Development

Heading East: The flight from San Francisco

Andrew Lam
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13

EDITORIAL There is no simple free-market solution to gentrification and displacement. There’s no way a crowded city like San Francisco can simply rely on the forces of supply and demand to protect vulnerable populations. And there’s no way the city’s flawed housing policy can prevent the loss of thousands of San Franciscans — particularly young, creative people who help keep a city lively — from fleeing to a town where they can actually afford the rent.

Richard Florida, the famous social and economic theorist who coined the term “creative class” argues that artists and writers and geeks and musicians are the forces that drive modern economies. His pioneering 2002 essay in the Washington Monthly was titled “Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.”

Florida’s something of an elitist and he ignores the contributions that tens of thousands of others (including retired people, union members and nonprofit workers) make a community. He idolizes tech culture and often ignores issues like class and race.

But he’s got a point: Nobody who’s doing anything cool wants to live in a city where everyone is rich and everything is clean and boring. And that’s the danger San Francisco faces.

Just go over to Oakland for a few days and talk to all the people who were once part of this city’s cultural scene. They’ll tell you what anyone with any sense knows: You don’t attract creative people to a city by giving out tax breaks for corporations and building fancy office space. The rock bands that Florida talks about aren’t going to stay in a city because it has high-end jobs for people with advanced degrees. Artists need a place where they can afford the rent.

San Francisco is still a great urban center, by any possible standard, and has all the qualities of diversity, openness, energy, politics and fun that have made generations of immigrants from all over the world want to make it their home. But at a certain point, housing becomes more important than all of the other development issues that local government can address.

Take Andy Duvall, a musician we interviewed who was part of San Francisco for 15 years before he was literally priced out of town. For half of what he was paying in the Mission, Duvall has more than twice the space in Oakland — and the situation is just getting worse. While most of the country is still mired in a deep housing slump (and parts of San Francisco are facing a foreclosure crisis), rents in this town are soaring, beyond the affordability of almost anyone who currently lives here. According to the city’s own statistics, only about 10 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rent on a median market-rate apartment. That means if they’re evicted or lose their homes, they have to leave town.

The supervisors held a hearing April 9 on affordable housing, and the message was profound: “Affordable housing preserves the neighborhood in more ways than one; residents are the foundation on which the economy is built. From any angle, if we can’t afford to live here, there is no city,” observed Val Sinckler, a Western Addition resident.

But while the mayor is working to attract companies that will pay high-end salaries to people who can afford to pay far more rent than the average San Franciscan, he’s a long way from coming up with the money to even begin to mitigate the problem.

An effective policy to preserve San Francisco requires strict regulation (to prevent evictions and displacement), a mandate that commercial developers build housing for their workforce and that residential developers meet the needs of low- and moderate-income residents — and a large investment of public money in affordable housing. If Lee isn’t willing to talk serious about those three crucial elements, then he’s presiding over the decline of one of the world’s coolest cities.

Editorial: The flight from San Francisco

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23

EDITORIAL There is no simple free-market solution to gentrification and displacement. There’s no way a crowded city like San Francisco can simply rely on the forces of supply and demand to protect vulnerable populations. And there’s no way the city’s flawed housing policy can prevent the loss of thousands of San Franciscans — particularly young, creative people who help keep a city lively — from fleeing to a town where they can actually afford the rent.

Richard Florida, the famous social and economic theorist who coined the term “creative class” argues that artists and writers and geeks and musicians are the forces that drive modern economies. His pioneering 2002 essay in the Washington Monthly was titled “Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.”

Florida’s something of an elitist and he ignores the contributions that tens of thousands of others (including retired people, union members and nonprofit workers) make a community. He idolizes tech culture and often ignores issues like class and race.

But he’s got a point: Nobody who’s doing anything cool wants to live in a city where everyone is rich and everything is clean and boring. And that’s the danger San Francisco faces.

Just go over to Oakland for a few days and talk to all the people who were once part of this city’s cultural scene. They’ll tell you what anyone with any sense knows: You don’t attract creative people to a city by giving out tax breaks for corporations and building fancy office space. The rock bands that Florida talks about aren’t going to stay in a city because it has high-end jobs for people with advanced degrees. Artists need a place where they can afford the rent.

San Francisco is still a great urban center, by any possible standard, and has all the qualities of diversity, openness, energy, politics and fun that have made generations of immigrants from all over the world want to make it their home. But at a certain point, housing becomes more important than all of the other development issues that local government can address.

Take Andy Duvall, a musician we interviewed who was part of San Francisco for 15 years before he was literally priced out of town. For half of what he was paying in the Mission, Duvall has more than twice the space in Oakland — and the situation is just getting worse. While most of the country is still mired in a deep housing slump (and parts of San Francisco are facing a foreclosure crisis), rents in this town are soaring, beyond the affordability of almost anyone who currently lives here. According to the city’s own statistics, only about 10 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rent on a median market-rate apartment. That means if they’re evicted or lose their homes, they have to leave town.

The supervisors held a hearing April 9 on affordable housing, and the message was profound: “Affordable housing preserves the neighborhood in more ways than one; residents are the foundation on which the economy is built. From any angle, if we can’t afford to live here, there is no city,” observed Val Sinckler, a Western Addition resident.

But while the mayor is working to attract companies that will pay high-end salaries to people who can afford to pay far more rent than the average San Franciscan, he’s a long way from coming up with the money to even begin to mitigate the problem.

An effective policy to preserve San Francisco requires strict regulation (to prevent evictions and displacement), a mandate that commercial developers build housing for their workforce and that residential developers meet the needs of low- and moderate-income residents — and a large investment of public money in affordable housing. If Lee isn’t willing to talk serious about those three crucial elements, then he’s presiding over the decline of one of the world’s coolest cities.

 

 

Why Wall Street loves the War on Drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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46
Why Wall Street loves the War on Drugs

The raid on Oaksterdam has just about everyone in local politics engaging in a little head-scratching: What possible reason would the Obama administration have to crack down on medical marijuana in an election year? How does it help the president, who will be facing an unsettled and angry electorate in a still-tough economy, to alienate the pot smoking liberals of the world, who were at one point among his most loyal constituents?

What a fucking idiot.

Here’s what make it worse: I don’t think anyone at Goldman Sachs talked to the White House about this, but the 1 percent clearly have a lot to gain from the drug war.

And it has nothing to do with drugs.

Let’s be logical here. There’s only one possible way to increase economic equality in this country, and it involves government intervention. With union membership at a fraction of what it once was, government is the only institution with the power these days to enforce income redistribution. The wealthy have to be forced to pay higher taxes, and that money has to be spent on public education, affordable housing, economic development, public-sector-driven job creation and other programs that are proven to narrow the wealth gap.

But that’s tricky, since the Right has done such an effective job (with the help of corrupt politicians of every stripe, including liberals) of making Americans mistrust government. How do you get people to vote for higher taxes when they think the money’s going to be wasted on pointless wars and crony contracts — and on sending federal agents to roust pot clubs?

The two factors that most accounted for the fall of economic liberalism in the 1960s were Vietnam and pot. My parents generation saw the government as the nation’s leaders who got us out of the Great Depression and won World War II. My generation saw government as the assholes who were sending us to die in Southeast Asia and putting us in jail for smoking weed. That’s why when Ronald Reagan announced that “government is not the solution, it’s the problem,” so many of my peers nodded (through the haze) and said: Right on.

There are more progressives in the Bay Area today who distrust and dislike the federal government than there were before the raids began. We’re going back to the days when “the feds” became a dirty word. And it’s undermining everything that Obama is tyring to do with the economy.

Yeah, Wall Street, which is trying to get rid of pesky regulations, loves this — if you hate the feds in Oaksterdam, it’s hard to love them at the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s what the 1 percent relies on. And it’s working.

 

 

So you want to be a time traveler!

Sue Vaughan
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0
So you want to be a time traveler!

If you’re an aspiring time traveler, you need to pick up a copy of the brand-new how-to book So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel (Berkley Trade, 326pp., $15). If you are already a time traveler, you should probably pick up a copy, read it, then go back in time till before you time-traveled in the first place, and use your new knowledge wisely.

Wait, does that make any sense? Time travel is some intense and tricky stuff. I got ahold of authors and time-travel experts Phil Hornshaw and Nick Hurwitch for further intel on the matter.

SFBG The book contains several film references (Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Terminator, etc). In your opinion, which film offers the most accurate depiction of time travel? Which is the least accurate?

Phil Hornshaw Back to the Future is a pretty reliable resource for the perils of time travel, even if it does take a few liberties in the service of being awesome. Granted, you can’t go into the future and find yourself there — how could you be there in the future if you left from the past? — but the ideas of timelines being corrupted and for the most part, of needing antecedents in the past in order to create the future, is handled pretty deftly in Back to the Future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SrV13F3x7Y

McFly: accurate.

Conversely, Terminator is a pretty terrible time travel movie, even though evil robots are super-cool, because of the problem of Kyle Reese going back, creating John Connor, and then getting sent back by John Connor in order to create John Connor in order to get sent back by John Connor. Those kinds of stories can work, but they make your brain ache. And that’s just not very nice, James Cameron. But really, there’s not really a “worst” time travel movie because they’re pretty universally terrible at being time travel movies. That was a big reason for the Time Traveler’s Guide in the first place.

Nick Hurwitch Agreed. You can’t go wrong with the Holy Trilogy — that’s Back to the Future, not Star Wars, kids. But the time travel movies that always bug me are those that send their characters to the era during which the film was made for the rest of the movie. For example, in Time After Time, the movie starts out in the late 19th Century, but the hero and the villain are quickly sent to San Francisco, 1979. The movie was made in, you guessed it, 1979.

That’s to say nothing of all the hundreds of movies and television shows that get time travel completely wrong — but at a minimum, don’t be lazy. Hopefully after reading this guide, the audience at large will have a better grasp of what works in a time travel movie and what doesn’t.

 

SFBG The book points out that time travel can have catastrophic results when executed improperly. Which rule of time travel is the most important?

NH You should never, under any circumstances, visit yourself in the past. History is easy enough to screw up simply by hopping around through time, but any interactions with other versions of yourself increase the risk of paradoxes exponentially. You could prevent yourself from traveling back in the first place, get yourself killed, be mistaken for yourself, or, more often than not, engage in hand-to-hand combat to the death with yourself. If you’re going to mess up time for the rest of us, at least stick to stepping on butterflies.

PH Yeah, that’s a good one. Also don’t make out with your mom or dad. That actually applies all the time. You don’t have to be a time traveler to apply that to your life.

 

SFBG Is time travel an activity suited for beginners? What kind of pre-training do you recommend, and will a montage be necessary?

PH The biggest danger of time travel is getting killed within the first 10 minutes of your arrival, so if there’s one thing a novice time traveler should be good at, it’s running. We also recommend bringing along a firearm, so if you’re looking for a montage, I’d recommend track-running and then gunplay. We don’t recommend them at the same time as that’s generally frowned upon no matter what time you’re visiting, but both are useful skills.

NH Many idiots less prepared and less intelligent than your readers have shot off through spacetime and managed to make it back alive, or at least only partially maimed. That’s a crapshoot, though. The best way to get your feet wet (or singed by electricity, as the case may be) is to sign up for the Qualified Users And Negotiators of Time Travel Universal Ministry (QUAN+UM) internship program, WEDGIE (the Wormhole Educational Development and Guided Internship Experience). It’s the bottom rung of time travel, sure, but you learn the ins and outs of quantum physics, proper shotgun etiquette, laboratory-mopping, and sandwich-making. 

 

SFBG Two of the most obvious reasons to attempt time travel are the “do-over” — re-living some important past event — and the “betting on sports games/lotteries in the past after learning the final score/winning number in the future.” The book strongly discourages both. Can you elaborate on why?

PH Do-overs never go all that well. When you head to the past to do over something you already did, you have your past-self to deal with. He or she is, you know, there — doing the thing. Doing it poorly, usually. How do you get rid of yourself in order to do something over? You can’t kill them or really remove them from the situation because you risk further complications. Plus, you’re Old You and they’re Younger You and it gets all complex and confusing. It’s generally inadvisable. As for time gambling, it has to do with the Biff’s World Effect — which is that acquiring a bunch of money through time travel generally makes you a jerk.

 

SFBG If a time traveler finds your book mid-journey, which is the first chapter he or she should read?

NH That of course depends on what era they find themselves in. The survival guide portion of the book is organized by era, so should they be in Prehistory in need of shelter or a dino pal, then the Prehistory chapter is for them. Or, if they’re next up to joust at the Renaissance Festival — an actual festival during the Renaissance — the chapter on medieval times might just get them out alive. For general panic on the run, however, Chapter IV: The Perplexing Pandemic of Potential Paradoxes, is your one-stop shop for things you’re likely about to screw up.

PH There’s a lot of generalized knowledge right at the front of the Survival Guide portion of the book. Really, though, you should never time travel without reading the whole book. And you should always have a copy. And a backup copy. As many copies as you can comfortably carry. The more copies you have, the safer you probably are. We have no science to back that up.

 

SFBG Which do you prefer, traveling forward in time or backward? Why? And what is the time and place of your favorite or ideal destination?

PH There’s a period right before the Robot Uprising and subsequent Robopocalypse when things are pretty great. Robotic butlers, plenty of technology, food for everyone — generally, everything is beaches and mai tais. Immediately after this comes the Robot Uprising, life underground and the near destruction of humanity, and after that comes peace between robots and humans, immediately after which aliens arrive and subjugate Earth for quite a while. But after that — things are pretty cool. Especially if you like space adventures, which everyone does, obviously.

NH Riding dinosaurs is one of the most underrated facets of human existence, sadly underserved due to a lack of time travel. It’s also pretty neat using just a single leaf as a blanket. But if you put a gun to my head, nothing beats forming a ragtag team of castoffs and space aliens and bounding around the universe as a smuggler and/or freedom fighter.

 

SFBG QUAN+UM is a mysterious entity often referenced in the book. What are you at liberty to reveal about the organization? Why are the official colors purple and orange?

NH Only that they have the best damned bowling team this side of the Cretaceous. As for the colors: it’s a science-y thing. You wouldn’t understand.

PH Purple and orange are great colors for intern time travel test jumpsuits because they stand out when you’re trying to recover bodies, but have you seen them together? It’s so horrific, it has been known to drive people insane. Also, as it happens, purple and orange are radioactive when combined.

 

SFBG Do you think time travel will ever be an option for uber-rich tourists like Richard Branson and Ashton Kutcher, a la space travel? Would this be a disastrous business venture that would ultimately require a hero or machine-man to travel back from the future to prevent?

NH If we learned anything from Jurassic Park, and we did, it’s that tourism and playing God with science do not mix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5gbNtYw9KA

“Hold onto your butts.”

PH QUAN+UM exists because of jerks with money and crazy people in their basement, making radioactive mini-fridges and trying to ride in them to visit the Wild West. We’re not really supposed to talk about it, but to answer your questions, yes. And yes. Repeatedly. In fact, that’s kind of what we’re doing in 2012 right now. We won’t say who needs a strict talking to, however. He knows what he did.

 

SFBG What’s the most dangerous foe (dinosaurs, wizards, Nazis, alien overlords, etc.) one might encounter while traveling through time? What’s the most important thing to know about them?

NH Yourself. No other foe is as dangerous to you or to the sanctity of the timeline. The most important thing to know about them is that they know everything about you. The second most important thing to know about them is that they will turn hostile, inevitably. It’s best to be unpredictable and use moves and tactics that you would never use, otherwise they’ll have a leg up in the battle. Or … a leg even, anyway.

PH Also dragons.

***

Bonus round:

SFBG This sign appeared last year outside of the Guardian offices. Please advise.

NH Uh-oh. What was the date, exactly? Looks like another intern is trying to “take matters into his own hands.”

 

Check out Hornshaw and Hurwitch’s web site for more info on So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel, which contains extended discussions on riding dinosaurs, the Robot Uprising, and other topics.

Mayor McLaughlin on synthetic biology issue

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayor McLaughlin on synthetic biology issue

For my story about synthetic biology in this week’s Guardian, I tried to reach Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, where Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is building its second campus. The group Synbiowatch is questioning the safety and environmental responsibility of these new technologies. McLaughlin was traveling and just got back to us, so we thought we’d share the perspective of a Green Party mayor of the city where this work will take place.

SFBG: Do you have any concerns about safety at the lab or with the regulation of the synthetic biology field?

GM: I understand that this issue is extremely important. I was at the symposium “Unmasking the Synthetic Biology Lab” held in Berkeley last week and have been learning about the risks and concerns related to this field.

SFBG: Are you worried that we’re entering another “economic bubble,” this time with so-called “green jobs,” and that it could pop like previous bubbles and end up hurting Richmond?

