Festival Archives — Page 118 of 135 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Hot fusion

-

March 19, 2008

If you’ve done any traveling at all, you know about Peruvian dance and music. You will have seen the small groups of black-caped musicians (occasionally accompanied by dancers) playing pan pipes anywhere from Tokyo to New York City, Copenhagen to Atlanta. But there is another aspect of this country’s culture, one that originated halfway around the world. Early in their sixteenth century conquests, Peru’s Spanish colonial powers imported slaves from Africa to work the silver mines. But with the abolition of slavery in 1854, the thriving Afro-Peruvian culture gradually started melting away. By the mid-twentieth century it was composed of fading memories, dances half-remembered, and musical instruments in disrepair. One was the cajon, today known from flamenco dancing; a wooden box Afro-Peruvians used for percussion instead of the forbidden drum. One man, Ronaldo Campos, realized what a tragedy the loss of these cultural traditions would be. In 1969 he founded Perú Negro (now run by his son), and with the help of ethnologists they began to save and revitalize Peru’s African heritage. If you have seen the Bay Area’s El Tunante perform Peru’s national dance, the zamacueca (now often called the marinera), at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, you’ll have had a taste of how European, Indian, and African cultures have mixed in Peru. Perú Negro’s one-night-only concert presents a collection of dances, including the percussive zapateos; the popular zamacueca, which is danced with handkerchiefs; the landó, originally from Angola but entering Peru by way of Brazil; and the toro mato, which mocks the stiff-boned formality of the European minuet. Thematically, the dances both lament and celebrate the slaves’ daily working and living conditions. In addition to the guitar, you may also hear quijadas, or jaw bones, and cajitas, small box drums worn around the neck. (Rita Felciano)

PERÚ NEGRO

Thurs/20, 8 p.m., $22–$42

Zellerbach Hall

UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

South By Culture: P.S.

-

March 18, 2008

0

Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

I made it onto my new friend Rachel’s blog at KCRW! Check out “Best Non-Musical Moment.” I can assure you, the feeling’s mutual.

Me and my new SXSW BFF Rachel Reynolds, closing out the weekend with Chromeo.

South By Culture: Highlights

-

March 18, 2008

0

Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

Some of my favorite non-musical moments at SXSW:

The “Yard Sale”

Ironic and slightly racist Texas T-shirt? Priceless.

My first day in town, my host (a friend of the family) and I came across what can only be called a Yard Sale in the most literal definition of the word. What this really was? Entrepreunerial brilliance. Rather than curse the thousands of indie rockers who descend upon his city every year, one Austin resident decided to capitalize on it. Before SXSW, he scoured thrift stores for hipster-friendly items like brightly-colored cowboy boots, ironic T-shirts, snap-front Western shirts, and leather jackets. Then he set up his wares in his front yard for three days during Southby – and priced everything three or four times higher than he paid. It was one-stop Southby-chic shopping. If only those green calf-length boots came in my size …

If only I wore a 9B.

South By Culture: Home again … and advice for next year

-

March 18, 2008

0

Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

I’m finally back from South by Southwest. And by “back” I don’t only mean “in San Francisco.” The latter happened early Sunday morning. But I only recovered, brushed my teeth, got out of bed, and unpacked last night. Yes, it was that much fun, and that exhausting. (Yes, I also have a habit of squeezing every bit of fun out of every moment I can, which often leads to days of bed rest, but that’s another story…)

Now that I have some time to reflect, I can say deciding to go was one of the best ideas I ever had. (Way better than paying $180 to see Buffy the Musical.) First off, Austin’s rad. Now I completely understand why everyone I know is moving there. Rent is cheap. People are interesting. It’s got the politics, art, music, and culture of Portland and San Francisco but without the rain and gloom of either; and it’s got the weather of Los Angeles, but without the smog, the sprawl, or the especially high ratio of douche-bags to cool people our sister to the South has got.

The unofficial SXSW (female) uniform: summer dresses and cowboy boots.

And second, the festival itself. How do I explain this? It isn’t simply that there’s music everywhere. It’s that everyone is there because they love being there. This is summer camp for music geeks. Or Sturgis. Or (don’t kill me for saying this) Burning Man. Southby isn’t just a big, spread-out Coachella or Bonnaroo – both of which are contained, commercial festivals in the traditional sense. This is more of a temporary culture – where every venue is dedicated to playing music from morning to night, and where every person there is so dedicated to music they want to spend several days immersed in it.

In fact, I found the experience of being at Southby much the same as being at Burning Man: intending to go one place and ending up at another, running into people I never expected to see, leaving the house at 11 a.m. with the intention of coming home for dinner and not seeing my bed until 4 a.m. Drinking early, forgetting to eat, thinking I’d found the most inspiring thing I’d ever seen and then, two blocks later, finding something even more inspiring. Sure, at Burning Man it’s guerrilla art or random performance or the joy of seeing Barbie Death Camp for the first time – at Southby, it’s rock bands that sound like Led Zeppelin (Parlour Mob) or discovering the punk band I’m listening to actually sings one my favorite song on an old, unlabelled mix tape (Meat Men) or finding my way into the Perez Hilton party (not as exciting as it sounds) with a writer friend from L.A. But the fundamental feeling is the same: riding the wave of the unexpected. I bet you could even draw parallels between relationships at Burning Man – how some are formed and how some are ruined – and those at Southby.

And just like Burning Man, Southby isn’t for everyone. The pace is breakneck. The beer is unlimited. And if you don’t like crowds, walking, or loud noise, it could be your biggest nightmare. But for people like me, it’s an absolute fantasy.

Which is to say, yes, of course, I’m going to go again. But I’ll do a few things differently. Here’s my advice for other Southby virgins, based on what I learned this year:

South By Culture: Why’d I bring my cowboy hat?

-

March 13, 2008

0

Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

Often, when I embark on a trip, I assume everyone else around me is going where I’m going. Usually I’m wrong. But sometimes – as with Burning Man and, apparently, South by Southwest – I’m right.

It was harder to tell who was headed to Austin on the first leg of my flight, but it was obvious on the last leg from Denver to Austin. The girl in the beat-up T-shirt, suspenders, and A-line skirt with matching A-line hair? SXSW. The Baby Boomer with surprisingly stylish shoes who was assigned to A-line girl’s seat on the plane (and won the battle)? Not so much. I know Austin’s pretty hip, not just by Texas standards but by anyone’s, but it felt safe to guess that the long-haired, pasty-faced guy with a stylie pattern embroidered on his blazer was headed my way. Same for his companion, with her choppy bob and screen-printed messenger bag.

Perhaps I should’ve bought myself an ironic trucker hat instead.

South By Culture: Kimya who?

-

March 13, 2008

0

Culture editor Molly Freedenberg hits SXSW for the first time to explore the festival’s extracurricular aspects. For Music Editor Kimberly Chun’s take on SXSW’s tunes, click here.

Yes, I’m a music fanatic, but I’m no music geek – and certainly no expert. I love the music I love in the simplest, purest way, as a child who grew up on the Stones and the Beatles and associates rock’n’roll with love and breakfast and spontaneous living room dance parties. I’m not the girl who’s up on the all the coolest new bands, nor the one who scours record stores for rare 7 inch bootlegs from all the coolest old ones. My haircut is symmetrical, my T-shirts aren’t ironic, and the closest thing I have to “skinny jeans” are pants I’ve outgrown. In short? I’m no spokesperson for indie rock.

So while it’s true that I’m here at South by Southwest (locals call it South By, by the way) to hear music until my ears bleed and my feet blister, I’m not going to pretend to assess the bands down here. I’ll leave that to Kim, who’s far more qualified on that subject.

No, just as I am at home, I’m going to be the eyes of the Guardian’s culture section while I’m here. Food, fashion, nightlife, drinking, lifestyle – and everything else that makes Austin the San Francisco of Texas. I can’t promise my posts will all be cohesive – or even coherent (there sure are a lot of bars in Austin, and a lot of parties being thrown at them during SXSW), but what else would anyone expect?

