Documentary

SFIFF: In the realms of the real

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Michael Moore may have paved the way for documentary gold, but the most structurally adventurous, ethically demanding nonfictions still reside on the festival block, where they frequently outshine their fictional counterparts for formal rigor and breadth of imagination. If the 2009 SFIFF field doesn’t have a marquee attraction like Standard Operating Procedure, all the better — a year later, I still haven’t lost the bad taste of Errol Morris’s hi-def moral confusion.

A corrective to Standard‘s self-serving auteurism might be gleaned from Avi Mograbi’s Z32. In this case the troubling testimony belongs to an Israeli soldier who participated in a senseless revenge killing of Palestinian innocents, but Mograbi handcrafts the layers of remorse that elude Morris’s smug "interrotron." We never see the ex-soldier’s face, though the digital application of masks produces an uncanny effect in tune with the film’s sliding scale of memory and performance, responsibility and displacement. Mograbi’s willingness to bring the war home (much of the film is set in his living room) is unusual for an investigative reporter, but then most investigative reporters do not narrate their mediating role in song.

Cameroonian-French filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno’s documentary Sacred Places seems more conventional in its blend of interview and ethnographic reflections, but the calm manner in which ideas flow from these encounters makes for a first-rate essay-film. Set in a poor district of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, Sacred Places centers on two eloquent men: Jules Cesar Bamouni, a djembe maker who makes some of the same linkages between film and the traditional storytelling forms that first incited griot-auteurs like Ousmane Sembène; and Nanema Boubacar, a hopeful entrepreneur who runs a neighborhood film club. The scenes in which Boubacar rifles through DVD deliveries offer an overlapping portrait of community-oriented cinephilia ("When there are spots on the DVD, it’s not good for the film fans") and the vicissitudes of distribution (even in Burkina Faso, African titles are harder to procure than a Jackie Chan vehicle). Sacred Places is light enough on its feet to pass itself as a slice of life, but Téno’s quiet approach constitutes a major revaluation of the aims of African cinema.

Another illuminating interviewer, Heddy Honigmann, returns with Oblivion, her first film set in Lima since 1994’s mobile portrait Metal and Melancholy. There’s also a double-shot of alternative histories from Lee Anne Schmidt (California Company Town) and Travis Wilkerson (Proving Ground), who are both associated with CalArts, an institutional hotbed for hybridized docs. Wilkerson’s An Injury to One (2003) remains one of the great American political films; his live performance of military footage promises more shots from the avant-garde of documentary. Also on SFIFF’s doc-centric slate: 2009 Persistence of Vision winner Lourdes Portillo, art-historical conspiracy theories courtesy of Peter Greenway (Rembrandt J’Accuse), and reality-bending fictions like John Cassavetes’ still-potent unraveling of the domestic melodrama, A Woman Under the Influence (1974).

SACRED PLACES

Fri/24, 8:40 p.m., PFA

Sun/25, 5 p.m.; April 29, 3:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

Z32

May 3, 9:15 p.m.; May 5, 8:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

May 4, 8:30 p.m., PFA

In a Dream

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REVIEW Jeremiah Zagar’s feature has a subject that’s not just close to home, it’s in his home: father Isaiah is an eccentric artist who’s created extraordinary mosaics covering myriad walls, rooms, and several entire buildings in Philadelphia. Julia, his wife of 43 years, views herself as the necessary "reality base" to his "crazy, self-absorbed but amiable … rare flower." Isaiah is a bit of an exhibitionist, his art a "journal of my life" that might easily embarrass family members less accustomed to his idiosyncracies. His past encompasses childhood molestation and institutionalization, while the present is imperiled by "delusions of grandeur." During the several years Jeremiah shot this documentary — at first intended as a simple tribute to a very creative parent — Isaiah upset the family’s long-term yet still very delicate balance by springing a major crisis. On top of that, the filmmaker’s brother moves back in, his marriage collapsed and substance-abuse problems evident to all. The Zagars aren’t anybody’s idea of a standard-issue nuclear unit, but this quietly engaging portrait transcends train-wreck fascination because for all their quirks, they are functional — close, loving, and supportive. Also, because Isaiah’s epic mosaics of tile, paint, and embedded detritus are so remarkable, you’ll want to book the next flight to Philly to see them first-hand.

IN A DREAM opens Fri/17 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

Mirah in SF tonight — arcane yet accessible

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By Danica Li

We guess it’s typical that Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn would write a batch of songs, group the songs into an album, and then name the album something pretty much incomprehensible. (a)spera (K), her first release in a near half-decade — wasn’t it just yesterday that Mirah arrived on the scene, a bright-eyed, scampering young up-and-comer? — is the Latin stand-in for hope or adversity, depending on how you interpret the handy parenthetical tacked onto the beginning of the word. With her restrained instrumentation, acoustic pop smarts, and whimsical inspirations, Mirah’s records are as oddly accessible as they are born of arcane esoterica: 19th-century French naturalist writings inspired her multimedia endeavor Share This Place: Stories and Observations (K, 2007), a concept album about the lives of insects.

Small town heroine or not, Mirah’s discreetly built something of a national following. Back before she’d even released an album, she used to play gigs with a full band at weddings and bar mitzvahs for extra monies, but that fledgling project fell to the wayside when she decided to do her own thing. That involved a bit of lo-fi futzing around, a couple of forays into riot grrrl bristling, and a lot of sparely beautiful acoustic sessions with just her guitar — Liz Phair knock-off dismissals be damned.

Mirah was MIA for the better part of the mid-2000s, in terms of solo recordings. She spent the time tinkering with an impressive number of side projects, including collaborations with the Microphones’ Phil Elverum and Black Cat Orchestra, plus the provision of an entire soundtrack for the documentary Young, Jewish, and Left. She also used to tour with the Microphones, but now she’s split off to do her own thing again. No insect noises this time, but the release of (a)spera lands her at Bimbo’s 365 tonight.

MIRAH
With Tender Forever and Leyna Noel
Tues/7, 8 p.m. (door: 7 p.m.), $16
Bimbo’s 365 Club
1025 Columbus, S.F.
(415) 474-0365
www.bimbos365club.com

Cat’s cradle

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Independent, slyly defiant, and given to zigzags, the cat is the spirit animal for a certain breed of cinematic gleaners. The films of Warren Sonbert and Chris Marker are packed with the feline kind. A kitty or two shows through the lucid abstractions of Nathaniel Dorsky’s recent work, and Agnès Varda’s La Pointe-Courte (1954) uses the animal as a structural device. Accordingly, Ben Rivers’ This is My Land (2006) opens with a lithe creature snapping its head to face the camera. There are several other such mysterious cameos across the 14-minute film, one of several bricolage studies Rivers has composed of off-the-grid settlers who are themselves catlike in both appearance (the whiskers and quick smile) and manner (gentle wildness).

Rivers must appreciate the cat’s association with the gothic, given his propensity to label his shorts as either horrors or portraits. The London-based filmmaker and programmer comes to town this week for two rare programs split along these lines, though it isn’t as stark a divide as it might first sound. The films are all exquisite documents of overgrown spaces, the kind in which the past is made palimpsest, audible in the creak of floorboards and everywhere apparent in the makeshift and ajar.

