Film

SFIFF: On tour

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SFIFF His last letter read, "Forget me" and "I’m never coming back." But instead of crying, waiting, hoping he’ll return, or pleading, "Please, Mr. Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter, a letter for me," she decides she will follow him, wherever he may go, because maybe, just maybe, one fine day, they’ll meet once more, and he’ll want the love he threw away before.

What follows is the sublime La France (2007), a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the same chapel of pop that houses tearful penitent Brian Wilson, radiant nun Anna Karina, and verse-scribbling choir boy Jacques Brel — and stage-set with the mist-swathed romanticism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

After our heroine and "Dear Jeanne" letter recipient Camille (Sylvie Testud) dons the boyish garb of a wartime Viola to unearth news of her soldier husband, she stumbles on a mysterious military troop slumbering uneasily in the woods. Camille wants to eat like them, march like them, and become one of them, with the sacrificial passion of a lover desperate to wear the garments and walk in the footsteps of her pined-for mate. But in the fall of 1917, all is not-so-quiet far from the Western front as director Serge Bozon’s band of brothers — many played by the actor-auteur’s fellow French film critics — pick up impromptu instruments fashioned from canteens and pots to play the sweetest yet strikingly barbed lovelorn tunes. What better way to meet doom while their country takes some of the heaviest casualties of World War I? What better way to mend a broken heart?

La France is "a war movie but almost in the absence of war and a love movie almost in the absence of love," as Bozon explains via e-mail while attending a Buenos Aires film festival. It turns gracefully on "a quest — just like the war, because we are never in the battlefields. So the war is more a horizon — something outside, always close but almost never reached.

"The unifying impulse is this magnetization, by definition from outside," he continues. "I think here the master of magnetization is Jacques Tourneur, the Henry James of cinema: how to drive la mise en scène by the absence of something at the (double) center of the story."

Balancing the visually sumptuous La France (lensed by the director’s sister Céline) on what he describes as the edge and arrogance of English pop-sike and the narcotic etherealness of California sunshine pop, Bozon has made one of the most unique films in the festival. No joke. He sports only two shortish works — the 84-minute L’Amitie (1998) and the 59-minute Mods (2002) — beneath the belt of his modish slacks: La France is his first feature. It’s also inadvertently launched something of a burgeoning DJ career for the music-obsessed director, who promises to draw from his healthy garage rock and Northern soul singles collection for at least one dance-party during the fest.

SFBG Why did you title the film La France? Does the soldiers’ plight say something about your country in general?

SERGE BOZON To put it in the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the ’60s (in Cahiers du Cinéma) who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who "got lost in the shadow of victory."

I wanted to deal with desertion, not to tell the story of the deserters who were caught by the French army, not to tell the story of the deserters who managed to reach their goal, but to tell the story of the deserters "in between," because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction. That’s why I chose the title.

Just listen to "Going All the Way" by the Squires or "On Tour" by the Chancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records), and you’ll understand the relation of this title to the music. "On Tour" is a song, as you can guess, about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes). But like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the "tour" of my soldiers. You begin by expecting some light pop, but in the end it’s only frustration and anger.

SFBG What do war movies mean to you?

SB It is the only classic American genre that is still alive in France, where a lot of war movies are made each year. The menace of war is unceasing — or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, so I could have done it in a present-day setting. But what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is in our present and desertion is, still, in our present history — "needles and pins," to quote the Ramones covering the Searchers.

SFBG Which war movies have intrigued you or inspired La France specifically?

SB The American and Russian war movies of the ’40s and ’50s. And I must press this point: the movies of [Samuel] Fuller, [John] Ford, [Raoul] Walsh, Tourneur, [Howard] Hawks are not more important for me than the sublime Russian war movies — for example [Ivan] Pyryev’s Tales of the Siberian Land (1947), [Leonid] Lukov’s Two Soldiers (1943), [Yuli] Raizman’s Mashenka (1942), [Alexander] Macheret’s Soldiers of the Swamp (1939).

In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller, and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time. There is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance among the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters. Mashenka, for example, is a war movie about a woman. You also have a non-American, rural way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense, like Berlioz).

For example, A Good Lad from 1943 by Boris Barnet is — in one hour! — a musical with opera singing during the war scenes, a comedy, a love story, and a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. By the way, Barnet is the best Russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed Russian geniuses like [Sergei] Eisenstein, [Andrei] Tarkovsky, and [Alexander] Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease.

In these different aspects, those Russian movies are more like the early ’30s American movies, when the exuberance of the filmmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes. Just think of a typical ’30s masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck (1933) by Walsh. My movie, with some exceptions, is much more Russian than American.

SFBG What do you want those who see La France to come away with?

SB Ninety-six tears.

LA FRANCE May 2, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 6, 6:45 p.m., Clay


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Ashes to ashes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF One of the greatest pleasures of the 50th SF International Film Festival was Forever, Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 study of the living among the dead at Paris’ Père-Lachese cemetery. Between footage of the sun-dappled necropolis in all its hushed, springtime glory, Honigmann (who received last year’s Persistence of Vision award) profiles several regular visitors, who in the course of discussing an attachment to a particular resident — whether that dweller be Frédéric Chopin or a deceased husband — reveal a great deal about how we commune with memory in our daily lives.

Echoes of Honigmann’s film can be heard on the breezes that float and whip through John Gianvito’s lean and hypnotic Profit motive and the whispering wind (Gianvito’s use of lowercase is intentional). In focusing on a very different kind of memorial landscape, Gianvito uses Howard Zinn’s oft-revised 1980 radical assessment of American history, A People’s History of the United States, as a roadmap. He’s constructed an hour-long pilgrimage to the graves, minor monuments, and commemorative plaques erected to honor America’s freethinkers and radicals.

Static shot after static shot shows names etched in stone, carved on wood, or stamped on metal: Red Jacket, Sacagawea, Thomas Paine, Mary Dyer, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Daniel Shays, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer (whose eloquent protest, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired," is now her epitaph), Malcolm X, Dorothy Day, and César Chávez, to name just a dozen. America is a nation of defectors, suffragettes, abolitionists, Wobblies, anarchists, union members, community organizers, and conscientious objectors. We see commemorations of the labor movement’s bloody struggles: the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Mass., the Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh, and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Occasionally we see signs that others have visited these sites: small tokens of solidarity left on graves, graffiti, piled pebbles. But many of the markers exhibit the creep of age and neglect.

Eschewing narration or interviews, Profit motive is near-silent, save for the ambient sounds of each site: chirping birds, the lazy buzz of insects, the occasional whiz of traffic, and most prominent, the whistling wind — though a whisper is only one part of its range. As Honigmann does in Forever, Gianvito periodically turns his camera away from the ground to watch the dance of sighing boughs or rustling plains. These almost animistic sequences remind us that the landscape has borne witness to the people who shaped it long before our time, underscoring the transience of human life and, by extension, political struggle.

