Film

Positive space

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In 2003, filmmaker and CalArts professor Thom Andersen completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, an ambitious and inventive undertaking that combines clips from a library’s worth of different movies set in Los Angeles into a long, discursive, highly opinionated film. Divided into three parts, this treatise presents an intriguing account of the numerous ways Los Angeles has been cinematically conceived, represented, and perceived. Through the cameras of thousands of filmmakers, Hollywood’s neighbor has been viewed either in accordance with or (more often) at odds with its particular geography and range of architectural styles.

The German artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz is attempting a similar spatial exploration — one that started long before Andersen’s, in 1993, and one that continues today. The five films in the Pacific Film Archive’s Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography are part of a larger "Photography and Beyond" project Emigholz has been working on for the last 24 years. This handful of works captures constructions by important but somewhat neglected architects of the 20th century. One aim of Emigholz’s endeavor is to provide an alternative kind of biography: a biography in which knowledge about the architect is derived directly from his or her creations.

All five of the cinematic explorations of space in "Architecture as Autobiography" are presented starkly, so that, as Emigholz explained to Siegfried Zelinski in an interview, "The eye reverts back to what it always was: an extension and interface to the brain, and one that needs no codes. It thinks and feels at the same time."

In Emigholz’s movies, there is no voice-over narration to share background facts about architects, their aesthetics, and the reasons for their historical importance. Instead, intertitles on the screen inform the viewer about the names of the buildings, their locations, when they were built, and when they were photographed. This information is juxtaposed with long, medium, and close static shots of the buildings, accompanied by sound from the locations.

Described this plainly, Emigholz’s films might sound boring. But watching them proves to be a surprising and fascinating experience. In Sullivan’s Banks (1993-2000), the long succession of shots depicting banks that the American architect Louis H. Sullivan was commissioned to build from 1906 to 1920 slowly allows us, the viewers, to make certain connections. Through observing Sullivan’s banks in their surroundings (from various exterior angles) and in the context of their use, we come to understand his intention of harmoniously uniting function and form. Upon entering one of Sullivan’s imposing, cathedral-like buildings, you feel like you’re in a serious institution — one where your finances are absolutely secure.

Similarly, in Maillart’s Bridges (2001), the quiet repetition of photographs featuring bridges designed and built between 1910 and 1935 by the Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart points to his obsessive experimentation with arches. In looking at Maillart’s curved constructions, one can’t help but marvel at their flowing shapes and forms, and also at the discrete ways in which they mingle with their natural environs.

This concern is even more evident in Goff in the Desert (2002-2003), where the filmmaker unobtrusively records — repeatedly — buildings that American architect Bruce Goff created from the 1920s through the 1970s. Goff’s attempts at simuutf8g the environments around his buildings yield imaginative constructions. Multilevel room divisions and novel uses of circle formations are two characteristics of his unique approach to spatial perception.

The residences in Schindler’s Houses (2007) — including one owned and occupied by none other than Los Angeles Plays Itself filmmaker Thom Andersen — are less preoccupied with fitting within a broader physical environment and more concerned with the harmony of their interiors. In the process of observing the ornament-free constructions that the Austrian American architect Rudolph Schindler built in Los Angeles from 1921 to 1952, Emigholz reveals the architect’s insistence on creating spacious, breezy, and minimal interiors for outwardly bulky houses.

The relative freedom Emigholz allows the viewer in terms of contemplation is one major reason among many that give his unusual films intrigue. Emigholz’s filmmaking technique moves several steps beyond — or in a different direction from — Los Angeles Plays Itself‘s concerns regarding spatial conception, representation, and perception. It does so while remaining true to one filmmaker’s particular perspective of how we experience and understand space.

"I believe that everyone perceives space differently, and that art and structure arise out of the perception of these nuances," Emigholz has said. In his films, this idea takes a number of different forms. Through his own understanding of space, Emigholz interacts with and presents other people’s conceptions and perceptions of it. In the process, he also creates his own artful cinematic structures — films that stimulate our understanding of space while in a sense simultaneously creating and navigating a visual maze. Mind boggling, isn’t it?

HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: ARCHITECTURE AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Through April 17

$5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Where’s Otto?

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ISBN REAL Graphic novels, obviously, aren’t just movies with a lot of missing frames. In the hands of artists like David B. or Craig Thompson, the elastic potential of their subjects, and of the panels that hold them, is realized in a manner entirely at odds with the medium of film.

From the perspective of screenwriters, however — particularly ones beaten repeatedly over the head with the knotty stick of the studio system — that’s nothing that can’t be worked out over a cup of coffee. More and more frustrated writers and directors are reviving their dead film and television projects in the form of comics and graphic novels, either as a last, affordable option or as a way of seeing an original vision make it through the production process intact. Joss Whedon could follow his and not the WB’s muse with the illustrated-only eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and certainly no one was knocking down Richard Kelly’s door to film the six-part prequel to Southland Tales.

Alex Cox, writer and director of the 1984 cult classic Repo Man, also has seen the light. His sequel to that film, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday (Gestalt Publishing, 164 pages, $19.95), is finally coming out, after more than a decade in the drawer, as a graphic novel. The script, written for the screen in the mid-1990s, was presented unsuccessfully to Universal and then later was the source material for an unfinished independent venture. So Cox posted the screenplay on his Web site, as well as dozens of others he has written or cowritten, with the open offer of a yearlong license to anyone interested in making a film.

Comics artist Chris Bones responded with a graphic novel proposal. The finished version, with artistic contributions by Justin Randall, is a richly drawn and smartly assembled festival of scuzz.

Waldo, as one might expect, answers the questions Repo Man raised with equivocation and deferment, and adds a couple of revelations that are quite cool if I understand them right.

You’ll recall that Repo Man left our hero, Otto, as he was shooting off into space in a glowing green 1964 Chevy Malibu. What we are kinda informed of right off the bat in the sequel is that Otto, now calling himself Waldo (presumably in a legal sidestep), has come back from a 10-year stint on Mars, maybe, though he thinks he’s only been gone for the night. Expecting to find his numskull parents where he left them on the couch, he shows up at their door only to discover he owes rent to a couple of bachelors (one "confirmed") now living there in meticulously rendered squalor.

Waldo more or less shrugs off his situation and proceeds to hop from one doomed job to the next, each of them overseen by the same mysterious man, though under different names. All the while, he abuses the trusting nature of the Russian Shopping Network and makes several attempts to use free tickets to Hawaii he earned by sitting through a real estate pitch. (I’m still not sure what was glowing in the Malibu’s trunk in Cox’s movie.)