There are traces of Murnau, Dreyer, and Herzog in Rivers’ work; the films are welcome demonstrations that Expressionism is nothing so much as a feeling for how the physical world relates to the spiritual one, though musical references are equally revealing. The beards, spirits, and foliage evoke the deep English folk of the Incredible String Band and Roy Harper. In addition, the field recording quilt-work done by Lucky Dragons and the Books provides a useful analogue to Rivers non-sync style. Shot with a wind-up Bolex, Rivers processes the film stock himself, leaving grain and light flecks unpolished, with sound and image each representing an autonomous, well-portioned montage. The films open the same rich interstices of avant-garde, documentary, and ethnography as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, but with an intense intimacy that makes them seem like home movies of the highest order.

The old dark house imagery of Rivers’ gothic curios strike a particularly English chord, but the back-to-the-land portraiture has a special resonance in California. We too know these beards, this tumble of wilderness, this particular migration. If these figures seem to age differently, it’s because their living choices represent a decisive approach to both space and time, something Rivers represents with great cinematic adroitness. The specter of global warming and natural disaster thickens these reclusive reliefs. Rivers has admitted his fondness for ’70s postapocalypse moves, a ripe genre rearticulated in the lunar landscapes and scrapyard play of Ah, Liberty! (2008). Horror, in this context, is a kind of awe. It is inseparable from nature — it is, in fact, nature reclaiming civilization.

"[There are] all kind of wild animals [here], and it’s only because I let it get wild. And that’s my point, but nobody will get it," the central figure of Astrika (2006) explains. Rivers, of course, does get it. The homesteaders’ scattered debris suggests Rivers’ own secondhand materials, improvised objects like a birdfeeder made from a milk container reflect his films construction, and the ethos of self-sufficiency is admired and enacted. The human warmth of his filmmaking emanates from these affinities, which go beyond sympathy to touch the elusive nerve of experience. Rivers’ wind-up camera means that no single shot can exceed 30 seconds. But when the pitter-patter of his images settles on something strange and moving, like a distant view of a horse rolling in the snow, it reminds us that beauty is often a humbling drama of the glimpse.

"THE POETIC HORROR OF BEN RIVERS"

Sat/28, 8:30 p.m., $6

Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

"THIS IS MY LAND: BEN RIVERS’ PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES"

Sun/29, 7:30 p.m., $10

San Francisco Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Ballerina

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REVIEW If comparisons between Bertrand Normand’s Ballerina and Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s 2005 Ballets Russes are inevitable, it’s perhaps mostly indicative of how infrequently a feature-length ballet documentary gets made and distributed. Then again, one could argue that the stark differences in subject and scope are historically significant. Richly researched and packed with archival footage and modern-day interviews, Ballets Russes depicts the milieu of dancers, choreographers, and impresarios exiled from postrevolutionary Russia in the early years of the 20th century. Ballerina trains its focus on the world they left behind, or what became of it, concentrating on the grueling, somewhat circumscribed lives of five female dancers making their careers in present-day, post-Soviet Russia, in St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, where the world-renowned Kirov Ballet has its home. Where Ballets Russes describes the historical arc within which modern ballet as we know it was created, Ballerina describes the smaller, personal arcs of two newer dancers making their painstaking way out of the corps de ballets and three principal dancers, one who is returning to work after a lengthy injury. Interviews and footage of unending classes, rehearsals, and performances clarify the single-minded conviction and commitment with which these young women approach their vocation, accepting physical pain and deprivation as a daily reality, while instructors and artistic directors sketch the larger picture of a profession in which early retirement is a fact of life. Still, the film has a flatness of tone that is literally conveyed in the somewhat run-of-the-mill narration ("A ballerina’s work is never done") and paralleled by the flat affect of most of the subjects. The performance footage is lovely — though also offering ample evidence of the Kirov’s aged repertoire — but perhaps the most visually startling moment occurs during an admissions exam at St. Petersburg’s premier ballet school, in which 10-year-old aspirants are put through their paces virtually naked, their limbs manipulated by ballet masters attempting to divine the future.

BALLERINA opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Come aboard, they’re expecting you

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By Natalie Gregory

Cruise Inc: Big Money on the High Seas — CNBC’s new documentary about the $30 billion cruise industry — certainly illustrates how arduous it can be to make people drink constantly. Cruise ships are like floating consumption carriers. From what I understand, they offer decent deals on the rooms. Then you enter the ship, and they bombard you with casinos, shops, and overpriced restaurants because you’re trapped. It’s like being in an airport with a pool and more children getting in your way.

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There’s got to be a morning after…

In the doc, Peter Greenberg investigates the business model specifically on the Norwegian Pearl of Norwegian Cruise Line. He examines day-to-day operations and tries to hone in on the cost of both consumer and cruise line. The overall point Greenberg is after is whether or not this type of vacation is more economically viable during a recession. That, or whether the industry is headed for disaster because of economic downturns. While cruise lines sell on the idea of consumer choice, at the end of the day, you’re stuck on a boat. Sure you get off at ports. But then they herd you off to spend more money on local tours. But that’s just me. Either way, Cruise Inc. offers an interesting look at the travel industry and the billions of dollars at stake in it.

Cruise Inc. airs Tues/24 at 9 p.m. on CNBC.

Check CNBC’s website for repeats.

Kennedy, compounded

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HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING It’s chaos theory’s maxim that the mere brush of a butterfly’s wings might produce a ripple effect sufficient to changes history. But let’s face it: it’s more interesting to muse upon the big what-ifs, like assassination attempts. What if Lincoln or Archduke Ferdinand had survived? What if Reagan hadn’t?

Are such speculations actually useful, or just a glorified party game? Clearly Koji Masutani thinks it’s the former, since he’s gone to the trouble of making Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived. As presented by the director and foreign policy historian James G. Blight, this new documentary makes the case that Kennedy’s nonconfrontational tactics on the world stage during his presidency would surely have carried over to preventing that "quagmire" known here as the Vietnam War (and over there as "the American War"). Had he lived, of course.

Parallels to our moment are hard to resist. Like Obama, JFK’s election was viewed as a landmark and greeted with messianic excitement unequalled by a Democrat until now. He arrived at a time of equally daunting if very different emergencies — the Cold War’s peak boiling point, the civil rights movement heating up at home — and likewise faced hostile Republican lawmakers as well as skeptical press.

Masutani charts six occasions on which JFK dodged armed conflict that might have triggered (or so reasoning went) World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the obvious one. Others, all four-alarm calls for anti-commie action, include resisting engagement in Laos and Vietnam, as well as over the Berlin Wall’s construction. In archival footage Kennedy looks alternately uncomfortable and good-humored defending his policies, as he’s accused of "appeasement toward communism," "utter incompetence," and "mismanaging the news" by rationing his statements to prevent hysteria outbreaks in an already paranoid nation. "This generation of Americans has already seen enough war and hate," he pronounced. Amen.