The film’s jarring final minutes, however, break its meditative silence in a move that aims to establish affinities between the left’s scattered history and current protest movements. Gianvito’s dedication to Zinn seems to get the better of him, and the closing montage of contemporary protests juxtaposed against McDonald’s and Wal-Mart signs comes off as crudely didactic. The answer — or, at the very least, some incendiary spark out of the past — it seems, was blowing in the wind after all.

If Gianvito’s film is part eulogy and part rallying cry for America’s radical left, then Hartmut Bitomsky’s more conventionally structured documentary Dust (Straub) is a vanitas for late capitalism. Just as Gianvito marshals a certain poetic charge from his footage of rustling branches and swaying grass, Bitomsky’s cold yet compelling study also mines the many-faceted existential resonance of the particulate terrain it surveys.

Bitomsky’s gravelly-voiced narrator is fond of repeating a Raymond Queneau quote: "Dust always leaves a trace, no matter what; then, a trace of the trace. There’s always a trace you’ll never get." Indeed, dust is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable. It is both the byproduct of human industry and what accretes once our industriousness has stopped. It is a bugaboo for museum preservationists, vacuum cleaner engineers, and clean room custodians. It is the cosmic prima materia from which the universe was born and to which we will all return long after the worms have had their fill. And as we are reminded in the documentary’s opening frames, dust is the very substance of film itself. What we watch are the shadows of dust, shot through with light.

From an industrial paints manufacturer, to a frighteningly OCD housewife, to a sweetly loopy artist who creates sculptural dust taxonomies, to military scientists testing for radioactive fallout from ballistics currently being used in Iraq, Bitomksy lets his unnamed subjects speak with little interruption on their Sisyphean efforts to analyze, sift through, and eradicate dust. At times, the extended and often extremely technical explanations of particle acceleration and filtration assembly can be tryingly dry. But the straightforward and de-personalized presentation of information is fitting with the film’s po-faced tone.

Bitomsky’s deadpan facade is tied on extra-tight. But faint traces of a smirk can be made out whenever he pauses on a particularly cruel irony (for instance, when he quotes military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz over photos of American and Iraqi babies deformed by in utero exposure to depleted uranium dust) or takes note of a pathetic one (a hulking, former GDR housing block imploded to make way for a shopping mall). As entropic as it is constant, dust is indifferent to human life or regime change.

Gianvito’s film clearly seeks to offer a momentary defense against our country’s tendency toward historical amnesia, though it also suggests that history may be one more notch on finitude’s marble bedpost. For Bitomsky, on the other hand, history is a dustbin.

DUST May 3, 1 p.m., PFA; May 5, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Blood ties

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Explosive stuff!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?

Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.

It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.

As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.

Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.

Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.

SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?

CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!

Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!

SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?

CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.

SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?

CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.

SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.

CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.

SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.

CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.

SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?

CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.

SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.

MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

Sibling rivalry

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REVIEW This week most San Francisco cineastes will be focused on the International Film Festival — but please don’t let this Italian import, one of the best in years, leave town before you catch it. Cowritten (with director Daniele Luchetti) by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli of the fantastic Best of Youth (2003), the film shares that four-hour epic’s ability to pare decades of roiling postwar Italian political history into an absorbing personal drama. Accio (Elio Germano) is the youngest child, perpetually at odds with everyone in his poor family. He is a natural contrarian and zealot — first as a divinity student too self-righteously pious even for the priests to bear, then as an avid member of the Fascist Party. (His hometown is the small central Italian city Latina, a one-time party stronghold founded during the Mussolini era that previously had been an undrained swamp.) Those proclivities, not exactly fashionable in the story’s 1960s and ’70s setting, particularly exasperate Accio’s brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio, one of those Italian men who are so good-looking they almost constitute a traffic hazard), a charismatic born leader who becomes increasingly involved in the Communist Party and underground radical actions. Still, blood is thicker than water — and by the end we realize this famiglia‘s constant yelling and slapping are as much forms of affection as anything else. And the siblings do have something else in common, namely a jones for Manrico’s upper-class girlfriend Francesca (Diane Fleri). My Brother has been compared to Italian leftist classics like Marco Bellochio’s Fist in His Pocket (1965) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964), no doubt largely because its manically malcontent protagonist — an indelible performance by Germano — and almost too-hyperactive imagery echo their restless intellectual agitprop. Fortunately, this is too warmly human a drama to share those films’ Godardian paternity.

MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Ghostride the filmstrip, thizzy

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By Justin Juul

Perhaps inevitably, long-awaited doc Ghostride The Whip: The Story of The Hyphy Movement screens this Thursday, April 24th at UC Berkeley. (It’ll be available on DVD this July after it makes some rounds. )

ghostride1.jpg

At first glance, it’s a movie about riding around on top of and outside your car while listening to goofy music, dropping e, and acting tough (duh). I was all set to write about how tired the film sounds and how played out the ghostriding phenomenon is, but I decided to do some research before opening my big mouth.

And now, well, what can I say? After spending an hour on Ghostride The Whip director DJ Vlad’s MySpace, I have become a full-blown fan. I still think ghostriding is ridiculous, and I can’t say I like hyphy music (or wasting gas), but holy shit, have you seen all the video tributes this Bay Area ghetto pastime has spawned? Maybe this is a perfect time to immortalize this movement onscreen. Here are a few of my favorites:

Ghostride the Granny

Extreme Ghostride!!!

Alligators, man

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TOOTHY CINEMA Alligators, man. As James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Peter Pan will tell you, meeting a gator is a surefire way to add insta-peril to your script, or at least supply a pun-tastic one-liner (Arnold Schwarzenegger to recently expired gator in 1996’s Eraser: "You’re luggage!") Last year’s pseudo-political Primeval was a disappointment, and Rogue, Aussie director Greg Mclean’s follow-up to Wolf Creek (1995), never quite made it into theaters stateside. Fortunately, Mother Nature’s cuddliest predator takes center stage in a few flicks well worth your Earth Day perusal. (Note: Scientists will tell you that head shapes, saltwater tolerance, and other factors separate alligators and crocodiles. But as far as Hollywood’s concerned, same difference.)

Lake Placid (1999) Directed by Steve Miner — who helmed two Friday the 13th sequels (including the one in 3-D), C. Thomas Howell blackface classic Soul Man (1986), multiple episodes of Dawson’s Creek, and Jessica Simpson’s soon-to-be-straight-to-video Major Movie Star — Lake Placid has the advantages of an agreeable cast (Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Brendan Gleeson, and a memorably foulmouthed Betty White) and a script by Emmy darling David E. Kelley. Lake Placid doesn’t quite achieve the critter-tastic heights of 1997’s Anaconda, but it’s adequately gruesome and campy. Trivia: the made-for-TV sequel subs in Cloris Leachman for Betty White and features laughably bad special effects, as well as way more boobs than the original.