Of course, there are more aliens and whatnot, but the strangest thing is Otto-now-Waldo’s change in temperament. The edgy, snotty Emilio Estevez of Repo Man is nowhere in sight. Waldo is a gentle, courteous kind of punk who says things like, "I’ll just redouble my efforts … buy a printer, get these job applications out, find another job ASAP." Waldo must have learned the word "redouble" in space, where he also picked up a considered cheeriness that could have been mistaken for maturity if it weren’t so apparent that Cox is up to something.

It helps to know that Cox is not one to shy away from the polemical, particularly at the expense of economic imperialism. The introduction to X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press, 304 pages, $17.95), an upcoming book about his experiences as a filmmaker, is only a few angry pen strokes shy of a screed, and his 1987 film Walker lampooned — not very elegantly, really — the 19th-century American mercenary William Walker’s overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Amongst Cox’s movies, Three Businessmen, a 1998 love child of the gospel according to Luke and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), presents the closest echoes of Waldo. Its characters share Waldo’s aimless, profligate compliance with the dictates of modern capitalism.

And that’s really what Waldo’s Hawaiian Adventure is about, probably.

Would you finance that movie?

The Duchess Of Langeais

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REVIEW Acclaimed director Jacques Rivette is still at the top of his game with his latest film, adapted from an Honoré de Balzac novella. The Duchess of Langeais is an opulent period drama that doesn’t feel like one — its story is fresh and alive, and has contemporary resonance. Guillaume Depardieu (Gerard’s son) gives a winning performance as the handsome general Armand de Montriveau. Humiliated when he’s refused by the Duchess (played flawlessly by Jeanne Balibar), it is only when seeking his revenge that he awakens her love. Photographed by William Lubtchansky, Duchess easily has to be one of the most beautiful pictures so far this year. With the richest art direction and wardrobe the genre has to offer, Rivette’s new wave sensibility shines through. Existential wit and love à la de Sade bring to life Paris of the 1820s, a juicy setting riddled with hypocrisy and vanity. Duchess evokes two films from 1975: Françoise Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Bombarded as we are with blockbuster-style films that are about as personal as a box of cereal, the release of this film is notable. Told almost exclusively in cool blues, Rivette holds up the mirror to our Bonaparte-esque swollen faces, revealing decadence-gone-awry results that wouldn’t be out of place in the 21st century.

THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS Opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters.

Deja vu, times two

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TAKE ONE With his short film Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais introduced the world to his idiosyncratic and esoteric filmmaking, while offering an initial glance at his obsessions with memory, time, and space. He would further elaborate on this trio of fixations in his extraordinary debut feature, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). But his second feature, Last Year in Marienbad (1961), is where Resnais truly allowed himself to grapple with these issues, as well as with cinematic form.

Because of its enigmatic plot, mysterious characters, and various peculiarities, Marienbad has inspired a wide variety of discussions about the nature of time and memory, and about the divisions and links between reality and fantasy. Although such explorations are totally valid, the most striking — and perhaps somewhat neglected — of Marienbad‘s many wonderfully bizarre features is its treatment of space.

Resnais’ choice and use of locations is very imposing. Marienbad‘s two protagonists — including Delphine Seyrig in only her second feature role — encounter each other at a hotel, and try to figure out whether they had met and fallen in love at that same place a year ago. The hotel is actually composed from the interiors and exteriors of various grandiose chateaux in Germany. Impressive scales, strictly geometric gardens, and an exhaustive array of rooms immediately give the impression of a sumptuous maze in which one can get trapped and become lost.

Employing repetitive long pans and dolly shots throughout most of the film, Resnais painstakingly observes the hotel’s interiors, emphasizing their excessive ornamentation. Endless corridors give way to doorways that yield yet more hallways and living rooms. All of them are decorated to perfection; all of them feel terribly empty, cold, still, and asphyxiating. These images are juxtaposed with shots that similarly observe the hotel’s occupants. Clad in their flamboyant Coco Chanel dresses, members of the bourgeoisie are shown aimlessly wondering around the hotel, engaging in commonplace activities and conversations.

By complimenting this visual pattern with eerie organ music, Resnais achieves a striking effect. As film professor and writer Laura Rascaroli puts it: “The [film recalls] one of the main features of baroque architecture, the use of a superabundance of details and decorative elements as a means of filling up the void and repressing the fear of nothingness, of oblivion, of death.”

Few filmmakers manage to treat space as more than mere background. Michelangelo Antonioni is one obvious example. In Marienbad, Resnais moves beyond an exploration of the creative possibilities that a film’s space has to offer. He goes so far as to use space to actually produce meaning. That idea, perhaps more than anything else, is what this ageless masterpiece is all about. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO To begin, a word for Sylvette Baudrot, “script girl” for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s arch postmodernist plaything, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Film critics are often guilty of underplaying contributions by screenwriters and cinematographers, but script girls? You’d better believe it with a film as rigorously mathematical as Marienbad. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s creation defies continuity, but it rests heavily on bridges and echoes, its staging directions endowed with interlocking, psychic value — all impossible, one assumes, without Baudrot’s attentive supervision. Resnais goofily nods to his obsessive predecessor Alfred Hitchcock when he places a cardboard cutout of the master of suspense in an early shot. But Baudrot provides the direct link: she was the script supervisor on Hitchcock’s 1955 Riviera dalliance, To Catch a Thief.

Credentials aside, Last Year at Marienbad is an elegant whirlpool, all the more notable for being made amid the fuck-all bluster of the early French new wave. At a sodden grand hotel, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) implores “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year and agreed to reconvene away from the watchful eye of A’s husband “M” (Sacha Pitoëff). Some of the aspects surrounding these characters seem hopelessly musty, encrusted by decades of swollen undergraduate debate. There is the flattening score, and the famous strategy game that M always wins. Try not to giggle at those scenes in which a character’s bulging eyes conjure so many Universal B-movies — indeed, Pitoëff seems to have been cast for his gaunt shape, evocative as it is of Karloffs and Lugosis past.