Alas, that fateful open-car ride in Dallas placed Lyndon B. Johnson in office. Though it evidently tormented him, LBJ saw no alternative to an ever-expanding Vietnam incursion. Some 58,000 U.S. lives and 2 million native ones later, it remains the quagmire by which all our blunders abroad are measured.

These days, not everyone thinks Kennedy was as golden as that Camelot glow suggested. But Virtual JFK does convince us that things would have turned out quite differently, at the very least, had he missed taking a premature powder. May history not repeat itself.

VIRTUAL JFK: VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED

Fri/20-Tues/24, see Rep Clock for times, $6–$9

Red Vic, 1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

Hot sex events this week: March 12-18

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Compiled by Breena Kerr

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Lusty Ladies and cheap tattoos at the “Friday the 13th” benefit party

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>> Bawdy Storytelling
Local literary smut-spillers – including Sherilyn Connelly, Isaac Rodriguez, Sister Mable Syrup, Melissa Hoobler, Ray Allen, and many more — share their bawdiest tales with a ribald crowd. Bring your own beverage and sparkling personality (and a tale of your own, too – there may be room for one or two from the audience!). This installment’s theme is “But We Finished Anyway: Tales of frozen asses and gag reflexes.” Good times.

Thu/12, 7pm, $7 (snacks included)
1286 Folsom, SF.
Contact bawdystorytelling@gmail.com for more info

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>> Born Into Brothels screening
This amazing documentary by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman is about children in Calcutta’s Red Light district. It won the Oscar for best documentary film in 2005. The screening is part of SF Camerawork’s film series about youth empowerment and will be followed by a discussion.

Thu/12, 7pm, free with suggested donation
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, second floor
415-512-2020
www.sfcamerawork.org

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>> ”Friday the 13th” fundraiser with Inkwell and the Lusty Lady
Join the lovely ladies of the Lusty Lady and the inkers at Inkwell tattoo studio for a lively show – and $40 tattoos all night! – benefiting the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Free drinks all night, and who knows what you’ll wake with scrawled permanently on your backside. For charity, of course.

Fri/13, 9pm, donations encouraged, tattoos $40
Inkwell
1145 65th St., Emeryville
www.inkwellworld.com

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>> IXFF Exposure Party
“The erotic film networking event of the year.” Come one come all directors, editors, producers, talent and more for a special panel presentation on erotic cinema. And if the thought of enjoying a live DJ, complimentary cocktails, and the sheer pleasure of knowing everyone around you is in the pleasure business isn‘t enough to get you through the doors, maybe the Independent Erotic Film Festival’s grand prize of $1,500 will have you smoozing with the porn-sters, combing the party for your production crew.

Fri/13, 7pm-10pm, $5-10 (sliding scale)
The Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission, SF.
510-522-5460
www.goodvibes.com

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Alone and ahead

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Amid a persistent backlash against feminism stateside — see: He’s Just Not That Into You — at least two SFIAAFF docs offer compelling reminders that women’s struggle for equality in education, work, property ownership, and their very lives continues to be very relevant: Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority and The Forgotten Woman (both 2008).

Now best known for her coauthorship of Title IX — the 1972 legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in schools that now bears the name the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act and is still being fought by athletic departments — the late Mink was a force of nature in national as well as Hawaiian politics. Growing up in Honolulu, I knew her as the fearsome liberal rabble-rouser who stormed the islands’ oft-complacent consciousness with such fire that she rated a daily newspaper comic strip. Kimberlee Bassford’s documentary reminded me of Mink’s achievements, her battles, and the incontrovertible fact that the Japanese American Maui native, once denied entrance into medical school because of her gender, became the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. Congress in 1965.

Dilip Mehta — a National Geographic photojournalist and the production designer of older sister Deepa’s Water (2005) — turns an equally empathetic lens toward the real-life subjects of his sibling’s feature: the tragically marginalized widows of India. In The Forgotten Woman, they gravitate to the holy city of Vrindavan to live on the streets after being abandoned by families who have claimed their land and property. Mehta doesn’t shy away from questioning the ashrams that dispense some charity but benefit financially from the donations; the men who claim that women are forbidden to remarry; and the upscale city dwellers — so far from the glam exotica purveyed by Slumdog Millionaire (2008) — who pay their alms and then banish the women from their minds. His images of the women themselves — surrendering their stories as monkeys scamper about, their glasses held together by string as he shoots them with the utmost grace, respect, and heartbreaking beauty — genuinely sing.

PATSY MINK: AHEAD OF THE MAJORITY

Sun/15, noon, and March 18, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

March 21, 12:45 p.m., Camera 12

THE FORGOTTEN WOMAN

Mon/16, 6:45 p.m., and March 18, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki

March 19, 6:30 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

THE SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL March 12–22. Main venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 12 Cinemas, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets (most shows $11) are available at www.asianamericanmedia.org. For this week’s schedule, see film listings.

Everyday wisdom

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Taking her cue from the oft-cited Socratic proscription that "the unexamined life is not worth living," Winnipeg-born director Astra Taylor returns from the success of her 2005 documentary Žižek! to offer a Lyceum of pontificating sophists. Examined Life finds the 20-something Taylor, a New School graduate turned New Waver, engaging in itinerant tête-à-têtes with some of the most venerated — and occasionally vilified — theorists of the last 40 years.

Interviewees, who appear in roughly 10-minute blocks, include civil rights advocate and cultural historian Cornell West, queer theorist and Gender Trouble provocateur Judith Butler, and Slovene Lacanian Slavoj Zizek, the so-called Elvis of cultural theory. Channeling the philosophic tradition of flânerie, Taylor purposely extracts her subjects from the academic setting in which they are usually immured and films them in mid-stride — at the street corner, boutique and even the garbage dump. The final product has a jet-setting, gonzo aesthetic, as the documentarian shuttles from London to New York to San Francisco to interrogate her subjects.

Butler, Zizek, and Michael Hardt (Duke professor and coauthor with Antonio Negri of several notable Autonomist tomes) are the most fascinating to inspect onscreen, likely because of the contentious aura that surrounds their collective work. Butler’s ambuutf8g meditation on the politics of disability has an introspective subtlety when paired with Zizek’s screed on the ecology movement, delivered amid piles of rubbish — while Hardt’s discussion of revolution is all the more odd set on Central Park’s limpid Turtle Pond. Throughout, Taylor is determined that motility (walking, rowing, driving) is a dominant leitmotif, whether it be languid and reflexive or brusque and pedantic. While the conversations self-consciously aim toward jargon-free transparency and inclusivity, the film’s attempt at hipster populism will probably fall on deaf ears outside of the university circuit.

Examined Life’s choice of celebrity theorists will, of course, provoke questions as to why certain icons were included and others were left out. So, obnoxious as it may sound, where was Paul Virilio or Giorgio Agamben or Michael Taussig? A sequel may be in order.

EXAMINED LIFE opens Fri/6 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Beautiful nightmare

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If the U.S. really is entering a new period of transparency and team-playing, that might take a while to swallow for some nations that have known us best as an unreliable fair-weather ally. One of the Vietnam War’s lesser-heralded tragedies was what happened to neighboring Laos. Early in Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, we see JFK in 1961 saying of Laos, "All we want is peace, not war. A truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn." Whatever earnestness that statement possessed, it was raped under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, despite all official denials.