GM: I think that green and sustainable job development will continue, as there is an absolute necessity for our human survival that we create a sustainable planet on which to live and thrive as well as pass along to future generations.

SFBG: The activists say the Precautionary Principle should dictate a slower and more careful and regulated approach to developing newly engineered microorganisms, do you share that view?

GM: I absolutely agree. There needs to a slow and deliberate process that fully researches and regulates this new engineering. I believe that science has a responsibility to examine step by step what is in the interest of us all as human beings – what truly advances us and what may cause us more problems.

SFBG: While the lab diversifies Richmond’s economy, much this research is funded by and could ultimately by developed by Chevron and other big energy companies. Is that appropriate for research into new energy forms that is sponsored with public money?

GM: I agree that the lab diversifies Richmond’s economy and I support opportunities it offers our community that come from positive, safe and healthy scientific exploration, education, and job opportunities. 

The fact that big energy corporations are funding much of the research definitely brings up concerns for me. We need to make sure that science is not conducted with an eye toward profit-making, but rather for the advancement of humanity. We know that our society currently is corporate-run, so we need to continuously raise the issue that true science has an obligation not to the corporations but to the people. This issue is something that should be raised everywhere.

Fact: your heart will go on if you skip ‘Titanic 3D’

Sue Vaughan
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0
Fact: your heart will go on if you skip ‘Titanic 3D’

We already made fun of Titanic 3D last week (spoiler alert: Kate aged better than Leo), and the only other big Hollywood cheese opening this week is American Reunion (spoiler alert: Alyson Hannigan‘s career has aged better than Jason Biggs‘).

Of slightly more urgent, politically relevent, Celine Dion-less note, check out Sam Stander’s review of This Is Not a Film, a movie by embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi that was literally smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake. It opens Fri/13 at the SF Film Society Cinema (a zone soon to be taken over by the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, kicking off April 19).

If you’re an artist yourself, possibly one who looks spiffy in a pair of chaps, the Folsom Street Fair (which has a new date this year!) has put out a call to independent filmmakers interested in working on a planned documentary on “the grandaddy of all leather events.” From the Folsom Street Events press release:

“Demetri Moshoyannis, Executive Director, said, ‘As Folsom Street Fair approaches its 30th anniversary, Folsom Street Events is seeking an independent filmmaker to help document our rich, diverse, and sometimes salacious history. With so much film talent in California, across the U.S., and even abroad, we believe that the development of Folsom Street Fair is a compelling story that must be shared.’ Jacob Richards, Board President, added, ‘The Board of Directors has agreed to provide support for the project in the form of a very modest grant (if requested), fundraising appeals to its donor base, access to historical documents and agency contacts, and more. We are hoping to receive a broad range of proposals from diverse filmmakers.'”

Head to www.folsomstreetevents.org for more info.

And if you’re simply looking for a new movie to see (The Hunger Games has grossed $373,330,642 worldwide … so far. Katniss Everdeen, you’ll never go hungry again!), you can geek out with Morgan Spurlock‘s fun doc Comic-Con IV: A Fan’s Hope; check out Moroccan filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’s latest, Free Men; see a couple of American Reunion cast members moonlight in the hockey flick Goon; and learn more about the recently-in-the-news-for-hopeful-reasons-for-once country of Myanmar in doc They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain. Reviews follow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN41gXXUlLI

Comic-Con IV: A Fan’s Hope When what is now known as the San Diego Comic-Con International launched in 1970, attendance consisted of a couple hundred comic-book fans. Now, it’s a huge event thronging with hundreds of thousands of geek-leaning movie, TV, video game, and — oh, yeah — comic-book fans; it’s also become an essential part of the hype-building machine for every major pop-culture property. Super Size Me (2004) director Morgan Spurlock’s lively doc examines the current state of Comic-Con with input from those who’ve ridden the nerd train to fame and fortune (Joss Whedon, Guillermo Del Toro, Stan Lee) — but the film’s most compelling sequences zero in on a handful of ordinary folks obsessed with the event for a variety of reasons. There’s the proprietor of a Denver comics shop, a 38-year Comic-Con veteran, faced with the chilling prospect of having to sell his most valuable (and most beloved) comic in order to keep his business afloat; the Carrie Brownstein look alike who spends the entire year crafting incredibly detailed costumes for Comic-Con’s annual masquerade contest; the soldier and family man who dreams of drawing comics for a living; and the sweetly dorky young man nervously planning to propose to his girlfriend … during a Kevin Smith panel. To its credit, Comic-Con IV never mocks its subjects, and it manages to infuse its many storylines with surprising emotional depth. Extra points for the clever, comics-inspired transitions, too. Director Spurlock appears in person for post-film Q&As Sun/8 at 5 and 7:30pm shows. (1:26) Vogue. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bXghcORxHo

Free Men Amid moderate hoopla for Casablanca‘s 70th anniversary, it’s a good time for something that was a whole lot more common back then — a wartime drama not about battle or victimization, but espionage intrigue crossing the lines between military, diplomatic, and civilian sectors. Arrested for participating in the black market in the occupied Paris of 1942, North African émigré Younes (Tahar Rahim from 2009’s A Prophet) evades prison or deportation by agreeing to spy on a local mosque suspected by the Nazis of harboring and smuggling out Jews. His clumsy efforts are quickly found out by a visiting imam (Michael Lonsdale), with the result that Younes — whose brother (Farid Larbi) is already a committed fighter in the Resistance underground — winds up playing double-agent, pretending to serve the police and SS while actually working against them. En route he becomes entangled in the disparate agendas of others including Leila (Lubna Azabal), who’s secretly involved in the Algerian liberation movement, and Salim (Mahmud Shalaby), an apolitical, bisexual singer whose career ambitions blind him to the personal dangers he risks. Ismaël Ferroukhi’s handsome, twisty drama won’t have you white-knuckling the armrests, but it’s an intelligent, satisfying throwback to the colorful characters and narrative intricacies of another era’s cinematic melodramas — with the welcome update of making non-white players our protagonists rather than “exotic” support players. (1:39) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytVoTYFT08

Goon An amiable Massachusetts bar bouncer who’s the odd one out within his highly-educated, high-achieving Jewish family (led by Eugene Levy), Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) can punch your lights out as easily — and with as little malice — as he’d flip a light switch. That skill looks useful to a local hockey team in need of an enforcer to disable relevant members of the opposing team when needed, then sit in the penalty box. Soon “Doug the Thug’s” burgeoning reputation brings him to the relative big leagues of Halifax, where his main job for the Highlanders is protecting a star (Marc-André Grondin) who’s been skittish since his serious bruising at the hands of “Ross the Boss” (Liev Schreiber), our hero’s veteran equivalent. Based very loosely on Doug “The Hammer” Smith’s memoir, this latest from director Michael Dowse (2004’s It’s All Gone Pete Tong) and co-scenarist Jay Baruchel (who also plays Doug’s incredibly crass best friend) is a cut above most Canadian hockey comedies — which, trust me, is not saying much. But it is indeed rather endearing eventually as an exercise in rude, pretty funny yet non-loutish humor about oafish behavior. A lot of its appeal has to do with Scott, who is arguably miscast and somewhat wasted as this “Hebrew Dolph Lundgren” — the actor’s forte being manic, impulsive, near-lunatic rather than slow-witted characters — yet who helps Goon maintain a no-foul friendliness in inverse proportion to its face-mashing action on ice. The writing could be sharper, but apparently there is only room for one smart hockey satire in our universe, and that spot was taken by Slap Shot 35 years ago. (1:30) Lumiere. (Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPDbdEN-XcM

They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain Recent elections signal that Myanmar’s status as “the second-most isolated country on the planet,” per Robert H. Lieberman’s doc, may soon be changing. With that hopeful context, this insightful study of Myanmar (or Burma, depending on who’s referring to it) is particularly well-timed. Shot using clandestine methods, and without identifying many of its fearful interviewees — with the exception of recently-released-from-house-arrest politician Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner — They Call it Myanmar offers a revealing look at a country largely untouched by corporate influences and pop culture. Myanmar’s military dictatorship is the opposite of a cult of personality; it’s scarier, one subject reflects, because “it’s a system, not an individual,” with faceless leaders who can be quietly be replaced. The country struggles with a huge disconnect between the very rich and the very poor; it has a dismal health care system overrun by “quacks,” and an equally dismal educational system that benefits very few children. Hunger, disease, child labor — all prevalent. Surprisingly, though the conditions that surround them are grim, Myanmar’s people are shown to be generally happy and deeply spiritual as they go about their daily lives. A highlight: Lieberman’s interactions with excited Buddhist pilgrims en route to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, with an up-close look at the miraculously teetering “Golden Rock.” (1:23) Bridge. (Eddy)

And if none of the above are weird or insane enough for your tastes, the new series at the Vortex Room, “Starship Vortex,” will not, we repeat not, in no way, shape, or form, let you down. Blast off!

Playing God?

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6
Playing God?

steve@sfbg.com

THE GREEN ISSUE When Richmond was selected as the site for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s huge second campus in January, city officials and community leaders celebrated the “green” jobs it would create, hundreds of them, diversifying an economy dependent on Chevron and its massive oil refinery. But a new coalition called Synbiowatch (www.synbiowatch.org) is questioning how green those jobs really are and raising fears about the new scientific realm on which they rely.

It’s called synthetic biology, which combines engineering and computer science with the biological sciences to design new microbes that don’t exist in nature — living, self-replicating organisms — taking the field of genetic engineering to another level by allowing scientists to actually write new DNA codes and incubate new life forms.

Proponents tout myriad potential benefits from the approach, from medical treatments (such as developing new anti-malarial drugs or creating new viruses that would attack cancer cells in humans) to the creation of renewable energy sources that might eventually replace fossil fuels, a major focus of the new lab and its main partner, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

“JBEI researchers are engineering new types of microbes using the latest tools in biotechnology,” notes a cartoonish video on its website (www.jbei.org) explaining how these engineered organisms will turn grasses and other abundant biomass matter into powerful fuels — a task that is not yet possible — which can run cleaner burning internal combustion engines.

But the environmentalists, labor organizers, scientists, and community activists who make up Synbiowatch say this technology not only doesn’t live up to its speculative hype, but that it is being developed too rapidly and without adequate oversight given its potential to alter natural ecosystems in unpredictable ways.

“We need a precautionary approach to health and safety,” Jim Thomas — program manager for ETC Group (which stands for Erosion, Technology, and Concentration) and lead author of the 2007 report “Extreme Genetic Engineering: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology” — told journalists during a March 28 briefing at Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley.

He was joined by UC Berkeley microbial ecologist Ignacio Chapela, a researcher who has publicized environmental impacts of the biotechnology industry; Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International; molecular biologist Becky McClain, who won a $1.4 million civil lawsuit against her old employer, Pfizer, after blowing the whistle on safety violations in its biotech research; Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition; and Richmond activist Gopal Dayaneni of Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. All took part in a conference the next day entitled “Unmasking the Bay Area Bio Lab and Synthetic Biology: Health, Justice, and Communities at Risk.”

Thomas said this coalition formed in recent years to counter the rapid development of what he says is now a $1.6 billion industry that has successfully resisted meaningful government regulation and oversight, despite the fact that the microbes it produces “have no analog in nature, and they will grow and reproduce.”

With no natural predators, the new microbes could reproduce unchecked. “We cannot allow these corporations to play God. They are not God,” said Bassey, who has spent a career combating the false claims and environmental degradation of some of the same big energy corporations (such as Chevron, Shell, and BP) sponsoring this new research. “It’s reckless, it’s out of control, it’s all about money.”

The biggest target of these activists’ ire is Jay Keasling, who directs the JBEI program, helped found the Richmond lab, and has pioneered synthetic biology research for LBNL and UC Berkeley, in addition to starting several companies to take advantage of that research. His latest is Lygos, which he formed in February to develop commercial applications for JBEI’s work on developing new fuels.

Keasling tells us that his critics are wrong and that these new microbes are basically just modifications of substances that scientists have worked with for decades and know how to safely handle. “What we’re trying to do is make the engineering of biology more reliable, so it’s safer and more predictable,” Keasling told us.

He dismissed the idea that these new microbes could threaten ecosystems if they escape from the lab, noting that microbes whose genetic sequencing has been altered in experiments over the last 40 years haven’t proven to be resilient in nature. “When they’re exposed to the environment, they generally don’t survive,” he said. “They get eaten by the other microbes completely.”

But the fear raised by Synbiowatch is that these rapid technological advances could produce a more durable new microbe, and that these scientists are essentially playing God with the basic building blocks of life before they really understand the implications of what they’re creating. Does Keasling think it’s possible that one of his new microbes might be more of a survivor than its predecessors?

“There’s always a possibility, but in 40 years of doing research in this area, that has not been found,” Keasling told us.

That’s not good enough for Synbiowatch and other critics, who say that it’s important to practice the Precautionary Principle — which places the burden of proof on innovators to prove that new technologies won’t be harmful to the environment or human health — before this new lab ramps up its research and development.

The new facility is expected to produce more than 800 jobs. Dayaneni said it’s understandable that Richmond officials embraced the new lab and the prospect of green jobs, but he called the promises of synthetic biology “a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or a wolf genetically engineered to look like a sheep.” He called the new lab “a shell institution for a host of corporate interests” seeking to “synthesize fuel in a petri dish” as much to create an economic bubble as a long-term energy solution.

But he and Bassey said the nascent industry isn’t focused on the many potential downsides of its pursuit, including the degradation of vast tracts of land and consumption of natural resources in order to acquire the sugars needed to fuel the process. “They will need a massive amount of land,” Bassey said. “This is what the progenitors of synthetic biology have failed to acknowledge.”

Keasling does acknowledge that to develop large-scale energy production of the new technology — something he said is still decades away from being viable — will indeed require vast tracts of land growing crops such as jatropha that have been developed for their fuel production potential, something Bassey said will displace poor people around the world.

“Farmers are being tricked to grow crops that are only for industrial uses,” he said. “Farmers that would normally grow crops for food will now be growing it for machines.”

Bassey ridiculed claims that such crops would only utilized marginal lands, but Keasling said the idea is to make use of currently nonproductive vegetation such as switchgrass, using the new microbes to extract sugars from their cellulose. “My hope is the plants will be grown on marginal land and the people who own it will make money from growing it,” Keasling said. “In some ways, it’s giving something back to the farmers.”

Dayaneni compared the new facility and industry to the short-sighted hubris of the nuclear industry before Japan’s Fukushima disaster: “You don’t build a nuclear power plant on the edge of the ring of fire and you don’t build a synthetic biology laboratory on the edge of the ring of fire either.”

Yet Keasling said he and his colleagues are far more aware of these issues and the need for safety and security than activists are giving them credit for. “The synthetic biology community is made up of people who are really concerned about the environment,” Keasling told us.

But McClain said her case shows corporations will often disregard worker safety and environmental consequences in pursuit of profits, often with the complicity of scientists enamored by new discoveries. “There is a lack of integrity and leadership in our scientific leadership,” she said, later adding, “The bottom line is we’re giving the scientific community the right to self-regulate, but that comes with responsibility.”

Keasling said he thinks there is a middle ground possible because “we’re not against regulation, we believe in regulation, it’s important, but it has to be sensible.” He also defended the role that large energy and biotechnology corporations have played in funding this research and licensing the patented new technologies it produces.

“We live in a capitalist system, somebody has to fund this research and science,” Keasling said. “The government doesn’t have the money.”

The slate controversy at the DCCC

Zelda Bronstein
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The slate controversy at the DCCC

There’s nothing like a combination of insider politics, a struggle for control of the local Democratic Party and the ongoing discussion about the need for progressives and moderates to get along better to make for a complicated political story.

Which is exactly what’s going on with Alix Rosenthal’s effort to put together a Women’s Slate for the Democratic County Central Committee.

I’ve spend way too much time trying to figure it all out, but it raises enough interesting issues to make it worth discussion in the progressive community.

The background: For four years, the progressives have controlled the DCCC – and thus the powerful local endorsements for the local Democratic Party. That’s taken considerable organizing – and it’s worked to a great extent because of a remarkable degree of unity among a famously fractious bunch.
In the past two elections, every progressive group, the Harvey Milk Club, the Tenants Union, the teacher’s union, the nurses, the Sierra Club — and the Bay Guardian – has endorsed essentially the slate of candidates. There are problems with that approach – it’s easy for some people or some groups to get excluded, and you get complaints of machine politics – but in reality, there weren’t a lot of people who identified as progressive getting left out. Quite the opposite – the slate organizers were working hard to recruit people to run. Serving on the DCCC isn’t glamorous and it’s a lot of work. (It’s also at times unpleasant — the arguments are harsh, sometimes more so than necessary.)

