nonetheless, their eventual marriage lasted 13 years.)

Bogdanovich had a left-field comeback in 1985’s Mask, with Eric Stoltz as Elephant Kid and Cher as biker-chick mom. But even that was marred by public sparring with both Cher and studio execs. The latter substituted Bob Seger tunes for Bruce Springsteen ones key to the story’s real-life inspiration. (The Castro’s "theatrical world premiere" cut restores all the Bruuuuce.) Whether good, bad, or indifferent, his subsequent ventures flopped. In an eerie echo of past events, 1993’s The Thing Called Love came out (barely) after star River Phoenix OD’d. Bogdanovich turned to directing TV episodes (including for The Sopranos) and cable movies. It wasn’t a comedown, he says. "The scripts were good … and I got to work with actors like Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, and George Segal."

Bogdanovich also relit an acting career abandoned decades earlier. Having written essays about film history (notably for Esquire) before moving to Hollywood, he thinks his industry hater trail is partly due to perception of him as critic turned filmmaker. He considers the roughly 45 stage productions he acted in (and the 6 he directed) from age 15 to 24 as his real prior job.

Given all past tempests, Bogdanovich seems on good terms with his exes — Shepherd (in town with the play Curvy Widow) has promised to show up at the Castro late Friday for The Last Picture Show and At Long Last Love; Louise is flying in to talk about her late sister when They All Laughed shows on Sunday.

Is it painful for them to see Dorothy Stratten onscreen? "Yeah, especially now that [costar] John Ritter has died," he says. "But you know, when you see it with an audience, it’s OK — it takes the pain somewhat away. One of the peripheral tragedies [to Stratten’s death] was that the movie was never properly seen in its day. You couldn’t really look at it in the way it was meant to be enjoyed."

A GENUINE TRIBUTE TO PETER BOGDANOVICH

Fri/7–Sun/9, $10 per day ($25 weekend pass)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com, www.ticketweb.com

SFIAAFF: Multiculti cock-meat sandwich

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› superego@sfbg.com

When we last left crazy-ass Kumar (Kal Penn) and his more straitlaced college pal Harold (John Cho), at the end of the 2005 stoner epic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, they’d just victoriously satiated their munchies with enough sliders to block a rhino’s colon. That movie was a classic bong-wielding buddy road-trip flick — Question: How long does it take two potheads to get to a drive-through? Answer: Neil Patrick Harris on ecstasy — that was improbably hailed by serious critics as a multicultural breakthrough. Kumar is Indian American and Harold Asian American, a combination of lead ethnicities that was new to the American mainstream. And even though lineage figures little in the characters’ daily realities, Harold’s and Kumar’s difference from the cartoonish honky inbreds and skinheads (and candid others of color) that exist beyond their postmillennial collegiate bubble — and who often mistake them for Arabs — fuels the plot. Dude, where’s my kufi?

White Castle screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg giddily foreground the first movie’s subtext in their follow-up (which they also directed), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, a special presentation at this year’s San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. Mistaken for terrorists when they’re caught with a "smokeless bong" on a flight to Amsterdam, weed capital of the world, our hapless heroes ("North Korea and al-Qaeda working together," gloats their bumbling FBI nemesis) are imprisoned in Gitmo. After being presented with a jailer’s massive "cock-meat sandwich" — "I’ve never sucked dick before," quips Kumar. "I bet it sucks dick!" — and submitted to various tortures, they eventually escape, crashing a "bottomless" hot tub party, impersonating Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice, and lighting up with George W. Bush himself. No shit.

I caught up with Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and actor Cho — a surprisingly intellectual type who studied English at UC Berkeley — as they prepared to promote the new movie at wacky comics convention WonderCon.

SFBG For Arab Americans like me, this movie is like a nightmare come true. People gasp whenever I stand up on an airplane, and 9 times out of 10 I’m the one who’s pulled over for "random" searches. I know that Indian Americans often experience similar treatment. But Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay seems revolutionary in that it expands that situation to include the feelings of Asian Americans, and it’s playing at the [SF International] Asian American Film Fest. Do you think Asian Americans relate?