The CIA drafted and trained Laotian military personnel as secret guerilla units gunning for North Vietnamese fighters along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. aircraft began dropping bombs on Laos — 3 million tons’ worth over nine years, more than in both World Wars combined. Vietcong were targeted, but civilians suffered plenty from the bombings as well as from a Yank-supported South Vietnamese invasion.

Nixon’s disgraced resignation drove one last nail in the coffin of this "unpopular" war. The 1975 "fall of Saigon" withdrawal was accompanied by abrupt pullouts of American interests and muscle in Laos. Though not quite as ghastly as what ensued in collaborating Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the fast overthrow of Laos’ "neutral" U.S.-backed monarchial government by Communist forces had similar consequences. Pathet Lao’s oppressive new regime closed itself to the world, arresting, executing, or otherwise persecuting anyone suspected of ties to the prior epoch.

The Betrayal fascinates like other rare, intimate documentaries shot over long periods — Michael Apted’s Seven Up series being the most famous example. This one began a quarter-century ago, when Kuras contacted 19-year-old Thavisouk Phrasavath (credited as co-director and co-writer, and the film’s sole editor) for lessons in speaking Lao for an unrelated project. His personal story — past, present, evolving — took up any time not occupied by Kuras’ cinematography career, which has encompassed features and docs by Spike Lee, Rebecca Miller, Harold Ramis, Jonathan Demme, Mary Harron, Jim Jarmusch, Michel Gondry, and Sam Mendes.

Phrasavath’s father was a Royal Army officer seduced by better pay and the promise that his own country’s best interests were being served — even when he plotted its bombing targets. After long service, the Americans’ abrupt pullout got him arrested, sent to re-education camp, and assumed executed by loved ones. Considered traitorous along with her 10 children, his wife Orady desperately bribed smugglers for their safe expatriation. When that happened, it was so sudden she had to leave two briefly absent daughters behind. She chose the United States as an asylum destination, believing that a government grateful for her husband’s sacrifices would "take care of us when we get to America." The clan got dumped in a decrepit mid-1980s Brooklyn apartment shared with other Southeast Asian refugees, next to a crack house and surrounded by gang violence.

Kuras was there then, and later on when some startling changes occurred in the Phrasavath family saga. But The Betrayal is as soft on narrative detailing as its color palette, which finds rainforest green and Buddhist monk-robe saffron echoed even in the harshest New Yawk/Joisey landscapes. Her visual impressionism is a gift, especially in the abstract illustration of teenage Phrasavath’s solo escape across the Mekong. But such poetical shorthand also frustrates — we’d like to know far more than Kuras and Phrasavath allow about what happened to immediate blood beyond himself and his mom.

But that stuff could be forgivably relegated to DVD extras. A rare new documentary that really belongs on the big screen, The Betrayal‘s flowing lyricism gracefully connects a poignant family history to larger socio-political and extra-large spiritual themes. It’s an almost sinfully beautiful movie about ugly global realities.


THE BETRAYAL opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Is inequality making us sick?

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OPINION The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets squeezed. It’s gone on so long, we hardly get angry anymore. But we do get sick.

Several recent studies indicate that the life expectancy gap between the most and least deprived Americans has widened since the early 1980s, paralleling the growing economic inequality during the same period. And, if the past is an accurate gauge, today’s economic crisis will only make things worse.

The wealth-health gradient is evident everywhere, even here in San Francisco. According to the SF Department of Public Health, rates for congestive heart failure are 42 percent higher in the Sunset than St. Francis Wood/West Portal; 131 percent higher in Mission/Bernal Heights, and 279 percent higher in Bayview/Hunters Point.

Contrary to myth, it’s not the CEOs who are dropping dead from heart attacks; it’s their subordinates. And it’s not violence or drugs that are the biggest killers in poor neighborhoods but chronic diseases.

Some point the finger at our broken health insurance system. But studies suggest medical care accounts for only about 15 percent of our health gap. That’s because health care repairs our bodies when they break down; it doesn’t affect what makes us sick in the first place.

What about making healthy choices? Don’t the poor smoke more and eat unhealthy foods? True — it’s hard to eat well if you live in a food desert like the Bayview, where there are no supermarkets. But even after correcting for individual behaviors, health inequalities remain. Poor smokers are more likely to get sick than rich smokers.

Many factors affecting health have little to do with individual behaviors. They include exposure to lead and other toxics; the quality of schools; the outsourcing of jobs; proximity of parks; the wages and benefits companies pay; exposure to discrimination; secure, quality housing; affordable preschool … When these conditions are distributed unequally, so is our health.

A century ago, U.S. life expectancy was about 48 years. Much of the 30-year increase since is due not to new drugs or medical technologies, but to improved living conditions. The abolition of child labor, the eight-hour workday, housing and sanitation codes, and other reforms won working Americans a bigger share of our growing prosperity.

By 1976, thanks to civil rights, Medicare, and other progressive policies, economic inequality had reached a 20th century low. The health gap between rich and poor, as well as that between whites and African Americans narrowed between 1966 and 1980.

Then we reversed course. While most European countries were providing paid parental leave, universal preschool, four or more weeks of paid vacations, and guaranteed health care, the United States, starting with the Reagan administration, cut taxes on the rich, slashed social programs, and deregulated business and banking. Economic inequality in the U.S. is now greater than it’s been since the 1920s. The consequence? The health gap is growing again too.

The wide class and racial inequities in the U.S. and the health inequalities they drive are not natural. They are the products of social policies that we as a society have made — and can make differently. We once did. Solutions lie not with new drugs or technologies, but our political priorities.

Larry Adelman is executive producer of the documentary series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (www.unnaturalcauses.org ) Find out more about the health of San Francisco neighborhoods at www.thehdmt.org and www.healthmattersinsf.org.

Dirty old town

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It’s been eight years since Terence Davies gifted us with his sublime if slightly inferior film version of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. After various false promises from moneyed folks and battles with bureaucratic fools, he’s returned with a largely found-footage documentary — an extremely mouthy one.

Those who’ve seen Davies in-person know he’s far from the shy misery maven one might assume from autobiographical films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and his peak work, The Long Day Closes (1992). He likes to spout a witticism or three. But even that awareness doesn’t quite prepare one for the full-boar melodramatic recital-ready voiceover of the made-for-TV Of Time and the City. At one point, discussing his first encounters with MGM musicals, Davies declares that he "swallowed them whole." In fact, here, his rich, raspy, megadramatic readings threaten to swallow the imagery he’s gathered just as wholly. He answers a great line about poverty from Willem De Kooning with an equally great insult about rich royalty. At other times he’s simply overwrought.

Of Time and the City is best when Davies lets the montage — or an excellent singer — do the talking. It’s uncanny how he choreographs archival material to perform the same slow retreats that characterize the ever-revealing dolly shots in his movies. As a soundtrack for wartime, the Hollies’ "He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother," is born again, so it’s a drag when Davies stuffily argues that the Beatles are provincial. Davies is a collagist with a strong nostalgia streak. Sometimes it spoils the best of him.