In 2012, we have a different problem: The people who are called moderates have convinced a lot of high-profile canidates (former Sup. Bevan Dufty, Sup. Malia Cohen, School Board member Hydra Mendoza) – people who will win on name-recognition alone – to run. Combined with the retirement of Aaron Peskin, and the all-but certain re-election of incumbents like Scott Wiener and Leslie Katz (who remains to this day the only member of the DCCC who refuses ever to take my phone calls) and you have the makings of a conservative victory.

Let me take a second on this “moderate” tag. Moderates in San Francisco are people who are liberal on social issues – like, frankly, 80 or 90 percent of the city – but conservative on economic issues. Conservative is the right word here: The moderates don’t typically support higher taxes on the rich and big business, don’t support development controls, are weak on tenant issues, don’t think that housing should be a right of all people and pretty much buy into what in the Clinton era we called neo-liberalism.

The progressives (who have economic policies more like the Democratic Party of FDR and Lyndon Johnson) and the moderates (who have economic policies more like the Democratic Party of  Walter Shorenstein, Dianne Feinstein and Bill Clinton) have been fighting for decades over the future of a city where there aren’t a whole lot of Republicans.

So when I say conservative I’m not talking about Reagan or Santorum — but I’m talking about a very different economic vision than mine.

And while I’m all in favor of being civil and polite to everyone and respecting friends and colleagues who disagree with you, I guess I’m enough of an old commie (with a lower case “c”) to believe deeply in class struggle and the idea that the rich and powerful don’t give up without a fight.

And having a good working relationship with the conservative Democrats (hey, I’m on great terms with Scott Wiener – we talk all the time and I respect him and like him personally) doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up the notion that in the United States and California and San Francisco, 2012, there’s a class war going on. We didn’t start the war, but we have to fight it to survive — and to keep the city from becoming an ossified playground of the very wealthy.

Okay, enough background and rhetoric. On March 29, Rosenthal – who is also my friend and I respect and often support – sent out an email that announced that all of the women running for DCCC were going to work together on a slate:

“The female candidates for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) have banded together to form a slate of our own. It’s called Elect Women 2012, and it includes all women running this June in both Assembly districts in San Francisco, moderates and progressives alike. The slate is intended to provide a support network for both new and seasoned candidates, to develop an amicable working relationship between moderate and progressive candidates, and above all to get more women elected to public office.”

 
That’s all good. More women in politics is good. Supporting new candidates is good. A working relationship between progressives and moderates is good.
But here’s the question, and it’s not a new one in San Francisco: Is it a good idea, both politically and as a matter of strategy, to promote the interests of people who largely disagree with you on issues? If a slate of women helps knock off a progressive man in favor of a conservative woman, is that a positive change?

Rosenthal doesn’t think that’s going to happen. We’ve had a couple of long discussions about this, and she’s looked at the math and the current list of candidates, and she thinks her slate is more likely to help a couple of progressive women (Petra DeJesus, for example) who might not otherwise win.
“You need to touch the voters three or four times before they know who you are,” she told me. “The winners will be people who are on several slates, and the progressives have more slates than the moderates.”

The guys who she agrees should really be on the DCCC and might have a close call (Matt Dorsey, for example, a gay man, or Dr. Justin Morgan, an African American man) won’t win or lose on the basis of a competing women’s slate.

Rosenthal ran for office on a pledge to bring more women into the DCCC and into public office, and that’s an important goal – right now, there’s not a single woman among the citywide elected officials in San Francisco. (That hasn’t always been the case — the mayor for 10 (awful) years was Dianne Feinstein, and in the past decade or so we’ve had a female treasurer, assessor, district attorney, city attorney and public defender. But right now: All guys.

The Board of Supes is a bit lopsided, too – seven men, four women.

And for the same reason that putting people of color into office almost by definition changes the perspective of politics, electing women is a progressive value. No matter how sympathetic the straight white men are, there are things we never had to experience and will never really understand.

That said, I would much rather have (mostly progressive) white guy Aaron Peskin run the Democratic Party than (mostly conservative) Asian woman Mary Jung – and so would Rosenthal. “No question, no doubt about it,” she told me.

Now that Jung has all but announced that she wants to be the next party chair, and since a number of the women on the slate will support her over a progressive (and would support her over Rosenthal) – is this doing the movement any good?

Gabriel Haaland, a transgender man and former president of the Harvey Milk Club, points out that “the Milk Club could simply endorse all LGBT candidates for our slate, and there are some who have argued for that over the years. But we don’t — because we work in coalitions, and that kind of slate undermines the whole concept of coalition politics.”

Hene Kelly, who is on the women’s slate but has insisted that the mailings make it clear she isn’t supporting some of the other candidates who will be connected with her, thinks the Rosenthal plan is a bad idea.

“There are people on this slate I could not and would not support because they don’t share my beliefs,” Kelly told me. “These are nice people, but they don’t see San Francisco the way that I do. Mary Jung and I don’t believe in the same things.”

Rosenthal says that the very fact that so many people who disagree on issues can work together on a slate shows that women can get along and end some of the divisiveness on the DCCC. Kelly – who is a passionate and often fierce fighter – disagrees: “I’m not that easy to get along with.”

Kelly is part of what will be a progressive coalition slate – including women and yes, men – and Latinos, African Americans, LGBT people, young people, older people … a mix. An imperfect but generally San Francisco mix. And all of them share the same political values.

Some of the people who don’t like the women’s slate are, indeed, men – and Rosenthal is at least a little proud of that. In another email talking about a Chronicle story, she notes:

“I have already received panicked calls from some male candidates and leaders, it seems there is quite a buzz about us and about Heather’s article. Which is great.  I hear that Malia said some good things, as did Supervisor Wiener.”

Wait — Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen are happy about the slate? This is supposed to be good news? I like Scott and we’ve worked together on issues we agree on, but I didn’t endorse him for office; on the most critical things, we don’t agree at all. And interestingly, there is not one progressive woman quoted as opposing the idea in the Heather Knight piece in the Chron.

I think the panic is not, alas, about men fearing the power of women. There isn’t a progressive man I know who would be unhappy with Hene Kelly running the party.

The question is about whether this effort might help shift the balance of  power away from the progressives – and, frankly, whether all this talk about getting along together is an excuse for watering down what we want to do and what we believe in.

Maybe Alix Rosenthal is right, and her slate — which will spend about $25,000 in what amounts to co-op advertising — will help bump a couple of progressive women to the top and help the left hold on (narrowly, because it will be close) to the DCCC. Maybe the moderate/conservative crew will win a majority, and some of the moderate women will be impressed by the help Rosenthal gave them and elect her chair (which would be a lot better than some of the alternatives).

Maybe politics should be less rancorous and we should all get along better – except that, in my 30 years of experience, getting along with the moderates has always, always, always, led to a watering down of the progressive program and agenda. 

Maybe I’m just a straight white guy who doesn’t get it – and I’m happy to cop to that possibility.

I agree that there aren’t enough women in local political office, that we need to encourage and promote progressive women candidates, that much of the leadership (such as it is) on the left is male — and that needs to change.

But I’m not sure that working to help elect people who disagree with you on the key economic and political issues is good for the values that I think Alix Rosenthal and I share.

It’s tricky, but at least we should be thinking and talking about it. Nicely. I promise.

Past, present, future

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Past, present, future

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This weekend choreographers Robert Moses and Sean Dorsey present new dances. Moses’ Helen, inspired by the myth of the beautiful Greek whose face launched a thousand ships, is at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Dorsey’s The Secret History of Love, based on how LGBT people used to meet, plays Dance Mission Theater. Both choreographers started dancing in their hometowns — Philadelphia for Moses, Vancouver for Dorsey — and began choreographing professionally in San Francisco. They recently talked to the Guardian about how they came to be where they are now.

SFBG Do you remember how dance entered your life?

Robert Moses We danced the way kids do. My sister and family members all danced. As teenagers we would get together in clubs where you showed your steps, and you had a contest. You couldn’t just jump around a little bit. You had to be the very best dancer that you could be.

Sean Dorsey My first memory is spinning round the living room in a leotard to “Free to Be … You and Me.” There was a lot of music in my house, lots of artists in my family, and there was a lot of space and encouragement for that kind of activity.

SFBG How did your formal training in dance start?

RM In my last semester in high school, I ended up in a dance class when another class was cancelled. At university, I started training in West African, Haitian, ballet, contemporary, tap, and musical theater. I did all of it because I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

SD My big childhood hero was Carol Burnett; my dream was to go into comedy. I was in graduate school in Community Development when I was invited to audition for the dance department. So I started to study dance at 25. It was going to be recreational, but I found that it was my deepest love.

SFBG We all bring our cultural background and life experiences to our work. If and in what way does that influence what you do?

RM Of course, it influences what you do; there is no way that it couldn’t. You are a member of group but you are also an individual who is changing and maturing. Sure, I have put perspectives on American, African American, and displacement issues. The thing to remember is what you do is not who you are.

SD As a transgendered person, a queer person, and an immigrant person, an outsider’s consciousness charges my art-making, and I hope that brings a heightened awareness and sensitivity to the kind of themes that I explore in my work such as family, love, or searching for a place in the world.

SFBG How does the process of making a new piece start?

RM It’s different each time. Sometimes it starts with a topic; sometimes with just a movement. A work might also tell me to lean more on the music or talk more about a subject. I also consider how a piece will be presented within a particular frame. The movement itself is created in the studio by the dancers and myself.

SD My process feels ridiculously long. All my pieces are accompanied by a sound score of narration and music. It takes four to six hours in the studio to make one minute. It’s always music, music, music and words, words, words. Once that is finished, I take the draft to the dancers and we make the movement together.

SFBG What would you like us to know about the upcoming premieres?

RM We are talking about the Greek Helen and the notion of an idealized woman, but also about the way people are the playthings of the gods. I am a fan of Carl Hancock Rux’s spoken word and music; he alludes to the Iliad but I am really interested in how women react to the situations they are in.

SD The show is based on archival research and features the real-life stories and voices of eight LGBT elders, from 1920s speakeasies to wartime love affairs, and the really repressive 1950s.

ROBERT MOSES’ KIN

Fri/30-Sun/1, 8 p.m., $25-$45

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

www.robertmoseskin.org

SEAN DORSEY DANCE

Thurs/28-Sun/1, 8 p.m. (also Sat/31-Sun/1, 4 p.m.), $10-$25

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

www.brownpapertickets.com

www.seandorseydance.com

Our Weekly Picks: March 28-April 3

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 28

“How to Drink Like a Locavore” Rents in the Mission and Noe Valley rose 10 percent in the last six months? Sea changes are afoot in this city (as always). But let’s make lemonade with the lemons of increasing preciousness — the monied have certainly provided a market for the Bay’s burgeoning local liquor scene. Community service for having snapped up the rental market? Today, for $25 anyone can sample pours from more than six distilleries in the tony climes of the Commonwealth Club — the ambrosial offerings of St. George’s Spirits, Anchor, and Distillery No. 209 included. Oh, and there’ll be an expert panel of hoochmakers to educate on what you’re sipping. Ask them if they need a roommate. (Caitlin Donohue)

6:30 p.m., $7–<\d>$25

595 Market, SF

(415) 597-6700

www.commonwealthclub.org

 

Sea of Bees

To call Julie Baenziger’s brand of sweet, haunting, exasperated vocals unique is an understatement. The Sea of Bees leader hails from California’s Central Valley and creates dreamy, blissful folk rock with a small group of co-conspirators. Sea of Bees’ debut album, Songs for the Ravens (2010), received critical acclaim and carries a fair bit of angst (with subtlety, mind you). Its forthcoming LP, Orangefarben, out this spring, includes “Gnomes,” a dynamic, surreal track released last summer on EP. Baenziger’s songs focus on love, sadness, hope, and intimacy, and her soulful style and live candor will draw you in.(Mia Sullivan)

With Radiation City, the Loom

8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com


THURSDAY 29

The Ferocious Few

Oh the Ferocious Few, how do we love thee, let me count the ways. That with just a guitar and drum kit you are nonetheless able to create a rock’n’roll ruckus any five-piece combo would be lucky to emulate (one). That Francisco Fernandez’s vocals, a honeyed firewater blaze, haunt every BART-station-street-corner-park-bench you’ve ever played (two). That every lyric you’ve penned about love lost slices right through the heart and straight for the jugular (three).That despite the massive setback of getting your gear stolen (since recovered), you still made it to SXSW with aplomb to spare (four). That you’re headlining a gig, indoors for a change, just before we went into major FF withdrawal (five). There are more reasons, but we’re out of word count. Just go. (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Zodiac Death Valley, B. Hamilton

8 p.m., $14

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

 

FRIDAY 30

“Dance Anywhere”

The world is in the toilet, and at times it feels like a giant cosmic hand is just about to flush us all. But a glimmer of hope for humanity lurks amid events like “Dance Anywhere,” which advises even the two-left-footed among us to pause and bust a joyful move in as part of a coordinated, global public art movement. Check the event’s website to line up your time zone (in San Francisco, it’s noon), and limber up for your solo macarena — or find your way to a free professional performance. Bay Area participants include Anne Bluethenthal Dance (at SFMOMA), Raisa Simpson and Push Dance Co. (at the Oakland Museum of California), and Alyce Finwall Dance Theatre (on 343 Sansome’s rooftop deck). In the words of Footloose: dance your ass off! (Eddy)

Noon, free

Various locations

www.danceanywhere.org

 

Kevin Brownlow

“The visual resources of the cinema have never been stretched further than in Napoléon vu par Abel Gance.” — that’s what Academy-honored film historian Kevin Brownlow had to say about the 1927 epic in his silent film tome The Parade’s Gone By… Now, his decades of restoration work on the film are culminating with screenings at the Paramount Theater in Oakland (the remaining two are Sat/31 and Sun/1; visit www.silentfilm.org for info). Brownlow will appear at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive to present “Abel Gance’s Napoléon, A Restoration Project Spanning a Lifetime,” a discussion of his work, sure to be an invaluable companion to the movie itself, which will feature scenes from the film and live piano accompaniment from Judith Rosenberg. (Sam Stander)

Book signing and reception, 5:30 p.m.; on Napoleon, 7:00 p.m., $5.50–<\d>$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

“Computer Face: A Show by Kirk Read”

Make way Wolf Blitzer, writer-performer-instigator Kirk Read, following the campaign trail as a sex worker like Mother Courage hauling her wares after the armies of Europe, offers his own take on the Republican primaries — among so much else — in his latest performance piece, now up through this weekend at the Garage. Read’s theater work is often grouped, not unreasonably, under performance art, queer cabaret, and such, but he has a quality that feels sui generis and shouldn’t be missed. Exuding a charming combination of practical, everyday groundedness and unmoored fancy, Read is a pure artist, and Rick Santorum’s hot wet nightmare. (Robert Avila)

Through Sat/31, $10–$20

Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 518-1517

www.975howard.com

 

Galactic

For those who aren’t really into jam, think of Galactic as an incarnate of Phish with brass instead of wah; but really, if you have a soul and like fun, you should probably acquaint yourself with Galactic, as it represents jazz-funk jam at its finest. The group’s live shows have been known to induce expressive dance as well as impressive marijuana intake. The pulsing and ecstatic Carnivale Electricos, which came out this past Mardi Gras, is an ode to carnivale in New Orleans (the band’s home city) and Brazil, where people take the responsibility of engaging in lustful debauchery on this crazy night quite seriously. (Sullivan)

With Soul Rebels Brass Band, Corey Henry

Fri/30-Sat/31, 9 p.m., $41.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

Filastine

Could there be anything more emblematic of the “global economy” — its giddy consumerism, its nomadic promise, its horrid displacement — than the lowly shopping cart? Audio-visual percussionist Filastine makes the shopping cart central to his transnational electro bass music project, zinging, plucking, and kicking its ribs to turn a metaphor into a dance party of resistance. His amazing latest video, “Colony Collapse,” was filmed at several sites of ecological disaster, pairing with the sites’ residents to make a fractured song of despair and hope. His live stage show, this appearance opening for Bay Area electro-jazz-hop collective Beats Antique, couples virtuoso live drumming and electronic grooves with a visual spectacle that holds crowds spellbound, a neat complement to the mobile dance parties and sonic activism he’s renowned for leading, from Tokyo to Barcelona. (Marke B.)