Alligator (1980) You know how New York City is supposed to have alligators in its sewers? Chicago has a similar problem. This creature-horror sorta-classic pits Robert Forster against a gator named Ramon. Alligator would double-feature well with swamp-sploitation ‘Gator Bait (1974), which features Cajuns, incest, hick-tastic accents, and quite a few slimy reptiles — most of them human.

Eaten Alive (1977) Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) also concerns an isolated house populated by "a family of Draculas" that’s stumbled upon by Marilyn Burns, Chainsaw‘s blond screamer. But in Eaten Alive, the dwelling resembles a redneck Bates Motel, with a hungry croc lurking in muddy waters that abut its porch. Veteran tough-guy actor Neville Brand glowers atop a cast of horror notables — including Carolyn "Morticia Addams" Jones, Kyle Richards (one of the kids Laurie Strode babysits in 1977’s Halloween), and Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund.

Crocodile Dundee (1986) Granted, much of the wildlife in this film is supplied by Times Square — but you gotta love that scene where Paul Hogan brains a baddie with a can of peaches.

Nickels and dimes

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We get a lot of press releases announcing that San Francisco has made it to the top of another "greenest" list. Popular Science named SF the second-greenest city in the nation last February. Sustainlane.com called this place the second-greenest city in 2006. Reader’s Digest added honors for the fifth-cleanest city in 2005, the same year San Francisco hosted the UN’s World Environment Day.

The city’s ban on plastic grocery bags is spreading, and last year Mayor Gavin Newsom won a Green Cross Award from Global Green USA alongside Irmelin DiCaprio, the mother of film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

But none of that adds up to what the city really needs: cash.

Then the US Department of Energy in late March designated three more California cities — Sacramento, San Jose, and Santa Rosa — as new "Solar American Cities" — and this award came with money attached. And the DOE has dough: the agency requested $25 billion from Congress this year.

The solar grant was worth $2.4 million. The money was divided among 12 cities nationwide, leaving each municipality with just $200,000. And that was supposed to cover a two-year period.

Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego made the "Solar American Cities" list in 2007. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment received the money, and a conciliatory Johanna Partin, the renewable energy program manager there, said it was the only grant from Bush’s Solar America Initiative her office had actually applied for.

San Francisco at least will able to use the money to help the owners of large buildings assess what it would take to install solar technology. We’ve already digitally mapped the city’s grandest roofs.

Margie Bates, a project manager for the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program in Golden, Colo., told us that the grant includes $200,000 in additional credit for hiring local experts to advise building owners on the technology or retain the expertise of DOE officials themselves.

"The funding is allowing us to do some pieces of our solar program that we didn’t otherwise have funding for. So in that sense it’s good," she said. "But, you know, $200,000 over two years is not a lot of money."

Wong takes wrong turn

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Whether his focus is on a gangster who falls for his cousin (As Tears Go By, 1989), or a lovesick cop getting over a breakup (Chungking Express, 1994), or two men who move to Argentina seeking a fresh start (Happy Together, 1997), the world of Wong Kar Wai is always populated by heartbroken people whose unresolved emotions render them romantically challenged. The fluid cinematography, evocative music, and sublime use of slow-motion that accompanies these tales of unrequited love make Wong’s attractive cosmos all the more moving and melancholy.

Although My Blueberry Nights, the director’s first US production, has all of the above ingredients, it isn’t what one expects from Wong. Unnecessary explanatory voice-over and Hallmark-card dialogue destroys the subtlety that permeates most of his films.

During a recent phone interview, Wong attributed this lack of subtlety to the "straightforward" way he believes Americans express their feelings. But I suggest a lot of it has to do with Norah Jones being the film’s star. Although the director admitted the singer was the reason he made the film in the first place, her performance isn’t nearly as nuanced as that of Maggie Cheung’s in In the Mood for Love (2000). An equally plausible explanation might be that well-known mystery novelist Lawrence Block was Wong’s unlikely script collaborator.

Anyone familiar with Wong’s films will be disappointed by the cheery conclusion of My Blueberry Nights. But according to the filmmaker, what we witness is not actually a happy ending. Instead, we’re given what he calls "the happy beginning of another story," one whose ending is as open as it is inevitable.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Opens Fri/18 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.blueberrynightsmovie.com“>www.blueberrynightsmovie.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.blueberrynightsmovie.com

Twin Olsen meltdown

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>johnny@sfbg.com

If you see one 11-minute video this year, make it Michael Robinson’s magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying Light Is Waiting (2007). The primordial, extreme slo-mo soundtrack is like a glitch mix from beyond the grave by DJ Screw. Robinson’s seizure-inducing blasts of stroboscopic light rival those of the Austrian film experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Olsen twins.

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, that formerly pint-size pair of formerly perfectly interchangeable human products, are part of Light Is Waiting. Robinson uses episodes of Full House as source material. His video’s first big punch line arrives after a two-minute unfiltered blast of the sitcom replete with laugh track, bad fashions, and Candace Cameron’s feathered hairdo. Robinson’s deployment of this clip is akin to a magician juggling TVs. He then mines the show’s trip-to-Hawaii episode — a colonialist trope that dates back past The Brady Bunch to another Robinson, last-name Crusoe (and that fires up a torch that’s been passed forward into the Survivor era) — in a manner so kaleidoscopic it’s hallucinatory. A three-eyed John Stamos’ version of "Rock-a-Hula Baby" turns into a Godzilla dirge, as his white-pantsed rump does the bump with itself. One Olsen twin becomes one two-headed Olsen twin, then turns into two Olsen twins forced to smooch each other.

Light Is Waiting exorcises American pop cultural demons via video the way Kenneth Anger did with film in 1964’s Scorpio Rising. Rife with floral symbolism, Robinson’s older studious excavations of the ideologies lurking beneath scenic landscapes don’t have the same impact. He had a semi-breakthrough with 2006’s And We All Shine On, where a karaoke instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" — yet more floral imagery, this time evoked via unsung lyrics — magnifies the loneliness of video game vistas. The sardonic creep factor is akin to that of Bobby Abate’s One Mile Per Min (2002), and it makes me wonder what a recent Robinson video I haven’t seen, 2007’s Victory over the Sun, does to Axl Rose.

SHINE ON: FILMS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON

April 27, 7:30 p.m., $6–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Chevron spinning out

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Yuck. Ecuadorian oil pit. All cleaned up, you say? Photo courtesy of Amazon Watch

As if publicly disputing the credibility of the Goldman Prize weren’t enough, Chevron has gone into serious corporate spin cycle, taking out a full page ad in today’s Chron and penning a guest editorial claiming they’re not to blame for 18 billion gallons of toxic waste dumped in unlined pits in the Amazon rainforest. The repeated cry of Charles A. James, Chevron’s vp and general counsel: It’s not us, it’s the government. Chevron, the parent company of Texaco, which began pumping Ecuadorian oil back in 1964, says noone cared about the environment back then, they’ve cleaned up their mess anyway, and anything left over is the fault of Ecuador’s national oil company, PetroEcuador.