OF TIME AND THE CITY opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Watch their steps

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Drummer Liam Morrison’s bandmates in the Amazements — Brendan, his guitar-playing brother, and Elon Etzioni, vocalist and bassist — could be heard jamming a symphonic-sounding Laibach track in the background when he picked up his phone in Los Angeles. It only got more peculiar from there: the Amazements ended up reeling off more funny, bizarre anecdotes than most groups ever accumulate in their lifetime.

For instance, there’s the incident when the Cobra Snake guy showed up to one of the ensemble’s shows: "He didn’t take any photos … he just left!" Brendan explained. "Either he was intimidated or really unaware." Conversely, they were once photographed by Mick Rock — but never got to see the shots.

In any case, no photo can do justice to the band’s dynamic, which, musically and in conversation, is tight-knit and eccentric. They quietly, relentlessly rib one another through the entire interview, and their music — a fanged and crazed take on garage-rock tradition in the James Williamson–era Stooges sense — seems born of an understanding that’s taken years to sediment. Each of them are quite young — Etzioni and Brendan are 22, and Liam is 20 — but they started playing together as preteens way back in 2001, making what Liam described as "crappy improvised stuff" based around three-chord structures.

They eventually ventured into "song" territory and arrived at a crossroads when they were hired — through Etzioni’s dad, Marvin, a member of 1980s group Lone Justice — to play an instrumental for a record by country vocalist Grey Delisle, who required a "raw garage rock" sound for one of her songs. Such straight-shootin’ session work wasn’t really the Amazements’ thing, however, as their unabashed reverence for some heavily varied sonic touchstones makes clear. As favorites, they name the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You (Virgin, 1981), L.A. rap station Power 106, and James Brown, whose "Get It Together" they give a possessed, clanging rendition live and on record. They’re likewise fond of Three 6 Mafia: the Amazements can cover 12 songs by the Oscar-winning rap group, including a striking word-for-word version of "Side 2 Side."

An Amazements song sounds like little else: they feel Shaggs-y in their odd, homegrown sense of rock, but they definitely aren’t making music in a vacuum. In fact, last year they curated and headlined four weeks of shows at Pehrspace, the up-and-coming downtown L.A. venue where, according to Brendan, the combo "arrived at performing pubescence." In 2006 they appeared in the 40 Bands 80 Minutes! documentary, and as Etzioni mentioned, their appearance later got shouted out in Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s column for Arthur magazine.

Finally, after two years of work, they’re now within inches of completing their first full-length, soon to be released by Peter’s Pool Boys. "We’re trying to make a masterpiece!" exclaimed Liam — a claim that, judging by what I’ve heard, will likely be fulfilled. According to the group, one of the record’s most fearsome songs, "Time Anus," is a "skate anthem in Colorado" due to its inclusion in a boarding vid put together by Etzioni’s cousin, Connor MacLeod.

"Watch Your Step," meanwhile, was born of a bewildering, improvised Etzioni vocal over a short, looped sample from the tail end of curio-funk number "Tutti Fruit," and where the original "Step" was distorted with disorienting effect — "Some frequency in the loop made people nauseous and feverish," Brendan said — its finished form pairs a frenzied, devolved-sounding rap with totally wired peals of pitch-shifted guitar. It’s anomalously awesome.

If the album’s not done by tour, the Amazements will have homemade CD-Rs for purchase at their shows, which will be well worth picking up. They don’t get to play out of town that often, so roll by a gig and get your head hammered onto their proverbial stick.

AMAZEMENTS

With Hungry Ghost, Sad Horse, the Sandwitches

Fri/6, 9 p.m., $5

Argus Lounge

3187 Mission, SF

www.arguslounge.com

Also with Pierre Le Robot and Cupids

Mon/9, 9:30 p.m., free

Blondie’s Bar and No Grill

540 Valencia, SF

www.blondiesbar.com

Girls Rock! on DVD

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By Natalie Gregory

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In the 90’s, there were girls who rocked. Kim Deal, Courtney Love, the girl from White Zombie. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these women were an inspiration. They still are; a big fat middle finger to anybody who says girls can’t rock out and rock hard. This is a big theme in the insightful documentary Girls Rock!: girls today have some pretty commercialized, f&*%#d up role models. It’s about a rock and roll camp for girls in Portland, Oregon and follows a few first-timers throughout their weeklong journey of songwriting, guitar playing, and all the compromises in between. By the end of it, these male directors manage to illustrate the girls gaining confidence and a better understanding of their own capabilities.

Sun/Slam dance-off

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

Midnites for Maniacs programmer and Academy of Art University film history teacher Ficks tallies up his favorites from Sundance and Slamdance 2009.

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(1) Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire – directed by Lee Daniels
Not to be confused with the upcoming Dakota Fanning film of the same name, this gut-wrenching adaptation of the struggles of Precious, an overweight, illiterate 16-year-old, (performed with utter grace by new-comer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe) has the power to take the country by storm if and when it’s released (the film has yet to be picked up by a distributor even though it won Sundance’s Grand Jury and Audience Award prizes). Mo’Nique as Precious’ abusive mother delivers one of the most authentic performances of our time (she won a Special Jury Prize for Acting), while Mariah Carey is brilliantly understated as a caring social counselor. But what’s so special about this Dancer in the Dark-esque film are Damien Paul’s screenplay and director Lee Daniels’ choices to always take the more difficult road with the characters. This is powerhouse filmmaking at its finest.

(2) Humpday – directed by Lynn Shelton
So straight they’re gay! If you took the two straight-male archetypes from Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) — the adventurous, wandering beardo and the settling-down, sensitive progressive — got them drunk at a party, and had them challenge one another to have sex with each other, you have the setup for hands-down the funniest bromance mumblecore film of the year. As the two friends (Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass of 2005’s The Puffy Chair) try and prove who’s living life to the fullest and man-liest, director Lynn Shelton showcases the “awkward moment” and thoroughly explores straight men’s confused sexuality. (If the premise sounds uncomfortable, think of how baffled the Utah audiences were of the concept of two straight guys fucking one another. Magnolia picked the film up so keep your eyes open for the limited release.) This is classic indie cinema of the golden 1990s type.

(3) We Live in Public – directed by Ondi Timoner
Following-up Timoner’s 2004 Documentary Grand Jury Prize-winning Dig!, this jaw-dropping doc follows the bipolar exploits of Josh Harris, a man who predicted every single step of the internet. The hypnotic footage has the power to warp the viewer into Harris’ Orwellian vision of the future. It’s as fascinatingly addictive as it is horrifyingly revealing of where our current society is headed.

‘Dance party

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PARK CITY REPORT A degree of relative tranquility settled on Sundance this year, as budget cutbacks among media outlets and distributors meant the customary frenzy was dialed down a notch or three. Of course most screenings were packed, but fewer people than usual got turned away; lodgings remained available during the festival, whereas normally they’d be booked months in advance. Still, what was onscreen remained as usual — a more or less even mix of good, bad, and indifferent. (Most likely in 2010 we’ll start to see a shrunken economy affect indie film production.)