And yet, Marienbad‘s distancing front-line of attack remains a radical proposition: erotic obsession defanged of the eros, and further soused in sounds and images that seem, if not deceitful, then at least unverifiable. At the center of this opaque sphere is Seyrig who, as A, has the unenviable task of making something of being more than a marionette. The film is most symphonic — and terrifying — in those moments when Resnais’ camera movements collude with Albertazzi’s direct address, simultaneously conjecturing and ensnaring the imagined A.

Marienbad‘s chilly core endures despite the extent to which its formalist shock tactics have been assimilated into mainstream productions. In stretching cinematic space-time like so much chewing gum, the film provides a direct link between Louis Feuillade’s shape-shifting serials (1913’s Fantômas, 1915’s Les Vampires), Stanley Kubrick’s gliding horror (1980’s The Shining, in particular) and latter-day brainteasers like Memento (2000), Being John Malkovich and The Matrix (both 1999). If this is Resnais’ unexpected lineage, Seyrig’s A keeps a different company. She’s still lost in Marienbad‘s hall-of-mirrors (the last line, like a curse: “Losing your way in the still night, alone with me”). But while there, she might catch a reflection of some kindred spirits: Kim Novak, of course, but also Rita Hayworth, Laura Dern, and least suspecting of them all, Rose in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936). (Max Goldberg)

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Through March 27

Opens Fri/21; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

SXSW: Lou, Lou, la, Lou, Lou…

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Hal Willner and Lou Reed get down and sorta brief at SXSW. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

Lean, not so mean, and ready with both sage music-biz advice and disarming wisecracks – that was SXSW keynote speaker Lou Reed, chatting comfortably with collaborator-producer Hal Willner two hours ago today, March 13, at the Austin Convention Center.

The pair discussed Reed’s new concert doc capturing his 1973 LP, Berlin, at the behest of Julian Schnabel who considers the record one of his favorites. Reed talked about recreating the album in Europe, “but it won’t be here. But not in LA. Music business town. Not in the states.”

They showed a clip from the film of his band playing “Men of Good Fortune” with particular intensity. Cribbing from his own 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel drifts watery, transparent, shadowy imagery, seemingly pulled from the photo collage backdrop behind the band. The group includes guitarist Steve Hunter, Willner pointed out. Reed added that Hunter was in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal band, which was actually Alice Cooper’s combo. “It’s emotional music – that’s what’s so great about rock ‘n’ roll,” said Reed. Berlin was marked by the time: 1973, a time much like our own. “Don’t you agree? Terrible.”

Desperately seeking cinema

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Jennifer Reeves’s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries. As we see ourselves reflected in the water’s surface after tossing in a coin, so too is Reeves’s presence apparent in the handmade, fussed-over quality of her moving pictures. I use that broad designation pointedly, as her films are as varied in material and form as they are prosaic in mood and temperament. Over 15 years of independent filmmaking, the New York–based artist has created hand-painted films in the style of her mentor Stan Brakhage, freewheeling shorts, fiction fantasias, 16mm double-projections, feature narratives, and experiments in high definition. San Francisco Cinematheque hosts the formally restless filmmaker for a three-program tour.

Reeves’s early shorts channel riot-grrrl spark with scratched-up film stock. Elations in Negative (1990) is a good sample of the celluloid-mad sexual politics of these 16mm beaters, though Taste It Nine Times (1992), with its vivid pickle-biting innuendos, will be missed from the Cinematheque run. In painted films like The Girl’s Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001), Reeves’s appropriation of Brakhage’s technique conveys playful femininity in color, pattern, and music.

Though Reeves toyed with narrative early on, most notably in 1996’s psychodrama Chronic, 2004’s The Time We Killed represented a kind of breakthrough. An unhurried 94 minutes passes through the dark mirror of an agoraphobic poet keeping to her New York apartment during the buildup to the Iraq War. "Terrorism brought me out of the house, but the war on terror drove me back in," Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) says in her peripatetic voice-over, adding later, "I’m afraid of catching the amnesia of the American people." Reeves’s magnetically immersive filmmaking is such that the political situation neatly folds into an extended experiment in subjectivity — besides being an unstinting portrait of madness (it’s everywhere in this film: in a record’s spin and neighbors’ voices echoing through the walls, in dogs’ faces, bathwater, and masturbation), The Time We Killed also serves as an understated chronicle of the collateral psychic and moral damage of our country’s manufactured warmongering.

The Time We Killed is heavier than Reeves’s other work, though it’s not without humor; she finds the ridiculous, unwieldy side of depression in Robyn’s litany of death fantasies and a painfully misguided interaction with a curious neighbor. Robyn’s locked in, but Reeves is formally unfettered, mixing conventional 16mm footage with lyrical, associative streams of inner life shot in high-contrast black-and-white. The filmmaker raids her home-movie archive for the film, in addition to using her own apartment and acting as Jarnot’s body double during the extended shooting. This air of transference makes The Time We Killed weirdly transparent, so we feel as intimately connected to Reeves’s isolated work in the editing room as we do to Robyn’s experience in the apartment.

Since The Time We Killed, Reeves has returned to more typically experimental filmmaking. Her 2006–07 Light Work variations strike an ideal balance of abstract and representational visions, in the process cataloging the changing textures of cinema. In the affecting He Walked Away (2007), Reeves dissects, refracts, and abstracts footage from her older movies to create a tri-tipped memorial piece in which the intrinsically elegiac nature of cinema is connected to the dissolution of film technology, which is then tied to the disappearing loves and friendships that shadow personal lives.

As with Guy Maddin — another filmmaker who favors overheated evocations — one has the sense that Reeves could make a hundred interesting movies from the same scraps of footage. "I want to counter the turncoats who say film’s dead," Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. "Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She’d be pissed." But if she were Jennifer Reeves, she certainly wouldn’t slow down.

IMMERSIVE CINEMA: JENNIFER REEVES

Artists’ Television Access, Sat/15, 8:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sun/16, 7:30 p.m.;
Tues/18, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

See Rep Clock for venue information

Martial bliss

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TAKE ACTION Hey, Donnie Yen fans! Director Wilson Yip’s Flash Point — in which the charismatic martial arts star (2002’s Hero, 1993’s Iron Monkey) plays an aggro cop on gangster-beatdown detail — is actually getting a local theatrical release. Currently, Yen is in Shanghai shooting Yip Man, which he describes as "the story of Bruce Lee’s teacher, a master of the Wing Chun kung fu style." He’s a busy guy, and he could probably flatten any fool with a flick of his pinky finger. Fortunately, he typed up some answers to my e-mailed questions instead.

