Film

Frameline 32:That’s us

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him. That’s the highest praise I can think of for Matt Wolf’s movie about the composer and musician, who died of AIDS in 1992. Clearly enamored with Russell’s wonderful and unique world of echoing sound, Wolf breaks free from the all-too-familiar generic commercial tropes of music documentaries to try a little tenderness. The gesture of affection is more than fitting: though Russell wasn’t a pop sentimentalist, he was capable of writing entire songs (such as "A Little Lost" and "Lucky Cloud" from the 1994 album Another Thought) about equally entire days spent thinking about his lips pressing against those of his beloved. As he sang, "Kissing I go overboard."

That beloved is Russell’s boyfriend Tom Lee, whose generous intimacy while being interviewed is one of the qualities that makes Wild Combination special. Though the Talking Heads are mentioned more than once as Wolf’s movie follows Russell’s idiosyncratic paths through the creative spots of downtown ’80s New York, the film’s chorus of commentators never falls into the kind of talking-heads detachment one associates with documentaries. There is a rare, moving intimacy to the camera’s rapport with Lee and with Russell’s Iowan parents, Chuck and Emily. That rapport only builds in the emotionally powerful final moments, yielding a story about love and family that, through sheer openhearted understatement, is a revelation. Think of it as a nonfiction answer to Brokeback Mountain: more shattering, nuanced, and hopeful because it is based in a commitment to creative life rather than manufactured myth.

"I’m watching out of my ear," Russell’s voice declares, with characteristic quiet softness, as Wild Combination first flickers onto the screen. This synesthetic intuitiveness seems to guide the film as it simultaneously travels his life story and communes with his spirit. The cinematography of Jody Lee Lipes passes like wind through the corn fields of Russell’s youth and the New York piers of his adult life, both of which provided lyrical inspiration. By simply tapping into Russell’s relaxed and meditative creativity (at least when Russell was working solo), Wolf makes the film’s charm and depth seem so easy. But subtly potent structural corollaries emerge, as when Chuck Russell’s remembrance of a physical fight with his gentle yet maddening son is mirrored — same words, but a recollection of a different situation — by musician and friend Ernie Brooks.

Wild Combination is the first feature film by the 25-year-old Wolf, whose Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of gay sensibility and whose early short films suggested an affinity for this kind of project. Wolf has already made a short fictive documentary about the late artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, a contemporary of Russell’s — in a Guardian article on Russell (see "Prince Arthur, 03/04/04), I compare the two — who followed similar paths. That 2003 film, Smalltown Boys, possesses the acutely critical parodic imagination of early Todd Haynes movies, a rare characteristic. But Wolf has since graduated from Haynes’ academic tendencies. He’s soulfully true to Russell, whose idiosyncratic gifts and personality led him to butt heads with avant-garde heartlessness and dance through underground discos. While alive, Arthur Russell never found a creative home outside of himself and those he loved. But in Wild Combination, Wolf proves those homes are more than enough. *

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

Sat/21, 9:45 p.m.

Roxie

FRAMELINE

The 32nd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 19–29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $10) are available at www.frameline.org.

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston interviews Matt Wolf. Plus: an Arthur Russell discography and short Frameline reviews

13 and life

-
0

HORROR CLASSIC The scene: Camp Crystal Lake, 1958. The song: "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." As a full moon looms overhead, someone sinister enough to get their own POV shot creeps into a cabin where two fresh-faced counselors are groping each other with wanton glee. "We weren’t doin’ anything!" the boy protests. Too late, sucka! With a scream, a freeze-frame, and a title card that zooms forward so fast it apparently shatters the camera lens, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th begins. Already, two key facts have been established: summer camps are inherently hotspots of evil, and the series’ signature sound effect (all together, now: "Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma!") is a sure sign that whoever’s onscreen is about to meet a gruesome end, courtesy of effects make-up god Tom Savini.

Back in Crystal Lake, circa "present day" — a time of feathered hair and Dorothy Hamill hair and side-ponytailed hair — a young woman soon to be employed at the reopened camp bums a ride from a friendly townsperson. But not before the appearance of my favorite Friday character, Ralph the bicycle-riding town drunk. "You goin’ to Camp Blood, ain’t ya?" he slurs. "You’ll never come back again! It’s got a death curse!" As we’ll soon see, this is the third truth taught by the Friday the 13th series: the town drunk is always right! Before long, the assembled counselors (including a very young Kevin Bacon, awww) start expiring with all the glorious gore a killer named Voorhees can supply. Other highlights: dope-sniffing cops, errant snakes, more Ralph ("I’m a messenger of God — you’re doomed if you stay here!"), a heated game of strip Monopoly, archery-range fun, a clothes-soaking rainstorm, and a conveniently-timed power outage.

Friday the 13th, made for far less than a mil, came out in 1980; it was modeled after 1978’s Halloween and met with such success that numerous slasher flicks followed — including several that picked up on Halloween and Friday‘s special-occasion theme: Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, Graduation Day, and the original Prom Night all dropped before 1981 was over, with many more to come (including 1993’s Leprechaun). And that’s without even mentioning all 11 Friday sequels. With the best ending (and dénouement) of any slasher film before or since, Friday the 13th features a strong performance from final girl Adrienne King and a menacing turn from Betsy Palmer. That fisherman’s sweater? Far more iconically terrifying a garment than any hockey mask could hope to be.

Oh, and about that Friday the 13th remake, due out in 2009 and helmed by Marcus Nispel, who’s already on notice for sullying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Let’s hope it’s doomed. (Cheryl Eddy)

FRIDAY THE 13TH

Fri/13–Sat/14, midnight, $8.50–$10.50

Clay Theater

2261 Fillmore, SF

(415) 346-1124, www.landmarkafterdark.com>.

Speed Reading

-
0

GO FUG YOURSELF PRESENTS THE FUG AWARDS

By Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Simon Spotlight Entertainment

268 pages

$29.95

Dear Diary: I wanted to like Go Fug Yourself Presents the Fug Awards. Really, I did. Partly because this tome by GoFugYourself.com creators Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan feels like a miss-guided tour through the mind of the cattiest, most clothes-obsessed cheerleader — one who spells Kanye, K-a-y-n-e and admits she’s too lazy to check the exact origins of the It Girl phenom. (Er, try Clara Bow of the 1927 silent film It.)

From its opening salvos at Inexplicable Style Icons (well, Vogue and all of Vogue‘s tatty offspring differ when it comes to Chloë Sevigny and Sienna Miller), to its truly startling images of a death-rattled Marc Anthony and a radical-plastic-surgery-disaster Kenny Rogers, Fug Awards is the book equivalent of the meanest girl in high school. You kind of, sort of, want to pal around with her, if only to protect yourself from the harsh glare of judgment. Alas, instead of nasty kicks, what it offers is unfunny and even tedious — like an awards ceremony, it fluffs its pseudo-pomp with overly lengthy intros and kaboodles of glossy red carpet snaps. Fug Awards only inspires you to dress in the most conservative yet "classic" garb, accessorized with a sorry case of the fashion blahs.