Falling flat

-

March 12, 2008

0

It was clear early on that the Slow Beer Festival, presented March 1 by Slow Food San Francisco and the San Francisco Brewers Guild, was more of an excuse to get drunk in a convention hall on a Saturday afternoon than to explore how beer could be sustainable. Twelve NorCal microbreweries lined the green-hued cement walls of the County Fair Building — Marin Brewing, Speakeasy, Anderson Valley, Red Seal, and so on. An administrator at the front desk, though, couldn’t tell me what the difference was between a Slow Beer and your everyday microbrew (though she did say it was "a good question"). The man at the nationally distributed Gordon Biersch stand said bluntly, "Yeah, we’re a corporation."

Normally I’d say, "Fill up my glass and pass me another Gambone-mushroom-and-cheese skewer [drizzled in salsa verde]!" Here, though, I began to actually wonder how beer could be incorporated in the Slow Food ideology. As the manifesto says, "May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency."

The Slow Foodists seek not just to change the food we consume but to change how we consume it as well. So isn’t a sterile room for beer tasting just stripping beer down to its flavor, and not about the way we experience it? At the festival, on one side of the gate there was a crowded room with a slender outdoor food garden and (by my estimate) 200 gallons of beer; on the other side, a park blanketed in sunshine. The latter setting might be better for bringing out the true sensual pleasures of beer. Next year, why not save money on the room deposit and hold the event in Michael Pollan’s backyard?

Bombs — and bongs — away!

-

March 5, 2008

0

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

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

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

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

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

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

The young untold

-

March 5, 2008

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

To say that Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers might sound like a provocation. But I have said it and will repeat it: Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and there’s nothing willfully perverse in my statement. What follows are initial notes toward understanding why Costa matters. Final judgment is left up to the audience — to whom this director yields so much — and should only follow from seeing his films. Watching Costa’s work gives me the chills; it’s a most mysterious, unusual, and unclassifiable oeuvre, one littered with ghosts of the past and the present.

From the first frame of each Costa film, it’s apparent we’re in the company of that rare filmmaker who simply cares about people: about who his subjects are, about what they’re feeling and thinking, and just as crucially, what his viewers are thinking about them. Each work is riddled with enticing close-ups, and Costa’s pictorial attention (coming out of a sensibility equally at home with European fine art as, say, the dust bowl photography of Walker Evans) is a constant wonder. The subjects are for the most part the downtrodden inhabitants of a Lisbon, Portugal, slum called Fontaínhas, people literally overlooked by dominant cultures. He’s not trying to rub their misery in his viewers’ faces — calling him a "Straubian neorealist," to quote J. Hoberman, is misleading; if anything, his films, with their rejection of rational structures, are more neosurrealist. Rather, the progression in Costa’s cinema has been to give voice to his subjects and to treat them as worthy of existing as fictional characters (Bones, 1997); then, to delve further into their world, their personalities, and their ways of living (In Vanda’s Room, 2000); and most recently, with great success, to combine the two approaches (Colossal Youth, 2006).

Costa finds richness in small variations, and his evolution has led to a narrowing of both subject matter and spatial exploration. Costa has retreated from the wide-open, Monument Valley–esque volcanic surface of Cape Verde to interiors; the benefit of seeing 1994’s Down to Earth is in realizing how Costa’s characters must now feel, cramped in their disheveled surroundings. Combined with his movement toward a long-take style, this signals a shift from a cinema of space to a cinema of time. A parallel trend is an attempt to redefine beauty in cinematic terms — from the exquisite monochrome 35mm of The Blood (1989) to the grubby, purposeful digital video of In Vanda’s Room — and its staggeringly unique use (aided by Costa’s remarkable compositional eye) in Colossal Youth. Likewise, few contemporary filmmakers are as concerned with the juxtaposition of image and soundtrack, and each of Costa’s films reveals new ways of seeing and hearing: in Colossal Youth, the sound is a better narrative guide than the visuals — making long takes a necessity.

Yet the more these movies seem to be within one’s grasp, the more they slip away from comprehension. Costa seems to be saying the same thing about life today: he portrays the outside world as a labyrinth and the domestic arena as a much-needed shelter. He’s surely something of a Brechtian modernist (with Jean-Luc Godard as perhaps an even greater influence than Jean-Marie Straub), yet it’s tempting to assign the modifier post in order to understand Costa’s work. His persistent interrogation of the ways in which people live is certainly post–Yasujiro Ozu. And as Jeff Wall has noted, Costa can also be considered post-Bressonian in that he improves on what some find problematic about the master’s later works — namely, Robert Bresson’s tendency to turn his models into intense abstractions. Costa corrects this by allowing disorder, the uncleanliness of the real world. (Bones is that rare transitional film able to stand on its own as a masterpiece, though at the same time, it doesn’t go far enough — as Vanda and Colossal Youth show). The category that Costa might most willingly fit is that of a postpunk director; that the English moniker Colossal Youth — distinct from the film’s Portuguese title Juventude em marcha, literally "Youth on the March" — is also the only album from the stripped-down Welsh band Young Marble Giants (Rough Trade, 1980) is a surrealist coincidence.

Costa’s films are complex objects in which the present and the past intermingle, both literally (in the posthuman Portuguese slums where Costa’s last three features unfold) and within the history of film. The lipstick traces of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and many other auteurs reappear in Costa’s films. Just as Down to Earth takes off from I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Bones remakes The Searchers (1956). (It might be perverse to say Colossal Youth is Rio Lobo [1970] to Vanda‘s Rio Bravo [1959], but … there, I just said it.) Les inrockuptibles‘s Serge Kaganski has said that Fontaínhas’s poor are like Indians in classical westerns, and that seems about right. In the same way that he recognizes Bresson’s genius, Costa nods to Hollywood even as he tries, in his unorthodox mode of production — he’s created a studio system in which the crew is minimal, and in the case of Colossal Youth, technical support is provided by the actors off camera — to rip it up and start again.

One final, crucial note: As Costa describes, the themes in the films are highly personal. A search for family and for home threads through them, articuutf8g desire for a community that merges the personal and the political (his community is about as far from the European Commission as one can get). And in his subjects, he’s found that missing family, which is but one of many reasons why Colossal Youth is so touching. He’s also developed an alternative, collaborative model of filmmaking that is radical yet replicable, and one that will generate disciples — provided a director is willing to devote the time needed to nurture similar relationships with actors. Even if Costa "only" continues to make films about downtrodden Portuguese — exploring what one festival guide has called a "desperate utopian dream of a human existence" — it’s a new form of cinema that will continue to reverberate, echo, and grow richer with each variation. The avenues of inquiry are innumerable. After all, John Ford only made westerns.

STILL LIVES: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA

Through April 12

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

SFIAAFF: Multiculti cock-meat sandwich

-

March 5, 2008

0

› superego@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sat/15, 9:15 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Manila: the drama

-

March 5, 2008

0

› johnny@sfbg.com

Over roughly the past year, Brillante Mendoza has brought a pair of films to festivals that pack a particular one-two punch when they are programmed to play at the same event. Foster Child first bears witness to the final day that caretaker Thelma Maglangqui (superb veteran actress Cherry Pie Picache) mothers three-or-four-year-old mestizo John-John (Kier Segundo), and as sunlight gives way to night, it follows her from a Manila slum into the ostentatious hotel where she passes him over to wealthy white foster parents from San Francisco. Slingshot also uses a real-time conceit, but in an entirely different manner — locked within the mazelike alleys and shanties of Manila’s Mandaluyong City, it foregoes long takes and methodical passages to careen as if the camera were a baton passed from one preoccupied, panicky person to another. Or perhaps more aptly, as if the point of view was a valuable that one character fleeces from another’s pocket.

As a melodrama, Foster Child fits into the dominant genre of Filipino feature films that screen at international festivals — a genre that certain North American critics might enjoy more than writers such as Richard Bolisay and Alexis Tioseco, whose critical conversations are as vital to thriving "CineManila" activity as any current filmmaker. In a piece on one of Tioseco’s excellent Web sites, Criticine, Noel Vera recalls a Rotterdam screening where fellow film scholar and Chicago-based critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared Mike De Leon’s Kisapmata (1981) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974). Perhaps in that spirit, Rosenbaum’s contemporary, the critic and influential programmer Tony Rayns, has likened Foster Child to Fassbinder as well.