SFBG On Flash Point — among other films — you’re credited as the "action director." How does that role differ from "fight choreographer," which you’ve served as on films like 2002’s Blade II and 2005’s SPL (a.k.a. Kill Zone)? Is it difficult to direct yourself when you’re also acting in the scene?

DONNIE YEN I think it’s a difference between the way action is treated in Hong Kong and in Hollywood. [In Hong Kong,] my job is to "direct" the action, and when I’m shooting the fight sequences, I take over the set. I choose the camera angles and see how the drama intercuts with the action. In Hollywood, you "choreograph" working with the main director. In the old days of Hong Kong action cinema, when the action director worked, the "drama" director went home!

SFBG Which fight scene are you most proud of?

DY Of my own stuff? I’d have to say the final fight in Flash Point, between Collin Chou and myself. That was definitely the toughest action scene of my career, and I think it shows! I really like the way we managed to apply MMA [mixed martial arts] techniques on-screen, especially some of the dynamic takedowns, which we haven’t really seen before.

SFBG You’ve worked on both Chinese and American films. What’s the biggest difference between the two industries? Are you interested in having a Hollywood breakthrough like Jackie Chan or Jet Li?

DY As I mentioned earlier, I have much more control over the final product in Hong Kong. I mean, on Flash Point, I’m the producer, the star, the action director…. Of course, I have to give credit to [director] Wilson Yip, who I have a great relationship with. This is our third film together. However, I would still like to work in Hollywood, providing it’s the right role in the right project.

SFBG Flash Point is a "modern" film, but you’re best known for period films like Hero. Which do you prefer?

DY Honestly, I just like to keep challenging myself. For example, Flash Point has a really raw action style, very MMA influenced, but now I’m starting Yip Man, which is about Bruce Lee’s teacher, and so it’s all classical kung fu movements but presented, hopefully, in a new and dynamic way. I would say that, technically, period films are more challenging, because, like with Hero, you’re performing in traditional Chinese clothing, and the movements tend to be more complicated. The modern films, like Kill Zone and Flash Point, are tough because of the degree of real contact when you get slammed about during a fight scene. They’re both challenging in different ways.

SFBG What are your thoughts on CGI-enhanced fight scenes versus the old-fashioned kind?

DY We used a lot of CGI in [2006’s] Dragon Tiger Gate, because the story and the style of action demanded it. I think it’s probably been overused in some films to compensate for the fact that the stars of the films can’t actually do their own action! In my own films, I tend towards keeping it as real as possible, and we only use CGI for shots that would really be impossible to do live on the set. There’s definitely very little CGI in Flash Point!

Flash Point opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters

Lagerfeld Confidential

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REVIEW As far as I know, Karl Lagerfeld is the only fashion designer to have had his likeness made into a collectible figurine. With his instantly identifiable uniform that foppishly mixes old (the white ponytail and high starched collars) and new (his omnipresent sunglasses, a small mine’s worth of silver jewelry, exquisitely cut clothes in every shade of black), he has become as iconic as the Chanel bouclé suits he has designed for the house for 20-plus years. Rodolphe Marconi’s documentary Lagerfeld Confidential performs a nice trick in letting us think we’re getting a candid portrait of the man behind the sunglasses. Depth, though, is a tall order when his subject declares, "I don’t want to be real in other people’s minds; I want to be an apparition." What we do learn across this extended interview, goaded on by Marconi’s softball needling, is that Lagerfeld’s mother was a formative influence (she "exuded frivolity" and "made slaves of everyone") and that he was a sexually precocious youth. But as Wilde and Warhol have shown, the dandy’s mode of address is aphoristic, not confessional. Given the frequency with which he dispenses such obfuscatory pronouncements as "Every friendship needs a sword of Damocles hanging over it" and "Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous, and unfair," perhaps Lagerfeld’s next project should be a little book of quotations à la Chairman Mao. Of course, Lagerfeld’s would be bound in black leather.

LAGERFELD CONFIDENTIAL opens Fri/14 at the Roxie Film Center.

“Friedlander”

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REVIEW Throughout Lee Friedlander’s 50-year oeuvre, much of which is now on display at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the photographer has been lauded for his liveliness, optimism, and mobility. Yet his paean to modern Americana often resembles monochrome memento mori. Taken as a whole, Friedlander’s work has always seemed driven to two poles: the ephemeral and the haunting.

Heavily impressed by the avant-naturalism of European photographers Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the post–World War II experimentalism of Robert Frank, Friedlander staked his claim at a moment in the 1950s when the photograph transcended the moribund category of journalistic tool and became its own art form. Modeling much of his working method around Cartier-Bresson’s so-called decisive moment, Friedlander’s timeless images still have a striking past tense about them. Now ossified on film, these thousand microcosmic moments, captured throughout the 1960s and ’70s, seem like lively obituaries.

While Friedlander first made a name for himself as a contractor for Atlantic Records — where he shot such musicians as Ornette Coleman — he was never a celebrity photographer. In fact, his most intriguing work resulted from a personal obsession with traveling and shooting the country, crisscrossing between New York and his home state of Washington. And so the images of nocturnal motel rooms, cycloptic TV sets, and storefront tessellations conjure the American dynamism and dread of Vladimir Nabokov or David Lynch. The plethora of windows and mirrors in his street photography admit countless apertures through which to see his subjects. But Friedlander’s playful sense of humor always appears just within the clutches of something inexplicably sinister — like the cartoonish shadows that often hover into his frame. Though his more recent work — in portraiture, nudes, and particularly in nature — may suffer slightly from the inevitable cooling of youth’s ambition, Friedlander’s baroque attention to detail and depth of field are unmatched. This is a definitive exhibition on one of America’s most ingenious, albeit conflicted, photographers. The photographer’s son Erik Friedlander will perform pieces from his album Block Ice and Propane (SkipStone, 2007) on April 24, 8 p.m., $12–$15, at Phyllis Wattis Theater.

"FRIEDLANDER" Through May 18. Mon.–Tues., Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

$7–$12.50, free for members and 12 and under. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Reveille in reverb

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The first thing fans will notice about Beach House’s second album, Devotion (Carpark), is that it hews to the same gauzy sonic architecture of their 2006 eponymous debut. An elegant combination of keyboard beats, organ drones, apparitional electric slide guitar, and Victoria Legrand’s molasses vocals gave Beach House a golden glow that sent music scribes running to their thesaurus for "autumnal" synonyms. These elements sound thicker on Devotion, though a few spins down the line it becomes apparent that the difference lies more in the compositions themselves than in any studio trickery.