True, the orange-hued aesthetics that inspire the Tanorexics Awards are startling in these melanoma-riddled times — occasionally there’s a logic to Cocks’ and Morgan’s middle-of-the-road rage. But does Cate Blanchett deserve to be in here simply for trying out an unconventional ensemble by a chance-taking designer? Must one wear a gown to a car promotional event?

Oh, Diary, such a long, lukewarm sip of haterade makes one wonder: why try anything sartorially daring or new and be subjected to a similar clawing, courtesy of your neighborhood Fug-in-training? XOXO (Kimberly Chun)

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN

By Charles Bock

Random House

417 pages

$25

The notion that Las Vegas is a playground for complete id-indulgence certainly holds resonance for tourists. But what is the city like for folks who work and live there? Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children strips away the city’s glittering veneer to reveal a degraded core. At the epicenter of Bock’s troubled Las Vegas landscape sits 12-year-old Newell Ewing, a coddled, almost joyless boy — comic books are his chief source of comfort — who disappears from his affluent suburban home. Newell’s alienated parents, Lincoln and Lorraine, each embark on a distressing solitary journey to find out what has happened.

Beautiful Children is also populated with runaways and street kids. Aside from one notable exception, these characters appear trapped underneath the weight of unfulfilled expectations. Their friends, family, and acquaintances — pawn shop dealers, gambling addicts, exploited sex workers — expand the tangle of disillusionment. The result is a modern counterpart to the alienated Los Angeles cityscape of Nathanael West’s classic 1939 snuffed-dream chronicle The Day Of The Locust.

Beautiful Children has been on the receiving end of more than a few "cinematic" compliments. Bock crafts an ambitious pull-back-the-curtains epic reminiscent of the early work of filmmaker P.T. Anderson. Occasionally the author appears overly aware of his novel’s filmic qualities, resulting in heavy-handed dialogue. Still, he portrays the underbelly of Las Vegas with precise detail. What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. Instead, Bock argues, what happens in Vegas is actually happening everywhere. (Todd Lavoie)

Blondells have more fun?

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

At the start of his 2007 biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 300 pages, $30), film historian Matthew Kennedy introduces the story of one of Hollywood’s forgotten actresses by posing a phenomenological question: what does it mean to always be gazed upon?

In describing Jack Warner’s golden girl of the 1930s, Kennedy looks to the lineaments of her face and body as the first sign of her success. "The architecture of [Blondell’s] mouth, simultaneously sharp and soft, suggested Cupid," he writes. "She had a radiant smile, straight white teeth, pillowy lips, and easy curls in her gamboge blonde hair…. Her figure was voluptuous, at one time measuring 37–21 1/2– 36." As for Blondell’s eyes, "they were spellbinding on screen, and apparently more so in person."

Kennedy’s paean to Blondell is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ poetic 1957 short essay, "The Face of Garbo." But whereas Garbo’s face represents for Barthes an eternal, unforgettable synecdoche of Hollywood, Blondell’s mystique lies mostly in her erasure. What became of this celluloid icon whose image once defined an era but has since been lost in the canister?

"Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda," playing at the Pacific Film Archive, collects some of the actress’ most memorable performances from a 50-year career. A vaudeville performer turned Warner Brothers ingenue lauded by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) as the most promising performer of her time, Blondell was part of the first generation of talkie actors who blossomed against the moribund backdrop of the Great Depression. After a childhood spent at the mercy of a peripatetic acting family, her endurance and versatility were soon exploited by the Hollywood meat-grinder. Unencumbered by unions, censors, or truculent auteurs, moguls like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer managed Hollywood like an industrial assembly line, churning out most films in four weeks. By the end of the 1930s, Blondell had completed more than 50 films.

Alongside contemporaries such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Judy Garland, Blondell was the face of the Hollywood studio system as it began its ascent to the so-called Golden Age. From the art nouveau musicals of Busby Berkeley (Gold Diggers of 1933) and pre-Code cheap thrills (1931’s Night Nurse and 1932’s Three on a Match) of the Depression to the classic melodramas (1945’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and noirs (1947’s Nightmare Alley) of the postwar era, Blondell’s putf8um performances regularly stole the spotlight. Her greatest onscreen collaboration came after a serendipitous meeting with promising stage performer Jimmy Cagney at a Broadway audition for playwright George Kelly. They would go on to star together in nearly a dozen Warner films, including The Public Enemy (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931), and Footlight Parade (1933).

Despite her constant, almost Puritan dedication to craft, Blondell’s equal devotion to a home life away from the screen might have contributed to her disappearance from the Hollywood A-list. She reportedly hated the spotlight and refused the preening lifestyle of industry players. Three disastrous marriages — to cinematographer George Barnes, actor Dick Powell, and producer Mike Todd — as well as work exhaustion and a predilection for domestic seclusion largely devalued her star status by the 1950s. It would not lessen the impact of her performances, however — 1951’s The Blue Veil, 1957’s Lizzie, and John Cassavetes’ 1978 dramedy Opening Night confirmed that maturity had not diminished her gift.

Blondell represented "the three-dimensional face on a two-dimensional screen," according to Kennedy, who describes her as "full of surprises, one moment as tough as Joan Crawford, the next as fragile as Margaret Sullivan, the next as saucy as Mae West." Her screen image represents a peak moment of Hollywood radiance. But that same radiant image contained a delicate talent yearning for the darkness of obscurity.

JOAN BLONDELL: THE FIZZ ON THE SODA

Fri/13 through June 29, $9.50 ($13.50 for double bills)

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Daddy issues

-
0

REVIEW Stuffy writer Blake Morrison (Colin Firth) struggles to come to terms with his father’s imminent death, hoping that, in their last days together, that they can finally make peace. A dying father? I know the premise is more than a little grim, but what When Did You Last See Your Father? lacks in levity it makes up for in heartfelt storytelling and powerful performances — trusty Jim Broadbent shines as Arthur, the overbearing, attention-seeking (possibly philandering) paterfamilias. We first encounter this force of nature as the film, set in the late 1950s, opens. Blake is eight, and his family is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But not for long: Arthur breaks ranks and rides the shoulder, zooming past the long line of cars, waving a stethoscope in the air to justify the blatantly arrogant maneuver. This devil-may-care attitude inspires admiration in young Blake and animosity in slightly older Blake, when he grows into a surly, socially inept teenager. Adapted from an award-winning memoir and directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, 2005), the film flows seamlessly in and out of flashbacks, fleshing out Blake and Arthur’s complex dynamic. Any film centered around a father-son relationship, especially when the father is terminally ill, pretty much lends itself to schmaltzy sentimentality. But When Did You Last See Your Father? avoids slipping down that syrupy slope. Instead, it is a poignant, sincere, occasionally funny — Arthur’s frank discussion of gonorrhea and masturbation during a camping trip had me chuckling — exploration of a man’s complicated history with his often uncouth but always larger-than-life father.