Lawyer Pablo Fajardo and activist Luis Yanza, two natives of Lago Agrio, Ecuador – a small village in the heart of the spoils — were just awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, what our congresswoman Nancy Pelosi called “on par with the Nobel Peace Prize.” Fajardo put himself through law school to take the lead in a suit against Chevron, claiming the company’s responsible for destroying soil, water, and natural resources. Lago Agrians suffer significantly elevated incidences of cancer, disease, and death.

Chevron, which ignored Fajardo at last year’s board meeting, now has Sam Singer handling spin. Singer’s other recent clients: the SF Zoo, post-tiger attack, and Don Fisher’s Presidio art museum. They also have William Haynes on the case. Why does that name sound so familiar? Yes, a la Kevin Ryan, we have another Bush Administration fall guy washing ashore in the Bay Area.

Reading through Chevron’s website on the lawsuit and taking in the pretty green pictures, it seems like there isn’t a thing wrong with this Amazonian rainforest. Everything’s been cleaned up, and if the indigenous people who live there are getting sick, it’s because they shit where they eat.

But MoFilms, an Oakland-based documentary company, shot footage of the region that shows someone has been wrecking environmental hell down there. Their film, Justicia Now, is screening this Thursday at the Roxie, 8 pm, 3117 16th St. San Francisco. The filmmakers will be on hand to answer questions about the issue and the movie, which they also distribute for free on their website.

Rock’s future, decades along

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER The money, the fame / And the public acclaim / Don’t forget who you are / You’re a rock and roll star." These bitter words by the Byrds roll over through my mind while watching the resurrection of three generations of rock hope realized — reappearing at a time when industry majors like Universal, Sony, and Warner Music are busy bowing to the social networking sphere, i.e., MySpace. The sands are shifting beneath the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and REM, all bands I’ve waved my adoring fangirl flag for, all once toasted as the future of rock ‘n’ roll when the form was the sexiest game in town. Well, the future — along with the classic LPs, the heavily referenced and canonical tunes, the wives, the money-printing tours — has come and gone, so why not step back from an eyeballful of IMAX and think about whether such once-seemingly-ageless, now-clearly-aging mortals are holding the course or moving forward? Does size still matter?

Lord knows — and Sir Mick Jagger surely realizes — you can throw money at a prestige project: the new Stones–Martin Scorsese business partnership, Shine a Light, is proof. Sure, it’s a decent, energized Stones performance — much better than their 2005 date at SBC Park — and certainly the band comes off well in their love for the music (Keith Richards) and artfulness (Mick Jagger). Ron Wood even gets off a nice solo or two. But why bother documenting a Stones live period — the "Bigger Bang" jaunt, otherwise known as the highest grossing tour of all time — essentially recognized for simply raking in a buttload of money for the band? Not only have the Stones been the subject of a much better concert film-documentary — the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (1970), which Scorsese bows to by enlisting Albert Maysles for some camerawork — but rock fan Scorsese has already made a much more multidimensional and affecting concert flick (The Last Waltz, 1978) and a more evocative and heartfelt documentary about a musical icon (No Direction Home, 2005).

Rather, the Stones appear to be recontextualizing their dirty blues-rock for a new, well-heeled generation that can afford them: denuding "Sympathy for the Devil" of its menace and recasting it as a party anthem, far from the madding Altamont crowd. Jagger’s toned, dancer’s physique looks downright expensive as he attempts to repurpose arena poses in the intimate Beacon Theatre, as pricey as Richards’ Louis Vuitton ad and as well-fed as the scrubbed and fratty crowd down front in Shine a Light. Is such a display of power and funds sexier — or offensive — during a recession? Still, the last laugh seems to belong to the Stones: how else to read the final image of Shine a Light as the moon morphs into the Stones tongue than as, "See ya, suckers"?

Springsteen’s aging, gray-tressed mob at HP Pavilion on April 5 would never tolerate such winking behavior. As earnest and idealistic in their Silicon Valley fleece and chinos as the so-called New Dylan so many decades along, they yelled back at the holy rollers picketing the front of the Shark Tank — o demon rock "Born in the U.S.A." — and dutifully lowed, "Broooce!" after each song. Springsteen returned their devotion in kind with two and a half hours of superhuman passion that drew from new releases as well as from Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River (both Columbia; 1978, 1980). Even as Broooce rocked "Reason to Believe," off Nebraska (Columbia, 1982), as a bluesy rave-up, or told stories of leaving wife Patti Scialfa at home to monitor their teenagers, his hard-working, well-meaning decency kept shining through. These days sax sidekick Clarence Clemons may find it necessary to sit out many songs on his throne/easy chair set to stage left and organist Danny Federici is sidelined by melanoma, but the leader still possesses a unflagging fire and expansive romanticism — even if it is spent stumping for Hillary Clinton as of late. On Saturday night, what was striking was less how indebted the latest long-players by younger artists like Arcade Fire and the Killers are to Broooce than the long arm of his influence on so much ’80s radio rock: everyone from Don Henley to Patti Smith to the Pointer Sisters to John Mellencamp.

And whither goes the next greatest rock band, after Springsteen, to attain critical mass: REM? The combo drew kudos for their recent South by Southwest turn — and as with Brooce and the Stones, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Peter Buck have chosen to grow louder with age, writing their new album on electric guitars rather than toning it down with dinner background Musak. More than 25 years into the band’s history, REM’s 14th album, Accelerate seems to plonk down in the Stones’ tax bracket with the opening "Living Well Is the Best Revenge," if not for the clearly articulated, biting irony of Michael Stipe’s lyric, "Baby I am calling you on that." Favoring rock ‘n’ roll blast in a compact 34 minutes, with only traces of the Velvety subtlety and Southern primitive melodicism I once treasured the band for, REM has instead picked up where "It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" left off, retuning its glib soothsaying for post-WTO riots, post-Katrina times, driving it through a pop filter, and sprinkling "Sympathy for the Devil" whoos on the closer, "I’m Gonna DJ." "Look at the world and see plenty of reasons to be angry," guitarist Peter Buck has said, describing Accelerate. We’ll see if they still rage, live.