I’d add another comparison that, however Eurocentric, is meant as a great compliment: Foster Child shares a number of similarities with Douglas Sirk’s mother of all melodramas, Imitation of Life (1959), such as a harshly ironic perspective on maternal bonds in a racist, capitalist world. When Mendoza’s film reaches its final wrenching moments — and Thelma seems stripped, at least temporarily, of life (even the future repetition of her foster maternal duties is harrowing) — a lesser director would have simply milked the pathos. Instead, Mendoza allows no mercy to invade his sympathy, presenting a sequence that calls to mind a scenario depicting Lana Turner’s selfish protests by the bedside of her dying maid Annie (Juanita Moore) in 1959’s Imitation of Life, a sight that is extra bitter because Annie’s lost daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) can be seen smiling in a nearby framed picture within the shot. Foster Child‘s climactic heartbreak is set against a backdrop of vulgar department store displays that privilege white glamour and which celebrate a false vision of familiar perfection. "The house that love built," proclaims one callow ad, depicting a mother and child. The cruel gods of capitalist marketing provide perfectly horrible set design.

Those last glances, leading to a weary climb up a concrete public transit stairwell, also ricochet off Foster Child‘s sustained (and indeed Fassbinder-like) first shot: a silent, postcard-perfect view of Manila’s high-rise cityscape that gives way to a noisier look at the ramshackle slums at the feet of those skyscrapers. A more subtle echo occurs between two scenes that take place nearer to the narrative’s center: an idyllic, sunlit view of Thelma bathing John-John outside her home, and a later moment when she has to wash him in a hotel’s many-mirrored, intimidating bathroom.

Engaged Web sites such as Bolisay’s Lilok Pelikula (Sculpting Cinema) have greeted this neorealist symbolism, and Foster Child‘s standing ovation at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, with some wariness. Indeed, it is frustrating if international audiences take Mendoza’s movies for the whole of Filipino independent film today, when thanks to the punk-fueled Khavn de la Cruz, the monumental Lav Diaz, the prodigiously visionary Raya Martin, and the autobiographical John Torres, CineManila is frankly more inspired than almost all of the indie film — and much of the experimental work — currently coming from the United States. Mendoza’s talent equals or bests anyone who has passed through the Sundance factory in the past decade, but he and his more formally radical contemporaries have to vie for the same too-few spaces allocated to feature films from the Philippines at most festivals.

By working within relatively linear narrative structures and feature-length frameworks, Mendoza veers toward the mainstream currents of vital Filipino independent cinema. But he’s demonstrating great versatility. Slingshot‘s burnt-brown palette, verging on black-and-white in nighttime scenes, contrasts greatly with the more colorful, sun-dappled view of slum life in Foster Child, which is so pleasant that soap bubbles blown by children float through one shot. But it would be a mistake to see Foster Child‘s view of cramped city blocks as purely idealized, simply because a fresh array of mothers with newborn babies can be found on every corner — a scene in which foster system overseer Bianca (comedienne Eugene Domingo) greets these women and knowingly checks in on their offspring has a sinister underpinning.

Its title translated from a term (tirador) denoting a street hustler, Slingshot is harder and faster — money or valuables are frequently handed from one character to another on the sly as people move in an out of a shot that is itself moving forward. A viewer had best be on the top of his or her game while watching, because everyone in the film is on the make. But the gay Mendoza brings a subversive eye to the masculine genre of action: he knows that harder and faster might seem tougher, but it doesn’t necessarily mean one is savvier. Interestingly, while Slingshot‘s critical reception in CineManila realms seems warmer than that given to Foster Child, the film has had its share of semiblind assessments in English-language publications. More than one critic has complained that the film wears a viewer out with its frantic pace before it abruptly ends. The reviews fail to note that Mendoza frames his many-stranded story line and slum-stranded characters amid a broader view of societal and political corruption. He kicks the story off with cops raiding blocks of Mandaluyong City to round up and arrest people who are then bailed out by politicians in exchange for votes. He fades out with a glimpse of a pickpocket at work during a quasireligious campaign rally dominated by empty, clichéd speeches.

Between those crowd scenes, Slingshot joins a wide variety of characters for intimate treks through semi-anonymous acts, only to abandon them — just as fate might and a politician’s promises are certain to. Tess (Angela Ruiz) steals video equipment to pay for a pair of dentures. Her illicit lover Rex (Kristofer King) neglects fatherhood in favor of druggy reverie. In an example of tail-biting irony, the impulsive Caloy (Coco Martin, whose open-faced melancholy carries over from Mendoza’s debut feature The Masseur [2005]) needs to scrape together cash to keep the pedicab that he’s using to earn money. Meanwhile, Leo (Nathan Ruiz, the gamine title character of Aureaus Solito’s 2005 The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, now adolescent and pimply) begins what will eventually become one of the worst days of his life by accidentally getting his dick caught in his pants zipper. The two-dimensional faces of political candidates — including actor Richard Gomez, then running in real life for a Senate position — look on from the campaign billboards and posters that dominate public spaces.

In the eyes of the official system, Lopez’s Leo is the thief character of Slingshot‘s Tagalog title, but in the real world he’s just one of many everyday bandits, who are doing whatever they can to survive while a faceless upper class profits from their votes. There’s a potent undercurrent to Lopez’s performance perhaps being the titular one, though, since it’s much harsher than the similar turn he delivered as Maximo in Solito’s comparatively romantic film festival favorite. The differences in pace and look between Foster Child and Slingshot demonstrate that Mendoza is capable of sculpting widely contrasting true visions of Manila’s streets, which in turn shows that the exact same setting can take on widely varying characteristics based on one’s perspective at any given moment.

Part of Mendoza’s versatility might be grounded in his background as a production designer under the name Dante Mendoza. It also might reflect a developing, nuanced queer sensibility, one that has forsaken forebear Mel Chiongo’s eye for international markets to also produce a feature, 2007’s Pantasya, that possibly plays off of Slingshot‘s view of corrupt police forces and probably adds a critical dimension to the age-old "I love a man in an uniform" motif of gay porn. After half a dozen features as a director, Mendoza has ranged from melodrama to action, from a pentet of gay sex fantasies to a story about education amid the Aeta tribe (2006’s Manoro). His next step will probably be hard to predict, and it’ll definitely be worth watching.

FOSTER CHILD

March 14, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

March 16, noon, Kabuki

SLINGSHOT

March 15, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 18, 7 p.m., Kabuki

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

Don’t phunk with my hope

-

February 27, 2008

0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER You probably can’t tell, but I’m totally high. I gotta be because I can’t stop watching this Kennedy family endorsement and that Texas debate clip, this crushed-out cult of personality vid and that hip-hop remix ode. I’ve admitted I’m powerless over my addiction — that my life has become unmanageable. And I’ve come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. That power is will.i.am — I mean, Barack Obama. Look, I know I got a problem: I can’t stop watching Black-Eyed Pea will.i.am’s celeb-studded "Yes We Can" video in praise of the Illinois senator. Frankly, I lo.a.the the Peas — "Let’s Get Retarded," yo, I didn’t think up that title — and I can’t stop wanting to repunctuate will.i.am’s gooberish stage handle, and even "Yes We Can" is a bit embarrassing.

But the tune is queued up there along with the Oprah clips, the 60 Minutes sound bites, and the "john.he.is" parody. You know Obama’s got something going on when his speechifying inspires such spontaneous music-making — and oh yeah, I’m tripping on the fact that we went to the same Honolulu prep school, and I’m drunk on the possibility of electing the first African American president, and I’m getting dizzy looking back through the media’s looking-glass lens at him, myself, and a shared past through yearbook photos of a now strikingly diverse-looking Punahou school. Sure, he complained about the school in his memoir, much like me and my friends have — at the time it seemed like a lily-white beacon of privilege on a brown island. I feel like I’m tumbling down a historically revisionist rabbit hole, seeing it as both exotic — and for presidential candidates of a certain age, class, and region, it is — and familiar. Now it looks like the culturally diverse rainbow gathering of kids that civil rights activists were fighting for. Maybe I’ll have to write a song about it.