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

White tigers: Your fierce queer arts week at a glance

-
0

whitetigersa.jpg

Pride is a rock! Whether a diamond or a millstone depends on which side of the Miller Lite bottle you view the whole dang sprawling homolicious mess from. HOWEVER, as usual, there’s a plethora of amazing performances and events happening — not only the gargantuan upcoming Frameline and Queer Women of Color Film Fest (of which I and the fab Johnny Ray Huston write about in this Wednesday’s Guardian) but also the citywide 11th Annual National Queer Arts Festival, that started at the beginning of June and continues throughout. Here’s a few choice choices from the NQAF coming up this week.

BUT FIRST — bonus pics! did you know that Seigfried of Seigfried and Roy was in town on Saturday (at the the Castro’s Lookout Bar) to celebrate his 250th birthday with his “protege” Darren Romero, “The (Gay) Voice of (Twink) Magic”? See his wizardly wizened face below, with fab girl about town Miss Kate and kind-of-bitchy Gloss Magazine columnist Pollo Del Mar. (Photos by Darwin Bell.) Roy did not attend.

seigfriedkatea.jpg

seigfriedpolloa.jpg

Now, out with the claws, and check here for more NQAF info and great events:

>>Kirk Read, This is the Thing

Thisisthethinga.jpg
Kirk Read, photo by Ed Wolf

450 pound sex work clients, surly Guitar Center employees, teenage Satanism, and touring through rural Alabama with strippers — what else would you want an evening of spoken performance to deliver? Perennial SF literary hotshot Kirk Read takes on sex work, hallucinations, and the apocalypse in this multinight odyssey, with musical accompaniment by Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney.
June 10-14, 8pm, $12-$15
The Garage
975 Howard
Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/32515

Tennishero on Roland Garros and The French

-
0

By Johnny Ray Huston

With this year’s French Open entering its last few dramatic days, the time is right to consult the Swedish duo Tennishero for their thoughts about the event. Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson have the qualifications. They hail from Sweden, the home country of six-time French Open champ Bjorn Borg. On MySpace, they initially described their music as “Roland Garros techno,” though that witty tag has since been joined by others such as “snowjogger acid,” as well as the wise declaration that they want to “sound like a David Hockney picture.” They’re off to a good start at that with “Alone,” their first single, one version of which features Chelonis R. Jones on vocals and a Lego fragment of the two-handed great Monica Seles on the sleeve art. According to Andersson, Tennishero has left 2006’s “Alone” behind to explore new realms of melody.

tennishero2.jpg
Tennishero’s Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson shake hands

I have to genuflect for days to Andersson for telling me about a tennis movie by the great William Klein, one of my all-time favorite photographers, who is experiencing a resurgence of sorts as of late. I have to argue with his assertion below that there are no tennis players today with the good-bad taste and intellect to enjoy Serge Gainsbourg, though. I once saw some Gainsbourg albums in the background of an at-home picture of the devilishly handsome and somewhat mad Marat Safin, whose kid sister Dinara is the story of this year’s tournament so far. You could say Dinara’s 4th-round match with Maria Sharapova was a “requiem pour un con” — especially since Sharapova, no wilting lily, mouthed some hilariously off-color words during the defeat.

SFBG: Who is your pick to win the French Open this year on the men’s side?
Jens Andersson: I don’t really know. The Swedes aren’t at the top of their game right now so I have to go with (Roger) Federer. Has he ever won Roland Garros? Tennis players today are boring and mundane. Hopefully there will be some new guy with the headband over — not under — his hair and the attitude of Serge Gainsbourg, but we doubt it. Now, you only see players like Nadal — I mean, come on.

alone12.jpg
The sleeve art for Tennishero and Chelonis R. Jones’s “Alone”

SFBG: Do you have any favorite and least favorite tennis players, past and present? (I ask this since older or vintage tennis styles have had an influence on your look.)
JA: Actually, we are more fascinated by the atmosphere surrounding tennis in the past – for example the culture around old French tennis clubs, like in the Truffaut movie La femme d’a cote. Another great film is William Klein’s The French, a documentary about Roland Garros in 1983 that captures this old charming atmosphere in a fantastic way. Back then, it was all about personality. McEnroe and Yannick Noah were inspiring in their own ways.

Hola, Maria! Alternaqueer Latinos get arty

-
0

Queer queer queer season is heating up — the monthlong National Queer Arts Fest is in full swing, Frameline Film Fest is set to explode — and the exuberant, popper-fueled alternaqueer-Latino arts subculture is ready to blow your mind this friday eve:

mariaa.jpg

Featuring some of my fave art-intellects on the scene — Robert Guzman, Leo Herrera and Allan Herrera of HomoChic, and Jody Jock — this subversive Latin free-for-all is all about “how gay culture survives.” Plus, the reception tomorrow will be bursting with who’s-who hotties on the hoof. Incendiary artist statement after the jump.

Maria
Opening reception Fri/6, 7:30pm
Galleria De La Raza
2857 24th St.
(415) 827-8009
www.homochic.com

A touch of Warren Sonbert

-
0

Over the past month, Konrad Steiner of Kino 21 and I have presented two programs of films by Warren Sonbert. For me, it isn’t an overstatement to say the experience has been a revelation, and not just because opportunities to see this SF filmmaker’s work are rare.

The third and final night of our Sonbert series takes place Thursday, June 5, and it unites the complex montage and silent focus of the first program (Sonbert’s 1971 magnum opus Carriage Trade, which screened at SF Camerawork) with the musicality of the second program (“Pop Witness,” which connected Sonbert’s early Warhol- and Anger-inspired ‘60s films to his magnificent and distinctive return to sound over 20 years later).

warren1.jpg
Warren Sonbert

“Narrative Vertigo” has two parts. The first half belongs to the 1983 silent work A Woman’s Touch, where Sonbert takes inspiration from two mainstream Hollywood directors he especially loves, Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. The second half brings 1991’s Short Fuse, a sound film completed four years before Sonbert’s AIDS-related death in 1995 at the age of 47. Sonbert had a flair for two-word titles, and Short Fuse is a poignant example: he crams a life more vibrant than most people’s dreams into 37 minutes.

Come see it with me if you’re free.

Kino 21 presents
Films of Warren Sonbert: “Narrative Vertigo”
Thursday, June 5, 8 p.m.; $6
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
www.kino21.org

Another Hole in the Head: another couple of reviews!

-
0

The San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s sci-fi, horror, and fantasy offshoot Another Hole in the Head kicks off tomorrow! Read Trash’s take on HoleHead’s offerings here; intrepid film intern Amber Humphrey chimes in below with mini-reviews of two fest flicks that just happen to be made by local filmmakers. Check HoleHead’s website for screening information.

Circulation In writer-director Ryan Harper’s unique vision of the afterlife, Gene, a retired American truck driver, and Ana, a Mexican waitress, meet while traveling through a desert purgatory where the dead gradually develop animal-like instincts. The story moves at a very deliberate pace and though there is an enjoyable sense of menace from start to finish — Ana’s jealous ex-husband stalks her, even in death — the film feels unnecessarily elusive. Gene seems like a pretty decent guy; so why is he turning into a blood-thirsty spider? This being said, Circulation may be worth watching simply for those oddly entertaining moments of fly regurgitation.