REM

With Modest Mouse and the National

May 31, 6 p.m.; June 1, 5 p.m., $39.50–<\d>$89.50

Greek Theatre

UC Berkeley, Berk.

www.apeconcerts.com

Bigger than life

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

How would you define an improbable Tilt-A-Whirl Technicolor or Vistavision or Cinemascope view of American virtue and vice? Jean-Luc Godard’s term for it was Tashlinesque. Watching the feverish films in the Pacific Film Archive’s short Frank Tashlin retrospective, we see an artist pushing the outermost limits of cinematic realism, gorging 1950s America on its desire for bigger, better, and faster.

The Tashlinesque land of excess encompasses Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, Kool Aid-red convertibles, and bubblegum teenagers. If there is a milk bottle in a Tashlin film, it will cream when a pin-up walks by. Ten-gallon hats spontaneously ejaculate oil. "The room temperature is changing, if you catch my cruder meaning," Mansfield coos in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and we do, over and over again. Tashlin’s America is a nation of alcoholics and dupes, softheaded nincompoops and sexpot cynics. France had Jacques Tati, and we had — and have — Tashlin.

Just as it did with other stateside pulp visionaries, it took the French to recognize Tashlin’s genius. "There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust [1956] and It Happened One Night [1934]… but a difference of kind," Godard wrote in a 1957 assessment for Cahiers du Cinéma. There’s a touch of cruelty (and a trace of the director’s cartoon roots) in Tashlin’s preference for physically excessive actors like Mansfield and Jerry Lewis, though the way he uses these figures to channel the distorting nature of American gluttony and naïveté is brutally effective.

It’s not just the bodies that are inflated. The frame itself seems to be stretched over the course of these films, with camera angles and props used to accentuate the horizontality of the widescreen image. Just as Preston Sturges outdid his era of talky screwballs with dialogue-mad farces, Tashlin amplified ’50s Hollywood’s taste for grandiosity and crudeness to a pointedly unmanageable extreme. His self-aware movies give a sharp sense of the studio system in its death throes.

As satire, Tashlin’s send-ups of ad men and agents are as prescient as they are unsparing. A typical Tashlin alarm is sounded when Dean Martin’s character in Artists & Models (1955) announces at the outset that he moved to New York to make money in order to study art. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall’s title character turns on the television to hear what the starlet Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) is saying to reporters on his front lawn — an apt commentary on the way technologies abstract reality and invade our privacy. The spin cycles continue to gain speed: the ’90s were an especially prime slice of the Tashlinesque, what with a booming economy, celebrity sex tapes, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Cinematically speaking, Richard Kelly just tried his hand at Tashlinesque with Southland Tales (2006), though I can’t help thinking the originator would have done better with the musical numbers.

Tashlin’s burlesque is dexterous, but it doesn’t hatch from any stable logic. Television is clearly the enemy, but the movies aren’t much better. With every bathing beauty and each overripe burst of Technicolor, the director indulges and implicates our most blithering desires. (One feels like a child reaching out for a lollipop while watching Tashlin’s films: when Godard famously quipped that there was no blood in his own 1965 Pierrot le fou but only red, he might have been quoting his American forebear.) If the plots nominally resolve themselves, the tone and visual style remain pitched between splendor and disgust.

"By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically," Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker. It was Tashlin who taught us to see this way. If there were any justice to art history, he would be in the pantheon of Pop Art, not just for his content, but also for his bold use of color and scale. But he of all people would have known that artistic success is on the same shaky ground as achievement in politics, entertainment, and business — same as it ever was.

FRANK TASHLIN: AMERICAN NONSENSE

Fri/11 through April 18

PFA Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

SFIFF: Color her deadly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does the climate need more PR?

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Al Gore is spending $300 million on ads to tell us some more about climate change and what we can do. It’s called “we.” Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Actually, does anyone else find this a little insulting and/or disturbing? Who hasn’t gotten the message? Wasn’t An Inconvenient Truth a big, giant ad for how fucked we are?

We get it! Why spend three years and $300 million to tell us some more about global warming? The mainstream media appears to have stopped calling the climate change nay-sayers. Global warming is now an acceptable dinner party topic, not something your partner rants at you for ranting about in public. It’s even transcended traditional party lines, but Al Gore’s group, Alliance for Climate Protection, is still pulling together a huge chunk of change to inundate us with advertising.

Three hundred million bucks could buy solar panels for 3,000 buildings the size of the Guardian’s, or 15,000 average homes. For $300 million Al Gore could identify the 13,200 longest commuters in the country and buy them all Honda Civic hybrids. He could set up a microloan-style fund for lower and middle-income people who really want to change their ways but just can’t afford it. They could apply for financing for solar panels, better insulation for their homes, new cars, more efficient water heaters, whatever it is they’ve identified in their lives that they could change if they could just friggin’ afford it.

The Washington Post runs down more details of the program, which seems aimed at riling the masses and asking them to harass their elected officials. According to the Post: “This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public’s sense of urgency in addressing this crisis,” Gore said. “I’ve tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it.”

BTW, for anyone who can’t wait for the ads, or hasn’t seen the movie it’s screening at the San Francisco Public Library as part of their Environmental Film Festival.

The deets:

Thursday, April 24, Noon
An Inconvenient Truth (2006, 96 min.)
Koret Auditorium, Lower Level
Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove)

All films are shown with captions when possible to assist our deaf
and hard of hearing.
All programs at the Library are free.

Chevron slapped with highest eco-fine ever

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Chevron may have to pay as much as $16 billion in damages for polluting parts of Ecuador, according to a report released today as part of a 15-year lawsuit against the San Ramon-based petroleum company. The report estimated $7 billion as the lower pricetag, for clean-up, soil remediation, and compensation to locals for health care costs and ecosystem loss.

For years, residents of Lago Agrio, Ecuador have contended that oil extraction and refining activities by Texaco (now owned by Chevron) were poisoning groundwater, food supplies, and people. Pablo Fajardo, a native of the small village, put himself through law school to take the role as lead litigator on the case. Last year, he and other Lago Agrians visited San Francisco to appeal to Chevron’s board members to do the right think, clean up their act, and make reparations.

Justicia Now, a film about Fajardo and the environmental crisis, produced by Oakland-based MoFilms, will be screening at the Roxie on April 17.

According to the press release, “by contrast, the total damages Exxon has paid in the Valdez disaster, the largest oil spill in U.S. history, is roughly $3 billion (an additional $2.5 billion is still under litigation). The plaintiffs in Ecuador have long asserted that the Chevron-created disaster in Ecuador, in terms of the amount of crude dumped, is 30 times larger than the Valdez spill.”

Yikes. And just yesterday Chevron officials were making excuses for their record profits at a Congressional hearing. Oh, times are tough.