The Bay Area was strangely underrepresented this year, particularly in the documentary realm where it often has a major presence. Instead, there were two dramatic features, each highly specific in local setting. Bratt Pack family project La Mission, directed by Peter Bratt, stars Benjamin Bratt as Che, an ex-con Muni driver and middle-aged lowrider whose macho veneer doesn’t get in the way of his love for a college-bound son (Jeremy Ray Valdez). When he discovers junior is gay, dad freaks out; the Castro District may be just a few blocks from their Mission District walkup, but it’s a world away from Che’s comprehension. This cable-ready exercise’s plot turns and social-issue pleadings can be predicted after 10 minutes. Yet it’s also got genuine warmth, easygoing humor, Benjamin B.’s charisma, and a fond grasp of the ‘hood.

Frazer Bradshaw’s starker Everything Strange and New focuses on young North Oakland couple Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) and Renee (sometime Guardian contributor Beth Lisick), neither of whom quite understand how they got to be saddled with a mortgage, two kids, her frazzled nerves, and his deadened ones. Meanwhile, Wayne’s work and drinking buddies (Luis Saguar, Rico Chacon Jr.) have domestic problems of their own. This is the kind of movie people walk out on at Sundance — too slow, uncommercial, etc. — but it’s a quietly original vision with nary a false emotional note.

Elsewhere, local luminary Robin Williams finally found an indie that suited his more restrained seriocomic abilities in The World’s Greatest Dad, an imperfect but clever black comedy about literary fraud and morbid personality cults from (no kidding) Bobcat Goldthwait.

I also particularly liked doc Prom Night in Mississippi, about a burg that finally held its first integrated high school prom last year; Israeli dysfunctional-slum-family drama Zion and His Brothers; amazingly detail-perfect recreation/spoof of 1970s blaxploitation flicks Black Lightning; and (at nearby Slamdance) Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story, about the Me Decade’s most alarmingly perky touring act. Imagine those song numbers in the satirical Brady Bunch movies performed by a couple hundred squeaky-clean young adults, sans irony. It’s enough to make a smiley face go postal.

Calvin Johnson

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PREVIEW It’s not hard to see Calvin Johnson as the obverse of Henry Rollins in the protean world of ’80s underground rock. Johnson’s teddy-bear huggability, and the straightforwardness and purity of sentiment of a track like his old band Beat Happening’s "Honey Pot," has nothing to do with Black Flag’s macho angst. Rather than burying his emotional life under muscle, Johnson’s appeal came from an embarrassing vulnerability. While he’s better known for his historic role and his work as K Records’ head honcho than for his current endeavors, Johnson remains au courant: his most recent release, Calvin Johnson and the Sons of the Soil (K, 2007), finds him backed by the likes of Adam Forkner, a.k.a. Portland, Ore., drone chief White Rainbow.

At press time, San Francisco opening act Grass Widow tentatively canceled its performance due to multiple family emergencies, so this Club Sandwich event will likely be rounded out by screenings of Heart of Nowhere, a stream-of-consciousness documentary about life in Alabama, and Crisis in the Credit System, a 2008 film by Melanie Gilligan. If you’re missing the cold, these hits of sunshine might not be for you.

CALVIN JOHNSON With screening of Heart of Nowhere and Crisis in the Credit System. Mon/26, 8 p.m., $6. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org, clubsandwichbayarea.com

Speed Reading

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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Reel time travel

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How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Beautiful voices

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In the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, Bob Dylan noted an era when people desired "beautiful voices over very melodic songs." He referred to the early 1960s and pop balladeers such as Doris Day and Johnny Mathis. But the description fits the current soul scene, too, and its celebration of black — and, increasingly, white — artists with wondrously perfect voices and virtuous, albeit sexually complicated lives. A friend of mine used to call it "church."

If the soul scene resembles a megachurch, then John "Legend" Stephens is its deacon. His rise in the music industry — from backup vocalist on Jay-Z’s "Encore" to flagship artist on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint — was balanced with a years-long stint as music director at Philadelphia’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. In photos accompanying his 2004 debut Get Lifted (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), Legend stood in the aisle of a nondescript church, bathed in sunlight, his hands resting on two adjacent pews. Thematically the album followed Legend’s transformation from hip-hop kid with a roving eye ("She Don’t Have to Know," "Used to Love U," which pays homage to Common’s "I Used to Love H.E.R.") to chastened man trying to save his relationship ("I Can Change," "Ordinary People") and, finally, spiritually and physically devoted lover ("Stay With You," "So High"). He performed these songs with a studious air. His voice alternately massaged and swayed, like an altar boy brushing the dirt off his shoes as he enters.

Legend has moved on to other themes of love and devotion, but the Christian aspects of his music remain. The "church" probably wouldn’t have it any other way. The modern R&B industry resembles the old-school pop industry — before it lapsed into the Madonna/whore syndrome personified by Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus — in its celebration of carefully manicured personalities with stylish (but not too avant-garde) fashion sensibilities and gossipy (but not too slutty) love lives. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going to church. Still, whether used as a metaphor or visited as a place of worship, a church and its congregation idealize the world around it.

As a result, most soul vocalists sing about love and sex, reducing the vagaries of life to intimate relationships. A few, particularly the great Anthony Hamilton and Raheem DeVaughn, address the black community, the effects of violent crime and rampant poverty, and the idea of working hard for a paycheck and dreaming of better days. But that’s not really Legend’s thing. He imagines as a songwriter and composer in the vein of Quincy Jones and Billy Joel. He cuts a dashing figure on the cover of his 2004 album Once Again (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), tinkling a grand piano in the middle of busy New York City streets and spinning light, romantic numbers such as "P.D.A. (We Just Don’t Care)." "Let’s go to the park, I wanna kiss you underneath the stars," he sings in a breezily sultry voice. "Let’s make love."

Much like Burt Bacharach, the old-school mandarin of fluffy Brill Building pop, Legend is an ace craftsman of modern standards. His best songs mix concise and thoughtful lyrics with subtle melodies, expert musicianship, and standout choruses. For his new full-length, Evolver (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), he adds "Green Light," a seductive come on buffeted by drum and keyboard programming. "Give me the green light, give me just one night," croons Legend as stray synth melodies pop and sparkle around him. Andre 3000 from OutKast shows up after the second hook, promising to have "you giggling like a piglet / Oh, that’s the ticket / I hope you’re more Anita Baker than Robin Givens."

The cover of Evolver, where Legend poses mysteriously in a Members Only jacket, plays on "Green Light"’s promise that the traditionalist is playing a new game. But, of course, it’s the same tricks. Get Lifted successfully mixed A-list rappers with familiar neo-soul grooves: baby-making music with a contemporary edge. Despite the subtle nods to ’80s babies nostalgia, Legend doesn’t wander too far from that winning formula. Instead, he offers creamy ballads such as "Cross the Line," where he admits, "I don’t want to risk losing everything."

For all the loveliness of Legend’s voice, it would be nice to hear him write more challenging material. Get Lifted drew unpredictable, exciting tension from his classical tendencies and hip-hop’s swagger, but with Evolver he veers dangerously close to blandness. Of course, his "church" probably wouldn’t want it any other way.