Homeworld When a race of telepathic aliens threaten to destroy mankind, a military strike team equipped with a deadly virus is sent to the alien home world to exterminate them. Down on the planet, what first appears to be a simple enough task is quickly complicated as the boundaries between reality and illusion and right and wrong are blurred. Homeworld primarily focuses on the crew’s psychological journey — which I suppose is to be expected when facing telepathic aliens—but the characters rarely seem to be in any kind of physical peril. Though the film is often visually impressive, there isn’t much action—which I would be willing to forgive if the dialogue had a little more punch.

hwposter.jpg

Christophe Honoré on liberty and Love Songs

-
0

By Johnny Ray Huston

In this week’s Guardian I write about Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs. Honoré recently answered some questions about the film via email. Dive below for thoughts on cross-dressing and Jacques Demy, and also a contemporary booklist for young gay men who read.

SFBG: Gaël Morel has a brief Hitchcock-like cameo early on in Love Songs. Was this born from your experience working together?
Christophe Honoré: Gael and I regularly meet to talk about cinema and life. I co-wrote two of his movies, including Après lui. I found it funny to have him appear in the waiting line of a theater because he’s an avid filmgoer. Après lui is a film that keeps Gaël’s particular lyrical style, but this time and perhaps for the first time, it’s a more “adult” story, focused on Catherine Deneuve’s character. The script was closer to a thriller but I guess Gaël fell in love with Deneuve while shooting and made it more of a melodrama.

lovesongs1.jpg
Louis Garrel and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet in Love Songs

SFBG: Love Songs is structured like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but elsewhere the similarities of spirit may not be obvious (or even exist). There is, to me, a bisexuality to Jacques Demy’s vision that one could say is extended or updated in your film. Would you agree?
CH: I do agree about the underlying homosexuality in Demy’s work. You could even say that his films deal mostly with cross-dressing. He always cast very handsome actors and filmed them in a way that made them look like icons. Love Songs is not an homage to Demy’s films but it definitely inherited something from them. And, of course, I can handle male sexuality as a filmmaker in a much more straightforward manner than what was possible in Demy’s time.

Ten City

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

For the last two years I have been trying to plant the term Afro-surreal into the collective unconscious. Unlike Afro-futurism, Afro-surrealism is about the present. In sound it conjures everything from Sun-Ra to Wu-Tang. In speech, it brings you Henry Dumas, Amie Cesaire, Samuel Delaney, and Darius James. In visual realms, the Afro-surreal ranges from Wifredo Lam to Kara Walker to Trenton Doyle Hancock. Afro-surreal stages are set for new productions of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959), George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) and Leroi Jones’ The Dutchman and The Slave (1964).

I’m always looking for an Afro-surreal movie. Maybe I’m the last of a dying breed.

The 10th San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF), is billed as a bridge between worlds. But which worlds? Sirius and Earth? Black and other? Local and global? Oakland and San Francisco? San Francisco and itself? Dammit, they all apply.

Most of the SFBFF is taking place in the Fillmore District, and many sites are redevelopment showcases. Opening night at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema presents Nogozi Unwurah’s Shoot The Messenger (2006), a UK import about paranoia, self-loathing, love, and redemption. The after-party is at Rassales, so I might get a haircut and brush off the derby.

Yoshi’s Fillmore is hosting Donnie Betts’ Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. (2005). Despite its connection to ongoing gentrification debates, the venue will be an apt and stylish location for a bio on Brown, an overlooked poet-singer-playwright-composer-social activist who penetrated the zeitgeist with his song "Forty Acres and a Mule." Certain other issues also spring to mind: The black derby again? The brown? Pin-striped wool pants and well-shined shoes, or suede boots?

The Melvin Van Peebles Awards Brunch (props to the festival for naming its short film award after the Afro-surreal mastermind behind 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) is taking place at 1300 Fillmore, which will also host a screening that includes the 2007 short film Lifted. Directed by Randall Dottin, it’s a magical realist piece about a dancer on the edge who finds herself on the wrong side of a subway platform, trapped by a spirit named "High John." The actors are great, which is just one reason why the supernatural story takes simplicity to the brink of facile schmaltziness without tottering over.

A housewife realizes she has superpowers in Chad Benton’s Women’s Work (2008), a warm, funny sitcom short with animation screening at the African American Art and Culture Complex. Around the same time, Yoshi’s is showing Nijla Mumin’s Fillmo (2008), a documentary about the gentrification currently taking place in the Fillmore. How’s that for mixed signals, homey?

Footsteps in Africa (2007), showing at the Museum of African Diaspora, is about the lives of the beautiful, mysterious, and enduring Taureg/Kai of Mali. These African nomads have survived thousands of years of drought, flood, and famine, and withstood acts of genocide. Director Kathi von Koeber’s portrait reveals the wisdom and strength of some of this planet’s greatest human survivors.

Considering the documented decline of black people in San Francisco, it’s a minor miracle that SFBFF continues to grow. Like MoAD, the festival is a testament to the artists and benefactors who’ve come to San Francisco, as well as to the aesthetes among SF’s native population. This year’s festival promises glimpses of vast black realities — the kind that appear to be diminishing locally, yet somehow still manage to thrive.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/4 through June 15

See Rep Clock for listings

(415) 771-9271

www.sfbff.org

Demy more

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

Jacques Demy’s raindrops keep falling on the heads of French filmmakers. While Jean-Luc Godard has to be the French new wave’s historical and critical favorite, the legacy of Demy has arguably inspired more imitation or homage. In the past decade, François Ozon (2002’s 8 Women) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (1998’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have mined or mimed Demy’s distinct use of color and musicality, though even Ozon’s bright red is blue-blooded, and the charms of Ducastel and Martineau’s effort don’t include Demy’s graceful staging and assured storytelling. Now, with his third feature Love Songs, new wave lover Christophe Honoré has forged an uneasy marriage. He’s set out to connect and update the romantic wisdom and classical dramatic structures of Demy with the arch political wit of ’60s Godard.

Love Songs proves few movies are entirely terrible or terrific. Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening. It begins well, because Honoré is attuned to the mood-setting power of well-deployed credits. Handsome, last-name-only opening titles are the first of the film’s textual nods to Godard, which continue when various books play cameo roles much as they do in Godard’s 1961 musical A Woman Is a Woman. Tomes by Henri Michaux and Hervé Guibert become effective shorthand for characters’ desires. But novelist and playwright Honoré’s sole moment of spine-chilling — as opposed to groan-inducing — wordplay takes place when he simply makes his protagonist Ismaël (Louis Garrel, attempting to channel Jean-Pierre Léaud) read the nighttime signs of the 10th Arrondissement.

Garrel’s character is the focal point of Love Songs, but the film’s hidden star is Honoré’s longtime musical collaborator Alex Beaupain, who appears in a pivotal scene, performing the lovely piano ballad "Brooklyn Bridge." Beaupain is stuck with the job of bringing Michel Legrand’s jazz-inflected pop orchestrations for Godard and Demy into the 21st century. Melodically, he’s up to the task, especially when evoking the neo-Gainsbourg rock of Benjamin Biolay. But he isn’t helped by Honoré’s libretto contributions, because Honoré seems to misinterpret the pop opera of 1964’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a basic copying of old Hollywood musical traditions, when in fact it was a radical yet classical revision. Honoré assumes the casual multigenre musicality of Love Songs is more contemporary, but that’s arguable.