With Beats Antique, the Loyd Family Players

8 p.m., $25

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 548-3010

www.thefoxoakland.com


SATURDAY 31

Pilot 60

ODC’s Pilot Program is giving young choreographers a leg up, so to speak. Having an idea about making a dance is easy. Shaping it so that it makes sense to the choreographer as well as to an audience is tough. Being in the same boat with others, however, helps. Just ask the dozens of choreographers who over the years (this is Pilot’s 60th incarnation) have gone through this well structured, proven way to nudge budding professionals to the spotlight. Alison Williams, Samantha Giron, Milissa Payne Bradley, David Schleiffers, Lisa Fagan and Claudia Anata Hubiak will be presenting works this time around. (Rita Felciano)

Sat/31-Sun/1, 8 p.m., $12

ODC Dance Commons, Studio B

351 Shotwell, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org


SUNDAY 1

“Memorabilia from the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust”

Know your Gershwins: Ira was the older brother (born 1896), but he outlived George (born 1898) by nearly 50 years. Together, they were a songwriting dream team ruling Broadway and American popular song — but even after George’s death, Ira continued writing lyrics for the stage and screen. He died in 1983; his widow, Leonore, died in 1991 after devoting her later years to preserving the legacy of the talented brothers. Fans won’t want to miss the exhibition of items from the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust (sheet music, concert posters, family photos, awards), as well as related events, including a talk by Ira’s nephew Mike Strunsky (Mon/2) and performances of The Man That Got Away: Ira After George (April 13-15). (Eddy)

Through June 15

Gallery hours Mon.-Thurs., 7 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sun., 7 a.m.-8 p.m., free

Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

Katz Snyder Gallery

3200 California, SF

www.jccsf.org

 

“April Fools With Miss Coco Peru”

Tempting as it might be to play a trick on some poor fool today, firing the opening shot in a prank war is risky — payback is, after all, a notorious bitch. Instead of getting your April Fool’s Day guffaws at the expense at someone else, why not show your appreciation for a razor-sharp and unfailingly glamorous comedian? Miss Coco Peru, star of screens big (1999’s Trick) and small (“Wee Britain”-era Arrested Development) — and, of course, of stage (Ugly Coco) — performs her latest, There Comes a Time, a no-holds-barred monologue reflecting on her colorful life in the spotlight. Earlier in the day, Miss Peru will be on hand for a short Q&A after a screening of 2003’s Girls Will Be Girls, a campy cult comedy (tantalizingly described as “every novel Jacqueline Susann’s ever written”) with a sequel due out this year. (Eddy)

Screening, noon, $10

Performance, 7 and 9:30 p.m., $29.95

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

(415) 863-0611

www.ticketfly.com

 

Chain & the Gang

You’re either with Ian Svenonius or you’re against him. The shamanic leader of Nation of Ulysses, Make-Up, and Weird War (all quality on their own, according to me) inspires fervor, mirrored weirdness, and the occasional eye-roll (hey, I’ve seen it). His most recent project Chain & the Gang (touring now in support new LP, In Cool Blood ) doesn’t get any less quirked, so if you’re not in line with Svenonius, you won’t find it as thrilling as the rest of us. With a muffled scream here, a tambourine shake there, and a buzzing chainsaw guitar slicing through it all, Chain & the Gang is a testament to Svenonius’s continuity, and his ongoing ability to scrap genres, culling the best bits of the past — Southern blues, working man shuffles, post-punk, and mod — for his own future perfect. (Emily Savage)

With Neonates, the Smell

9 p.m., $9–$12

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com


TUESDAY 3

Field Report

Chris Porterfield used to be a member of the now-defunct Wisconsin-based act DeYarmond Edison with Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and the men of Megafaun (Brad Cook, Phil Cook, Joe Westerlund). He also made music under the Conrad Plymouth moniker for a while but recently debuted his new project, Field Report, at SXSW — a lush and poetic picture of longing, nostalgia, and hope. The retrospection and emotionality wrapped into Porterfield’s folksy, bluesy Americana is easily relatable and will make you want to melt into his world. Field Report’s debut album, which was recorded in Vernon’s studio and produced by Paul Koderie, is due out in July. (Sullivan)

With Megafaun

9 p.m., $12

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

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Lost at sea

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Lost at sea

cheryl@sfbg.com

AMERICA’S CUP Clear your mind, if you can, of brawls over San Francisco piers and other obscenely expensive parcels of waterfront real estate. Focus solely on the inevitability of the 34th annual America’s Cup.

Summer 2013, it’ll rip into town, offering self-described “adrenaline sailing at its best” to jet-setting yachting enthusiasts. In 2010, the 33rd contest was won in Spanish waters by Oracle Racing, headed up by billionaire Larry Ellison. In 2013, Ellison plans to defend his trophy as the competition (ironically, dealing with its own financial struggles; the San Francisco Business Times reported March 23 that America’s Cup officials laid off half their staff) makes its San Francisco Bay debut.

Of course, average San Franciscans — often found ransacking their couch cushions to scare up burrito funds — couldn’t give a rat’s ass about an event blatantly catering to the one percent. But they should, and here’s why: unless we want to see all those Top-Siders stride directly to wine country after each day of racing concludes, we need to give the visitors (estimates vary on the numbers: 10,000? 200,000?) a reason to hang out in SF, visit its neighborhoods, and spend money locally.

One idea: organize an arts festival with programming complementary to the America’s Cup races. Such an event would potentially offer a huge boost to the local arts scene.

The most passionate supporter of an America’s Cup arts festival has got to be Andrew Wood, executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Last fall, he announced the 2013 SFIAF would shift its dates from May, when it usually takes place, to July through September. That way, SFIAF could coincide with the race — and be a component in what he envisions as a much larger, citywide event.

“We first contacted the America’s Cup about including an arts component before they even confirmed San Francisco as the venue,” Wood remembers. “They’ve never really had a strong arts component to the America’s Cup before, but they’ve never tried to do anything like they’re trying to do here.”

He’s referring to this particular race’s unique appeal for “a land-based audience.” Geographically speaking, some America’s Cup races are viewable only to television audiences and anyone who happens to have a boat hanging out within sight of the course; the San Francisco Bay obviously offers far more viewing opportunities for landlubbers.

“If you do either of the two largest sporting events in the world — the Olympics and the World Cup — an arts festival is mandatory. You can’t even bid on the Olympics unless you have a festival that’s going to run alongside it,” Wood explains. “[The event will then] appeal to more people. People will stay in the locale longer and spend more money — [especially important for] the America’s Cup, where there’s only racing for an hour a day.”

Money is always a factor when planning for an arts festival of any size, particularly something large enough to entertain 200,000-ish people.

“We can raise a lot of our own money, but what we need is some type of agreement that says we can go out and raise it as the name ‘America’s Cup’,” Wood says, noting that he’s already broached the subject of fundraising with some of the consulates representing countries with boats entered in the race. He’d like to bring artists from all of the participating countries (so far: Italy, Spain, France, South Korea, New Zealand, China, and Sweden) to San Francisco to perform alongside Bay Area arts groups. His grand vision includes theme weeks for each country revolving around the various holidays that happen to fall within the race dates — for example, France’s Bastille Day, July 14.

 

AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Wood was optimistic after his first meeting with Mark Bullingham, then the America’s Cup director of marketing, in April 2011.

“Then I jumped into SFIAF in May,” Wood remembers. “When I came back in June or July, he’d resigned. We were never able to get traction with the America’s Cup after that.”

As time for fundraising grows short — and the America’s Cup deal shrinks and evolves as development plans are tinkered with; the latest incarnation was presented to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors March 27 — Wood holds out hope that an arts festival will be included in the deal. A little bit of hope.

“If they let the deal be signed without including an arts component — or even just mentioning ‘Well, we’ll have a future conversation around this’ — then Larry Ellison can do what he wants. Oracle can have some entertainment if they wish, or they can cut the entertainment if they wish,” he says. “The way the actual America’s Cup legislation is written at the moment, the city is going to let the America’s Cup Event Authority escape without having to commit to any type of arts program whatsoever.”

From the city’s point of view, that’s not entirely true. San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development acknowledged the importance of having an arts component in a memo titled “America’s Cup Neighborhood Engagement Strategy” presented to the Board of Supervisors February 22, 2012 — though so far, that’s been the only official word on the subject.

“We’re still trying to get our approvals here so we haven’t really moved much beyond [what’s in the memo],” says the OEWD’s Jane Sullivan, Communications Director for the America’s Cup project. “I think what we in the mayor’s office are concentrating on is trying to make sure the economic benefits spread across the city, and probably using the neighborhoods as a focus of how to do that. But certainly that would include the arts component in the neighborhoods and maybe beyond.”

One promising idea outlined in the memo is to use a smart phone app to help alert visitors to neighborhood activities, including arts events.

“There’s an app that exists right now called Sfarts.org that is a project between the [San Francisco] Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts,” Sullivan explains, noting that working with the San Francisco Travel Association would be a way to market the app to visitors.

Though discussions are “ongoing,” Sullivan says the city is focused on “coordination and promotion, and then helping to develop or further develop a robust technology platform to support that.”

When asked if she thinks an official, large-scale arts festival would make its way into the America’s Cup deal, she’s straightforward: “I do not think that’s going to happen.”

 

X GAMES 2.0

Tony Kelly — facilities manager at Bindlestiff Studio, and a longtime participant in San Francisco’s arts and political scenes — believes that arts events are “the only way to save the America’s Cup” in terms of reaping any of the event’s promised neighborhood economic impact.

“It’s not just having arts events, it’s putting them in places to draw people to the neighborhoods,” he says. “If people go to the races in the afternoon, then you draw them out into the neighborhoods for arts events in the evening, then they actually stay in the city longer. They go to restaurants, bars, hotels, and merchants.”

However, he cautions, “If you think this many people are showing up, you better have things for them to do. If you don’t think this many people are showing up, you better create things so that people do show up. Either way.”

He’s concerned about the city’s strategy of promoting existing arts events without offering additional support to arts groups.

“If the city pretends that we have this ongoing international arts festival any weekend of the year, and therefore we’ll just promote what we already have, and that’ll be our festival during the America’s Cup, that essentially works as a budget cut,” Kelly says. “There’s a certain amount of funding that dribbles down to the arts right now. It is what it is. And then they’re like, ‘We’re gonna add this whole other thing, and we hope you guys can add capacity to handle this stuff, because here come all these people. But no, we’re not going to support it at all.’ That’s a classic unfunded mandate. ‘Oh, you can take this on too.'”

Kelly, Wood, and other members of the arts community have brainstormed a hypothetical list of festival events: an America’s Cup-themed parade, allowing Sunday Streets on Market Street throughout the weeks of racing, outdoor musical performances, an art walk along the Embarcadero, and more, tapping into publicly-owned venues around the city. A sample budget was also drafted.

“It is definitely an example of what could be done fairly quickly and efficiently in this year’s budget, if anyone at City Hall chose to do so,” Kelly says.

Unsurprisingly, Wood shares Kelly’s frustration with the city’s let’s-promote-what’s-in-place plan. “San Francisco has this enormous arts infrastructure that it isn’t using properly,” he says. “Why not hotwire the system to create a program of events that would also complement [arts events which are] already going on? There’s been no real effort to try and corral what’s going on and figure out how it fits together, so that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”

Kelly remains skeptical that the America’s Cup will even draw the promised crowds; he suspects its actual impact on the city will more resemble the X Games — which San Francisco hosted in 1999 and 2000 — than an event “as big as multiple Super Bowls.”

He also views the city’s reluctance to support an arts festival as part of a larger, long-standing problem.

“San Francisco is this great, hip, fun, creative city — why is that? It’s because of the artists. But housing prices keep going up, so more artists have to leave,” he says. “However, when there’s an event that’s counting on us to actually deliver this stuff to the neighborhoods, there’s no support for it. Push is coming to shove and has for a number of years now, and this is just one more obvious, obvious example of it.”

Nite Trax: The fabulous creatures of Gaultier’s opening gala

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hyperproductive fashion designer and revered fantasy engineer Jean Paul Gaultier was in town last week for the opening of a (very cool) retrospective of his work at the de Young. His nightlife stops included the Some Thing drag show at the Stud on Friday, a cruisy interlude at the Powerhouse on Saturday — and of course a lavish opening gala celebration at the de Young itself on Friday evening.

The fantastic function included an exposed “backstage” area where models were fitted into Gaultier pret-a-porter, primped, temporary-tattooed, and hairdressed with amazing sculptural headpieces by SF’s Glama-Rama salon, before trotting out onto a makeshift runway. Attendees — not all of them our city’s social page elite, btw — wore their most unusual outfits. (There were a lot of sailor stripes, man-skirts, and Gaultier looks from the past three decades.) Even the servers were decked out in handmade kaleidoscopic Krylon smocks by graffiti gallery 1:AM. Tunes from the gorgeous, killer-bobbed DJ started out retro-cute and fun, including JPG’s own 1990 dancefloor hit, “How To Do That” before devolving into the standard party jams of today, which certainly got the singles (cougars) in the crowd “puttin’ their hands up.” It was a blast.  

Soon the raucous and always riveting Extra Action Marching Band took over, the flowing cocktails kicked in, and we drifted down to the exhibit itself, which includes eerie singing mannequins with projected faces beamed in directly from Uncanny Valley. (There’s even an interactive one of Gaultier himself, which supposedly answers questions, although I think the ambient noise levelof the gala confused it.)

The amassed collection of clothing and concepts, of course, was overwhelming in its creativity and development — although I could have done with a few more iconic items from the “Chic Rabbis” 1993 collection (personal preference!) and some more recent work, and perhaps a wee bit less emphasis on the infamous Madonna-cone bra connection. But I did tear up at the site of Gaultier’s childhood teddy bear preserved in a vitrine wearing, yes, a miniature cone bra prototype.

I think the most touching thing in the show, however, was a Polaroid by Andy Warhol, taken of the young and not quite hatched Gaultier at New York’s Area club in 1986. Gaultier is caught in a stairwell, a bit Joker-like in what looks to be a purple silk suit with a gold lozenge pattern and his trademark bleached blonde hair. It’s accompanied by Warhol’s famous quote, ““I think the way people dress today is a form of artistic expression. Saint Laurent, for instance, has made great art. Art lies in the way the whole outfit is put together. Take Jean Paul Gaultier. What he does is really art.”                

A new food-truck map

Zelda Bronstein
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A new food-truck map

Sup. Scott Wiener wants to compromise on the food-truck limits, and is working with the folks at SFUSD and the food advocates.

Dana Woldow, who is working with Nancy Waymack, director of policy and planning for SFUSD, Chris Armentrout, the district’s director of development and government relations, and School Board member Jill Wynns, told me that the advocates are open to the idea of allowing more trucks in the Mission:

As I have said, I (and other parent advocates wanting to maintain a viable school meal program which can afford to offer healthy food to all students) do understand the dilemma of gourmet food trucks; that’s why we are willing to reduce the zone around all middle schools in the City to 500 feet from the current 1500 feet. Additionally, we would consider looking at drawing a custom boundary, which could possibly be smaller than the current 1500 feet, around each of the high schools in the Mission district. That way, we could free up some prime parking for trucks while still maintaining a wide enough truck-free area to discourage students from leaving school at lunchtime.

She’s got a new map for me that shows where trucks would be banned under the compromise proposal — one that includes only public middle schools and high schools. Check it out here. (pdf) And compare it to the old map here.

This all seems eminently reasonable, and maybe we can have healthy school food and burrito trucks, too.

Supervisors hope to halt foreclosures with new resolution

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John Avalos introduced a resolution today urging support for homeowners facing foreclosure in San Francisco. The resolution calls for several actions, including suspending all foreclosures until state and federal measures to protect homeowners are in place.

Sponsors of the resolution Avalos, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, and Christina Olague joined a coalition of community organizations to explain the resolution at a press conference.

The resolution would call for support of a statewide Homeowners Bill of Rights, a series of bills that would address predatory loans and robosigning, as well as California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s campaign for a statewide suspension on foreclosures in properties controled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also “urges all city and county officials and departments to work proactively to ensure that San Francisco residents do not fall victim to unlawful foreclosure practices,” as Avalos explained.

Supervisors cited a report released in February by Assessor Phil Ting as one of the reasons for the resolution. The report found “irregularities” in 99 percent of foreclosure documents in San Francisco between 2009 and 2011, and “what appear to be one or more clear violations of the law” in 84 percent of cases. 

The resolution’s language also names “predatory banking practices that disproportionately targeted racial and ethnic minority communities, especially working class African Americans and Latinos” as an impetus for the resolution, noting that “from 2007 to 2008, Wells Fargo, and mortgage lenders it has since acquired, was 188 percent more likely to put African American borrowers and 117 percent more likely to put Latino borrowers into higher-cost, subprime loans.”