The joy of cowboys

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The western has not so much died as fragmented," declared New York Times critic A.O. Scott in a think piece last year about Hollywood’s latest incarnations of the genre. Citing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and more recent, far-flung revisions such as Wisit Sasanatieng’s 2000 Tears of the Black Tiger, Scott argued that the western is a mutable export because the myth of the Old West existed even before the advent of cinema. Myths build on their grandeur and solidify their status with each new telling and embellishment, whether those revisions take the form of broadsides spreading the dastardly deeds of Billy the Kid or cinematic Cold War–era allegories staged by John Ford under a baking Arizona sun.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s film series "Non-Western Westerns" has traced the global fragmentation of the western myth from more familiar locales such as Utah (as represented by the Italian Alps in Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 film The Great Silence) and the Mexican desert (Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo), to unexpected stopovers in Bollywood (1975’s Sholay) and Hong Kong (Johnnie To’s 2006 Exiled). But the most curious, if not the most joyful, destination in the series’ itinerary has to be the land once known as Czechoslovakia, the home of Oldrich Lipsky’s rangy 1964 horse opera Lemonade Joe.

Lemonade Joe is a sweet and goofy musical parody of the type of westerns Hollywood specialized in before Sam Peckinpah sauntered into town. Though made the same year as Leone’s breakthrough, A Fistful of Dollars, Lipsky’s movie is its diametric opposite. The good guy’s whites remain stainless; the bad guys are mustachioed; and the Trigger Whiskey saloon is likelier to erupt into musical numbers or slapstick fisticuffs than gunfire. The plot follows song-prone sharpshooter Lemonade Joe (played by the suitably dashing operetta stag Karel Fiala) as he weans the rowdy menfolk of Stetson City off of their beloved firewater and over to his miracle tonic, Kolaloka lemonade, all the while competing for the hand of temperate ingenue Winifred Goodman against archnemesis and Trigger Whiskey owner Doug Badman.

Lemonade Joe‘s hand-tinted look is clearly at odds with its soundtrack. But Lipsky’s last concern is fidelity, let alone realism. Indeed, the plot is periodically nudged along by touches that are as evocative of Bugs Bunny cartoons as they are of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Smoke rings spell out messages, dotted lines plot the course of bullets, men fall like dominos after a single punch, and an unforgettable wide screen close-up travels deep into Joe’s yodeling throat.

As singularly silly as Lemonade Joe may be, its eccentricity is a reflection of the western genre’s established popularity in Eastern and Central Europe. Writer Jirí Brdecka based his screenplay on the Lemonade Joe stories he penned for magazines in the ’40s. Around the same time, Karl May’s novels set in the American West were immensely popular in Czechoslovakia. During the Cold War, Eastern Bloc countries produced and consumed westerns that functioned as ideological critiques of America, yet trafficked in the trappings of that most stalwart of American icons: the cowboy.

Then again, wherever it is set, the western has always been about the encroachment of capitalism and civilization onto untamed, lawless wilderness. Many of the genre’s narratives are driven by an unspoken nostalgia for a savage paradise lost. In Lemonade Joe, this takeover is staged in economic terms. Joe’s father turns out to be the president of the company whose product he constantly shills, and whose fiercest competition is the whiskey market. In true entrepreneurial fashion, Joe and his newly-won Winifred hope to ride off into the sunset to sell their new product, Whiskeykola, bringing together alcoholics and teetotalers under brand unity.

Lipsky’s imagery and Brdecka’s screenplay may be slyly critical, but they’re far from a critique of American imperialism. If anything, their movie’s outlandishness might be seen as a rebuff to the then–Soviet Union’s aesthetic mandate for socialist realism. Lemonade Joe is an East Side love letter to a now-vanished chivalric myth of the West, one that Hollywood was discarding in favor of moodier and bloodier fare, and one to which it is impossible to return — except, perhaps, in the movies.

NON-WESTERN WESTERNS: LEMONADE JOE

Sat/5, 3 p.m., $5

SFMOMA, Phyllis Wattis Theater

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Tom’s jones

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

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

UNITED ARTISTS 90TH ANNIVERSARY FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/3 through May 4; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Complexions Contemporary Ballet

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PREVIEW It’s about time. This Saturday, Complexions Contemporary Ballet is finally making its Bay Area debut. The company is 14 and travels all over the globe, from Israel to New Zealand. Founded by former members of Albert Ailey American Dance Theater Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, the company started out small, primarily with duets Rhoden created for himself and Richardson. In the Bay Area, Rhoden’s work has been seen most often during the Ailey company’s yearly gigs. In 2002, the Oakland Ballet (then under the leadership of Karen Brown) debuted his Glory Fugue to much acclaim. Meanwhile, Richardson, a principal guest artist of American Ballet Theater, is mesmerizing in whatever capacity he chooses to perform. In the Bay Area he is best known for the title role in San Francisco Ballet’s filming of Othello. Today, Rhoden is a hot item in musical theater, film, video, and jazz, as well as ballet and modern dance. Complexions’s 20-odd dancers continue to focus most of their endeavors on the prolific Rhoden’s choreography, which favors speed, angularity, and the kind of power attacks even a William Forsythe could admire. As performed by Complexions, the pieces showcase forceful dancers who draw their perspectives from a wide variety of backgrounds — both artistic and cultural. The program for this one-night stand includes a solo by Ailey dancer Abdur-Rahim Jackson; the rest of the program is entirely by Rhoden and features the recent Dear Frederic (2007), an homage to Chopin, and honors Marvin Gaye with the closer Chapters Suite (2007), which Rhoden peopled with a fabulously eclectic mix of street characters.

COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET Sat/5, 8 p.m., $25–$40. Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. (415) 499-6800, www.marincenter.org

serge bozon

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–Why the title “La France”? Is there something about the soldiers’ story or plight that evokes or says something about your country in general?

To put it with the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the sixties (in the Cahiers), who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who “got lost in the shadow of victory”. They managed to escape, but died during their trip, so disappeared “en voyage”. So I wanted to deal with desertion, but in the following way: not to tell the story of the desertors who were caught by the French army (and put in jail or shoot), not to tell the story of the desertors who managed to reach their goal, no, to tell the story of the desortors “in between”, because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction, that’s why I choose the title. Just listen to “Going all the way” by The Squires or “On Tour” by The Cancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records) and you’ll understand the relation of this title (in the sense just given) to the music: “On Tour” is a song (as you could guess) about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes…) but, like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the “tour” of my soldiers… You begin by expecting some light pop uplifting on the air, but in the end it’s only imposture, frustration and anger all over the place. “Anywhere out of the world”, yes, but you won’t even manage to get out of your own town. You will die before. Like my soldiers.

–Why did you want to tell this story – during war? What do war movies mean to you?

Doing a war movie (in France) has nothing to do with doing (in France) a western, a pirate movie, a musical, etc., because this is the only classical american genre which is still alive (in France), where a lot of war movies are been made each year. So there is no manierism here. The menace of war is unceasing, or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, and so I could have done it nowadays, but what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal (in the very special way already explained) with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is only our present, and the desertion is still, in our present history, “neddles and pins”, to quote The Ramones covering The Searchers.