In their previous film together, 2006’s Dans Paris, Honoré and Beaupain discovered naturalistic, inventive intersections between drama and music sequences. Love Songs is more traditional in form, saving its radical aspect for a view and presentation of sexuality that’s far more fluid than one finds in contemporary cinema, straight or gay. Honoré is out to disavow exactly those kinds of divisions, and if he’s not helped greatly by Garrel, he’s aided immeasurably by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, whose arrival in the film’s second half takes the story out of a tritely fatalistic ménage-a-trois realm. He’s also saved by Chiara Mastroianni. Her presence is Honoré’s ultimate invocation of Demy, since she’s the daughter of signature Demy star Catherine Deneuve. (She also brings the off-camera baggage of a recent breakup from chanson specialist Biolay to her part.) Her role might appear secondary, but her solo number signals the return of the melody at the film’s heart. Her melancholic understatement testifies that Honoré hasn’t lost the attraction to eroticism that inspired his brash attempt to bring Georges Bataille to the screen with 2004’s Ma mère. He’s just made it as pop as he possibly can by setting it to music.

LOVE SONGS

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

Slamdance elegance

-
0

"Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?" Rock critic Simon Reynolds opens his recent survey Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 432 pages, $16) with that famous piece of invective, courtesy of Johnny Rotten from the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland. Rotten sneered those words during a Sex Pistols show. Tellingly, they arrived at the end of an American tour that contained both a zeitgeist and its own annihilation — or so it seems from Lech Kowalski’s documentary D.O.A. (1980), one of four features comprising the Pacific Film Archive’s "Louder, Faster: Punk in Performance" series.

Even before the blowup, Rotten’s question had already been answered — first by the art school oddballs and city poets who pre-dated then capitalized on punk’s groundswell, and later by the younger acolytes who reclaimed the false prophets’ call for "louder, faster" with their authenticity-obsessed rebel yells. Punk was made to be photographed — Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren ensured that much — but the spirit of the frame depended on who was doing the shooting. The same three-chord assaults could make for social documents (1978-’88’s Target Video) or hipster scrawls (1976’s Blank Generation). They might inspire science experiments (Bruce Conner’s 1978 Mongoloid; Graeme Whifler’s 1978 Hello Skinny), or lyrical love streams (1979’s Deaf/Punk).

Blank Generation is the earliest punk film essay, a given since its New York milieu was already codified and oozing latent celebrity before punk moved to the provinces. Directed by Patti Smith bassist Ivan Kral and future No Wave saint Amos Poe, the film’s chapbook portraiture is heightened via a Hollis Frampton-like use of non-synched sound. Grainy black-and-white 8mm footage floats over the skips and starts of the soundtrack’s mix, creating a jilted effect perfectly suited to the push-pull of Television and the Talking Heads, as well as the tense erotics of Smith and Blondie.

Crappy audio and video smears aside, Joe Rees’s Target Video compilation reveals Bay Area post-punk in full bloom as it moves between Black Flag’s pummeling hardcore and Flipper’s art-damaged sludge to Devo’s proto-Teletubbies weirdness. The austere, one-camera setups anticipate a billion YouTube transmissions. I’ve driven by San Quentin Prison dozens of times wondering how Johnny Cash scored his famous gig there, but that was before I saw Rees’ footage of Crime at the same site — thrashing away in mock police uniforms under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.

Before it is art or communion, punk is permission. For a zenith-like picture of this freedom flight, one should look no further than John Gaikowski’s modest short Deaf/Punk. Gaikowski’s film uncorks a long-forgotten performance at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, using slow motion to revel in punk’s limitless potential energy. This music wasn’t designed to be elegant, but I can think of no better word for Gaikowski’s shocked vision of a singer standing in repose among a small crowd of daydreaming slamdancers.

"LOUDER, FASTER: PUNK IN PERFORMANCE"

Thurs/5 through June 26

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

So much “Useless” beauty

-
0

Perhaps cinema is useless. Jia Zhangke entertains this idea — as a subtext — in his 2007 documentary Useless.

As the waves of raves for Jia have rolled in, I’ve felt a bit detached. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on clothing and to some extent fashion, he takes on subjects I find inherently filmic. (I’ll watch documentaries about Yves Saint-Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and yes, I’m a Project Runway devotee). More important, he appears to be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of Jia’s movie, reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes its title partly from a clothing label of that name started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the film’s three sections. After she muses on the "shame" of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods, Jia films the unveiling of her debut collection for Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up from the ground after a period of burial.

The potential meaning of such moments ricochets silently — yet far from painlessly — off the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory in the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fengyang at the close. Some reviews have faulted Useless for not relying on literal touches such as intertitles or voice-overs. But when Ma Ke’s deluxe car heedlessly speeds by a tailor on foot, Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke — my guess is that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.

NEW WORKS BY JIA ZHANGKE

Thurs/5 and Sun/8, call for times

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

An everywoman at war

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Erykah Badu disappeared for a bit, taking her musical incantations and majestic head wraps on a retreat into motherhood. In 2006, she flitted back onto the mainstream radar in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a concert film that takes place in a Brooklyn neighborhood and includes the comedian’s closest muso pals. Badu’s appearance stops the hustle and bustle of the event cold with her tiny frame and a huge glorious Afro, which blows off during her duet with Jill Scott during the Roots number "You Got Me." The movie audience I was with that day gasped in admiration as Badu let her trademark locks sail away while she continued to sing, her head and soul apparent for all to see — a diva whose resplendence and power does not rest on borrowed plumage alone.

Back then searching out Badu’s whereabouts led to a stripped-down MySpace page with a selection of songs off her 2003 EP, Worldwide Underground (Motown/Island), and not much else. At one point an old press release showed up, but interjected between the normal publicist-speak were "additions" in block capital letters, which were gentle mockeries of her multiputf8um accomplishments and declarations about "paying bills" and other roadblocks appearing in her life. Her words had the feel of new life forcing its way up through the old. Two years on, that same page is a tricked-out site to behold: a dizzying pastiche of acid-rock tableaus and neo-propagandist political imagery that bears Badu’s likeness — many a result of an art contest held for her fans. It was here that she chose to debut many tracks from her new album, New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War (Universal/Motown).

The recording begins with an aural soup: the noise of a ghetto train ride and the booming voice of a marauder telling folks to drop off their valuables while backing vocals exhort the "Amerykahn Promise." Badu’s voice emerges from this cacophony asking for explanations, a metaphor for her own post-sabbatical rebirth. With a quick costume change and tinkling prayer bells, Badu becomes a prophet with "The Healer," a meditation on the restorative properties of hip-hop, which she describes as "bigger than religion / Bigger than my niggas / Bigger than government." Never one to shy away from her role as everywoman — cue those propaganda posters — Badu emerges amid the muted horns and mellow groove of "Me," underscoring an autobiographical letter to listeners explaining her hesitance to be in the spotlight, her life as a single mother of two, and her fears of martyrdom at the hands of the entertainment industry. Her resolve at the close of the song is evident as she proclaims, "They may try to erase my face / But millions spring up in my place."