“What we see around foreclosures is that we have a systemic problem,” said Campos. Over 1,000 homes in San Francisco are currently in the process of foreclosure, 

Supervisor Kim connected the issue to another systemic problem affecting San Francisco, that has been a recent topic of discussion at City Hall: family flight. 

“We do have many low-income families that are actually homeowners in the city, primarily in the southeast sector. But how they afford to buy homes is by squeezing often two to three families in these homes in the southeast. So we’re talking about not just one household when we foreclose on a home, we’re often talking about two, three families with multiple youth and seniors,” said Kim.

“This is something that has been an important issue for many of our supervisors across the political spectrum, is how to retain families in San Francisco. Stopping foreclosure has to be a key part of that.” 

A few supervisors congratulated community organizers for focusing on the foreclosure crisis.

“I want to thank Occupy Bernal for not only shedding light on what’s happening in Bernal Heights, but realizing that the foreclosure crisis that we’re facing is something that involves all of us. Every single neighborhood,” said Campos.

The resolution was introduced to the Board of Supervisors March 20. It will be discussed further at the Land Use and Economic Development committee meeting April 2. 

If it eventually passes the Board of Supervisors, the resolution will be non-binding; a citywide foreclosure moratorium is likely not imminent. Yet many supporters expressed urgency and commitment for city action to address foreclosures. 

“When speaking with the sheriff about how we can stop evictions, what struck me most was he said that sometimes when we walk into these homes, we’ve found that people have committed suicide before the sheriffs even come in,” said Supervisor Kim. “This is a life and death issue for many of our residents.”

 

Film Listings

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

OPENING

*Centaur Is our scarily intense, morally slippery narrator a man or a beast? J.P. Allen not only wrote and directed Centaur, but also stars in the claustrophobic, beautifully lensed SF-based noir with a contemporary update: Allen’s unnamed, driven protagonist lets you into his mind with a video journal, a document of his revenge on the drunk driver (Chris Pflueger) who caused the death of his true love, Jennifer (Amy Mordecai). Repeated images of the Golden Gate Bridge, and of Jennifer reading love poetry and caressing herself, parallel the obsession of the narrator, who methodically lays out his love, loss, and murderous plan, while the refined look and sensual feel of the images — and the soundtrack by Bad Seeds-like, cacophonous Michael Slattery and Shoulders — make this independent rise above the ordinary. Allen wisely pares his character’s struggle and story down to the bare essentials, in the process crafting a film that draws you in and continues to haunt you after the credits roll. (1:27) Lumiere. (Chun)

Footnote Oscar-nominated Israeli film about the fierce academic competition between a father and son at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (1:45) Clay.

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the annual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) Marina, Presidio. (Rapoport)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

*The Kid with a Bike Slippery as an eel, Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the bane of authorities as he tries to run away at any opportunity from school and a youth home — being convinced that the whole adult world is conspiring to keep his father away from him. During one such chase he literally runs into hair-salon proprietor Samantha (Cécile De France), who proves willing to host him on weekends away from his public facility, and is a patient, steadying influence despite his still somewhat exasperating behavior. It’s she who orchestrates a meeting with his dad (Jerémié Renier, who played the child in the Dardennes’ 1996 breakthrough La Promesse), so Cyril can confront the hard fact that his pa not only can’t take care of him, he doesn’t much want to. Still looking for some kind of older male approval, Cyril falls too easily under the sway of Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a teenage thug whom everyone in Samantha’s neighborhood knows is bad news. This latest neorealist-style drama from Belgium’s Dardenne Brothers treads on very familiar ground for them, both in themes and terse execution. It’s well-acted, potent stuff, if less resonant in sum impact than their best work. (1:27) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Raid: Redemption As rip-roaring as they come, Indonesian import The Raid: Redemption (from, oddly, a Welsh writer-director, Gareth Huw Evans) arrives to reassure genre fans that action films are still being made without CG-embellished stunts, choppy editing, and gratuitous 3D. Fists, feet, and gnarly weapons do the heavy lifting in this otherwise simple tale of a taciturn special-forces cop (Iko Uwais) who’s part of a raid on a run-down, high-rise apartment building where all the tenants are crooks and the landlord is a penthouse-dwelling crime boss (Ray Sahetapy). Naturally, things go awry almost immediately, and floor-to-floor brawls (choreographed by Uwais and co-star Yayan Ruhian, whose character is aptly named “Mad Dog”) comprise nearly the entirety of the film; of particular interest is The Raid‘s focus on pencak silat, an indigenous Indonesian fighting style — though there are also plenty of thrilling gun battles, machete-thwackings, and other dangerous delights. Even better: Redemption is the first in a planned trilogy of films starring Uwais’ badass (yet morally rock-solid) character. Bring it! (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Sound of Noise The ingenious 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers expands to feature length — and blankets an entire (unnamed) Scandinavian city in anarchic soundscapes — in Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson’s eccentric, engaging comedy. A cop (Bengt Nilsson) on the anti-terrorism squad also happens to be the only tone-deaf member of his musical-genius family; the fact that his name is Amadeus only makes his hatred of music all the more potent. When a mysterious band of percussionists begin holding disruptive performance-art “concerts” in odd places (a hospital, a bank), Amadeus becomes obsessed with the case — though, in a nifty bit of fantasy, once an object has been played on by the group, he can no longer hear the sound it makes. Sound of Noise is worth seeing just for the toe-tapping musical interludes, played on objects both commonplace and ridiculous, but Nilsson and the musicians (especially ringleader and lone female Sanna Persson Halapi) are also deadpan delights. (1:38) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Four Star, Lumiere, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Boy Apparent in his 2007 film Eagle vs. Shark and his brief turns writing and directing The Flight of the Conchords, filmmaker Taika Waititi seems to embody a uniquely Polynesian sensibility, positioned at a crossroads that’s informed by his Te-Whanau-a-Apanui heritage and his background in the Raukokore area of New Zealand, as well as an affection of global pop culture and a kind of keeping-it-real, keeping-it-local, down-home indie sensibility. All of which has fed into Boy, which became the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time when it was released in its homeland in 2010. Its popularity is completely understandable. From the lush green inlands and stunning beaches of Waihau Bay to its intimate, gritty and humorous sketch of its natives, this affectionate, big-hearted bildungsroman is a lot like its 11-year-old eponymous hero — eminently lovable and completely one of a kind. Despite the tragedies and confines of his small-town rural life, Boy has a handle on his world: it’s 1984, and his pals spend their time hanging out at the snack shop and harvesting weed for one deadbeat biker parent. Boy’s brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) believes he has superpowers and is scarred by the fact that his birth was responsible for their mother’s death, and Michael Jackson has just been crowned the king of pop. Then, while his grandma’s away, Boy’s own deadbeat dad, Alamein (Waititi) appears on the scene, turning an extended family of small children on its head — and inspiring many a Thriller dance-slash-dream sequence. Waititi finds his way inside Boy’s head with Crayola-colorful animated children’s drawings, flashbacks, and the kind of dreamy fluidity that comes so naturally during long, hot Polynesian days, all while wonderfully depicting a world that far too few people have glimpsed on screen. (1:30) Bridge, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Casa de mi Padre Will Ferrell’s latest challenge in a long line of actorly exercises and comic gestures — from his long list of comedies probing the last gasps of American masculinity to serious forays like Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Everything Must Go (2010) — is almost entirely Spanish-language telenovela-burrito Western spoof Casa de mi Padre. Here Ferrell tackles an almost entirely Spanish script (with only meager, long-ago high school and college language courses under his belt) alongside Mexican natives Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and telenovela veteran Genesis Rodriguez. This clever, intriguing, occasionally very funny, yet not altogether successful endeavor, directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, sprang from Ferrell’s noggin. Ferrell is nice guy Armando, content to stay at home at the ranch, hang with his buddies, and be dismissed by his father (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) as a dolt. The arrival of his sleazy bro Raul (Luna) and Raul’s fiancée Sonia (Rodriguez) change everything, bringing killer narco Onza (Bernal) into the family’s life and sparking some hilariously klutzy entanglements between Armando and Sonia. All of this leads to almost zero improvisation on Ferrell’s part and plenty of meta, Machete-like spoofs on low-budget fare, from Sergio Leone to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Casa punctures padre-informed transmissions of Latin machismo, but it equally ridicules the idea of a gringo actor riding in and superimposing himself, badly or otherwise, over another country’s culture. (1:25) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Roxie. (Chun)

Delicacy Without visible effort, Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) charms the hearts of the susceptible males in her vicinity, including François (Pio Marmaï), a young man in a café who is soon proposing marriage, and Charles (Bruno Todeschini), a company director who hires her on the spot, transfixed by her very photograph on a résumé. When François, now her husband, is killed in a car accident, grief overwhelms her and she pours her energies into her professional life — until the day she finds herself unexpectedly making advances toward a frumpy, socially awkward colleague, a Swedish expat named Markus (Belgian comedian François Damiens). Her choice confounds the expectations of coworkers (Charles calls him an “ugly, insignificant guy”) and friends (one tells Nathalie, upon meeting Markus, that she could do better), but while the pairing is rather precipitous, it’s no more difficult to swallow than anything else in a film that feels like a pencil sketch on tracing paper. Events in Delicacy are lightly threaded together, so that a relationship turns into marriage and a three-year emotional tailspin goes by without our sensing the passage of time. We hear Nathalie described as “one of those women who cancels out all others,” but — while Tautou is as lovely as ever — we don’t see this in her. We hear people tell Markus how funny he is, but — though comedy is Damiens’s stock-in-trade — he doesn’t make us laugh. The problem lies largely in the script, even clumsier than Markus; it tells us we’re watching two unlikely people fall in love but doesn’t give us much reason to care. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Fake It So Real It would have been very easy for someone to make a film about an uber-low-budget posse of indie wrestlers and make fun of the entire enterprise. Robert Greene, whose cousin is among Fake It So Real‘s subjects, chooses a different path: his film is almost earnest in its appraisal of these Lincolnton, North Carolina good ol’ boys, who live for their Saturday-night matches under the fluorescent lights of the local Vietnam Veteran’s Center. For these men, wrestling offers an escape from otherwise glamourless lives (filled with boring jobs, heartbreak, health problems, and the like), and they take it very seriously, plotting out character arcs and sweating through training sessions. Comparisons to Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler (2008) are inevitable, but remember, Rourke’s character had once been famous. These guys’ definition of success is being approached by a group of kids in Wal-Mart for an autograph. Note for the easily offended: Fake It So Real‘s fly-on-the-wall filming style doesn’t filter out its subjects’ affection for gay jokes, clearly a deeply-enmeshed part of the small-town culture depicted here. (1:31) Roxie. (Eddy)

*The FP The town is real: east-of-Santa-Barbara, south-of-Bakersfield mountain burg Frazier Park, Calif. But this is no bucolic village; nay, the world portrayed in The FP is a dark one, a place without jobs or fashion sense that evolved beyond the 1980s. It’s a world where disputes between warring gangs are settled via Beat Beat Revelation, a video game that bears absolute resemblance to Dance Dance Revolution. A family affair (brothers Jason and Brandon Trost co-directed; Jason wrote and stars; Brandon was the cinematographer; sister Sarah — from Project Runway, season eight! — designed the costumes; and dad Ron did the special effects) and an obvious labor of love, The FP pays adoring homage to John Carpenter and Walter Hill’s classics of the dystopian-future B-movie genre. Angry loner Jtro (Jason Trost), rocking a Snake Plissken-esque eye patch, leaves the FP after the Beat Beat-related death of his older brother; with the help of friend KC/DC (Art Hsu) and mystical guru BLT (Nick Principe), he trains (via ’80s-style montages, natch) for a match with town bully L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), all the while wooing troubled girl next door Stacey (Caitlyn Folley). Of particular note is The FP‘s riotous dialogue; this is maybe the first (and let’s hope last) film to be written entirely in what sounds like the language of the juggalos. (1:23) Roxie. (Eddy)

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Four Star, Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Jeff, Who Lives at Home The failure-to-launch concept will always thrive whenever and wherever economies flail, kids crumble beneath family trauma, and the seduction of moving back home to live for free with the parental units overcomes the draw of adulthood and individuation. Nevertheless brotherly writing and directing team Jay and Mark Duplass infuse a fresh, generous-minded sweetness in this familiar narrative arc, mainly by empathetically following those surrounding, and maybe enabling, the stay-at-home. Spurred by a deep appreciation of Signs (2002) and plentiful bong hits, Jeff (Jason Segel) decides to go with the signals that the universe throws at him: a mysterious phone call for a Kevin leads him to stalk a kid wearing a jersey with that name and jump a candy delivery truck. This despite the frantic urging of his mother (Susan Sarandon), who has set the bar low and simply wants Jeff to repair a shutter for her birthday, and the bad influence of brother Pat (Ed Helms), a striving jerk who compensates for his insecurities by buying a Porsche and taking business meetings at Hooters. We never quite find out what triggered Jeff’s dormancy and Pat’s prickishness — two opposing responses to some unspecified psychic wound — yet by Jeff, Who Lives at Home‘s close, it doesn’t really matter. The Duplass brothers convince you to go along for the ride, much like Jeff’s blessed fool, and accept the ultimately feel-good, humanist message of this kind-hearted take on human failings. (1:22) California, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Kill List “Oh jeebus,” you say. “Another movie about a hit man lured out of retirement for one last score?” Well, yes — and no. British director and co-writer Ben Wheatley (2009’s Down Terrace) manages to reinvent one of cinema’s most tired clichés by injecting a healthy amount of what-the-fuck-just-happened?-ness, as well as a palpable sense of absolute dread. Without spoiling anything, here’s how the story begins: married with a young son, surly Jay (Neil Maskell) and shrill Shel (MyAnna Buring) are struggling to maintain their wine-drinking, middle-class, Jacuzzi-in-the-backyard lifestyle. Their financial troubles are due to the fact that Jay hasn’t worked in eight months, which is to say he hasn’t offed anyone since his last job, a mysterious assignment in Kiev, went awry. When best friend and partner Gal (Michael Smiley) hears about a new, well-paying gig that involves a “kill list” of U.K.-based victims, Jay figures he might as well sign on, if only to get Shel off his back. But as the pill-popping Jay soon learns, his sinister new employer is no ordinary client, and the murders have a special significance — revealed in a twist I guarantee even seen-it-all horror buffs will neither anticipate nor fully comprehend on first viewing. Ergo: what the fuck just happened? (1:36) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

A Thousand Words (1:31) 1000 Van Ness.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center. (Eddy)

In the SXSW green room

Andrew Lam
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In the SXSW green room

culture@sfbg.com

HERBWISE DIY pop star Lisa Dank doesn’t smoke marijuana to help with her art — smoking weed is her art. The Seattle singer-producer — known for her florid, handmade costumes and gonzo stage presence — crafts odes to cannabis (check out her aural fixation at www.soundcloud.com/lisa-dank), and has a day job at 4Evergreen Group, a patient network that supplies legal and educational resources to its members, as well as physician recommendations for medical marijuana.

Dank was headed down to South By Southwest to do shows at house parties and on the street with the aide of a PA system jacked into her car, but she managed to snag an artist wristband and also logged in hours in the green room chatting with performers about weed culture today. She’ll be publishing her findings in 4Evergreen Group’s new bi-monthly lifestyle magazine — but first, we got her to share her favorite snippets from South By.

 

TOP 11 MEDICAL MOMENTS FROM A POTSTAR AT SXSW

1. My Omicron hash oil vaporizer pen. Didn’t leave my side. Not even on the airplane. ‘Nuff said.

2. Austin loves pot. Especially at the Wells Fargo. Every time I went to withdraw cash, the point was brought up that I work in the medical marijuana industry. These boys couldn’t get enough! They sang the praise of medical pot (literally — shouting and fist-pumping.) They even brought out their camera-phones to show me the NORML cop car rolling around town.

3. MPP (Most Popular Piece): Quartz glass pieces are popular amongst locals and musicians for their affordability, cleanliness, and durability. Local glass pieces were a close second. Note: My all-star award goes to the editor of UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, who pulled out a gorgeous hand-blown, sandblasted Sherlock similar to the work of glass artist Snic. The editor had bought it at the smokeshop across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. We loaded bowl after bowl of Sour Diesel and Grape Ape six feet from Diplo in the VIP section of Speakeasy’s rooftop patio all Tuesday night, as Teki Latex and the Sound Pelligrino team did their thing.

4. Let’s just say Talib Kweli and his crew are fortunate that I have such a good weed connect in Texas.

5. Chali 2na smokes joints! Hemp extra-long! He had his own stash but took my number just in case. You can never have enough weed connects in Austin. He’s also a sweetheart because he let me use one of his papers.