Get on the Bus, Part Two Hope is in the air, and I’m feeling it, listening to Evil Wikkid Warrior’s John Benson talk about his recent troubles with the Bus, the 40-foot AC Transit behemoth he converted into a vegetable oil–swilling clean machine and mobile-as-a-dinosaur, all-ages, all-fun free underground music venue. Noise and party starters from here and away like Warhammer, Fucking Ocean, and Rubber O Cement have been playing down-low shows in the vehicle while it was parked on quiet, oft-industrial San Francisco and East Bay streets, but that all seemed to screech to a dead halt when, on Dec. 22, 2007, after a West Oakland show put on by a Benson cohort, the Bus was vandalized.

Bored neighborhood youth, Benson theorized, smashed all its glass windows, busted its solar panels, and threw bricks on top of it. "It was probably just a bunch of bored kids in the middle of the night. They saw this big thing, and it was like, ‘Duh, throw rock at big thing,’<0x2009>" offered Benson, who at the time was on a trip to Detroit. When he returned a few days later, the former A Minor Forest and Hale Zukas member faced compounding problems: the winter rain had flooded the exposed interior, damaging the electricity, warping the wooden floorboards, and causing the oriental rugs to molder.

Benson had planned to take the bus to Mexico to shoot a film, but that was out of the question. "The police told me that I wasn’t allowed to keep any vehicle on the street with a broken windshield and windows and they’d have to tow it," he recalled. "But then I also wasn’t allowed to drive a vehicle with a broken windshield. It was a catch-22, and with no place to keep it, the cops visited me on a daily basis." He also couldn’t find glass that would fit in the windshield, since most of the AC Transit fleet from back in the Bus’s day had been sold to Mexico, according to Benson, and it appeared that the only glass available would have to come from there — at more than $1,000 a piece.

Fortunately Benson’s friends and the noise community-of-sorts came together to support him. Guardian contributor George Chen threw a benefit that raised about $300, and word got out on the message board Spockmorgue that Benson needed money to repair the bus and a PayPal account was started on his behalf. Benson told me, "I did spend a lot of money on new solar panels and new skylights," but what kept him going were the many people "e-mailing me privately, saying ‘Keep it up, John. Don’t give up. Don’t give up.’ I just got a huge amount of support from people I don’t even know." One Boston member of the message board donated $100 simply because he said he had heard about the Bus through his friends who had performed on it and wanted to help.

An artist friend welded new metal frames to fit the vintage 1962 windshield glass that Benson discovered were the closest fit for the Bus, and after a few months of work the Bus was finally completed at the beginning of February. "It was miserable," he remembered. "We were literally working in rain under tarps, broken glass everywhere, bleeding fingers, miserable. There was a 24-hour paint job with a lot of volunteers. Someone said it was like Fitzcarraldo — there were so many times we were burned and bloody and freezing cold in rain, trying to the get floor replaced and carpet. Definitely insane."

Fortunately, work was completed in time for Benson to drive the mammoth vehicle down to Miami for the International Noise Festival, picking up pals and playing shows along the way. Later this spring he’ll head back to Florida to do more work on the Bus — it’s resting in Orlando in a friend’s backyard — and then drive it north for an East Coast tour. "In terms of love the bus is doing better than ever," Bensons said happily, while eating chicken with his 12-year-old daughter, who’s also his Evil Wikkid Warrior bandmate. "Mechanically it’s just a little wrinkled." *

NEW WRINKLES

TAKEN BY TREES

Pretty! The Concretes’ Victoria Bergsman (who contributes vox on Peter Bjorn and John’s "Young Folks") takes to dreamy chamber indie, written around her love of arboreal life, with Open Field (Rough Trade, 2007). With White Hinterland. Sat/1, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

RICKY LEE ROBINSON

The Oakland rock ‘n’ roller cuddles up to classic ’60s and ’70s pop values at his CD-release show while playing drums and guitar simultaneously, somewhat like "that sad guy in the straw hat at Six Flags whose eye contact you and your punk friends made sure to avoid," according to Robinson. With the Dilettantes and the Pandas. Sun/2, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

MAMMAL AND MANSLAUGHTER

Detroit’s Animal Disguise artisto embraces a darker breed of death-beat mesmerism, alongside Manslaughter, a "stupor group" including Sixes and Noel von Harmonson. With Chinese Stars and Pod Blotz. Sun/2, 8 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

LANGHORNE SLIM

The Philly native gives a few hard hugs to a freewheeling brand of full-band electric folk on his soon-to-be-acclaimed Langhorne Slim (Kemado). With Nicole Atkins and the Sea, and the Parlor Mob. Mon/3, 8 p.m., $12–<\d>$14. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Noise Pop: Joy Rides and Darby Crash test dummies

-

February 20, 2008

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the current glut of music biopics and documentaries, it seems any band or scene worth its salt in influence and innovation is fair game for the big screen. Chalk it up to corporate tie-ins or affordable filmmaking equipment, Behind the Music or DIY videozines, but chances are your favorite group will someday make it to a theater near you. Eschewing polished product for its annual film program, the Noise Pop festival spotlights several ragtag productions focused on left-of-the-dial music legends.

To begin with the cream of the crop, Chris Bagley and Kim Shively’s Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides balances a measured introduction with an intimate appreciation of the titular hero. The film will inevitably be compared to In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) for its profile of an outsider artist and its clever animations of Willis’s colorful cityscapes, but Willis was simply too one of a kind for Joy Rides to be anything but. Willis’s music and art flowed directly from the outsize personality of the hulking Chicagoan, who was raised in the projects. Bagley and Shively evidently spent a lot of time filming Willis in the years before his 2003 death, and their movie is much the better for Willis’s constant jiving, affable head butts, and offhand bouts of inspired wordplay.

Not that all of Joy Rides goes down so easy. It’s wincingly uncomfortable to watch Willis, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, knock himself upside the head while trying to "get the demons out," and some of the film’s talking heads veer dangerously close to "magical black man" territory. But there’s a discernible difference between transparency and exploitation, and Joy Rides decidedly sways toward the former. Bagley and Shively had Willis create the documentary’s credits sequences, which seems emblematic of a broader mutual appreciation. Given Willis’s prolificacy, it’s no surprise he would want a hand in the film: the next time I encounter creative restlessness, I’ll be sure to think of Willis’s maxim "The joyride keeps my ass busy."

Darby Crash was similarly driven during his brief life, but the punk vocalist’s ferocity is blunted by biopic clichés in the weirdly saccharine What We Do Is Secret. Rodger Grossman’s film follows the course of Crash’s five-year plan, which took him from high school dropout to rock ‘n’ roll suicide. The director catches some of the excitement of the Germs’ hopelessly abbreviated sets and lucks out in a nice performance by Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom, but his tendency toward sitcomish lighting and confessional monologues sinks the band’s fire in a morass of conventionality. The original Germs recently tapped Crash impersonator Shane West for a cash-in tour, proving that some legacies are never safe.

A pair of low-key documentaries cast a wider net in their hard-rock forays, with varying results. Such Hawks, Such Hounds profiles a few of the most vibrant interpreters of heavy music (Comets on Fire, Dead Meadow, Om) but without much purpose. Filmmaker John Srebalus floats between interviews with divergent bands without offering any of the categorizing insights or personal passion that made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2006) such a hit.

Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s documentary You Weren’t There, on the other hand, is a thrillingly exhaustive survey of early Chicago punk. Viewers may not be familiar with outfits like Strike Under and Silver Abuse, but the documentary’s detailed time line and great stock of interviews and primary documents thoroughly pinpoint that most elusive beast of rock music: the scene. Whether parsing overlapping band lineups, defunct venues, or long-out-of-print zines and records, You Weren’t There strays from the master narrative of punk, recovering a local history no less vibrant for staying below the radar.

The Jamie Kennedy vehicle Heckler chooses the route of takedown rather than appreciation, serving up a feature-length revenge act on critics — the title fudges the film’s true target. As strangely compelling as it is to watch the likes of Jewel and Henry Winkler spill their guts, Heckler is too indulgent of its interviewees’ bipolar bursts of insecurity and bullying to shape much of an, er, critique. This just in: bloggers take cheap shots at celebrities! Then again, no one likes a … you know how it goes.

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Mother of all indie?

-

February 20, 2008

0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Is indie rock back? Did it ever go away? Is it to safe to wax naïf and twee once more? Is my shirt ill fitting yet modest? Will Converse ever go out of style? Do the Strokes suck? Wait, who are the Strokes?