Such resolve lies at the crux of Badu’s brilliance, her unerring ability to carry her vulnerability on a dais of steely resilience. Downtrodden tunes like "That Hump" offer funk-laced pipe dreams of a solo mom trying to break even: "We just need a little house / That comes with a spouse." But no matter how broken-down Badu’s New Amerykah gets, there is always an undercurrent fed by the missions for social justice that Badu feels she has been called upon to fight. "Soldier" is both an exhortation and rallying cry: "To my folks think they living sweet / They gonna fuck around and push delete," she warns. Expect the woman to bring this message and attitude to the stage with the help of longtime friends and collaborators the Roots during her "Vortex Tour 2008."

ERYKAH BADU

With the Roots

Sun/8–Mon/9, 7:30 p.m., $45.50–$83.50

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakl.

(510) 465-6400

www.paramounttheatre.com

Yuks galore

-
0

FILM FESTIVAL Sometimes the best thing a movie has going for it is its title, especially if that title happens to be Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!. Far and away the most expressively named selection at this year’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, Zombies imagines what would happen if a couple of rival gangbangers, a weary cop, and assorted other ragtag types emerged as the only humans unaffected by a mysterious solar flare. Zombie-movie conventions are followed (the obligatory lesson about shooting ’em in the head, etc.), self-referential jokes are cracked (Shaun of the Dead gets a shout-out). The most distinctive features here — casting erstwhile soul man C. Thomas Howell as the cop, an eye-rollingly dated Snakes on a Plane joke, and a truly disturbing twist that renders the zombies brain eaters and sex freaks — aren’t quite enough to elevate Zombies to the realm of must-see undeadness. To be fair, though, even Troma would have a hard time fulfilling the promise of something called Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!.

A better bargain for your gross-out buck is 2007’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, a film I seized on after noting the top billing of Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund. With higher production values than Zombie and a clever script (cowritten by John Ainslie and director Jon Knautz), Monster follows the titular hero (Trevor Matthews), a slacker dude plumber who’s been toting around some serious anger issues since childhood — when he witnessed a monster gobble up his entire family. Jack’s princess-bitch girlfriend (Rachel Skarsten) convinces him to enroll in a night-school class taught by the bumbling Professor Crowley, who ropes Jack into taking a look at the rusty pipes beneath his creepy old house. Cue: the unearthing of an ancient evil, and Crowley’s transformation from science geek to chicken-wing-gobbling, Jabba the Hutt–like menace.

Naturally this turn of events unleashes the inner warrior in Jack; the film is bookended by flash-forwards that suggest he becomes something of a Buffy for the monster population. But the main reason to see Monster is Englund, who’s having something of a mini-comeback between this film and the recent Zombie Strippers. Always a limber, engaging performer, Englund further proves there’s more to him than vivisecting Elm Street teens — though that’d be enough for me, really.

But back to the zombies. One of HoleHead’s programming edicts is apparently "never enough zombies," to the extent of capitalizing the Zed-word in their programming notes. Along with those mutant hood-rats, the fest also includes Wasting Away (2007), Trailer Park of Terror (question: when did zombies and white trash become so synonymous?), and Brain Dead (2007), the latter containing nearly as many gratuitous female nudes (full-frontal, in most cases) as it does alien-parasite-spawned undead beasties. Whatever, dude — you want class, look elsewhere. These HoleHead selections embrace crass with pride.

Other notable picks in this year’s festival include the locally made Home World, an uneven if ambitious sci-fi tale that owes a debt to Battlestar Galactica; a revival of Roger Vadim’s 1968 Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy (free entry for Jane Fonda look-alikes and other costumed attendees); The Machine Girl, about a one-handed Japanese schoolgirl who exacts tasty, gory revenge on the baddies who offed her family; and, just ’cause it’s Uwe Boll, ‘Nam drama The Tunnel Rats, potentially the first film he’ll direct that spawns a video game instead of vice versa. HoleHead kicks off with the Bai Ling-starring The Gene Generation (2007), followed by a party headlined by all-girl psychobilly quartet Thee Merry Widows.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 5–21, most shows $10.50

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St, SF

www.sfindie.com

Opening night party with Thee Merry Widows, the Zooby Show, and the Undertaker and His Pals

Thurs/5, 9 p.m., $5 (free with HoleHead pass or ticket stub)

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

www.anniessocialclub.com

It’s pronouced “Oo-vuh:” Uwe Boll, Part One

-
0

Just so you know. It’s not “Oo-way.” This is the first thing I learned while gearing up to interview Uwe Boll last August, on the occasion of the uncut version of his film Postal‘s world premiere at the 2007 Dead Channels Film Festival. The film played to a small but enthusiastic Castro Theater crowd, many of whom were surely lured more by the Boll’s presence than by the film itself. Boll, who has embraced video games as cinematic source material the way other directors have embraced, say, Shakespeare, is so fond of controversy it’s difficult to read a news story about him that doesn’t include something ridiculous, like a Boll vs. critics boxing match or an anti-Boll petition. The first picture of him furnished by a Google search features a grinning Boll flipping off whoever’s behind the camera.

postal.jpg

Postal, as a whole, is kind of an exercise in fuck-you cinema: in addition to making light of 9/11, it pokes fun at everything from new-agers to trailer trash to coffee snobs to midgets to Nazis … and more. (Read my shockingly positive review here.) The long-delayed film is finally getting a theatrical release; it rocks the Roxie starting tomorrow. Such an event affords me the chance to dust off my interview with Boll and cast members Zack Ward (who plays “Postal Dude,” and also appeared in 2007’s Transformers) and Larry Thomas, Seinfeld‘s “Soup Nazi” — who plays Osama Bin Laden. Read on for part one, if you dare.

‘REN’-membering Matthew Barney in LA

-
0

mbarneyren sml.bmp
Heave ho at Matthew’s Barney’s REN. Photo courtesy of www.lipsticktracez.com/reggie/.

By Glen Helfand

How any artist follows up a large scale, career-making project is accompanied by the same critical pressure that greets the sophomore album of a hot new band. Matthew Barney made it through his post-Cremaster days with Drawing Restraint 9, which took over a whole floor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a couple of summers ago, though many would agree that while it stayed the course, it was a film and exhibition that didn’t quite rival the five part film/sculpture extravaganza that preceded it.

In an interview before that show, Barney said his next works would be in the realm of live performance, and true to his word, he’s been mining that vein. He staged a typically perverse work at the 2007 Manchester International Festival, an adults-only performance that involved a bull, a self-fisting female contortionist and Barney wearing a live dog on his head. (The reviews were mixed.) Another performance, staged in New York, was shown as a video as part of an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects last year.