6. Shiny Toy Guns does not smoke pot.

7. Bands on the run: Brick and Mortar (from New Jersey), Fox and the Law (Seattle), and The Sundresses (Cincinnati) stocked up on buds at home and drove slow all the way down to Austin.

8. Sub-pop recording artists Spoek Mathambo and Thee Satisfaction enjoyed the relief brought forth by the herb after a long walk and checking out Sub Pop’s great showcase at Red 7 on Friday night.

9. Strain trend: Sour Diesel. My guy had it. When he was out, the pedi-cab that I tried to buy from told me he had Sour Diesel too. Just hours later on the official SXSW artist’s deck-lounge at the Austin Convention Center, some locals pulled out two grams of S.D. to roll up in our blunt.

10. Underground future-super-producer Dubbel Dutch had a quandary for me: “I can’t smoke weed anymore! I used to smoke weed every day when I was younger, but now I take one hit and I’m done!”

I explained to him the brain schematics of cannabis, how we have cannabinoid receptors built into our brain but don’t produce cannabinoids endogenously. I hypothesized that his adult brain’s super-sensitivity to THC was due to his excess smoking during the formative years of his brain’s development. I told him he’d trained his brain to be extra-receptive to cannabinoids.

11. Smoking joints throughout my house party set. And for that I thank you, kids of Wilson House.

Film Listings

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

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

The 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival runs through Sun/18 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 3 Cinemas, 288 S. Second St, San Jose. For tickets (most shows $12) and complete schedule, visit www.caamedia.org.

OPENING

Apart You’re almost waiting for the chorus to kick in: “With a taste of your lips, I’m on a ride/You’re toxic, I’m slipping under&ldots;” In another world, that might be the theme song for this somber and straight-laced indie horror fantasy-slash-romance by first-time director and writer Aaron Rottinghaus. Josh (Josh Danziger) is trying to piece together a shattered memory — he knows he has a rare form of schizophrenia and must get in touch with Emily (Olesya Rulin), a girl he once shared a scary intense intimacy with. The two are of one delusional, or perhaps oracular, mind: what they picture somehow comes to pass — a state of folie à deux triggered by a childhood school-bus accident. While evoking ’70s psychological horror flicks such as 1978’s The Fury, Apart, said to be based on real case history, takes a much more delicate tact, casting its lot with the fatalistic young romantics who must be together, come what may, and the power of youth scorned and outcast. Frustrating as unconsummated, all-consuming true love: the murkiness at the denouement of this star-crossed romance. (1:25) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Boy Apparent in his 2007 film Eagle vs. Shark and his brief turns writing and directing The Flight of the Conchords, filmmaker Taika Waititi seems to embody a uniquely Polynesian sensibility, positioned at a crossroads that’s informed by his Te-Whanau-a-Apanui heritage and his background in the Raukokore area of New Zealand, as well as an affection of global pop culture and a kind of keeping-it-real, keeping-it-local, down-home indie sensibility. All of which has fed into Boy, which became the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time when it was released in its homeland in 2010. Its popularity is completely understandable. From the lush green inlands and stunning beaches of Waihau Bay to its intimate, gritty and humorous sketch of its natives, this affectionate, big-hearted bildungsroman is a lot like its 11-year-old eponymous hero — eminently lovable and completely one of a kind. Despite the tragedies and confines of his small-town rural life, Boy has a handle on his world: it’s 1984, and his pals spend their time hanging out at the snack shop and harvesting weed for one deadbeat biker parent. Boy’s brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) believes he has superpowers and is scarred by the fact that his birth was responsible for their mother’s death, and Michael Jackson has just been crowned the king of pop. Then, while his grandma’s away, Boy’s own deadbeat dad, Alamein (Waititi) appears on the scene, turning an extended family of small children on its head — and inspiring many a Thriller dance-slash-dream sequence. Waititi finds his way inside Boy’s head with Crayola-colorful animated children’s drawings, flashbacks, and the kind of dreamy fluidity that comes so naturally during long, hot Polynesian days, all while wonderfully depicting a world that far too few people have glimpsed on screen. (1:30) Bridge, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Casa de mi Padre See “Where There’s a Will.” (1:25) Shattuck.

Delicacy Without visible effort, Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) charms the hearts of the susceptible males in her vicinity, including François (Pio Marmaï), a young man in a café who is soon proposing marriage, and Charles (Bruno Todeschini), a company director who hires her on the spot, transfixed by her very photograph on a résumé. When François, now her husband, is killed in a car accident, grief overwhelms her and she pours her energies into her professional life — until the day she finds herself unexpectedly making advances toward a frumpy, socially awkward colleague, a Swedish expat named Markus (Belgian comedian François Damiens). Her choice confounds the expectations of coworkers (Charles calls him an “ugly, insignificant guy”) and friends (one tells Nathalie, upon meeting Markus, that she could do better), but while the pairing is rather precipitous, it’s no more difficult to swallow than anything else in a film that feels like a pencil sketch on tracing paper. Events in Delicacy are lightly threaded together, so that a relationship turns into marriage and a three-year emotional tailspin goes by without our sensing the passage of time. We hear Nathalie described as “one of those women who cancels out all others,” but — while Tautou is as lovely as ever — we don’t see this in her. We hear people tell Markus how funny he is, but — though comedy is Damiens’s stock-in-trade — he doesn’t make us laugh. The problem lies largely in the script, even clumsier than Markus; it tells us we’re watching two unlikely people fall in love but doesn’t give us much reason to care. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Fake It So Real It would have been very easy for someone to make a film about an uber-low-budget posse of indie wrestlers and make fun of the entire enterprise. Robert Greene, whose cousin is among Fake It So Real‘s subjects, chooses a different path: his film is almost earnest in its appraisal of these Lincolnton, North Carolina good ol’ boys, who live for their Saturday-night matches under the fluorescent lights of the local Vietnam Veteran’s Center. For these men, wrestling offers an escape from otherwise glamourless lives (filled with boring jobs, heartbreak, health problems, and the like), and they take it very seriously, plotting out character arcs and sweating through training sessions. Comparisons to Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler (2008) are inevitable, but remember, Rourke’s character had once been famous. These guys’ definition of success is being approached by a group of kids in Wal-Mart for an autograph. Note for the easily offended: Fake It So Real‘s fly-on-the-wall filming style doesn’t filter out its subjects’ affection for gay jokes, clearly a deeply-enmeshed part of the small-town culture depicted here. (1:31) Roxie. (Eddy)

*The FP The town is real: east-of-Santa-Barbara, south-of-Bakersfield mountain burg Frazier Park, Calif. But this is no bucolic village; nay, the world portrayed in The FP is a dark one, a place without jobs or fashion sense that evolved beyond the 1980s. It’s a world where disputes between warring gangs are settled via Beat Beat Revelation, a video game that bears absolute resemblance to Dance Dance Revolution. A family affair (brothers Jason and Brandon Trost co-directed; Jason wrote and stars; Brandon was the cinematographer; sister Sarah — from Project Runway, season eight! — designed the costumes; and dad Ron did the special effects) and an obvious labor of love, The FP pays adoring homage to John Carpenter and Walter Hill’s classics of the dystopian-future B-movie genre. Angry loner Jtro (Jason Trost), rocking a Snake Plissken-esque eye patch, leaves the FP after the Beat Beat-related death of his older brother; with the help of friend KC/DC (Art Hsu) and mystical guru BLT (Nick Principe), he trains (via ’80s-style montages, natch) for a match with town bully L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), all the while wooing troubled girl next door Stacey (Caitlyn Folley). Of particular note is The FP‘s riotous dialogue; this is maybe the first (and let’s hope last) film to be written entirely in what sounds like the language of the juggalos. (1:23) Roxie. (Eddy)

Jeff, Who Lives at Home The latest comedy from mumblecore man-child champions Jay and Mark Duplass stars Jason Segal as a 30-year-old still living in his parents’ basement. (1:22) California.

*Kill List “Oh jeebus,” you say. “Another movie about a hit man lured out of retirement for one last score?” Well, yes — and no. British director and co-writer Ben Wheatley (2009’s Down Terrace) manages to reinvent one of cinema’s most tired clichés by injecting a healthy amount of what-the-fuck-just-happened?-ness, as well as a palpable sense of absolute dread. Without spoiling anything, here’s how the story begins: married with a young son, surly Jay (Neil Maskell) and shrill Shel (MyAnna Buring) are struggling to maintain their wine-drinking, middle-class, Jacuzzi-in-the-backyard lifestyle. Their financial troubles are due to the fact that Jay hasn’t worked in eight months, which is to say he hasn’t offed anyone since his last job, a mysterious assignment in Kiev, went awry. When best friend and partner Gal (Michael Smiley) hears about a new, well-paying gig that involves a “kill list” of U.K.-based victims, Jay figures he might as well sign on, if only to get Shel off his back. But as the pill-popping Jay soon learns, his sinister new employer is no ordinary client, and the murders have a special significance — revealed in a twist I guarantee even seen-it-all horror buffs will neither anticipate nor fully comprehend on first viewing. Ergo: what the fuck just happened? (1:36) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Marina, Shattuck. (Chun)

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. (1:12) Embarcadero. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Being Flynn There’s an undeniable frisson in seeing Robert De Niro acting paranoid and abusive behind the wheel of an NYC cab again, but Paul Weitz’s drama isn’t exactly Taxi Driver 2. The actor plays Jonathan Flynn, a bellicose loner who abandoned his wife (Julianne Moore in flashbacks) and son to pursue his destiny as a great writer. Years later, the wife is deceased, the son estranged, but Jonathan remains secure in his delusions of genius — despite the publishing industry’s failure to agree. When an assault on noisy neighbors gets him thrown out of his apartment, his gradual descent into homelessness forces a paths-crossing with now-grown only child Nick (Paul Dano), who has taken a job at a shelter in an attempt to do something useful with his own unsettled life. Adapting the real Nick Flynn’s memoir, Weitz resists the temptation to make Pops a lovable old coot — he’s racist, homophobic, ill-tempered and pathetically arrogant — or to overly sentimentalize a father-son relationship that’s never going to have a happy ending. Nonetheless, this competent exercise too often feels like formulaic fiction, the material perhaps demanding a less slick, starry treatment to ring as true as it ought; the fuzzy warm blanket of a song score by Badly Drawn Boy doesn’t help. Still, intentions are good and the performances strong enough, including those by support players Lili Taylor, Wes Studi, and Olivia Thirlby. (1:42) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much “Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue” — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma (“hubris” is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max “son of John” Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s “self-shot” structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Castro, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Clay. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Let the Bullets Fly A huge blockbuster in China, the latest from director Jiang Wan (1998’s Devils on the Doorstep) has received high praise for the zippy wordplay in its script — not such great news for us non-Mandarin speakers stuck reading the not-especially-zippy English subtitles. What’s left is an overlong tale of a notorious bandit (Jiang) who stumbles upon an opportunity to fake his way into a governorship after a train robbery goes awry. He and his henchmen (who wear masks styled after mahjong tiles) have no sooner arrived in town when it’s made clear that wealth and power will not come easy, since the entire burg is controlled by a gold-toothed gangster (a braying, over-the-top Chow Yun-Fat) who doesn’t like to share. Let the bullets fly, indeed, and let the games begin, with occasionally thrilling but often cartoonish results. Tip: if it’s a red-hot, nerve-jangling, balls-to-the-wall Asian action import you seek, wait a few weeks for Indonesia’s The Raid: Redemption. Yowza. (2:12) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Lou Harrison: A World of Music Doing the late Aptos, Calif. composer justice with its depth and breadth, Lou Harrison: A World of Music is the fortunate product of filmmaker Eva Soltes’s relationship with the underappreciated musical genius. Over the course of two decades, she gathered footage of the visionary experimentalist who freely roved the realms of contemporary music and dance, Asian musical traditions, and instrument-making. Her work has borne fruit — here, you get the full, rich scope of Harrison’s achievements — from his time in the woods with partner and instrument-making cohort William Colvig to his toils alongside choreographer Mark Morris to his struggles to stage Young Caesar, his opera on a Roman ruler’s same-sex revels. What Soltes doesn’t get on camera, she manages to trace through still images and interviews with contemporaries and cohorts such as Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, and Michael Tilson Thomas, filling out Harrison’s beginnings at Mills College, mentored by Henry Cowell and collaborating with John Cage; encapsulating his success as a composer, critic, and arranger in NYC; and touching on his breakdown and retreat to his mountain cabin where he sought to write music in peace, yet nevertheless continued to lend his teeming creativity to points close to home, à la the Cabrillo Music Festival, and abroad. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 In 2001, filmmaker Kevin Epps turned a camera on his own neighborhood: Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern San Francisco community best-known by outsiders for Candlestick Park, toxic pollution, and gang violence. Straight Outta Hunters Point was an eye-opener not just locally but internationally, as its runaway success opened doors for Epps to travel with the film and establish his career. These days, Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up. Described by Epps as a “continuation of the conversation” launched by the first film, SOHP 2 investigates the community as it stands today, with both external (redevelopment) and internal (violence) pressures shaping the lives of those who live there. It’s a raw, real story that unspools with urgency and the unvarnished perspective of an embedded eyewitness. (1:20) Roxie. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term “romantic comedy” in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of “comedy” are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

A Thousand Words (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Castro, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

“2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated” Smith Rafael.

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The case for a study of the economic impact of market rate housing

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The case for a study of the economic impact of market rate housing

“SF’s rush toward the ultimate highrise” read the headline on the Guardian front page of Sept. 27, 1971. The headline and the graphics by Art Director Louis Dunn illustrated the central point of our bombshell study: that despite the rhapsodies of  the Chamber of Commerce and the big developers, highrise commercial buildings don’t produce gushing revenues and they don’t pay for themselves.In fact, our exclusive study of the downtown highrise district  found that “for every $10 the district yields to the city treasury, the city has to provide $11 in services.

“Put another way: the highrise district contributes $62.9 million, or 25.2% of all locally generated municipal revenue.  But it costs $67.7 million, or 25.2% of all locally financed expenditures (figures from fiscal 1970.

“This means taxpayers subsidize–35 cents or so on the tax rate in fiscal 1970–the construction and maintenance of our civic monuments–the Bank of America building, the Transamerica building, the Hilton Hotel–and soon, another 23 skyscrapers that will be taller and bulkier and more  expensive than ever for residents and taxpayers.”

Project Director Tom Lehner, a San Francisco resident and expert on urban policy from UC-Berkeley’s School of Public Policy, made the crucial point: :”This report overturns once and ffor  all, emphatically and conclusively, the conventional wisdom that downtown skyscrapers somehow provide the municipal treasury with its lifeblood.

“Anyone who thinks for a moment about what’s happening in New York,” Lehner added, “will come to the same conclusion as our study did.  But the air’s been so full of propaganda from the Chamber of Commerce and other downtown interests like the Examiner and Chronicle that it’s difficult to have a clear thought about the subject.”  The economic  fact that taxpayers subsidize highrise development has become gospel and helped provide the ammunition for the slow growth movement on commercial highrises that ultimately won on the Proposition M  initiative in 1986.

Below is the  PDF that shows our study with the Louis Dunn drawings: scroll  through.

http://test.sfbg.com/PDFs/highrise.pdf

Today, the burning issue is the luxury building at 8 Washington and the host of market rate developments already built or in the works and their impact on neighborhoods. And today the city needs a study that can provide the facts on the economic impact of market rate development and how neighborhoods can cope with the impacts in an era of “now new taxes.”

Tony Kelly is the president of the Potrero Hill Boosters and one of the most knowledgeable neighborhood activists on the market rate housing front.  He and the Boosters are dealing with the Mission Bay Landrush and the city’s plan to flood the Eastern Neighborhoods with market rate housing. His take is most instructive on why a study is needed:

‘”During the Eastern Neighborhoods re-zoning in 2008, I saw neighbors who supported development turn into NIMBYs overnight as soon as they realized that building market-rate housing in San Francisco doesn’tpay for itself, or much of anything else.  On Potrero Hill, we spent an entire decade working on neighborhood planning that was supposed to  
give us new parks, new transit lines, and better schools in a part of town that desperately needs all of that.  And then, when the new zoning was finally approved … … we found out that none of those improvements made it over the finish line. 


“The impact fees for the new development won’t even come close to providing the transit, parks, schools or infrastructure that the new residents need, let alone those of us who are already here in a very underserved part of town.  I shouldn’t really have to remind you that the new housing isn’t affordable for City residents.  And the Planning  
Department’s own study from 2008 confirms that when you build market-rate housing, you create a bigger need for affordable housing – more than you are getting in affordable housing fees or inclusionary units.

” So, with every new market rate housing unit, we are falling further behind on everything the City needs to do to support neighborhoods.  And the increased property taxes are all going to the General Fund, to support services elsewhere in the City.  Who in their right minds, in any neighborhood, would sign up for such a deal?