Thoughts worth flexing one’s gray matter around on the verge of the indie-oriented Noise Pop music festival — though, well, the RCA-aligned Strokes ain’t indie, really. Nor can one imagine their jumpy once-new-rock appearing on the shock chart topper for the week of Jan. 27: the Juno soundtrack. The disc bounded bashfully up Billboard’s Top 200 over the course of a month till it reached the peak at a mere 65,000 copies, allegedly delivering a first-time number one to Warner Bros.–affiliated Rhino Records and inspiring many a question mark. Such as, isn’t 65,000 awfully low for the number one album in the country — surely those crack six digits?

Well, no more, apparently, in the many-niched, entertainment-rich marketplace (the sole exception: triple or quadruple threat Jack Johnson?). Sure, geeks are once again chic — as Superbad, Rocket Science, Eagle vs. Shark, and numerous other awkwardness-wracked cinematic offerings could tell you. And don’t forget, brainy indie rockers à la the Shins and Modest Mouse have been making inroads in chartland of late. Even the woman pegged by mainstream movie critics as the soundtrack’s breakout star, the Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson, has been around since the turn of the century, when she was banging her bleached ‘fro against Adam Green’s tennis headband onstage at the Fillmore. Please, indie, let’s not even go into how long Cat Power, Belle and Sebastian, and Sonic Youth have been doing the do — and how canonical the Kinks, Mott the Hoople, and Velvet Underground are. Has indie — and its primary sources — simply reached an apex of popularity by virtue of low overall CD sales?

Like its music, Juno the film doesn’t quite reinvent the wheel but instead delivers the hormonal, feminine flip side of Rushmore‘s protagonist, less an antihero than a talented misfit learning from a young person’s mistakes. Pregnant with meaning, Dawson’s frail, wobbly voice — buttressed by her verbose, brainy lyrics — embodies that character and aesthetic as much as her clear inspiration, the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, who sings the ever-sweet-‘n’-lowly "I’m Sticking with You" on the soundtrack.

It’s not so much that everyone is discovering indie rock: instead, perhaps the soundtrack gets much of its shine from the fact that the music is such an intrinsic part of the film’s emotional power — it’s as memorable as Juno’s rapid-fire, perhaps overly arch one-liners. Playing the film’s title tyke, Ellen Page at times sounds like a 35-year-old woman in a 16-year-old’s body. And in its no-fail, crowd-pleasing selections, the soundtrack similarly plays like a cultured 35-year-old’s music collection in teen comedy maternity garb. Now how fair is that? I’m tempted to call foul for the outclassed Hannah Montana 2 soundtrack (Walt Disney/Hollywood). *

KIMYA DAWSON

Thurs/21, 7 p.m., call for price

924 Gilman Street Project

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

SIX-SIX-SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE TIME!

Six Organs of Admittance’s new CD, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City), rocks ‘n’ drones the most — but don’t expect the project’s winter tour–besieged Ben Chasny to scrape together too many thoughts on the making of the album: his "brain is on zombie mode," he concedes during a drive to Minnesota. Yet he does let on that the lovely Shelter was the result of simply bunking down, looking around his Mission District neighborhood for musical assistance (including from Comets on Fire kin Noel Harmonson and Fucking Champs chief Tim Green, who dwell nearby), and enlisting his live-in paramour, Magik Marker frontwoman Elisa Ambrogio, and Matt Sweeney, who happened to be in town for a wedding.

Too bad the Mars Volta had to swipe Chasny’s Ouija board rock ‘n’ roll thunder with their supposedly magic-derived new LP. "I was actually designing a Ouija board to sell during this tour — there are some really beautiful ones out there," he says. "And I ended up looking up Ouija on Wikipedia and found out about the Mars Volta, and I just gave up on the whole project." Of course, there are upsides to that downer. Chasny adds, "Elisa was, like, ‘It’s turning into a Six Organs tchotchke revue.’<0x2009>"

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

Sat/23, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Gyan Riley

-

February 20, 2008

0

REVIEW I first heard Gyan Riley on the spectacular, otherworldly The Book of Abbeyozzud (New Albion, 1999), by his father, minimalist maestro Terry Riley. The younger Riley’s playing on "Zamorra," a guitar duet with David Tanenbaum, reached new heights of raging classical guitar intimacy.

In 1999, Gyan Riley was the first guitarist to receive a full scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Since then, he’s been around: he’s had major commissions from the Carnegie Hall Corp. and the New York Guitar Festival, given performances worldwide, and held an artistic directorship with the San Francisco Classical Guitar Society and a teaching gig at Humboldt State University. So the stakes are high for his new full-length, Melismantra (Agyanamus Music). With an almost preternatural sense of musical presence, it doesn’t disappoint.

The four-part "Progression of the Ancestors" suite showcases the range of Riley’s complex sensitivity as a guitarist and composer. He never rushes the moment unless an overwhelming musical force takes control of the song on its own. Tabla giant Zakir Hussain’s elegant pops and rolls and Scott Amendola’s persuasive drumming add texture to the mix. Tracy Silverman’s electric violin playing — introduced prior to "Progression of the Ancestors" on the epic title track — touches on everything I love about not just violin but sound itself. Throughout the album Silverman leaps and bounds in world-turning harmony with Riley.

Melismantra‘s opening three-song cycle, "Mobettabutta," recalls the fusion jazz and somewhat self-interested tone poems of guitarists Larry Coryell and Pat Martino — especially the latter’s odd 1976 album Starbright (Warner Bros.). This doesn’t quite jibe with the rest of the recording, but in a way "Mobettabutta" opens your mind to the delightful guitar perversions of "Herbie Moonshine’s Last Dance." Riley might make thinking people’s music, but he knows how to party.

GYAN RILEY With Tracy Silverman and Scott Amendola. Thurs/21, 8 p.m., $19.50. Freight and Salvage Coffee House, 1111 Addison, Berk. (510) 548-1761, www.thefreight.org

Robert Moses Kin’ and Black Choreographers Festival

-

February 12, 2008

0

PREVIEW In February, as the days start getting longer again, two things come to mind: Black History Month summons deep reflections, and all of that extra light brings the advent of fresh views. In the Bay Area no better example of clear-sighted perspectives can be found than in the work of the Robert Moses’ Kin company and from the codirectors of the fourth Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes and Laura Elaine Ellis. Moses starts his two-week season at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Feb. 14, while the Barnes-Ellis team is entering its festival’s second half at Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco.

From Moses, be prepared for a smaller company of six dancers performing in a brand-new program that includes three world premieres and a revival of 2007’s Rose (set to Beethoven), which is new to San Francisco. In addition to choreographing, the prodigious Moses also created the score for one of the evening’s pieces, Reflections on an Approaching Thought. In step with the company’s tradition of addressing social issues, the program’s Consent delves into the ethics of medical experimentation on poor people.

The Black Choreographers Festival has scheduled three lineups spanning work representative of the African diaspora — jazz, African, Afro-Brazilian — as well as modern and dance theater. If you have never seen site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood and her Zaccho Youth Group, from the Bayview neighborhood, don’t miss them on the afternoon of Feb. 17. They are exceptional young artists.

ROBERT MOSES’ KIN Thurs/14–Sat/16 and Feb. 20–23, 8 p.m.; Sun/17 and Feb. 24, 2 p.m.; $23–$26. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL Fri/15–Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 and 7 p.m.; $10–$20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, (510) 801-4523, www.bcfhereandnow.com

Cocoa-a-go-go

-

February 12, 2008

0

HOT CHOCOLATES In honor of Valentine’s Day, the official holiday of chocolatiers (and florists, and jewelers, and marriage counselors) nationwide, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite places to get your chocolate on — for Feb. 14 and beyond.

Democratic candidates: eat me So food has always been political — is it genetically-modified-organism free? Farmed fairly? Packaged responsibly? — but this is something else altogether. Designer Chocolate (www.designerchocolate.org) wraps its 100 percent natural chocolate in either Hillary Clinton– or Barack Obama–themed paper, complete with photos and quotes. I don’t feel qualified to say which candidate tastes better.