This isn’t a small distinction, given our tendency to fetishize certain sounds. Phil Spector productions, Dusty Springfield laments, and Lee Hazelwood bonanzas all have brilliant surfaces, but they also have the depth of classical songwriting, complete with bridges, vamps, and theatrical flourishes. Legrand, the niece of French film composer Michel Legrand, grew up in a musical atmosphere. The two of us have a phone date, but work and a sick dog interfere, leaving her to e-mail me from her Baltimore home about her glam-rocking father ("My papa wore tight purple satin pants, with hair down to ‘there’<0x2009>") and her studies at Paris’s International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq ("I was trained classically, and I know Alex [Scally, her Beach House bandmate] also has an affinity towards the classical, old-fashioned world, so I think it’s a given we’d be into the Zombies and . . . watered-down show-tune buildups").

And so we get a folded gem like Devotion‘s "Heart of Chambers," in which Legrand breathily asks, "Would you be my longtime baby?" On "Holy Dances," a drowsy, shaker-spurred verse flowers into the sunburst of Scally’s arpeggios. The centerpiece chorus of "All the Years" echoes with the same kind of distant regret running through the best of old girl-group records. Still, the purest pleasure on Devotion might be its sole cover, a version of Daniel Johnston’s "Some Things Last a Long Time": Beach House distills the song to a plucked melody, lolling drum beat — it’s like listening to a "Be My Baby" single at 33 rpm — and Legrand’s barely there inflection. "We felt compelled by the fragile essence of the song and merely wanted to capture it, if only for a brief moment," she writes.

Across Devotion, Legrand’s phrasing emerges as a major shaping force. She knows how to pause — inserting the breath before the chorus in "Turtle Island" and a delicious lingering note over at the end of "You Came to Me." And her sometimes slumberous drawl gives the 1960s pop orchestrations a European edge — Nico comes to mind — and from that same era Legrand also seems to have picked up the special knowledge that spelling a word out, as with "D.A.R.L.I.N.G.," always makes it sexier.

"We don’t have full rock band power, but that can also be detrimental to songwriting," Legrand writes. "Being a duo enables us to start simply and build from there." It also allows the twosome to maintain a key measure of intimacy. Though their preproduced effects emulate yesteryear’s studio magic, listeners never lose sight of the modest means of this music. Devotion‘s cover image strikes a similar balance, signaling formality — Legrand and Scally sit at a candlelit table — while admitting a homegrown touch: the album’s title is spelled out in a cake’s icing, and Legrand’s casual bare foot peeks out at the bottom of the frame.

If Beach House established the group’s palette, Devotion sees the duo working more confidently with the brush. When I describe some of the new disc’s brightest passages as "Technicolor moments" to Legrand, she replies: "I personally heard Technicolor in ‘Turtle Island’ during the bridge because all of a sudden the voices burst out, and it feels literally like paint and light are bursting through . . . a soft burst like a bubble in slow motion." That beats "autumnal" any day.

BEACH HOUSE

With Anaura and Best Wishes

Sat/15, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Dress sharp

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REVIEW Don’t tell anyone, but I have a secret fetish. Nothing turns me on like a new pair of shoes, and few bring me to shoegasm like sexy stilettos. So I put on my favorite pair of Gucci patent-leather tuxedo shoes and headed down to Stiletto, clubutante Parker Day’s arty party at Asia SF, in search of the perfect footwear.

Day named the night after the seductive heels, but it also alludes to the discreetly slim knife — both of which are deadly in the hands of the Pam Anderson B-movie character Barb Wire. "It’s sharp and it’s sexy," Day said. "It gets to the point." But it was The Warriors, a 1979 cult classic about New York City street gangs at war, that set the theme for that night’s party. As footage from the film was projected onto a side wall, the music morphed genres, from hip-hop and hit pop to electronic and indie-rock remixes for an audience as diverse as The Warriors‘s cast — and equally reminiscent of the early-’80s Big Apple. Fab Five Freddy, Blondie, and Madonna occupy the same turf without incident.

The crowd’s footwear was just as varied, but cowboy boots and Converse All-Stars were the most heavily represented in The Warriors–inspired fashion show. Taking cues from the movie, models worked leather vests and gunmetal belts into fierce ensembles, which they paraded down the runway like gangsters. A bit later, audience members were able to participate in a Warriors–themed costume contest. Not to ruffle anyone’s fab feathers, but I think my own shoes were the ultimate winners.

STILETTO

Third Friday of the month, 10 p.m.–3 a.m., $8

Asia SF

201 Ninth St, SF

http://www.myspace.com/stilettosf

Beautiful losers

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Great movies stay with you in the oddest ways. In the days after I first saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, I was preternaturally attuned to the sound of skateboards dragging the street outside my bedroom window—the slow tug of concrete, the bumping waves of wheels. This ambient strain surrounds Paranoid Park‘s cherubic point of focus: Alex (Gabe Nevins), a sleepy-eyed skater waiting out his parents’ divorce in a Portland, Ore., suburb. He occupies most of the film’s exquisitely composed frames, though he’s more a figure etched in light than a proper protagonist.

Figure-eight narrations and slow-moving Steadicam tracks have underpinned Van Sant’s last couple of films (2003’s Elephant, 2005’s Last Days), though they’re more artfully embedded in Paranoid Park‘s fragrant sprawl, not least because of the visual equivalencies provided by the film’s skateboarding footage. Blake Nelson’s airless young-adult novel presents Alex’s story as an extended confessional letter. Van Sant dissembles chronology and inflects the narration with associative freedom.

Most immediately, Van Sant folds Nelson’s plot to delay the central trauma, which first enters our vision peripherally through a detective’s investigation and a local news report. With that said, narrowing the effect of this organizing principle is a little like trying to get a fix on Phil Spector’s reverb or Gerhard Richter’s gray — Van Sant’s placid puzzling is a textural aesthetic before it’s a device. Where Nelson’s moral tale is a streamlined account, Van Sant’s adaptation aims for something more transparent and sublime. His Alex is at once layered and laid bare.