Back in 2006, I saw Los Angeles singer-songwriter Esthero open for Legend. Walking on stage barefoot and in loose-fitting clothes, Esthero’s funk jams and earthy Bjork-like trip-pop drew snickers from the audience. She was almost booed off the stage. It took Legend to pacify the old ladies and married couples.

"Hey, do you remember this one?" he teased them, playing a few notes from Jay-Z’s "Encore" and Slum Village’s "Selfish." He sang in fine form that night, and the church was pleased.

JOHN LEGEND

With Estelle

Mon/12, 8 p.m., $50.50–$76.50

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakland

www.apeconcerts.com

Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch

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pimp.jpg
Image from imdb.com’s archive for “American Pimp”.

Text by Sarah Phelan

Folks in Oakland—and those in the parallel universe that makes films about Oakland—are getting their knickers in a twist about a HBO drama that wants to focus on a 40something Oakland-based pimp’s attempts to get out of the world’s oldest profession.

In the right corner, we have Mayor Ron Dellums, who is worried about the impact of the show, called ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” and based on a 1999 documentary called “American Pimp”, on Oakland’s image as a “model city.”

In the left corner, we have folks who are worried about the impact of canceling the show, set to begin 2009, on Oakland’s already flailing economy.

And stuck in the middle, so it seems, are the folks at Oakland’s Film Office.

Reached by phone, Ami Sims, (oops, as one reader just pointed out, her name is Ami Zins, not Sims) Film Coordinator for Oakland’s Film office, told the Guardian that she had heard nothing, in terms of the show actually being nixed.

“The company doesn’t even have a script, so there’s really nothing to talk about,” Zins told me.
Pressed for details of how the City could stop HBO from filming and whether it has taken steps to do so, Zins said, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

So, what in heck is going on in Oakland, a city made infamous by Too Short’s “No love from Oakland” which begins “Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch/ Niggas always talkin bout ‘I love you’/But ain’t no love, bitch”?

Shortly before Christmas, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the HBO proposal had come under fire from Mayor Ron Dellums and other city officials before filming had even started.

‘It’s the mayor’s view that this project goes against our vision of Oakland as a ‘model city’ and does a disservice to residents and visitors alike,” Dellum’s chief of staff David Chai told the Merc. “The people of Oakland have come too far to have our city’s name trampled upon in the name of entertainment.”

Now, it’s true that folks nationwide hold a negative stereotype of Oakland, and that the City has spent a lot of time, money and effort to clean up its crime-plagued streets.

But that doesn’t take away from the reality the Oakland continues to be crime ridden and that pimps are no strangers to many of its less than pristine streets.

In 2008, Oakland witnessed 124 homicides. That’s three fewer than in 2007. But 25 more than in San Francisco, which saw 99 homicides (its highest since 1995) in 2008. And it’s a stunning 121 more than the city of Alameda, which saw three homicides in 2008 and is only separated from Oak town by a short underground tunnel.

It’s also true that Oakland is in a very dire financial predicament, one that Mayor Dellums predicts will only get worse over the next couple of years. The City’s $42 million deficit in 2008 could balloon to $113 million by 2012.

So, could ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” be Oakland’s financial salvation?

City officials argue that the $150-a-day cost of a film permit is chump change, given that the project would only reinforce the city’s criminal reputation.

But as a film industry source, who prefers to remain anonymous, points out, Oakland would also benefit from the jobs that the show would create, not to mention the trickle down effect of people spending their paychecks locally.

“These are jobs we could have had, that actors who live in the East Bay could have had” our source said, noting that the Emmy-award winning show Dexter “doesn’t mean that everybody who lives in Florida is a serial killer.”

Don’t look back

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Cinephilia is a malady that affects the imagination above all. As 2008’s year-end pieces roll across the blogosphere, one encounters the alluring titles and stills of films which won’t reach the Bay Area for months. Against this tempting tide, I turn to the faint echoes of those undistributed movies which lingered in mind long enough after their festival screenings to become pliable to memory. To take one powerful example, the earthiness of John Gianvito’s still frames of the monuments and graves marking American radicalism’s many resting places inflected my own perception of Obama’s soaring rhetoric. Months after seeing it, Profit motive and the whispering wind‘s contemplative chronology kept returning to me as a visual counterpoint to the "long march" of the campaign season. Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, on the other hand, provided the punch lines to the economic meltdown before the fact. The two films have nothing in common except for prescience, but then prescience is no small thing in a year in which the news outpaced the dream factory for twists-of-fate.

An elegiac documentary like Profit motive is a tough sell in any climate, but I fully expected Go Go Tales to score theatrical distribution after catching it at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Asia Argento slobbering a Rottweiler, Sylvia Miles rasping poetic about Bed Bath and Beyond, miles of dialogue, and a depth of staging which rewards concentration and intoxication in equal kind: Ferrara’s nightlife ballad is ripe for a cult following. At the center of film’s enclosed universe is Ray (Willem Dafoe), a small-time dreamer who runs his Manhattan club on less than a shoestring. The strippers are threatening a work stoppage, the landlady (Miles) is waving her pocketbook around about turning the lease over, and Ray’s brother — a hairstylist from Staten Island known at Ray’s Paradise Lounge as the "king of coiffeuse" — is pulling his financial support from the club. Drawing together all his business acumen, Ray invests in a crooked lotto racket.

After-hours in a threadbare nightclub is an ideal stage for waning fortunes, and it does seem that Ferrara was after a certain timeliness with Go Go Tales: gadfly Danny Cash (Joseph Cortese) spins a Jersey-size yarn about a pastrami projectile hitting "Hillary ‘I Might Be Your Next President’ Clinton," a headstrong cook hawks free-range hot dogs, and the staff grouses over the new Chinese customer base. But there’s no way the director could have known what Go Go Tales augured: Lehman Brothers shareholders left holding their own equivalent of "Ray Ray Dollars," budget cuts, drunk real estate agents, Ponzi schemes, and murmurs of the sinking ship.

A comedy of teetotaling fortunes, a musical with a touch of Beckett, Go Go Tales is every bit a Depression movie. Ferrara’s style is steeped in ’70s playbacks — Robert Altman’s wandering long takes, Woody Allen’s softness for showbiz, and John Cassevetes’ own strip-club serenade, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) — but as long as we’re talking about filmmakers who love talkers, let’s not overlook the original screwball savants. The Ray’s crowd bubbles over with the same provincial clamor as Preston Sturges’ stock company in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). In Go Go Tales‘ climactic scene, Ray uncorks a brilliantly obfuscating speech before finding the winning lottery ticket in his front pocket. It’s delirium on the edge of despair and a worthy successor to Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940). Thinking about what Sturges would have done with a world in which "bailout" is Merriam Webster’s "word of the year" makes me want to cry laughing — but there I go imagining things again.