Fair trade truffles Love humankind as much as you love chocolate? You’re in luck. Global Exchange (4018 24th St., SF; 415-648-8068; 2840 College, Berk.; 510-548-0370; store.gxonlinestore.org) has a full selection of certified fair trade and organic chocolate, from special holiday versions (like the Fair Trade Valentine’s Day Action Kit for $15) to year-round delights (like the Chocoholics Gift Basket for $75), including offerings from Divine, the world’s first farmer-owned fair trade chocolate brand.

Design within reach (of your mouth) When it’s just as important for the chocolate you buy to be pretty as it is for it to be delicious, Richart Chocolate (393 Sutter, SF; 415-291-9600, www.richart-chocolates.com) is the only place worth looking. These tiny rectangular delights come marked with classic, understated designs like swirls, polka dots, flowers, and geometric shapes and in creative flavors like licorice ganache, thyme praline, and ginger. They’re almost too pretty to eat … almost.

A pint of pleasure It might possibly be the second most brilliant idea anyone ever had: pairing beer with chocolate. The most brilliant? A whole festival dedicated to the two. And the Beer and Chocolate festival (Feb. 15, 8 p.m., $90; Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness, SF; www.beer-chef.com) is no PBR–and–Hershey’s kisses kind of affair. Oh no. We’re talking a four-course dinner with items like roasted quail with chocolate port sauce served with Koningshoeven Bock. Do I hear last-minute Valentine’s Day plans being made?

IndieFest: “Sexina, Popstar PI”

-

February 7, 2008

0

By Jennique Mason

“She has the boobs and brains of a queen, she’s every man’s dream …” When have truer words been spoken? As sung by Monkees heartthrob Davy Jones in the film’s theme, Sexina: Popstar, P.I. is the long-awaited answer to critically renowned films like Austin Powers and Legally Blonde.

Directed by Erik P. Sharkey, this East Coast production — complete with villain Adam West (TV’s Batman) — goes inside the pop music machine, literally! On the surface, Sexina may appear to be your average pop star singing sensation, but undercover she’s hot on the trail of a kidnapped scientist manufacturing cyborg boy bands. That sort of crime stopping clearly speaks for itself, but what I wanna know is, where did co-star Allyn Rachel come from? I want her to be in my movie. She may get overshadowed by Sexina (played by Lauren D’Avella), but Rachel’s lezzie publicist was sensational. As for the rest of the movie — chock full o’ elements like high school girls with brigades of vibrators, Paula Abdul fans, some unicorns, and oblique Britney references (“Kevin Tenderloin,” “I did what again?”) — Sexina is like totally crunk. I know that I won’t soon forget the film’s message (delivered in song!) that “having a vagina rules.” Indeed.

Sexina: Popstar, PI screens at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Feb 14 and Feb 16, 9:30 p.m., Roxie Film Center. For additional Guardian coverage of this year’s IndieFest, check out reviews here and here and right here — on upcoming PixelVision posts.

Ficks’s Sundance (and Slamdance) picks

-

February 6, 2008

0

1. Downloading Nancy (US) As the movie unfolds, the self-destructive couple at the center of Johan Renck’s film enabled me to feel what they could not. I was hypnotized by Nancy‘s bitter, snowy sadness (emphasized by Christopher Doyle’s camera work); it forced me to sob and, at the same time, made me want to run toward the exit. In fact, dozens of people left during the press screening, and not in a casual way. Watching it twice in two days made it clear that knowing the plot would affect the experience. Just watch this film.

2. Momma’s Man (US) A man hides at his parents’ home to figure out his mid-midlife crisis while his wife and newborn child await his return. Filmed with director Azazel Jacobs’s real parents in their real home, this is a throwback to the great films that Sundance showcased in the early 1990s.

3. Funny Games U.S. (UK/US/France) For those who don’t understand why Austrian bad boy Michael Haneke remade his 1997 intellectual torture-porn classic shot for shot, blow for blow … well, how about the fact that Americans don’t like subtitles? For those who haven’t seen the original, prepare to be traumatized.

4. Paranormal Activity (US) A couple buy a video camera to record the unexplained occurrences happening in their house while they sleep, and I was holding my breath though most of the film’s subtle freakiness. Oren Peli’s chiller, which played at the Slamdance Film Festival and is about to screen at San Francisco IndieFest, is worthy of its comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.

5. Pariah (US) A young lesbian struggles with her identity at school, at the clubs, and at home in this short by Dee Rees, which presents the most honest 27 minutes you’ll see this year. Luckily, it’s going to be extended into a feature. Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire) packs quite a punch as a confused father.

6. My Mother’s Garden (US) Cynthia Lester’s bare-all documentary (winner of the Slamdance Jury Honorable Mention) sensitively explores a mother’s hoarding disorder and her children’s difficult job of helping her understand her problem. Directed by the woman’s daughter, it conveys a similar familial love as Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation.

7. Because Washington Is Hollywood for Ugly People (US) With the best title of the fest, Ken Tin-Kin Hung’s hyperactive video game collage has meticulous designs of political figures fighting one another while inhabiting celebrity bodies. MC Paul Barman narrates this clusterfuck, bringing it to the level of downright genius. Also worth watching is Hung’s five-minute prepresidential election battle Gas Zappers.

8. Hamlet 2 (US) Finally, a movie that made me laugh! This vehicle to help British comedian Steve Coogan make his United States crossover has him playing a Dudley Moore–esque high school teacher who decides to write and direct a sequel to Hamlet. Andrew Fleming’s satire was purchased for one of the highest prices in Sundance history ($10 million, by Focus Features), and its first and last half hours are some of the funniest things I’ve seen in years. Thank gawd, because all of those cynical films were starting to take their toll.

Should you be ‘dancing?

-

February 6, 2008

0

The Sundance Film Festival is like Los Angeles (in fact, for 10 days Park City, Utah, really is LA, plus snow). Each year you think it can’t possibly get any more congested and shallow, yet it does. This is largely the fault of umpteen opportunists (people who set up celebrity gifting lounges! Paris Hilton!) who show up to exploit the enormous and indiscriminate media spotlight.

But the festival must also share blame, its original "purity" having given way to a marketplace and red-carpet zone often barely distinguishable from the entertainment mainstream. This year found such personalities representing indie cred as U2, Robert De Niro, and Mary-Kate Olsen. Media attention invariably goes to the most high-profile films — for which folks like Josh Hartnett and Tom Hanks suffer pay cuts for art’s sake — which almost invariably disappoint. Ultimately unwanted and unloved this year were such big-noise entries as The Deal (William H. Macy, Meg Ryan, and LL Cool J … together at last!) and What Just Happened? (De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn), both soft satires of that kwazy industry.

There was the ongoing curse of the Sundance selection that plays like a moderately quirky cable flick, this time encompassing The Last Word (Winona Ryder and Wes Bentley), Smart People (Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker), The Year of Getting to Know Us (Jimmy Fallon and Lucy Liu), and so forth. There were literary adaptations (of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), each easier to take if you hadn’t read the book; sophomore slumps (Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, aptly described in the Sundance catalog as "a Happy Meal of a documentary"); and the usual cases of festival acquisition fever likely to look less all that in the sobering light of theatrical release. Principal examples: American Teen, a heatedly bid on doc that smells as manipulated as an MTV reality show (in fact some MTV staff told me so), and Hamlet 2, which is Waiting for Guffman plus Dead Poets Society minus about 45 percent of the laughs that description would lead you to expect. Fifty-five percent ain’t bad, but is it worth Focus Feature’s $10 million?

Of course, there were plenty of good movies at Sundance. Nonfiction cinema is usually where the most quality is concentrated, this year being no exception. There was an astute appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo) and one of Derek Jarman. Anvil! The Story of Anvil paid fond tribute to a Spinal Tap–ish Canadian ’80s metal band that refuses to quit even though it probably ought to. On the "my movie, my self" tip, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster was a funny, surprisingly sympathetic look at steroid use, while Londoner Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures made autohumiliation hilarious.

On the fiction front, there was less to get excited about — The Wackness was yet another teen-angst exercise, albeit a good one, with Ben Kingsley cast more or less as Dennis Hopper. Tuvalu director Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan is definitely the German Azerbaijani Lysistrata whimsy of the year. But only one film at the festival knocked my socks way off: Half Nelson makers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, about a Dominican Republic pitcher’s culture shock when drafted into the United States minor leagues. I don’t even like baseball — but this movie is the rare kind so enjoyably right that after a while you find yourself grinning like a fool from sheer pleasure.