–Which war movies have intrigued or inspired you over time – or for this film specifically?

The american and russian war movies of the fourties and fifties. And I must press this point : the movies of Fuller, Ford, Walsh, Tourneur, Hawks… are not more important for me that the sublime russian war movies, for example “Tales of the Siberian Land” (Pyriev), “Two Soldiers” (Loukov), “Mashenka” (Raizman), “Soldiers of the Swamp” (Matcheret)… In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time : there is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance amongst the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters : “Mashenka” for example is a war movie about a woman. And you also have a non-american (but rural) way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense : as in Berlioz). For exemple, in Pyriev’s masterpiece, there is no such sense of economy as in the classical american way of directing, la “mise en scène” is a little pompous, in fact, but in a non academical way, with a lot of ingenuity. Very pictural also, but also with a lot of ingenuity. And there are a lot of changes of registers (moods), much more than in the american movies. For exemple, “A Good Lad” (from 1943) by Boris Barnet is (in one hour!) a musical (with opera singing during the war scenes), a comedy, a love story, a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. (By the way, Barnet is the best russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed russian genius like Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease. ** And it’s always very interesting to see how Barnet treats some american genres, not only the war movies, but also for example the spy movies in his fabulous “Secret Agent”.) In these different aspects, those russian movies are more like the early thirties american movies, when the exuberance of the filmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes… Just think of a typical thirties masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck by Walsh. My movie, in some of these acceptions (songs, picturality, constant changes of registers, no hard-boiled virility all along, a central feminine character, etc.) is much more russian than american.

–Some of the soldiers are cinema critics? Why did you cast them? Are you making a comment about cinema writing? How do the soldiers – and the real people who play them – strike you?

They are my friends, and I like to work with my friends, because my friends are talented, and that’s why they are my friends.
By the way, I must say that, in all my answers, all the things I said occurred to me after the editing process, when I had to watch my completed movie over and over and so thought about it like a film critic. When Axelle was writing or when I was directing, I just tried to make what I liked, lost in emergency and rushing through the material and financial problems. But the main thing is that the more you love movies, the more you can free yourself of influences. You can not be sincere when you don’t really know what you like. That’s why film critic is the best school.

–Where did the music come from? Is it one song, sung throughout? Also who did the final song over the credits? How and why did you come to choose this music?

The songs in La France are an attempt to synthesise British pop-sike (nervous, acidic, driven, tongue in cheek, and incorporating elements of Victoriana & Nursery Rhyme), and Californian sunshine pop (slow, ethereal, hallucinogenic and featuring multi-layered harmonies), two mid-sixties musical genres. However, it’s a twisted synthesis because the instruments and the recording conditions are unlike the usual recording process required for this kind of music: no bass, no guitar, no drums, no organ… the actors played live, outdoors, like the 1917 “Poilus”, on trench-made acoustic instruments, built with junk (a coal bucket, a pickle tin can): the “charbonnière” guitar, the “cornichophone”, the square violin, the Vosges spinet, etc. The songwriters and arrangers for the songs are Fugu and Benjamin Esdraffo. The first one is coming from a sunshine pop background, the other one from pop-sike, which created this hybrid result. There are four different songs played live by the soldiers in my movie. The first three are original songs, the last one in an adaptation of the song of the end credits, which is a 1969 homemade demo of another unsung sixties genius : Robbie Curtice (the music was composed by Tom Payne, the lyrics by Robbie Curtice).

–You are a big music fan and record collector, I hear. How does music play into your films? What role does it play in your cinema and your life?

I did not write the script of La France, but only the lyrics of the songs. The script-writer is Axelle Ropert. She wrote the scripts of all my movies and even shorts (La France is my third movie being released in France in the theaters). In all the movies we’ve made (because she’s also a director), there is always something related to music. In Mods, garage music was central; in Axelle Ropert’s Etoile Violette, it was folk music; in La France, it is pop; in the Wolberg Family, Axelle Ropert’s next movie (written before the shooting of La France), it’s (northern) soul. It’s always that very same idea: to handle a musical genre by putting it in self-working fiction, like Craig Brewer’s beautiful movie Black Snake Moan succeeded to do for the blues. Self-working fiction means that the action has nothing to do with the current playing (no musicians, no managers, no concerts nor parties) and fiction doesn’t call up for the usual musical imagery (no Lambretta in Mods or patchouli in Etoile Violette or Carnaby Street outfits in La France). How can one find the essence of a musical genre when the story has nothing to do with music? I think it’a an interesting question.

–What is the most valuable record in your collection? Single? Album?

The french EP of The Birds (mod freakbeat).

–What are you listening to now? In Buenos Aires?

Nothing here, in Buenos Aires, because even if I’m here with three boxes of rare 45’s, because I’m Djaying tonight, I can not listen to them, because I don’t travel with my turntable, my speakers, etc.! And I do not have any Ipod, or things like that. But, the day before my flight ot Argentina, I was listening to the last two volumes (just released) of Messthetics, the beautiful UK seventies DIY-punk compilation series of Chuck Warner (the owner of the Hyped to Death label), some obscure fifties rockabilly (compiled by Billy Miller and Miriam Linna from Norton label), and some doo-woop and psychedelic singles I bought in New York two weeks ago.

–What songs or albums are inspiring to you?

Every song I like.

–Do you prefer to act or direct? And why?

I have more immediate pleasure (to quote one of my fave groups, The Eyes) when I act, but I have more eternal pleasure when I direct

–“La France” is very beautiful. What did you hope to achieve with the cinematography and look?

Thank you. The cinematography choices came from my desire to have many night-scenes in La France, like in the best war movie of all time : “Objective Burma” (Walsh). When my sister (the cameraman) and I thought about the lighting process, we wanted to get, without any special effects, a kind of secret oniric touch far away from the usual modernistic natural chiaroscuro. Take for example in “Gerry” (Gus Van Sant) the scene where Casey and Matt speak about the ancient greeks in front of a small campfire. Everything is completely black (you just can not see anything) except the fire and the parts of the two bodies lighted up by the natural light of the fire. In my movie, on the contrary, you can see a lot more things in the night scenes, because no part of the screen is completely dark, never, thanks to the many spotlights we used. So it’s artificial, like in the fifties movies, but this artificiality is buried, is secret, so to speak, because it is used subtly to get a soft image, where the colours are less constrated, the texture of the image almost a little blurred, and the same goes for the relation between the dark parts of the screen and the light ones, etc. All the boundaries are softed, to get this “aquarium feeling” you sometimes have in the best B movies (Tourneur, Ulmer, Dwan…: in “Cat People” for example, the dramatic tension is almost always induced by this subtle “aquarium lightning”). After all, my movie deals with Atlantis, so the lights must be just like “under the sea”, with all these soft shimmering stirrings just like invisible ripples. We used a film never used before for the shooting of a movie, the Kodak 5299, which is usually used as an intermediate film in numerical post-production.