I can’t say I wasn’t thrilled to get an invitation to a recent Barney performance, titled REN, that took place on May 18 in not so beautiful Norwalk, a south-of-LA suburban flatland populated by convenience stores and auto dealerships. Here’s some of what the invite promised: “’Ren’ represents the first stage of the soul in its journey through the afterlife in which its ‘Secret Name’ is revealed, and subsequently lost. REN will reference the Cremaster Cycle, linking Barney and [music collaborator Jonathan] Bepler’s earlier project to the iconography and mythology of ancient Egypt. REN will feature the return of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial and Aimee Mullins from Cremaster 3, a Southern California drum and bugle corps, ranchera singer Lila Downs, and British performance artist Mouse. Performance is approximately one and a half to two hours in duration.”

Nerd is the New Cool: An Interview With Yo-Yo Master David Capurro

-
0

By Justin Juul

If we’ve learned anything from the most recent technological revolution (Web 2.0 and stuff, duh!), it’s that nerds are way cooler than we thought they were. In fact, the word “nerd” has lost nearly all of its negative connotations, now defining a certain type of person with highly specific interests rather than a loser. “I’m a music nerd,” people will proudly say, or “I’m an art nerd.” Being a nerd, then, has become cool; and not just in an ironic hipster sense like when you wear glasses without lenses or pretend to like B-movies. The people who used to be nerds are now actually cooler than the people who used to be cool. Take skateboarders for example. Being a skateboarder in 1990 meant that you lived a life of dread, that you were a nerd, and that all the jocks, cheerleaders, and thugs got to make fun of you. But being a skateboarder these days means that you have the freshest gear before anyone else, you know about underground art and music, and you have a pretty good chance of being an extra in the next Larry Clark film. The same thing goes for yo-yo champions like David Capurro. He may not spend his weekends getting drunk and doing cocaine at clubs, but well, come on; that shit’s for nerds.

The Guardian caught up with Capurro recently to explore the subculture of competitive yo-yo players, who might just be the coolest people on the planet (next to skateboarders, of course).

yoyo3.jpg

SFBG: How did you get into yo-yoing?
David Capurro: I saw a kid playing with a yo-yo when I was ten years old. I was kind of a socially awkward kid so I traded him a pair of walkie-talkies for his yo-yo. I guess I just figured I’d rather play with a yo-yo by myself than go out and try to make friends with those damn walkie-talkies. Besides, yo-yos don’t need batteries.

I against I

-
0

CULT FILM Nothing exerts quite the same simultaneous attraction-repulsion magnetism like a really world-class vanity project. You know, the kind in which the writer-director-star-editor-caterer-fluffer — usually playing a thinly disguised version of moi in a world that does not at all fully appreciate them — reveals more of their off-screen inner workings than one ever wanted to know.

Typically these things occur just once in a talent’s life, then are never allowed to happen again, like Babs’ 1996 The Mirror Has Two Faces or Los Angeles weirdo Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-surreal cult microhit The Room (2003). Some inexplicably get to make several, like Vincent Gallo, Ed Burns, or such determined wrong-medium meddlers as Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer. It’s possible to strangle whole movies with manifest-destiny egotism even when one merely stars in them. It’s even possible to overexpose oneself without actually appearing onscreen: what are The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006) but coded maps of Mel Gibson’s soul?

For full effect, however, the more personal credits, the better. In 1969 Brit multitalent Anthony Newley conceived, cowrote, produced, directed, starred, and pretty much jacked off for the world to see in something called Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? This "erotic" autobiographical musical phantasmagoria cast Newley’s actual then-wife (none other than Joan Collins) and children as his endlessly cheated-on wife and neglected children — not to mention Milton Berle as Satan.

Though it was a major-studio release made for the then not-inconsiderable sum of $1 million, Merkin has since become more rumor than reality, with bootleg TV dupes sought by a few while most simply forgot it existed. Could it really have been that bizarre? Yup. That bad? Well, anything this out-there pretty much transcends ordinary quality measures. An extremely rare chance to taste its unique flavors — indeed, the only revival screening I’ve ever heard of — occurs June 4 at the Roxie when the Film on Film Foundation pairs it with another legendary cliff-jumper, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971).

Newley conquered the West End and Broadway with shows mixing Chaplinesque whimsical bathos and big-ballad bombast. They gave some critics hives — but not audiences. Covered by every mid-1960s crooner, his songs (like "What Kind of Fool Am I?") topped charts. A ubiquitous variety-show guest, he looked set to become a movie star too. Result: carte blanche for Merkin, the type of freedom that ought to have set off alarm bells from Hollywood to Hampstead.

The film tells the tender tale of an angst-ridden famous writer-singer-actor who, like Newley, was born a "bastard" (at a time when that really mattered), a former child star now on his second marriage — to Collins’ piquantly named Polyester Poontang — while incessantly screwing the likes of Filigree Fondle and Trampolina Whambang. Liberally partaking of Fellini’s 8 1/2 model, this "sum total of my life to date" (as the auteur then stated) operates on many levels, from flashbacks of Merkin’s professional rise to fantasy sequences to onscreen ersatz producers and critics critiquing the movie-in-progress. There’s a zodiac dance, a bestiality number, a mime alter ego, and an acid trip (not to be confused with the black mass) — plus the queasy running theme of Newley-Merkin’s jones for Lolita-esque girls, as personified by Playboy playmate Connie Kreski’s defiled innocent, Mercy. She’s his true love — or as close as it gets for a character who finally admits, "Not only do I have no respect for women, I may well hate them."

In her memoirs, Collins notes, "I had a sick, horrible feeling when I first read the script. Tony seemed to have spelled out the end of our marriage." (Indeed, that event promptly occurred.) The commingled massive egotism and masochism in this "totally revealing picture of his life" (her words) had a similar effect on most real-life critics, a typical notice saying Newley "so overextends and overexposes himself that the movie comes to look like an act of professional suicide … [it] is as self-indulgent as a burp."

Roger Ebert, however, thought it "strange, wonderful, original, and not quite successful," applauding its sheer nerve if nothing else. Indeed, Merkin remains such an oddity and perfect warts-and-all memorial to Newley (who died in 1999, his long, post-Merkin career slide actually highlighted by 1987’s The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) that, like most spectacular follies, it commands a certain awed respect.

CAN HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS?

June 4, 9:15 p.m., $7

with The Last Movie, 7 p.m.

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

www.filmonfilm.org

Mixed doubles

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A new work by Robert Lepage is always a major event. In theater, the Quebecois director, actor, and filmmaker stands with the likes of Robert Wilson or Peter Sellars at the pinnacle of theatrical invention and global acclaim. Little wonder that, like Wilson and Sellars, Lepage has found opera a logical outlet for his extraordinary capacities and grand, all-encompassing visions. (His last Bay Area bow was in November 2007 at the San Francisco Opera, where he staged Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress.) But while he is a truly international force wielding the largest of canvases, there’s an intimate and personal side running through much of his work, perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in his stunningly staged solo plays The Far Side of the Moon (2003) and The Andersen Project (2005). The latter, which slyly folds layers of personal and cultural doubt (as well as biting cultural satire) into a glancing exploration of Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen’s troubled psyche, makes its local debut courtesy of Cal Performances.