This channeling begins with a slow-creeping tracking shot as Alex is interviewed by a detective. What begins as a conversation eventually lands as a full-frame portrait of the adolescent, the detective’s words ("What’s your parental situation?") left hanging in the air, irrelevant. As Nevins garbles his lines, the boundary between the nonprofessional actor and his character becomes palpably blurred. Does Van Sant’s MySpace casting call automatically qualify as tawdriness? Not when Paranoid Park maintains its enigmatic distance. Indeed, Van Sant renders the film’s MacBook surfaces — the subdued luminescence, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and soundtrack shuffle from Elliot Smith to the Juliet of the Spirits score all evoke a MacBook — as something unique and refined.

Like so many high school boys, Alex is essentially passive (see the film’s hilarious sex scene, with talky girlfriend Jennifer’s blond wisps dissolving Alex’s face like something from Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon). Van Sant captures this state via formal permeability, rigorously designing Paranoid Park‘s memory machine as a head trip. Strips of slow motion, a narrow-depth-of-field, ping-ponging sound, a mumbled voice-over — all these elements serve to cover the largely amateur cast but also to project Alex’s environmental interiority. This tendency reaches a swollen apex during a posttraumatic shower. The camera again draws in, and Christopher Doyle’s typically luscious lensing isolates every droplet; the lighting darkens, and the blistering sheets of water-noise are overlaid with thick forest sounds as Alex drops his head, revealing the bathroom wallpaper’s bird motif.

There’s no buried logic to Paranoid Park, and even though it’s shaped as much like a jigsaw as Donnie Darko (2001) and Rian Johnson’s underappreciated Brick (2005), it doesn’t invite solutions. Whether or not Alex’s withholding aura is read as a symbolic closeting, Van Sant’s direction is some kind of sorcery, especially in those B-roll streams of easy riders through which the film’s story expands to encompass all breathless teenage riots. Paranoid Park ends with these images after cutting from Alex asleep in biology class, dreaming of flying. He never touches the ground, always hovering between idyll and responsibility, the dream and his place in it. (Max Goldberg)

PARANOID PARK

Opens March 21 at Bay Area theaters
www.myspace.com/gusvansant

Diamonds are harder than gym bodies

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Black Lizard made me gay. Or, at the very least, Kenji Fukasaku’s 1968 jewel-toned mod noir opened my quasicloseted 16-year-old eyes to a certain queer aesthetic — one which foregrounds its own artifice by using Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome as wallpaper; one which dresses deviance in a gown with a 25-foot-long feathered train; and one which knows that the flipside of fabulousness is utter ridiculousness. It certainly wasn’t something I was seeing in the twink-filled issues of XY foisted upon me by my Pride ring–wearing, secret community college beau, but something closer to what I later found in John Waters’s films with Divine, James Bidgood’s diaphanous beefcake photography, and Ronald Firbank’s deeply purple prose.

However, unlike the above artists, Fukasaku was heterosexual, and Black Lizard represents an anomaly within a career that included much macho studio boilerplate. Even at his finest, Fukasaku had a flair for rough stuff: he directed some of the best yakuza films ever made (Battles Without Honor and Humanity [1973–74]) and ended his career with 2000’s controversial adolescent bloodbath and political fable Battle Royale. Yet, as with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s practically flaming 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, there was just the right combination of elements (and most importantly, the right combination of peacocks involved) to make Black Lizard one of queer cinema’s unsung gems. Which is precisely why freelance curator T. Crandall chose the film to kick off his rep series, "The Revival House: Classic Queer Cinema," at Artists’ Television Access.

As clichéd as such a phrase may be, Black Lizard is awash in precious stones and glittering surfaces — but none shine with as much brilliance as the transvestite Akihiro Miwa (credited as Maruyama), who plays the titular jewel connoisseur and criminal mastermind that kidnaps specimens of human beauty to freeze them in eternal tableaux vivant on her island lair. The film is completely Akihiro’s: her entrances stop time, her song is a siren call which causes men to become her slaves, her lavish outfits become more so with each new scene. "The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event," quipped Roland Barthes (referring to Audrey, not Kate). Miwa’s face, whose mouth morphs rubber band–like from a sour moue into the devouring O of a deep cackle unleashed, is a gloss on Barthesian idealness.

Prior to Fukasaku’s film, Miwa had appeared in the same role in Yukio Mishima’s long-running stage adaptation of pre-World War II mystery and suspense novelist Edogawa Rampo’s 1934 short story "Black Lizard." Rampo’s tale was one of many starring his Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant detective Gogoro Akechi, who in Mishima and Fukaaku’s retelling falls heart-first into a dangerous pas de deux with his androgynous quarry. Miwa was a successful nightclub entertainer active in avant-garde theater (and she still is: last year, she starred in a Tokyo production of Jean Genet’s The Eagle Has Two Heads) when she met Mishima — our second of the aforementioned peacocks — who was haunting Tokyo gay bars to "research" his 1953 novel Forbidden Colors.

It’s not hard to see why Rampo’s story of a moribund ice queen obsessed with changeless beauty appealed to Mishima. By 1968, Mishima was that queen, fully immersed in his own homoerotic brand of aestheticized Emperor worship, which would reach its grisly apogee in his ritual suicide four years later. Prior to Black Lizard, his muscular body had already been given the coffee table book treatment in Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses (Aperture, 1971), where Hosoe Eiko’s photographs present the author posed as a martyred St. Sebastian or as a snowbound samurai. Appropriately, he makes his cameo in Fukasaku’s film as one of Black Lizard’s frozen exemplars of aesthetic perfection— a brawny sailor, no less.

In the end, though, diamonds are harder than gym-wrought muscle, and it was Miwa’s flash, not Mishima’s flesh, that held my attention — at least consciously — upon my first adolescent exposure to Black Lizard. Many viewings later, Mishima seems pathetically unaware of the self-parody he’s partaking in. But Miwa’s exquisite luminescence remains untarnished.

THE REVIVAL HOUSE: BLACK LIZARD

March 19, 8 p.m.; $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.myspace.com/therevivalhouse

There won’t be blood

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Michael Haneke would likely be offended if you said you enjoyed his movies — though no doubt he would enjoy hearing you were offended by them. The chill surface neutrality of a Haneke feature such as Caché (2005) is designed to intrigue and then frustrate — by depriving extreme situations of their usual sensationalism and neat narrative resolution so that we end up implicated by our own thwarted expectations. Even as a scold, Haneke is too disciplined to let us join him on his soapbox. The whole point lies in being discomfited.