“Now, on this side of town, we are stuck with development plans that are designed to double the populations of district 10 and district 6 in the next 20 years.  In my neighborhood, Potrero Hill, the population will triple. And now we have to figure out how to support this booming population without much help from City Hall.

“The new condominium projects that the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association has already seen in the past few months reveal the consequences of the Eastern Neighborhoods rezoning—thousands of condos and apartments (and thousands more residents) coming to the neighborhood, with very few opportunities for children or families, and not much planning from the City for alternatives to automobiles.  

“We cannot have urban density in our part of this City with suburban ways of living and getting around, and yet, that is what we have, now and in the future.  So in the neighborhoods, we have to plan (and takeaction) to create our own infrastructure, and not simply rely on what the City manages to give us.”

Kelly’s arguments against pellmell market rate housing is particularly strong for the city’s new frontier of Mission Bay and the Eastern Neighborhoods, but it applies to every neighborhood and the entire city.  This is why for starters the supervisors need to direct the budget analyst or the city’s economist to do a detailed study to help Tony Kelly and the rest of the neighborhoods deal properly with the onslaught of market rate housing.  b3

Editorial on the case against 8 Washington:
> http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/03/06/editorial-case-ag

Paperwork snafu delays big condo project

Zelda Bronstein
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Paperwork snafu delays big condo project

The developers of the 8 Washington project, who have already spent a sizable sum of money on legal, lobbying and prep work, have run into another setback: The March 8 hearing on the project’s shadow impacts has been postponed because of a missing public notice.

The hearing notice and the agenda for the joint meeting of the Planning Commission and the Recreation and Parks Commission wasn’t posted on the Rec-Park website, as required by state law, Linda Avery, the Planning Commission secretary, told us.

The joint meeting was set to consider the impact of shadows the project would cast on nearby Sue Bierman Park and to consider allowing increased shading. That approval is necessary before the project can move forward.

The problems with the public notice were brought to light by Zane Gresham, a lawyer with Morrison and Foerster who often represents developers. In a March 5 letter (PDF) to the two commission presidents, Gresham pointed out that the hearing notice describes the lot on Washington Street, where the project will be constructed, but never mentions the location of the park that will be shadowed.

“The notice misleads the public as to what lots would be affected by the proposed action and fails to disclose to the public the subject of the action to be considered,” the letter stated. “Because the instant hearing notice does not meet minimum legal standards, we respectfully request that no action be taken.”

Avery said that letter sparked a review of the entire notice, and city staffers discovered that it wasn’t properly posted. It also apparently fails to describe fully the action that the two commissions would take: they would to amend the acceptable shadow levels for the park, and then vote to apply those amendments to the 8 Washington development. Only the first type of action is mentioned in the paperwork.

It’s not clear who made the mistakes with the notices — but for a project of this magnitude, critics say it’s remarkable that the city and the developers can’t get the little details of posting a notice correct. “This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” former supervisor Aaron Peskin told me.

The other mystery: Who hired Gresham to review the notice? His letter makes no mention of any specific client, and none of the leading public foes of 8 Washington have retained him. He hadn’t returned my calls and emails by press time.

AH, BUT HERE’S THE UPDATE: Chuck Finnie, who works for the lobbying firm BMWL, just called to tell me that Gresham represents Equity Office Properties, which runs the Ferry Building. EOP, a major national real-estate development firm, is unhappy because the 8 Washington project will wipe out a parking lot used by patrons of the Ferry Building’s businesses. “When EOP took on the job of restoring that building, part of the deal was that parking would be available,” Finnie said. “The Port is ignoring that responsibility.”

Gee, this condo enclave gets more and more unpopular by the day.
 

Occupying the Capitol

Andrew Lam
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Occupying the Capitol

It’s an unseasonably hot day at UC Davis, and student activists are milling around a tent city, set up especially for 100 people arriving from a four-day March on Education. The school, one of the hubs of the Occupy movement, gained notoriety when public safety Officer John Pike casually pepper sprayed a line students during a sit-in back in November. Now, officers bike through the idyllic scene, smiling and chatting up occupiers.

Everyone is preparing for the next day, March 5, the statewide day to defend education that will bring thousands of students and teachers to Sacramento to demand an end to budget cuts and fee hikes at California’s schools, community colleges, and universities.

Those on the march hope to highlight the importance of this issue, marching 79 miles from the Bay Area. The first night, the march stayed in Richmond, and the next day Richmond’s Mayor Gayle McLaughlin came out to welcome them.

Students march annually on Sacramento, and say they won’t stop until education is affordable (or, as some would demand, free). A climate of worldwide protest over disparities in wealth and opportunity, including Occupy protests in the United States, helped fuel a larger than usual turnout this year.

More than 5,000 people converged in Sacramento March 5 and marched to the Capitol building, occupying the Rotunda all day. Many chanted “no cuts, no fees, education must be free.”

Community college student throughout the state are reeling from the cuts, and resulting fee hikes—course units, once free, were raised from $26 to $36 per unit last year, and will be increased another $10 this summer. These costs go towards closing the state budget deficit, and not toward a bigger course catalogue; classes continue to be slashed.

Frances Gotoh of San Bernardino Valley College is back at school after being laid off from her longtime job at Bank of America. She said she desperately needs the retraining; without it her job prospects look dim. She needs to support her family—her 20-year-old son is also a college student—but says she can’t afford the increasing fees. “Why is education being taken away?” asked Gotoh. “It belongs to the people.”

Josselyn Torres, a psychology major at Sonoma State University, felt similarly. “Every year, the fees are getting higher but the class size is getting bigger,” said Torres, who noted that many of her friends won’t be graduating with her because so many of the classes they needed were cut. “The politicians have all gone to college. If they keep cutting our education, how can we make it as far as them?”

When the march reached the Capitol, student and state government leaders spoke on the importance of education. Students demanded an end to fee hikes and budget cuts. Assembly Speaker John Perez (D-Los Angeles) and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) praised student activists and expounded on the necessity of accessibility to education. Almost all speakers decried the two-thirds majority needed to raise taxes, allowing just a few Republicans to block them.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom also spoke, describing the need to support education in staunchly free-market terms: “You can’t have an economic development strategy without a workforce development strategy.”

Periodically, the crowd interrupted Newsom and other politicians in the midst of making promises with chants of “show us.” They also chanted this election year threat: “You’ll hear us out or we’ll vote you out!”

Around 12:30 p.m., the permitted rally ended and thousands dispersed. About 400 stayed to “Occupy the Capitol.” The group streamed into the building and into the rotunda. California Highway Patrol officers, responsible for policing the Capitol, blocked more than 150 from entering the central area. So, communicating via the Peoples Mic with several rounds of crowd repetition for every sentence spoken, the group participated in a statewide general assembly.

Some building employees showed support, but the only politician to sit down with the protesters was Newsom, who sits on the UC Board of Regents and CSU Board of Trustees. He chatted with students, some of whom requested that he ask police to stop blocking students from meeting in the same area; he didn’t do so, but was able to convince them to give protesters in the rotunda access to bathrooms.

The group managed to collectively decide on demands of the state: support the Millionaire’s Tax ballot initiative, repeal Prop. 13, cancel all student debt, fund all education through college, and democratize the Board of Regents. When building closed at 6 p.m., officers declared the assembly unlawful and arrested 70 who refused to disperse.

Meanwhile, another 400 or so attended a permitted rally on the Capitol lawn called by several Sacramento labor unions to support Occupy the Capitol.

Over the past five years, education funding in California has been cut drastically. Spending per K-12 student per year has gone down by almost $2,000 and higher education has seen program cuts and tuition hikes. Gov. Jerry Brown’s latest budget proposal includes still more cuts to California colleges and universities.

Several proposed ballot initiatives are designed to address this. An initiative sponsored by Brown would bring spending per student per year up by $1,000, stabilizing at $7,658 (it was $7,096 in 2011-12) and reversing a five-year slide. But it would still be less than 2007-08, according to a report from the California Budget Project (CBP).

That report shows K-12 education spending is the biggest piece of the state budget, although California ranks dismally low compared to other states for spending on K-12 education: 47th in the country.

The governor’s proposal would raise funds with a combination of a tax increase for those earning $250,000 and over per year and a sales tax increase. But critics say the increase in the sales tax, which is notoriously regressive, would hurt lower and middle income families.

The measure is up against other potential ballot initiatives that would raise revenue strictly from the wealthiest Californians. The so-called Millionaire’s Tax, for example, would raise funds for education by increasing taxes on those making $1 million or more per year. The Millionaire’s Tax also has the advantage of resulting in a permanent change in the law, while Brown’s measure would apply only for the next five years.

“California’s problems have also been exacerbated by tax cuts, one-time ‘solutions,’ overly optimistic assumptions, and the fact that the two-thirds vote requirement for the legislature to approve any tax measure has blocked adoption of a balanced approach towards bridging the budget gap,” according to the CBP report.

Teachers’ unions are divided over the best ballot measure. The California Teachers’ Association has endorsed Brown’s measure, emphasizing that it includes a plan to close the budget deficit.

“The governor’s initiative is the only initiative that provides additional revenues for our classrooms and closes the state budget deficit, and guarantees local communities will receive funds to pay for the realignment of local health and public safety services that the Legislature approved last year,” said Dean Vogel, CTA president, in a press release.

But the Millionaire’s Tax was sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers, and it has now been endorsed by this student general assembly. John Rizzo, president of the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees, also endorsed the measure.

“We’ve got to tell the state of California that we cannot continue this. We cannot continue the cuts to our community colleges, to UCs, to the California State Universities,” said Rizzo, speaking at a March 1 rally in San Francisco.

According to a recent report, of five polls conducted throughout California, each initiative has majority support, but voter prefer the Millionaire’s Tax, with a recent Field Poll showing 63 percent support.

Legislators are also at work trying to increase education funding. Assembly Speaker Perez has introduced a bill that would slash tuition fees by two-thirds at CSU and UC schools for students of families making less than $150,000 per year. The bill would also allocate funding to city colleges throughout the state, for them to determine how to best use the money.

The cost of the plan, about $1 billion, would be paid by eliminating a corporate tax loophole that the Legislature approved in 2009, which would allow companies to choose the cheaper of two formulas for calculating their taxes. Critics have called the legislation bad for business, saying that removing tax incentives would hurt California companies.

“The California Middle Class Scholarship Act is very simple,” Perez told students at UC Davis when he unveiled the bill on Feb. 3. “Too many families are getting squeezed out of higher education. For students whose families make $150,000 a year or less, too much to qualify for our current financial aid system, but not enough to be able to write a check for the cost of education, without feeling that pinch, the Middle Class Scholarship Act reduces fees at the UC system and at the CSU system by two-thirds, giving tremendous assistance to those families to make college affordable again.”

Education advocates say California needs to do something to reverse the spiraling cost of higher education in California, which could do long-term damage to the state, affecting young people and businesses that need skilled workers and spiraling out from there. And these advocates say this short-sighted strategy is easily preventable if there is the political will to address it.

“There are a lot of sources of revenue that are not being taken advantage of,” Lisa Schiff, a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco, told us.

Even if tuitions were lowered or—as the most ambitious of protesters demand—higher education was made free, most former students would still be saddled with massive debt. As costs have risen, debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars are commonplace. With the job market recovery slow and painful, graduates often feel helpless to pay back their debt.

Robert Meister, a professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz and president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, has long argued that the state’s higher education systems ought to focus on keeping tuitions low and student debt in check (see “In the red,” 1/11/11).

Yet he told us that growing income inequality makes people even more desperate for a college education and willing to accept levels of student debt that limit their ability to become anything more than corporate cogs after graduation. “Their ability to raise tuition is a function of the growth of income inequality,” he told us.

In his speech at UC Davis, Perez cast the issue as one of a disinvestment in the state’s future: “California’s public colleges and universities has been one of our most prestigious institutions, and, unfortunately, because of the collapse of the economy, we’ve moved away from fully investing in those universities and colleges.”

A month later, the school again served as a backdrop for illustrating the problem and calling for reform. Dani Galietti, a MFA student at UC Davis who was setting up a performance art piece when I arrived, greets everyone cheerfully and is thrilled about the Occupy movement.

“I wanted to share myself and my work with the movement,” Galietti tells me while taping a “paper trail” to the sidewalk; she plans to walk on it with home-made stamps attached to the bottoms of her shoes.

But her mood darkens when I ask about her student debt. “I came out of five years of education $100,000 in debt,” says Galietti, “and I’m not the only one.”

She is a first generation college student, she explains, who helped pay for school with McNair scholarships.

“I grew up one of five, with a single mother,” Galietti explains. “We struggled my whole life, as a lot of people have, financially.”

“So many people are graduating with so much debt. There’s this looming fear, fear and hopelessness. The economy’s bad, the job market sucks. I’m so thankful that they’re out here. People are active, they’re making a difference.”

“We need education,” Galietti says. “I mean, knowledge is power.”

 

Psychic Dream Astrology: March 7-13

Andrew Lam
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Mercury goes retrograde on the 12th. Put off signing contracts and solidifying plans until April 4th when it goes direct again.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

If you focus too much energy on how you think things should go you will find yourself in a power struggle with stuff that you don’t need to be controlling. Get in touch with yourself and whether you are participating in your life in a way that brings about the results you want. Let others make their own mistakes.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Fear is a beast with claws and if you run, it’ll chase you. This week it is far better to face the things that scare you because they will do less damage if you handle them head-on. Cultivate the courage to cope instead of strategies to evade the worst of your feelings and circumstances.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Get control of yourself, Gemini. You need to go with the flow of your life instead of against it, and that means you should resist the urge to do things that stand in the way of your own happiness just to satisfy your ego. Practice offering of yourself freely, unhampered by jealousies and self-doubt.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Guard against shortsightedness, Moonchild. If you can see things from new perspectives then you are more likely to use your freedom wisely. Make sure you know what you want and are moving towards it, instead of only focusing on what you don’t want and running from it.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Sometimes your larger happiness calls for small sacrifices of the heart, Leo. Make sure that you don’t move so fast that you turn mountains into molehills and heartaches into earthquakes. It is vulnerable to go slow with your emotions, but the payoff will totally be worth it in the end.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Not knowing where others are at can incline your imagination to take some pretty steep turns on you, Virgo. Have fun, fall in love, play, and live lightly this week! Better to take the risks to be happy than to stay safe and disconnected. Look for the “yes” in every situation you find yourself in, pal.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

There is what you are capable of, and then what you can do with your poise and grace still intact, and this week you should strive to know the difference between the two. Don’t do all that you can, do all that you can do well! Your self knowledge is being tested, Libra, so take the time to figure yourself out.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

There is no fast track for you this week. You need to know yourself, and that means investing your time and energy in a little place called Scorpio. Don’t figure things out per se, but also stop running from them. Sit with whatever stuff your mind is obsessing on till it runs its course and you can move on.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

You cannot predict the future, and so fretting about it won’t help matters along at all. Your primary task should be to calm your nerves and get emotionally present; it doesn’t matter if it’s fair or not, or who is responsible for what. Create conditions that support you in getting your needs met, Sag.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

You have so much to find out about yourself, Capricorn. Treat everything as a learning opportunity that you can pass, ace or fail, this week. Take responsibility for how you participate in your life as this lays the framework for what you get out of it. Let go of your attachments to what’s holding you down.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

You have major changes to be making, and if you are actively engaged in transformation, then you’re likely to be on the right path this week. Don’t resist the short-term pangs that come with any transition, because the long term freedoms you will win are worth it. Pace yourself, but stay in the race.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Your relationships are a work in progress and like all projects, have different stages of development. Tend to the foundations of your connections with others, which means that you may need to reconnect with why you like your peeps and what works between you and them in the now.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 17 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com

Film Listings

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

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

The 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival runs March 8-18 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 3 Cinemas, 288 S. Second St, San Jose. For tickets (most shows $12) and complete schedule, visit www.caamedia.org. For commentary, see “Here’s Looking at You, Kids” and “Docs and Shocks.”