–What do you love – or find relevant – about musicals? Why are there so few? Do you have a weakness or love for Scopitone images/films and music? Do you have a favorite and why? How do you feel about current music videos?

I do not love so much the musicals and it’s the only american genre that I don’t know well. To put it frankly, I have not seen many of them. My movie is not a musical, the soldiers just sing when they have nothing else to do, just like in the classical westerns, war movies, adventures movies, etc. I will be more precise : firstly, to have songs in a war movie (and not a musical movie!) is very classical (or used to be – when the american cinema was still great); secondly, the fact that these songs are not historically accurate is also classical and almost a convention, just like in all the other movies non-musical genres (think about Ricky Nelson singing in Rio Bravo, Marilyn in The River of no Return, Marlene in Rancho Notorious, etc.: are these 19th century songs, are these movies musicals? Not at all); thirdly, singing songs from a female point of view is also common (even the brutal Victor MacLaglen sings like this, if I remember right, in The lost patrol of John Ford, which could have been the title of my movie by the way), and it was a tradition in primitive folk music from the twenties and before (listen to the Alan Lomax or Harry Smith anthologies). So I hope I made clear that I never tried to get any “out of it” originality.

–Your previous short movie was called “Mods” and appeared to touch on that subculture? How do you see that film connecting with “La France”? Were you a mod? What did you like or connect with concerning mods?

Mods was one hour long, I am (dressed like a) a mod, like some of the characters in Mods, but I do not know how Mods connects to La France.

–What do you want those who see “La France” to come away with at the end?

96 tears.

–Do you still write about film? What was the last thing you wrote? And what interests you about or in film criticism?

No, the last thing I wrote was about Paul Vecchiali for a retro of his work in the festival of Belfort.

–How would you describe the state of cinema?

Poor.

Rhymin’ Riot XX-style at Yerba Buena

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By Vanessa Carr

muz.jpg
Julie Atlas Muz (photo: Karl Giant)

Opening tonight, Fr/28, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is The Way That We Rhyme a multimedia group show featuring work by a heavy-hitting line up of contemporary female artists that emphasizes performance and interaction.

Aptly titled, The Way That We Rhyme references a lyric from Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic,” a lengthy shout out to the feminist foremothers and heroines – from Angela Davis and Gertrude Stein to Kara Walker and Yoko Ono – who have shaped and inspired the current generation. Fittingly, Le Tigre’s homage includes Vaginal Davis and Tammy Rae Carland, two artists featured in the Yerba Buena show.

Le Tigre performs “Hot Topic”

Tonight’s opening party features San Francisco punk outfit Brilliant Colors and folk-bluesy rockers The Sarees, a DJ set by Erase Errata’s Jenny Hoyston, and performances by feminist performance and video art collective Toxic Titties and crazy comedienne extraordinaire Dynasty Handbag, as well as a film screening and interactive projects by a number of the participating artists.

Dynasty Handbag – “The Quiet Storm” By Jibz Cameron, Hedia Maron 2007

But it seems that Saturday – with its full schedule of interactive programs – is the day not to be missed.

Superlist: Youth record labels

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› superlists@sfbg.com

Youth record labels are fast becoming one of the most innovative and effective ways to combine job development, skills training, and music production for many working-class youth of color. At these programs, there are no holier-than-thou "back when I was a kid" lectures from out-of-touch old fogies. Instead, kids study DJ’ing under DJ Quest and get stage-presence tips from Zion I. Teens also take an active role in the creation, production, and management of their projects and think about their work as something larger than simply entertainment. From beat-making classes to benefit concerts for immigrant rights, young folks are helping lead the cry for transformation at every level of society — all to an intricately produced soundtrack. What follows are the heavy-hitting youth record labels in the Bay.

The DJ Project (440 Potrero, SF; 415-487-6700, info@thedjproject.com) is a youth entrepreneurship program built on the foundations of hip-hop and community empowerment. As part of Horizons Unlimited, the DJ Project offers classes in DJ’ing, music production, and promotions taught by some of the Bay’s finest independent hip-hop artists. Aside from simply making hip-hop, young artists discuss how such forces as racism, love, homophobia, and anger inform their lyrics. After they record their first CD, the students learn graphic design skills in order to create their own cover art. Recently, the project produced the film Grind & Glory (2007), which showcased local young hip-hop artists competing for a chance to play at the annual hip-hop festival Rock the Bells.

Youth Movement Records (368 24th St., Oakl.; 510-832-4212, contact@youthmovementrecords.org) is one of the more popular youth record labels around. Their program offers classes such as music production and entertainment law and boasts a stellar success rate, with over 90 percent of its graduates earning their high school diplomas. Already, YMR acts have toured the country in support of Amnesty International. The program features tutelage from folks such as Zion I and Brotha Los of Company of Prophets.

Bay Unity Music Project (BUMP) Records (1611 Telegraph, Oakl.; 510-836-1056, bump@bavc.org), a Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) program, is a youth-run record label that gives its participants hands-on experience with music making. BUMP Beats is an introductory music production and composition program geared toward youth with little or no previous experience. Students get the opportunity to perform and distribute their work with local Bay Area promoters.

Cov Records (220 Harrison, Oakl.; 510-625-7800, www.myspace.com/covrecords) is a community-based music and production center serving young adults in Oakland between the ages of 13 and 25. As a project of the Covenant House community center and homeless shelter, Cov Records has produced documentaries, offered classes in video and music production, and teamed up with the Stop the Violence campaign to organize Turf Unity shows, which get young folks from rival neighborhoods to create art together.

Shelter

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REVIEW To a certain extent, almost all surfing flicks carry undercurrents of homoeroticism — but rarely do those vibes take center stage. With Shelter, that’s not the case. Starring Trevor Wright (a TV vet making his big-screen debut) and Brad Rowe (Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss), the movie is about two young surfer dudes whose practice of spending endless hours together either half-naked in the water or bonding over neverending six-packs of beer leads to a passionate love affair. So don’t expect to see any radical wave-riding here. Instead, you should count on a sweet and tender rendering of innocent flirtation (and the awkwardness, playfulness, and silliness that come with it), and of the complex deeper emotional phases that a person falling in love goes through. Although Shelter doesn’t avoid being a bit sappy every now and then — and at times the acting feels a bit forced — the truly amazing chemistry between the two protagonists overshadows many of the film’s imperfections. The first movie to be produced under the here! Films Independent Film Initiative (which helps thematically edgy and thus noncommercial projects with all aspects of production), Shelter also marks director Jonah Markowitz’s first attempt at feature filmmaking. If you missed it at Frameline last summer, here’s a chance to make amends.

SHELTER opens Fri/28 in San Francisco.

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