MAX GOLDBERG’S TOP 10 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

Actresses (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France, 2007)

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

Foster Child (Brillante Mendoza, Philippines, 2007)

Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA, 2007)

The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Myth Labs (Martha Colburn, USA)

Profit motive and the whispering wind (John Gianvito, USA, 2007)

Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong, 2006)

The Witnesses (André Téchiné, France, 2007)

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1. Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2008)

A masterful film was made in San Francisco by someone who doesn’t just live for the city, but does the city know it? Dorsky’s latest (along with the superb companion piece Winter) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was part of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archive, but as far as I know it has yet to have a public screening in his hometown, where he resides on the avenues that separate the filmmakers and film lovers of SF’s streets, and the Film Society in the Presidio. This summer, along with kino21’s Konrad Steiner, I put together a program devoted to Dorsky’s one-time peer and brother filmmaker of sorts, the late Warren Sonbert, whose revelatory explorations of editing and direct vision lead up — in far more frenetic and sprawling sense — to what Dorsky is doing today. Sarabande is the time and place where Dorsky’s devotional cinema reaches the sublime. This country priest of a film critic may be misreading the signs, once again, in making such a claim — but so be it.

2. The Exiles restoration (Kent MacKenzie, USA, 1961)

This night in the life of urban American Indians occupies a one-of-a-kind place and time. The title renders any description superfluous — what form of exile is stronger than the one discovered while drifting through a stolen home? MacKenzie’s movie, with the life-and-death tunnel vision of its gorgeous Weegee-inflected vérité cinematography, revealed a lost United States. Today it’s a haunting marker of a moment before this country’s commercial independent cinema went in countless stupid and phony directions, and of an area of Los Angeles that has vanished. People are rendered disposable. Lonely spirits continue to gather.

3. Wimbledon Men’s Final 2008: Rafael Nadal def. Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (8-10), 9-7

If you believe what you read and what you see, Raise the Red Lantern and Hero director Zhang Yimou’s production of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony was the spectacle of the year — so dazzling it erased the torch’s troubled travels from what’s left of a collective memory. Television networks have it on rerun, art publications like Artforum can’t stop parsing and usually praising it. (It also garnered an excellent lengthy "movie review" in the magazine Cinema Scope.) Yet Zhang’s endlessly-rehearsed and prefabricated festivities paled in comparison to the marathon drama and dazzling finale of this year’s last match at Wimbledon. The spine-tingling aspect came from fate, not machination, as night crept into a stadium that doesn’t use lights, and the victor’s triumph gave way to an outrageous spontaneous ovation of flashbulbs. It didn’t hurt that Rafael Nadal is the sport’s version of his idol, Zinedine Zidane. Lil Wayne said it best: "I love his motivation and his heart is so big. He leaves it on the court."

4. The Juche Idea (Jim Finn, USA, 2008) and Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, USA 2007)

Convulsive cinema is radical cinema, one of the reasons the gut-busting aspects of these two movies are vital. Finn’s look at Kim Jong-Il’s film theories (yes, "Dear Leader" is a film theorist with publications to his name) is uncannily timely, from its clips of North Korean stadium parades — shades of Zhang Yimou’s Beijing bombast — to its satirical insight that little separates dreaded (and oft-ridiculous) socialism from the broken-down ghost of late capitalism. Also, best use of ski jumps, rodents, and fly-face sculptures this year. Robinson finds a Satanic kaleidoscope within the fractured pixels of an episode of Full House, making the discovery roughly around the time one of the Olsen twins re-manifested as an angel of death. His statement for the movie still might be the definitive one: "Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive." Dying of laughter has rarely felt better.

5. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)

The growing wave of top 10 raves and critic’s awards for Alfredson’s deeply subversive eternal preteen romance is a rare heartening aspect of this year’s feature film malaise.

6. California Company Town (Lee Ann Schmitt, USA, 2008), Viva (Anna Biller, USA, 2007), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008), and When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 2008)


The heart of American cinema in 2008 is as wild and strong as these directors’ visions. Schmitt’s scorched-earth exploration of California’s abandoned past, closing with a final chapter on Silicon Valley that refreshingly breaks its own rules and throws down the gauntlet, is the timeliest movie in a year of ever-accumuutf8g economic disaster. Biller’s tribute to the bodaciously vivid soft-core fantasies of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger couples enthusiasm with smarts with kinky results. It also features a character whose incessant cackling laughter practically becomes hallucinogenic. Reichardt starts off what could have been just another shaggy dog story by paying tribute to the Polaroid Kidd (she’s also sussed out the new depression), and allows her lead actress’s offscreen back story to silently color in a thousand shades of loss. In sync with Skuli Sverrisson’s incandescent score, Reeves’ movie makes love to nature. The past-tense in the title proves she’s looking ahead.

7. Wild Combination (Matt Wolf, USA, 2008)

In his feature debut, the talented 25-year-old Wolf chooses a documentary subject he has an affinity for, and Russell’s still-blooming musical legacy automatically gives the film a unique soulful beauty. While the pastoral and waterfront imagery is expected, Wolf’s humane insight as an interviewer is a wonder to behold. It results in one of the year’s most emotionally powerful films, when following the reticent Russell could have been futile. The final 10 minutes are a complete rebuke to all the idiotic discourse that rails against (and perhaps even for?) gay marriage.

8. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK/Ireland, 2008) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008)


Is hunger sated by milk? Can milk alone get rid of hunger? Steve McQueen is the last art star with film director aspirations, and Gus Van Sant is a movieland auteur who always seems to look longingly at the art world’s white cubes. Both have made bio-dramas about political icons: McQueen speculates about the life and death of IRA leader Bobby Sands, while Van Sant, in case you haven’t heard, has realized his fascination with a certain trailblazing gay San Franciscan. Funny, then, that McQueen makes a riveting experimental work that devolves into a standard heroic final passage, while Van Sant crafts a traditional film in drag. In interview, McQueen told me that he thought of Hunger‘s standout confrontational scene as a bit like the 1982 Wimbledon final. (See, tennis is uniquely cinematic.) But his visceral perspective is most effective early on, when scarcely any words are spoken, and his oblique references to everyone from Jean Genet to Van Sant’s old love Alfred Hitchcock don’t seem merely precocious.

9. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008)

I may have enjoyed this movie because I know next to nothing about (and don’t give a damn about) Mickey Rourke’s misadventures. He arrived in my frame of vision as a modern-day American version of Jean Cocteau’s Beast, blinking out some perfectly round tears when he isn’t pulling staples out of his leathery salon-tanned hide. Look no further than the corrupt endgame of Hulk Hogan — better yet, try to avoid looking at it — for proof that such a figure suits the late-Bush era, though of course Rourke’s brawler has true working-class heart. A working class hero is something to be.

10. Manny Farber, 1917-2008

A lot of critics, ranging from musty well-off bores to young upstarts, wrote tributes to Farber upon his passing. But I have to wonder, who in the current era’s echo chamber of Web-bound opinion has actually learned from him? Ten years ago, there were at least a few voices (Chuck Stephens, Edward E. Crouse) whose writing carried traces of Farber’s spiky structures and wonderfully disorienting shifts in point-of-view. Now, I don’t see hear anyone with a voice like his, but more troubling, I don’t see newer generations of film critics picking up on the fact that he approached the medium as something other than a passive "entertain me" observer. Farber’s vision of film was anything but literal. He was, and is, an artist.

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