JOHN CHO I would assume that every immigrant group has their own bag of individual problems. I don’t know if Asian Americans get hassled at the airport — maybe they do. Traveling with Kal on the publicity tour for the first film, I got to see firsthand how he was treated — and that’s real; he was patted down all the time. We were traveling together, and he’s the one that got pulled aside. I’m really happy that the film’s playing at the festival. I feared that Asian Americans wouldn’t accept this movie — the subject matter isn’t discussed much in the community — but it seems that the programmers feel they will.

SFBG Not to state the obvious here, but Jon and Hayden, you’re a couple of white guys. I’m wondering if these scripts come from your own experiences, or if you do a lot of research?

JON HURWITZ We’re white guys, but we’re Jews. So we’re already a minority subset, but I don’t really know if that plays into it. We’ve always had a large group of multicultural friends and been able to observe and have conversations with people with different points of view. As a writer and director you’re just hoping to put something out there that’s new. Something with Asian American and Indian American leads was something that hadn’t been done in the way that we were doing it. We felt that we had enough perspective as huge fans of comedy to pull it off.

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG We didn’t set out to make this big statement, although I have to say when we looked at the first one when it was done, we said, "Wow, this is so much better than we thought." It went way beyond the fart jokes, weed humor, and nudity that we love to put up on-screen. But it’s really just a classic comedy trope. Two guys, a baggie, a voyage. . . . It was the right time to have someone finally throw ethnicity into the mix. The script took off from there. The only question now is, where else can we take this? Harold and Kumar Fly the Space Shuttle?

JC And the focus is always on being funny first. The characters’ races are almost secondary. I find that so refreshing because a lot of Asian American cinema is just about being Asian American, how hard it is. Not to denigrate anyone’s work, but those movies get really repetitive, and fewer people want to see them.

SFBG Speaking of space — John, you’re about to be mobbed at WonderCon because you’ve accepted the role of Mr. Sulu in the upcoming Star Trek film. Following in actor George Takei’s footsteps must feel huge.

JC I’m delighted. As a kid it meant so much to me to see an Asian American on television and say, "Whoa! He’s not wearing a cone-shaped hat or teaching kung fu!" It was very important, a legacy that I desperately wanted to be a part of, and something I feel my work on the Harold and Kumar movies pays tribute to. Now Asian Americans can be stoners too.

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sat/15, 9:15 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Take one

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>Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran, 2007) Buddha marks the feature debut of Hana Makhmalbaf, one of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s daughters (she made her first short, The Day My Aunt Was Ill (1997), when she was only 9 years old). It has already won eight awards at different international film festivals, a fact that becomes more impressive when one considers the filmmaker’s age: she’s 19. Reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema, her first feature is shot in a neorealist style in Bamian, Afghanistan, and features a 5-year-old girl named Baktay (the extraordinary Nikbakht Noruz) as its main character. In following the youngster during her struggles to attend school, the film becomes a stunning exploration of how Afghanistan’s violent political history affects its youth. (Maria Komodore) March 15, 12:45 p.m., Castro; Tues/18, 8:45 p.m., Pacific Film Archive.

>Happiness (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2007) One of the most adept melodramatists working in South Korea, Hur casts an affectionate, gently comic glance on the see-sawing declines and resurrections of the hard-partying, handsomely weather-beaten Young-su (the talented Hwang Jung-min), an aging club kid with a raging case of cirrhosis. Luckily, the man is able to rub a few brain cells together and get himself to a rural health retreat that specializes in detoxifying worst-case-scenarios with clean living, herb gathering, fresh air, and outrageously light exercise. Young-su is also lucky enough to win over the clinic’s sweet, fragile princess, Eun-hee (Lim Soo-jung), who suffers from lung disease and just might keel over if forced to break into anything more strenuous than a stroll. But can you keep the playboy down on the farm once his liver is back in business? (Kimberly Chun) March 15, 6 p.m., Castro; March 16, 5 p.m., PFA; March 22, 7 p.m., Camera.

Never Forever (Gina Kim, South Korea/USA, 2007) At first, it’s purely business: as a last-resort response to her Korean American husband’s infertility, Sophie (The Departed‘s Vera Farmiga, sporting an ice-blond ‘do) lurks after a Korean immigrant (Jung-woo Ha) she spots at a fertility clinic. She pays him big bucks to have sex with her and possibly make a baby — therefore saving her husband (David L. McInnis) from depression and getting his intensely Christian family off their backs. Of course, things get complicated mighty fast. Farmiga is riveting in this deliberately quiet (save its melodramatic violin-heavy score) drama, a delicate exploration of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons — and grappling with the sudden realization that wrong and right are often not so easy to define. (Cheryl Eddy) March 15, 9:15 p.m., Clay; March 16, 7:50 p.m., PFA.