As with Far Side, Andersen was developed with Lepage playing dual roles that together define a kind of split personality and serve as starting point for a series of thematic dyads. In this case, the main characters are a corrupt French opera director and a French Canadian musician-songwriter named Frédéric Lapointe, who arrives in Paris on a commission to write an opera based on an Andersen story. Also as with Far Side, Lepage eventually handed off the roles to Yves Jacques. An extremely gifted theater and film actor in his own right (probably best known to Americans through several Denys Arcand films), Jacques shares a history and affinity with Lepage (they’ve known each other since their twenties) that make him the best, and perhaps the only, person capable of stepping into these demanding, idiosyncratic solo shows, with their half-hidden strands of autobiography and fraught national identity. I recently spoke with Jacques by phone from Montreal.

SFBG Before Andersen, you took over another Lepage solo play.

YVES JACQUES It started with Far Side because it was a story very close to him. So he wanted someone with the same sensibility. I was able to understand his feelings about [the subject matter]. So afterward he said, ‘Why not continue with The Andersen Project?’

SFBG Was it at all intimidating to take over these plays from their originator?

YJ Oh, yes. I felt a big responsibility to be at least equivalent to Robert — just to reach the level of the acting he puts into the show. But he liked [what I was doing] and was very happy because for once he could see his own work. When you play in a solo show you don’t always understand what you’re doing. Now he could see himself, or himself through me.

SFBG How did you approach the part?

YJ I never feel I’m doing a one-man show; I’m doing a play. I’m doing the yin and the yang of the same character, in a way. Far Side was the story of two brothers, and this is quite the same. You have the director of the Paris Opera and then you have Lapointe. They’re very different but they’re played by the same actor. In a way, it’s the yin and the yang of the same personality, which is Hans Christian Andersen. Lepage is using two different characters to describe [the complexity of] Andersen. It’s very clever. You see Andersen only twice in the show but he’s not talking; he’s just a silhouette. The only way to know him is to understand the other two.

SFBG The assertion of a Quebecois identity against the dominant Anglo culture of Canada is a theme in much of Lepage’s work.

YJ Lapointe comes to Paris because he wants to be approved of by Parisians — [but] he says at the end, I came here for the wrong reasons. I came here for approval, and we shouldn’t do that. We should be proud of what we are. And Andersen had the same problem in his own country. People in Denmark loved his fairy tales but they didn’t take him seriously as a writer because he was writing for children. So he needed to come to Paris as well, and be approved of by Balzac or George Sand or Victor Hugo — just as we need to be approved of by the old country. It’s like being in a colony sometimes [laughs]. That’s why I’m very proud of working with Lepage, because he [raises] Quebec to another standard. His work is totally amazing. *

THE ANDERSEN PROJECT

Wed/28–Sat/31, 8 p.m.; Sun/1, 3 p.m., $62

Zellerbach Playhouse

Bancroft at Dana, UC Berkeley, Berk

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

The orbs

-
0

In Thorsten Fleisch’s five-minute Energie! (2007), an untamed 30,000-volt current exposes photographic papers that are then sequenced in a manner that suggests or reveals systems of electrons. Fleisch’s film is a blast. Its black-and-white lightning formations resemble angry veins in the eyeball of an electrical beast — and the veins in your eyes will sprout similarly after gazing at this strobe attack by Fleisch, a student of Peter Kubelka.

The orb that gradually rises to the center of the screen during Energie could be a ferocious cousin of the eclipse that forms the insignia for the digital projects of Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin’s space for visions in the Mission. It also serves as a core symbol for Other Cinema’s latest calendar-closing "New Experimental Works" program.

Here’s an orb, there’s an orb, everywhere’s an orb, orb! There’s one at the center of Shalo P’s Vengeance 2.0, which begins with a word of warning from Michael Jackson before mixing Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1958) and numerous Batman symbols into a brew fans of Paper Rad and Michael Robinson might enjoy. There’s even a character named Orb in Apple, a sword-clanging, sprite-eared, and typically ingenious vision from "from the hideous director of Dawn of the Evil Millennium," Damon Packard, whose movies are as potent as laughing gas and better than all other drugs.

Eli Marias’ and Amos Natkin’s An Internal Camaraderie might not feature an orb, but its new age mix of hilarity and potent hypnotism includes just about everything else, including fluorescent rainbow colors, a sea of testifying infomercial faces, and one well-deployed white turtleneck.

Other highlights among "New Experimental Works" that this reviewer was able to see include: Roger Deutsch’s Act Your Age, where a pencil is not just a pencil; Tony Gault’s Count Backwards From 5 (2007), in which images of water — with a powerful use of voice-over — convey the mystery of family and death; and Danny Plotnick’s Out of Print, a four-minute testimonial that should be placed in a time capsule.

OTHER CINEMA: "NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS"

Sat/31, 8:30 p.m.; $7

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

Rich and useless

-
0

Some kinds of artistic ostentation possess a breadth of scale and insularity of purpose that have everything to do with privilege. Matthew Barney is responsible for some enormously pretentious cinematic objects, but even he hasn’t dreamt as self-indulgently big as the mono-monikered Tarsem (birth name: Tarsem Singh) does with The Fall. Shot in 20 countries — from Chile to Fiji to Namibia to Romania to all over his native India, plus plain old Hollywood — it’s perhaps the ultimate "Why? Because I can" movie, sumptuous and useless to equal degrees.

The film’s story (inspired by an obscure 1981 Bulgarian children’s film called Yo ho ho, something the filmmakers haven’t gone out of their way to acknowledge) is a haphazard clothesline on which to hang two hours of pictures. Collected in a coffee-table book, these images might suggest that The Fall is the greatest surreal epic ever — an update of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 magnum opus The Holy Mountain.

Actually watching the thing, however, is a different experience.

You might remember — or might still be trying to forget — Tarsem as the director of 2000’s J-Lo vehicle The Cell, an odious serial killer tale tricked out in the biggest wholesale cribbing of Art History 101 imagery since the more enjoyable Altered States (1980). He also directed numerous TV commercials and music videos (most notably REM’s 1991 "Losing My Religion"), two forms of media that suit his empty pictorial flash. The Fall is like an endless high-concept shoot of extravagant fashions no one could ever really wear, presented against backdrops few could ever visit — unless, like this movie’s director, they’re the kind of global citizen who (according to biographical notes) "lives in London, Italy, Los Angeles, and India."

If The Fall‘s exotica had something, anything — a heart, a point, some philosophical intent — behind it, Tarsem’s movie wouldn’t end up seeming like such monumental upscale baloney. But this director has no feel for pacing, actors, or tone; he wobbles from labored whimsy to maudlin realms before abruptly opting for nasty violence.

Just who is The Fall‘s cold pageant-cum-travelogue for? People who wish they had Tarsem’s life, I guess. Perhaps this is his way of sharing it with the proles. Isn’t that generous.

THE FALL

Opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters

www.thefallthemovie.com

1...132133134...168Page 133 of 168

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org