OPENING

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye See “Together Forever.” (1:12) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Being Flynn There’s an undeniable frisson in seeing Robert De Niro acting paranoid and abusive behind the wheel of an NYC cab again, but Paul Weitz’s drama isn’t exactly Taxi Driver 2. The actor plays Jonathan Flynn, a bellicose loner who abandoned his wife (Julianne Moore in flashbacks) and son to pursue his destiny as a great writer. Years later, the wife is deceased, the son estranged, but Jonathan remains secure in his delusions of genius — despite the publishing industry’s failure to agree. When an assault on noisy neighbors gets him thrown out of his apartment, his gradual descent into homelessness forces a paths-crossing with now-grown only child Nick (Paul Dano), who has taken a job at a shelter in an attempt to do something useful with his own unsettled life. Adapting the real Nick Flynn’s memoir, Weitz resists the temptation to make Pops a lovable old coot — he’s racist, homophobic, ill-tempered and pathetically arrogant — or to overly sentimentalize a father-son relationship that’s never going to have a happy ending. Nonetheless, this competent exercise too often feels like formulaic fiction, the material perhaps demanding a less slick, starry treatment to ring as true as it ought; the fuzzy warm blanket of a song score by Badly Drawn Boy doesn’t help. Still, intentions are good and the performances strong enough, including those by support players Lili Taylor, Wes Studi, and Olivia Thirlby. (1:42) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Forgiveness of Blood Joshua Marston’s follow-up to his 2004 indie hit Maria Full of Grace is a similarly sensitive, heartbreaking look at a culture not often illuminated by the silver screen. Co-written by Marston and Albanian filmmaker Andamion Murataj, The Forgiveness of Blood takes place in an Albanian town caught between traditions of the past — fiercely upheld by the older generation — and youths whose main areas of interest are texting, scooters, and the internet. When a turf war involving whose horse-cart can pass through whose land boils over, the father of teenage siblings Nik (Tristan Halilaj) and Rudina (Sindi Lacej) goes into hiding, intent on evading both the police and the family of the man he’s helped murder. Unfortunately for Nik, the laws of blood feud mean it’s now open season on his head, should he venture from his home; this puts an extreme damper on his wooing of the pretty classmate he’s just exchanged phone numbers with, not to mention his dreams of opening an internet café in the village. Unfortunately for Rudina, her father’s absence means the bright girl must drop out of school and take over his bread-delivery route — a job she excels at, despite her initial reluctance. It’s a no-win situation for everyone (mom’s working double-time at her factory gig; younger siblings are sullen and frightened), and dad’s crime starts to feel more and more like a macho, selfish act as the frustration builds. Though The Forgiveness of Blood was inexplicably passed over for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination (especially considering Marston’s success with Maria), it arrives in local theaters having won the Best Screenplay award at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. Don’t miss it. (1:49) Bridge, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, Piedmont. (Rapoport)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) Four Star, Marina. (Eddy)

Let the Bullets Fly A huge blockbuster in China, the latest from director Jiang Wan (1998’s Devils on the Doorstep) has received high praise for the zippy wordplay in its script — not such great news for us non-Mandarin speakers stuck reading the not-especially-zippy English subtitles. What’s left is an overlong tale of a notorious bandit (Jiang) who stumbles upon an opportunity to fake his way into a governorship after a train robbery goes awry. He and his henchmen (who wear masks styled after mahjong tiles) have no sooner arrived in town when it’s made clear that wealth and power will not come easy, since the entire burg is controlled by a gold-toothed gangster (a braying, over-the-top Chow Yun-Fat) who doesn’t like to share. Let the bullets fly, indeed, and let the games begin, with occasionally thrilling but often cartoonish results. Tip: if it’s a red-hot, nerve-jangling, balls-to-the-wall Asian action import you seek, wait a few weeks for Indonesia’s The Raid: Redemption. Yowza. (2:12) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Lou Harrison: A World of Music Doing the late Aptos, Calif. composer justice with its depth and breadth, Lou Harrison: A World of Music is the fortunate product of filmmaker Eva Soltes’s relationship with the underappreciated musical genius. Over the course of two decades, she gathered footage of the visionary experimentalist who freely roved the realms of contemporary music and dance, Asian musical traditions, and instrument-making. Her work has borne fruit — here, you get the full, rich scope of Harrison’s achievements — from his time in the woods with partner and instrument-making cohort William Colvig to his toils alongside choreographer Mark Morris to his struggles to stage Young Caesar, his opera on a Roman ruler’s same-sex revels. What Soltes doesn’t get on camera, she manages to trace through still images and interviews with contemporaries and cohorts such as Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, and Michael Tilson Thomas, filling out Harrison’s beginnings at Mills College, mentored by Henry Cowell and collaborating with John Cage; encapsulating his success as a composer, critic, and arranger in NYC; and touching on his breakdown and retreat to his mountain cabin where he sought to write music in peace, yet nevertheless continued to lend his teeming creativity to points close to home, à la the Cabrillo Music Festival, and abroad. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen A fisheries expert (Ewan McGregor) is tasked by a sheik with bringing fly fishing to the desert in this adaptation of Paul Torday’s acclaimed comic novel. (1:52) Embarcadero.

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) (Eddy)

A Thousand Words Karma proves to be quite the bitch when a literary agent (Eddie Murphy) screws over a spiritual guru. (1:31) Shattuck.

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) Balboa, California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much “Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue” — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma (“hubris” is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max “son of John” Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s “self-shot” structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Gone Still-shaky if now highly self-defensive Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was abducted from her bed a year ago, thrown into a deep hole in a forest outside Portland, Ore., and escaped death only by overcoming her barely-glimpsed captor. Or so she insists — the police never found any corroborating evidence, and given Jill’s history of mental instability, wrote off her whole purported adventure as delusional. When sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) goes inexplicably missing the morning of an important exam, however, Jill is convinced the serial kidnapper-killer has struck again, going off on a frantic manhunt of her own with no help from the authorities. There is nothing spectacularly wrong with Gone, but nothing right, either — to justify the ponying up of cash money at a theater these days you have to offer something a little more than the routine execution of a derivative, uninspired script with little suspense but plenty of plot holes. That sort of thing is best experienced at a sleepless 2 a.m. on cable, for free. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, Opera Plaza, Presidio. (Harvey)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Castro, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D (2:16) SF Center.

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 In 2001, filmmaker Kevin Epps turned a camera on his own neighborhood: Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern San Francisco community best-known by outsiders for Candlestick Park, toxic pollution, and gang violence. Straight Outta Hunters Point was an eye-opener not just locally but internationally, as its runaway success opened doors for Epps to travel with the film and establish his career. These days, Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up. Described by Epps as a “continuation of the conversation” launched by the first film, SOHP 2 investigates the community as it stands today, with both external (redevelopment) and internal (violence) pressures shaping the lives of those who live there. It’s a raw, real story that unspools with urgency and the unvarnished perspective of an embedded eyewitness. (1:20) Roxie. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term “romantic comedy” in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of “comedy” are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie It’s almost impossible to describe Adult Swim hit Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but “cable access on acid” comes pretty close. It’s awkward, gross, repetitive, and quotable; it features unsettling characters portrayed by famous comedians and unknowns who may not actually be actors. It all springs from the twisted brains of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, now on the big screen with Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. The premise: Tim and Eric (amplified-to-the-extreme versions of Heidecker and Wareheim) get a billion to make a movie, and the end result is a very short film involving a lot of diamonds and a Johnny Depp impersonator. On the run from their angry investors (including a hilariously spitting-mad Robert Loggia), the pair decides to earn back the money managing a run-down mall filled with deserted stores (and weird ones that sell things like used toilet paper) and haunted by a man-eating wolf. Or something. Anyway, the plot is just an excuse to unfurl the Tim and Eric brand of bizarre across the length of a feature film; if you’re already in the cult, you’ve probably already seen the film (it’s been On Demand for weeks). Adventurous newcomers, take note: Tim and Eric’s comedy is the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it experience. There is no middle ground. There are, however, some righteously juicy poop jokes. (1:32) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds (1:51) 1000 Van Ness.

“2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated” Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael.

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The case against 8 Washington

Andrew Lam
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The case against 8 Washington

tredmond@sfbg.com

In city planning terms, it’s a fairly modest project: 134 condos, no buildings more than 12 stories tall, on a 27,000-square-foot site. It’s projected to meet the highest environmental building standards and offers new open space and pedestrian walkways. It’s near Muni, BART, and ferry lines. And the city will collect millions of dollars in new taxes from it.

But the 8 Washington project, which will come before the Planning Commission March 8, has become a flashpoint in city politics, one of the defining battles of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration — and a symbol of how the city’s housing policy has failed to keep pace with the needs of the local workforce.

Put simply, it will create the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the richest of the 1 percent on the edge of the waterfront — and will further push San Francisco toward becoming a city that caters almost entirely to the very wealthy.

So in a city where the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us has become a central issue and where the lack of affordable housing is one of the top civic concerns, 8 Washington is an important test. By any rational standard, this sort of development is the last thing San Francisco needs.

But some of the best-connected lobbyists in the city are pushing it. One of the mayor’s closest allies, Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, is a leading advocate — and the final outcome will say a lot about city politics in the Lee administration.

There are all sorts of half-truths and misleading statements by supporters of 8 Washington. Here are the five main reasons the project shouldn’t be approved.

1. It fills no housing need. San Francisco has no shortage of housing for the very rich; the dramatic need, outlined in both regional planning documents and the city’s own General Plan, is for low- and moderate-income housing for the people who actually work in this city (see “Dollars or sense?” 9/28/10). While San Francisco is getting richer by the day, the core workforce — public employees, workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, service workers, construction and trade workers, and a majority of the people in the lower levels of the finance and tech sector — are being priced out of the city. That means more people working here and living far out of town, often commuting by car, in what everyone agrees is an unsustainable situation. Meanwhile, more and more high-paid workers from Silicon Valley are living in San Francisco — again, commuting to distant jobs, either by car or by corporate bus.

The city’s General Plan states that some 60 percent of all new housing built in the city should be below market rate. San Francisco desperately needs housing for its workforce. This type of project simply puts the city deeper in the hole and further from its housing goals.

2. It’s a reward for bad actors. The main developer of this project is Simon Snellgrove, but one of his partners is, by necessity, Golden Gateway, which owns a significant part of the land — and which has been flouting at least the spirit if not the letter of city and state law and costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars.

As project opponent Brad Paul has noted in written testimony, when Timothy Foo, the current owner, bought the complex from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago, he used a loophole in state law that allowed him to avoid a formal transfer of ownership. That means the property wasn’t re-assessed, costing the city about $1.5 million a year. According to the Assessor’s Office, the deal wasn’t illegal (and these tricks to avoid reassessment are relatively common) but still: He’s costing the city millions by using a loophole not available to most people.

Golden Gateway, which was built in a redevelopment area as middle-class housing, is now renting out apartments as short-term tourist or corporate rentals. There are dozens of examples right now on Craigslist. City law bars the owners of rental housing from converting it to hotel rooms, but a loophole in that law makes what Foo’s outfit is doing technically legal. But he’s clearly violating the spirit of the city ordinance that seeks to protect rental housing from hotel conversions.

One of the main aesthetic complaints about the area — something Snellgrove’s lobbyists have tried to use to support the project — is the ugly fence that now surrounds the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club. But who do you suppose put that fence there?

Do we as a city want to be giving special zoning benefits to companies that try to circumvent tax and housing laws?

3. It’s an environmental disaster. Snellgrove and his architects, Skidmore Owning and Merrill, are seeking LEED platinum certification for the project, saying that its energy-efficiency, water use, and green building materials will make it one of the most sustainable structures in San Francisco. It is, the project website notes, close to all types of public transit.

But LEED doesn’t take into account what the building is used for (see “Is LEED really green,” 7/5/11) — and in this case, the use makes a huge amount of difference.

People who buy multi-million-dollar condos don’t tend to take Muni or BART when they go places. That’s not conjecture, it’s a proven fact. A 2008 study by the American Public Transportation Association notes, bluntly, that wealthier people are more likely to drive cars. When you move into the stratospheric regions of the ultra-rich, that’s even more true. A 2011 report on the Charting Transport website notes: “The very rich tend to shun public transport.”

The current zoning in the area allows for one parking space for every four residential units. Snellgrove is asking for one space per unit — in other words, he figures every single buyer will have a car.

Many of the people who buy these condos won’t be working or even living most of the time in San Francisco. These are condos for world travelers, second and third homes for people who want to spend a few weeks a year in San Francisco. “They aren’t going to be living here all year,” Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission member who is now the District 5 supervisor, told us last July.

If five of the 165 residents of 8 Washington fly in a private or corporate jet from, say, New York to their SF pad once a month, the project will cause the use of jet fuel equivalent to what a normal family would use driving a car for 330 years, Paul noted.

“How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel a year?” he asked.

Then there’s the construction issue. If the developer’s projections are correct, as many as 20,000 dump truck runs will be trundling along the Embarcadero for several months, one every two minutes — and it could be happening right as the traffic nightmare called the America’s Cup is hitting the waterfront.

It also goes against some 40 years of waterfront planning policy, all of which as focused on downzoning and creating open space. This would be the first upzoning of San Francisco waterfront property in decades.

4. It will wipe out what is mostly a middle-class recreation facility. The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club will be closed for three years, then (possibly) reopened later as a smaller facility. The club — with two outdoor pools and six tennis courts — sounds like something for the elite, and it’s managed by the upscale Bay Club, but a lot of the users are longtime Golden Gateway residents and seniors. “I would say 30 or 35 percent of the users are seniors,” Lee Radner, chair of Friends of Golden Gateway, told me. Most, he said, are middle-class people, and the expense isn’t that high. “My wife and I pay $3 a day to use the pool,” he said. “I swim every day, and it would cost more than that to use the public pools in the city.” He added: “There are some wealthier people, of course, but many of us are retired and on fixed incomes.”

We’re talking about 90,000 total square feet of outdoor recreation space — which dwarfs the 20,000 square feet of open space the developer promised to provide.

5. The city doesn’t get much out of the deal. In exchange for upzoning the waterfront, creating a big all of buildings and screwing up the city’s housing balance, what does the San Francisco general fund get? Not a lot. The estimates for new tax revenue run about $1.5 million a year of the next 60 years — and when you translate that to what economist call “net present value,” the cash equivalent today of that revenue stream, it’s about $30 million. The Port of San Francisco is talking about creating a special infrastructure financing district — sort of the equivalent of a redevelopment area — to pull that money out in advance, which may not even be legal (since part of the land is a former redevelopment area, the state law that allows these special finance districts may not apply). But even so, a Jan. 14 Port memo suggests that the agency has plans to spend all that money on its own infrastructure — setting up a potential battle between the supervisors and the Port Commission over where the money, if it actually can be collected up front, will go.

Like any developer, Snellgrove will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund — in this case, about $9 million to pay for the equivalent of 27 units. No affordable units will be on site, of course; that would detract from the uber-wealthy ambience of the place. And it’s not clear when those units would be built. “Nobody builds 27-unit buildings any more,” Paul, a former deputy mayor for housing, said. “We’ll have to wait until there’s enough money for a bigger project, somewhere, sometime down the road. That’s what we’re getting here.”

Either way, it’s not a huge benefit for allowing this disaster of a project — and it’s a terrible statement for San Francisco to make. At a time when the mayor has cleared the Occupy protesters — who are talking about how little the rich pay in taxes — off the waterfront, the city is preparing to move in the exceptionally rich, who aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in tax revenue to local government.

(Nobody knows for sure whether the costs of servicing high-end residential exceed the revenue the city gets from property taxes. In 1971, the Guardian put together the first-ever cost-benefit study for highrise office development, which showed that commercial buildings cost the city more than they paid; that’s been confirmed and demonstrated over the years to the point where it’s hardly even an argument any more. The supervisors ought to ask the city economist or the budget analyst to do the same sort of analysis for luxury condos.)

There’s another element here: Mayor Lee made a point during his campaign to say over and over again that he was an independent thinker, that powerful and influential allies like Rose Pak would not be calling the shots at City Hall. This will be his first major test: Pak and lobbyist Marcia Smolens are working hard to promote 8 Washington. And we’re already getting some disturbing signals out of the mayor’s office.

Lee told us that he has “no thoughts” about the project and hasn’t been paying any attention to it. That’s an odd stance, considering that his own Port Commission is pushing it and staffers in his office are working with the developer. This is a big priority for Pak, and the notion that she has never mentioned it to the mayor defies reason. Board President David Chiu, who talks to the mayor regularly, opposes the project, which is in Chiu’s district.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who pays attention to local politics could be missing what will be one of the landmark votes this spring on the Planning Commission — which will take up the project March 8 — and the Board of Supervisors.

The mayor, may, indeed, be ignoring everything that supporters and opponents of 8 Washington have said and may be waiting until the Planning Commission vote to take a position. But if he’s just ducking questions because he’s planning to support it, he’s making a big mistake.

This is a chance for San Francisco to go beyond the platitudes about building housing, go beyond the hype about “green” buildings, see through the fraud about community benefits and consider what this really is: A special favor for a developer who wants to cater to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent and move San Francisco even closer to being a city of, by, and for the elite. The only reasonable vote on 8 Washington is No.

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