>Ping Pong Playa (Jessica Yu, USA, 2007) Energetic direction by Jessica Yu — best-known for docs like the Henry Darger portrait In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and the Oscar-winning short Breathing Lessons (1996) — perfectly complements a star-making turn by Jimmy Tsai as Christopher "C-Dub" Wang, a slacker who discovers he’s got talent as a ping-pong teacher and, eventually, competitor. Yu and Tsai cowrote the hip-hop flavored script, filled with rapid-fire dialogue and culturally targeted zingers (as when C-Dub assures an opponent, "I hope you’re hungry, because I’m about to serve you some Chinese take-out!"). Winning from start to finish, Ping Pong Playa achieves the near-impossible: it makes infectious hilarity seem entirely effortless. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 6:45 p.m., Clay; March 17, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 22, 2:15 p.m., Camera.

Santa Mesa (Ron Morales, USA/Philippines, 2008) Ron Morales’s first feature focuses on 12-year-old Hector (Jacob Kiron Shalov) and his efforts to fit in when he’s forced to leave the United States (where he was born and raised) to be with his grandmother Lita (celebrated Filipino actor Angie Ferro) in Manila, Philippines, after his mother’s death. Despite Shalov’s awkward performance and some uneasy sentimental scenes, Mesa‘s yellow-hued cinematography attractively portrays the colorful, throbbing city, and the young boy’s eagerness to internalize his surroundings without knowing how to speak Tagalog is brave and touching. (Komodore) March 15, 7 p.m., Clay; March 22, 4:30 p.m., Camera.

>3 Days to Forever (Riri Raza, Indonesia, 2007) After a night of partying makes Ambar (Adinia Wirasti) miss a flight to her sister’s wedding, she hitches along with cousin Yusuf (Nicholas Saputra), who’s in charge of driving a set of delicate dishes to the event. Drugs, detours planned and accidental, and frank talk about what it’s like to be a rebellious teen in Indonesia (Ambar’s sister is getting married because her parents caught her having sex) — and an uncertain teen, period — color this road movie. 3 Days to Forever echoes 2001’s Y tu mamá también‘s racy tone and the-journey-is-the-life-lesson message, and boasts similarly photogenic young leads. Bonus for armchair travelers: it also makes Indonesia look like the most magical place on earth. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 18, 9:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2:15 p.m., Castro.

Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara (Koji Sakebe, Japan, 2007) Punk’s not dead! And neither are the wide-eyed little girls, drowsy dogs, and the other indelibly etched creatures that populate Yoshitomo Nara’s oeuvre: they’re alive and evolving in Nara’s studio. Koji Sakabe and his crew tail the artist as he travels to public appearances at museums and radio stations where he’s treated like a rock star; as he creates a massive village installation in his hometown of Hirosaki, Japan; and then follow Nara back to his studio, where he conjures his avatars of cuteness all by his lonesome. That’s where things get interesting: watching the bashful yet driven enigma study his own paintings, one hand on his camouflage-encased hip, and then home in with a brush on a fillip in a wide-eyed tot’s ‘do. (Kimberly Chun) March 16, 12:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2 p.m., Camera.

The Unseeable (Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand, 2006) For those whose eyes are still adjusting from the ultraviolet palette of Wisit Sasanatieng’s stunning debut, the genre-bending 1999 western Tears of the Black Tiger, the clammy greens and dusky grays that hang over The Unseeable feel like so much dust on the lens that can’t be wiped off. Unfortunately, you can still see everything coming from a mile away in this ghost tale of a country mouse trapped in (where else?) a decaying mansion. At least the magical touches of 2005’s Citizen Dog seem like genuine quirks in the fabric of reality. Here, the supernatural is an excuse to trot out tired new Asian horror staples like the crazy old lady or spooky child, and the multiple twists of the Shining-aping finale only work to make an already shaky premise all the more hamstrung. (Matt Sussman) March 16, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; March 21, 9:15 p.m., PFA; March 23, 4:45 p.m., Camera.

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

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