Hungry men

-

February 6, 2008

0

› cheryl@sfbg.com

"This is not a midlife crisis," 51-year-old John Zeigler insists. "I see this as a wonderful adventure." But when the this in question is a 3,000-mile rowboat race across the Atlantic Ocean, it’s hard not to speculate about his motivation. Zeigler’s teammate, 41-year-old Tom Mailhot, shares Zeigler’s determination, not to mention his daddy issues — as Row Hard, No Excuses is quick to point out, both men feel they have something to prove to their respective fathers (perhaps by coincidence, the doc’s director, San Francisco’s Luke Wolbach, coproduced the film with his father). After a failed hockey career and an early exit from college, Mailhot is dead set on rowing his way to victory: "It’s important to me to finish what I’ve said I’m going to do."

But back up a sec. Yeah, I said 3,000 miles, all the way from the Canary Islands to Barbados. The Atlantic Rowing Challenge is no joke, with duos spending 50 to 100 days at sea in hand-built boats that contain all of their food and other supplies. It also requires $19,000 in entry fees, not to mention time away from jobs and families. "This is really a mind game," one of the other participants notes; the race draws a colorful, international crowd of serious athletes who, necessarily, are all a little nuts. At least, that’s what Zeigler and Mailhot discover once they’re adrift on the ocean: close quarters shared between "a perfectionist and a bull" draw subterranean personality conflicts into the boiling sun; the task of rowing, rowing, rowing can cause inconceivably bizarre injuries (including a tremendous butt rash that nearly cripples one of the men); and transcendent moments, when they finally come, can involve some mighty trippy hallucinations.

Row Hard, No Excuses relies quite a bit on video-diary footage shot by the men, and as the days stretch on the film’s themes of competition, masculinity, and — no matter how in shape these dudes are — aging come into undeniable focus. Similar in some ways to Touching the Void (2003), Row Hard is especially effective in illustrating how extreme physical conditions can lay bare a person’s true self; the race also helps both men gain new appreciation for their lives on dry land. The press notes specifically ask reviewers not to reveal how the men fare in the race — so I won’t — but even as it approaches, the finish line seems less important than Row Hard‘s deeper message of self-improvement by any means necessary.

After seeing the muscle-bound geezer posing in the promo photo for The Bodybuilder and I, you might be surprised to hear the film is pretty similar to Row Hard, No Excuses. Made by Canadian Bryan Friedman, it is ostensibly about Friedman’s father, Bill, a 59-year-old who found his way into the competitive bodybuilding world after a self-esteem-crushing second divorce. But Bryan, who spews some unnecessarily literal voice-over, quickly lets us know he never liked his father because Bill was basically AWOL for Bryan’s entire life; he also finds Bill’s new pursuit utterly ridiculous. After witnessing Pops bake under a tanning lamp, Bryan muses, "Here’s a guy who could spend so much time and energy on a bizarre hobby but who could never spend any time and energy on a relationship with his own son."

It soon becomes clear that The Bodybuilder and I is more about the I than anything else. Oh, you get well-oiled, senior-discount-qualifying beefcakery, but you have to sit through some major family drama to get there. Still, the circumstances are so oddball (seriously — would you want to see your estranged dad in a Superman Speedo?) and Bryan Friedman so unflinchingly honest about his misery that the film’s shortcomings are eventually overcome. Once Bill’s big competition rolls around, the weepy father-son bonding feels well earned — plus, you won’t want to miss cinema’s most gob-smacking "How does that head go on that body?" moment since 2001’s Ichi the Killer.

THE BODYBUILDER AND I

Sat/9, 5 p.m.; Sun/10, 2:45 p.m.; Roxie

ROW HARD, NO EXCUSES

Feb. 16, 2:45 p.m.; Feb 17, 9:30 p.m.; Victoria

The 10th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs Feb. 7–20 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF. For tickets (most films $10) and additional information, see www.sfindie.com.

They need more

-

February 6, 2008

0

It’s probably not fair to expect that if your duo goes bass free, if its rock falls somewhere under the crude banner of garage, and if your early riff education occurred in Detroit, you won’t be assailed with comparisons to the White Stripes. It’s even less fair if the best song on your debut pulls off the protoblues swagger and gnarly scale work that once made Jack and Meg interesting. But as applied to Leopold and His Fiction — the pairing of Motor City expat and current Russian Hiller Daniel Toccalino and drummer Ben Cook, formerly of Kentucky — that match is a little too neat. As Toccalino dryly put it to me the other week, checking in from a tour stop at the Sundance Film Festival, "There are garages everywhere."

Indeed. Toccalino and Cook — who have been playing together for three years, releasing one self-titled LP along the way — have their reasons for limiting personnel to two. Cook’s training is in jazz, and as his frontman sees it, this has taught the percussionist to carry a heavier load — to artfully sub in where the bass is supposed to go. "He fills up a lot of the low end," Toccalino notes admiringly. This doesn’t always come up on the album, on which songs are colored in by other instruments. But it’s a central skill when it comes to Leopold’s two-person live show, and the studio session drops clear hints in this direction. "Promise to Reality," a Doors-ish epic late in the record, is heated by a boplike boil of toms and kick drums.

Still, this is a jazz tactic being used in the service of rock. It’s a way to launch a leaner attack without losing depth, which makes sense: Leopold’s overriding urge is toward the primitive. Spare blues structures, ragged guitar riffs, and spent vocals abound on the LP, the last given extra wear by Julian Casablancas levels of distortion. This skuzzy bent can go several different ways. The trashed-up "Gonna Be Your Boy" — as opposed to your dog? — is the Stooges with the blues kept more audible. Yet — almost as if to even things up with his Kentucky bandmate — Toccalino can also twang out his melodies and head up a country and Southern rock path, as on the wide and glowing "Miss Manipulation," which evokes My Morning Jacket. The group may be at its best when covering a few scenes at once: "Mother Natures Son" feels like Iggy Pop up front with an Exile on Main Street–era Keith Richards on guitar.

There can be an itch, in supposedly bearish times for back-to-blues rock, to fetishize a band like this — to get giddy about the so-called honesty of its raw sound. To Toccalino’s credit, he seems to have little interest in playing the ideologue or the prophet. He mostly just likes the rapport of playing with only one other dude, feeling that it accelerates the creative process. "In three years we’ve gotten as far as [other bands] get in 10," he told me.

Besides, austerity has its limits. Ticking off the changes we’ll find on the pair’s second full-length, already cut and set for a late-spring release, he could only come up with increases: "A little more country, way more Motown, more Stooges." More, it seems, of everything.

LEOPOLD AND HIS FICTION

With Candy Apple

Sun/10, 8 p.m., call for price

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

Digging the new-old roots

-

January 30, 2008

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yodeling is African? Well, one could certainly trace the practice from the Ituri of the Congolese rainforest, described as the first people by ancient Egyptian chroniclers, to country icons such as Jimmie Rodgers — who, incidentally, recorded with Louis Armstrong — but also to less-explored sonic shores like James Brown’s iconic scream or Marvin Gaye’s version limning his legendary 1970s LP cycle. However, if this is too far a leap for you to make, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ appearance as part of the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival might be a bit of a head-scratcher. The Chocolate Drops — Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — don’t straight-up yodel, but their harmonies and banjo-and-fiddle-anchored instrumentation reach back not only to the halcyon days when Africans in America entertained themselves at fiddle-scored frolics but all the way to the griot tradition of Western Sudan.

To be sure, the Durham, NC, band — yes, their moniker invokes the Tennessee Chocolate Drops and Mississippi Mud Steppers of yore — is neither superurban nor contemporary. Its members play strictly prewar African American string-band repertoire, as evidenced by their current release, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (Music Maker): see "Tom Dula," "Ol’ Corn Likker," and yep, the ever-contested "Dixie." Still, being young, hip children of the postdesegregation era, the trio have a musical expression and an aesthetic that are informed as much by the hybridity and daring of the 1960s and ’70s golden age of black rock and psychedelic soul as by classic country and western and ethnographic studies of the genre’s African antecedents. If only by pursuing their dusky twang muse in reaction to the deplorable, moribund state of today’s urban music, these Drops live in a world that differs from that of their 1920s and ’30s predecessors chiefly in that (a) the wages of desegregation include black audiences’ will to eschew arts reminiscent of their past of bondage and hard times and (b) the dominant society’s prevailing and most popular stereotype of blackness has an inner-city face — "Makes me wanna holler!" — that rejects any other ways of being or seeing.