The "normal" boy who kills a girl in Benny’s Video (1992); the bourgeoisie unraveling due to exposure of their own race and class prejudices in Code: Unknown (2000) and Caché; and an entire society reverting to primitive behaviors after unspecified catastrophe in Time of the Wolf (2003) are all so disturbing because they’re so banal. Even when portrayed by movie stars, these figures are willfully ordinary, observed at length performing dull tasks or making poor decisions for petty reasons. The one time he approached a conventional melodramatic arc and larger-than-life protagonist (if an antiheroine) was in the Elfride Jelinek adaptation of The Piano Teacher (2001) where Isabelle Huppert’s character embodies the masochistic role usually played by his viewers themselves.

None of these films are exactly date movies, but they still orbit an audience’s comfort zone more closely than Haneke’s most notorious film, the original 1997 Funny Games. Now, Haneke has made the seemingly perverse choice of creating a shot-for-shot remake as his first English-language feature. Actually, it’s a decision as coolly logical as any he’s made, since he has said more than once that the original is more a comment on US society and media than their Austrian equivalents.

Beyond its sheer unpleasantness, both language and subtitling prevented the original from reaching his target audience. Still, it’s unlikely people will be turning out en masse for Funny Games U.S., as the movie is being called everywhere but here. Those who do take the plunge are likely going to hate, hate, HATE it — which will be one way of gauging that Haneke’s subversion of standard genre rules is working as planned.

We meet the Farber family via eye-of-God aerial shots following their car to the exquisitely leafy countryside where their expansive lakeside summer home resides. With little Georgie (Devon Gearhart) in the backseat, Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) play guess-the-classical-composer. It’s too perfect and we know it, because Haneke incongruously interrupts their banter with a jarring blast of cacophonous death metal (actually a John Zorn piece) — the only music heard in the film that’s not ostensibly played from CD by an onscreen character. Horror, it suggests, might just be a dial flip away from intruding on this cozy trio.

Stopping short of their own electronic gate, the Farbers greet strangely uncommunicative neighbors standing on their lawn with two unknown men. Later, while father and son prep the sailboat, Ann gets a visit from Paul (Michael Pitt), who says he’s staying with the aforementioned neighbors and has been sent to borrow some eggs. Apologizing profusely, he nonetheless quickly manages to turn her hospitality into sputtering rage. Meanwhile, the dog disappears. Soon Paul is joined by Peter (Brady Corbet), his doppelgänger in tennis whites and floppy bangs. They look like consummate squeaky-clean preppies — or Hitler Youth. They have a not-long-hidden agenda. Things degenerate very quickly.

For all their sadism, Peter and Paul aren’t so much conventional villains as they are abstracts — tools to indict the viewer for participating in these games, or expecting anything like the usual fictive payoffs. The casting of the instantly recognizable Watts and Roth distracts at first, but Haneke’s approach (which employs agonizingly long takes, including one extreme instance that approaches 10 minutes in duration) and the actors’ grueling expressions of physical and emotional distress hit the right note of violated ordinariness.

It’s worth noting that perhaps Haneke’s most ingenious (and frequently overlooked) gambit is that there is almost no onscreen violence. As much as Funny Games feels like particularly merciless, graphic torture porn, the actual moments of assault are almost always cut away from or just out of frame. The one exception turns out to be Haneke’s single cruelest joke — and naturally, it’s on you. Without coming right out and saying it, Funny Games is now very much an answer to Hollywood norms and a larger cultural denial: here, violence is all suffering and no spectacle. *

FUNNY GAMES

Opens Fri/14 at Bay Area theaters

wip.warnerbros.com/funnygames

Girls Rocked!

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By Justin Juul

girlsrock.jpg

What? You haven’t seen “Girls Rock! The Movie” yet? It’s a documentary about a rock n’ roll camp in Portland Oregon that teaches young girls how to overcome oppression, fight off attackers, and most importantly how to rock! I recently attended the film’s East Bay premier at The Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley with my girlfriend, Heather Duthie, who has been working with the film’s co-directors Arnie Johnson (a frequent Guardian contributor) and Shane King for the past six months. So there’s your full disclosure of my interest in the movie. But really: I never knew girls could be so awesome!

Two different bands played to a sold-out theater full of prepubescent girls and their super hip mothers or fathers. The girls entered the theater timid and meek, but after hearing The Kitties play a punk version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” and watching Girls Rock! star, Palace, scream obscenities and punch people in the face, they were able to bang their heads and throw up the horns without a touch of bashfulness. Let’s hope and pray they stay the course. The last thing we need is another Britney, however punk rock she has become.

Here’s where to see it.

And here’s some pics from the event

Bombs — and bongs — away!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Peter

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Arguably no modern film director made a better sustained entrance than Peter Bogdanovich, whose first four features were all triumphs. Targets (1968) was a chilling conceit that brought Hollywood pretend terror (Boris Karloff basically playing himself) against a modern real-world horror, the randomly mass-murdering sniper. That critical success led to a major studio deal to adapt (with then wife and collaborator Polly Platt) Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show (1971), a melancholy black-and-white flashback to 1950s rural Texas. It won two Oscars, was nominated for five more, and served as a launching pad for actors including Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd. Next came What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a delightful, San Francisco–set nod to 1930s screwball comedies with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Its huge success was equaled by 1976’s Paper Moon, with O’Neal and daughter Tatum as a Depression-era confidence duo.

That’s a heady four hits in five years — and they’ll all be shown at the Castro Theatre in a tribute to the director presented by Midnites for Maniacs’ Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. Another four films will be seen in director’s cuts different from original theatrical versions. Further, Bogdanovich himself will be on hand at all but the earliest matinees. He’s a great raconteur who’s insightfully frank about the ups and downs of an eventually checkered career.

"Ups and downs" puts it mildly. While Bogdanovich started out on top, Hollywood relished kicking him with each downward step. But he’s still here — and especially visible recently, thanks to his role on The Sopranos as Lorraine Bracco’s shrink. Behind the camera too, he’s gotten love lately from the four-hour DVD documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Bogdanovich, who hasn’t directed a big-screen movie since 2001’s lamentably underseen The Cat’s Meow with Kirsten Dunst, hopes to soon start shooting an adaptation of Tracey Letts’s jet-black stage comedy Killer Joe — and he’s got other irons in the fire.

If it’s thus a fine moment to be Bogdanovich, there have been many not-so-great ones. Phoning recently from Los Angeles, he recalls that before the debut of Daisy Miller (1974), his first commercial failure, critic Judith Crist asked him, "Is it good? It better be … because they’re waiting for you." Catching major flack for that film was Shepherd, the model-turned-actress he left Platt for.