Some of my colleagues — and doubtless myself — have been obliquely accused of holding up emerging progressive black artists on the rock scene and satellites such as the Drops as examples of uplift and enshrining their hard work beneath a welter of sociological wankery stretching back into the prewar mists of time to Talented Tenth big daddy W.E.B. DuBois. Yet if some of that giddiness at Afro-futurist striving is sloughed off, there remains the central, inescapable fact that in much of the West, rock is still seen as "black music played by white people" and country is this nation’s most racially separatist genre.

Much was made this past fall of Rissi Palmer’s Billboard debut with "Country Girl," since it was the first such charting by an African American in the two decades after the long-forgotten Dona Mason’s fleeting dent with "Green Eyes (Cryin’ Those Blue Tears)." Critics worked overtime to display color-blind bona fides, bending themselves over backward in the attempt to downplay the role of race in Palmer’s ascent and note the singularity of the event while also sugarcoating their general consensus on the disc’s mediocrity. Personally, I wish Sister Palmer much success and far better material plus production, but what struck me most was the cover of her eponymous release. Only a sliver of Palmer’s brown face is to be seen, the overabundance of russet curls perhaps meant as commerce-inducing allusion to the Great Reba. It’s certainly baffling that 42 years since Charley Pride’s debut was released sans artist photo, one still has to mince around difference.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops have more to overcome, seeing as they play an earlier, unplugged form of twang that’s light-years away from not only the patriotic-pandering, reheated Southern boogie and suburban soccer mom–and–sippy cup sentiments of mainstream Nashville but also the ambitious incursions of Palmer and Cowboy Troy and the recent bluegrass syncretism of Merle Haggard and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Now sharing management with fellow Carolinians the Avett Brothers, the Drops are garnering just acclaim from roots-friendly media and making fruitful incursions into important arenas, like the annual MerleFest. Yes, the trio are benefiting from both the breakdown of a music industry in turmoil that’s reliant on streams from independents and a more reflective moment among media and listeners who have come of age in an era of omnivorous multiculturalism. And let us not discount the Drops’ sheer talent and charm.

Nevertheless, as a mere Negress observer, this critic finds her attention inevitably straying to the lack of intraracial institutions to advocate for artists in the Drops’ vein — in addition to an infrastructure for developing and sustaining nonwhite audiences’ taste for the music. Since, y’know, they’re isolated from the rural. (Must Dona be retroactively screwed and chopped?) It would be nice to see the band embraced as part of a continuum by progressive audiences, just as there’s some energy around soul-folk as a viable trend. Will the Drops’ version of young fogydom garner as much breathless critical attention and community building as the so-called freak-folk scene does? Of course, cross-cultural exchange is possible: current Nashvegas superstar and Troy’s boy "Big" Kenny Alphin traveled to Sudan last October to do his bit for the struggle and got the country press to cover his contribution. Now if only the media would turn its attention to the best acolytes of medieval traditions created by Africans not abject but divinely inspired.

THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Feb. 7, 8 p.m., $18.50–<\d>$19.50

Freight and Salvage Coffee House

1111 Addison, Berk.

(510) 548-1761

www.thefreight.org

CRITICAL ‘GRASS

The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival runs Feb. 1–9. For information on other shows and events, go to www.sfbluegrass.org.

Noir or not?

-

January 30, 2008

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nothing brings out the pugilist in film critics like a discussion of what does or doesn’t count as film noir, which is perhaps appropriate, given the number of slugs, sucker punches, fisticuffs, and beatings that occur onscreen in the movies being discussed. As with any kind of canon formation, the issue can prompt trainspotting, finger-pointing, and impassioned arguments. But the question — as much of the scholarship on the subject has shown — is something of a red herring.

Despite the stylistic qualities that seemed to unify them — chiaroscuro lighting, a fixation on the seedy underbellies of urban space and people’s souls, devouring women and browbeaten men, a curiously persistent lack of daylight — the ’30s and ’40s American movies that cinema-starved French critics wolfed down after World War II had originally been marketed at home as different types of genre films. The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946) was a gothic romance; Detour (1945) was a low-budget B-movie thriller; and Joan Crawford vehicles such as Possessed (1947) and Mildred Pierce (1945) were women’s pictures. A number of films now considered noirs began as literary adaptations — take your pick of any inspired by James Cain, Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett, or Robert Siodmak’s 1946 take on Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.

Noir City 6, czar of noir Eddie Muller’s yearly celebration of not-on-DVD rarities and shadow-dappled classics resurrected from studio vaults, offers plenty of fodder for noir-or-not debate. The programming spans from the critically enshrined (Jules Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City) to the relatively unknown (1960’s The 3rd Voice) and the not so old (the Coen brothers’ 2001 neonoir The Man Who Wasn’t There). Perhaps more than past incarnations, Noir City 6 makes a case for film noir as a set of stylistic conventions — or, alternately, for noir as an inspired malaise that permeates a film like stale cigarette smoke — rather than something hard-and-fast that sports a time stamp.

The festival’s second week features two period pieces, which might surprise fans expecting a parade of hired guns in fedoras and femmes fatales in pantsuits. Robert Siodmak’s The Suspect (from 1944, the same year he made the Maria Montez jewel Cobra Woman) follows one husband’s slow road to hell in Edwardian England as he offs his wife at the behest of a new lady friend. Reign of Terror (1949) sets the way-back machine to the French Revolution, but instead of liberté, égalité, fraternité, we get greed, deceit, and betrayal. Celebrated cinematographer John Alton — who has rightly been called noir’s painter of light — is in top form here, transforming the standard back-lot Paris street sets into a backdrop more closely resembling the city’s catacombs.

Reign of Terror screens as part of the festival’s tribute to character actor Charles McGraw, whose rugged visage made him a favorite for cop and tough-guy roles, including a memorably menacing hit man in The Killers and a star turn as a detective in The Narrow Margin (1952) alongside Marie Windsor. "[McGraw’s] guttural rasp of a voice, reminiscent of broken china plates grating around in a burlap sack, was complemented by an intimidating, laserlike glare," critic and Noir City coplanner Alan K. Rode writes in his recently published book Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy (McFarland), which he’ll sign at the tribute.

Also on the McGraw double bill is Anthony Mann’s brutal Tex-Mex mystery Border Incident (1949), in which the actor plays a sadistic ranch owner involved in an illegal-immigrant smuggling and exploitation ring. Again, Alton’s cinematography perfectly frames the standout performances from bronze screen legend Ricardo Montalban as an undercover Mexican federale and Howard Da Silva as the racist crook he has to bust, setting into relief the two characters’ moral distance from each other in one memorable medium shot. (To go back to the subject of canon formation, between Border Incident, Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil, and John Sayles’s 1996 Lone Star, a host of films could pack a frontera-themed noir program.)

Alton’s transformation of the Imperial Valley into a silvery, inhospitable moonscape — especially during the knife-and-quicksand offing of a group of frightened braceros under the cover of night — is an inversion of the sun-baked mesas and sage-scoured plains that typically dominate the western genre. In Border Incident he and Mann show us that corruption lurks in the wide-open spaces as much as it festers in the Piccadilly Circus back alleys of Dassin’s Night and the City or the ritzy enclaves of Chandler’s Los Angeles.

That vision brings us to the Coen brothers, whose No Country for Old Men qualifies as perhaps the latest entry in the group of borderland noirs, though their The Man Who Wasn’t There is the more obvious noir homage. Despite the often bleached-out palette of its mise-en-scène, No Country for Old Men drives home the nihilism that is at the heart of all film noirs with all the force of Javier Bardem’s pneumatic hammer. In noir as in No Country, even the most hardened cop is made to confront the futility of his convictions, Manichaeanism is disproved by double crosses and spilled blood, and the only thing one can bank on is what Noir City 6 promises in its tagline: no happy endings.

NOIR CITY 6

Through Sun/3, $12

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.noircity.com