"Peter and Cybill" were inseparable, possibly obnoxious. They cohosted The Tonight Show for a week and were reportedly arch as hell. They occupied the inaugural cover of People, with the headline "Living Together Is Sexy." The director quotes Cary Grant (doing a perfect vocal imitation) advising, "Petah, please stop telling people you’re happy and in love!" Asked why, Grant said, "Because they aren’t happy and in love."

Even those who liked Daisy Miller went Attila on 1975’s At Long Last Love, a lavish tribute to ’30s musicals with Cole Porter songs recorded live by some actors who were trained singers (Madeleine Kahn) and others who weren’t (Shepherd, Burt Reynolds). It was meant to be charming. It got the most vitriolic reviews this side of Battlefield Earth. Bogdanovich now says, "We rushed and fucked it up. The first preview in San Jose was an unmitigated disaster. Then we recut and remixed, and it played quite well. But I made some calamitous changes after that, and didn’t preview it again before release. We were just killed. Later we made a different edit. When Jesse called me to say he was showing it, I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I like it.’ ‘Oh, you’re the one.’<0x2009>"

The Castro will screen that improved edit — which is charming. Although the title is still a pseudonym for "turkey," At Long Last Love has never been released on video or DVD. In a town where success usually excuses all egotism, Bogdanovich had still somehow crossed a line. His failures were blamed on sheer arrogance. "I got a lot of that," he says — though back then a purportedly imperious on-set demeanor and statements like "I’m not modest, I’m not humble, and the more success I have, the more critics will resent me" surely didn’t help. He’d had the temerity to befriend Hollywood legends including Grant, John Ford, and Orson Welles — who was practically a permanent houseguest. Who the hell did he think he was?

Cynics had already interpreted Bogdanovich’s hit homages to Hollywood’s past as evidence he didn’t have an original thought in his head. Then they gloated over his nonhits. Despite the star power of Reynolds and both O’Neals, Nickelodeon was a 1976 Christmas flop. (Forced to shoot in color, Bogdanovich says, "It’s another movie in black and white" — which is how he’ll show it at the Castro.)

Despite excellent reviews, 1979’s Paul Theroux adaptation Saint Jack didn’t find an audience. Ditto 1981’s They All Laughed, an enchanting, ensemble romantic comedy. It was (among other things) a valentine to his new love and protégée, erstwhile Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten — who shortly after filming ended was killed by the thuggish promoter-husband she’d tried to leave amicably. That murder-suicide was followed by more ugliness: a war of words between Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner; "dramatization" of the tragedy in 1983’s Star 80 ("I begged Bob Fosse not to do it") and a TV movie; and distribution problems for They All Laughed that cost him millions. Sympathy soured when Bogdanovich became involved with Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise — who was all of six months older than his own daughter. (Nonetheless, their eventual marriage lasted 13 years.)

Bogdanovich had a left-field comeback in 1985’s Mask, with Eric Stoltz as Elephant Kid and Cher as biker-chick mom. But even that was marred by public sparring with both Cher and studio execs. The latter substituted Bob Seger tunes for Bruce Springsteen ones key to the story’s real-life inspiration. (The Castro’s "theatrical world premiere" cut restores all the Bruuuuce.) Whether good, bad, or indifferent, his subsequent ventures flopped. In an eerie echo of past events, 1993’s The Thing Called Love came out (barely) after star River Phoenix OD’d. Bogdanovich turned to directing TV episodes (including for The Sopranos) and cable movies. It wasn’t a comedown, he says. "The scripts were good … and I got to work with actors like Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, and George Segal."

Bogdanovich also relit an acting career abandoned decades earlier. Having written essays about film history (notably for Esquire) before moving to Hollywood, he thinks his industry hater trail is partly due to perception of him as critic turned filmmaker. He considers the roughly 45 stage productions he acted in (and the 6 he directed) from age 15 to 24 as his real prior job.

Given all past tempests, Bogdanovich seems on good terms with his exes — Shepherd (in town with the play Curvy Widow) has promised to show up at the Castro late Friday for The Last Picture Show and At Long Last Love; Louise is flying in to talk about her late sister when They All Laughed shows on Sunday.

Is it painful for them to see Dorothy Stratten onscreen? "Yeah, especially now that [costar] John Ritter has died," he says. "But you know, when you see it with an audience, it’s OK — it takes the pain somewhat away. One of the peripheral tragedies [to Stratten’s death] was that the movie was never properly seen in its day. You couldn’t really look at it in the way it was meant to be enjoyed."

A GENUINE TRIBUTE TO PETER BOGDANOVICH

Fri/7–Sun/9, $10 per day ($25 weekend pass)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com, www.ticketweb.com

“My Name is Albert Ayler”

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REVIEW My Name Is Albert Ayler offers a close reading of the titular musician, a saxophone colossus who pushed the emotional limits of free jazz, but it also tells a broader story about the strange currents of American avant-garde music. Interviews with Ayler’s churchgoing Ohio family, New York City compatriots, and Scandinavian admirers trace a particular, though by no means atypical, passage. The tenor saxophonist first achieved renown in Stockholm, Sweden, where he began to experiment with the wailing, explosive runs that would some years later turn even John Coltrane’s head. ‘Trane specifically asked for Ayler to play at his funeral, and the photographs and live sound from the memorial service included in the film are searing enough to make even the staunchest defender of melody reconsider. Rather than employing warts-and-all tactics, first-time Swedish director Kasper Collin keeps a respectful distance from Ayler’s mysteries, nowhere more hauntingly than in a few late sequences regarding the musician’s purported tendency to stare into the sun. There is so much we will never know about Ayler, Collin seems to tell us, but watching former collaborators listen to his music through cracked expressions of pain and amazement is revealing enough.

MY NAME IS ALBERT AYLER runs Sun/9–Tues/11 at the Red Vic Movie House. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

World of echo

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It’s been 20 years since My Bloody Valentine released their breakthrough album, Isn’t Anything (Creation) — long enough for it to be wound up in a younger generation’s musical DNA. For how frequently the band is referenced by both musicians and critics, the rich double-sidedness of MBV’s peculiar attack often gets simplified as "swooning" and "ethereal." Erstwhile Deerhunter vocalist Bradford Cox is one of the few shoegaze suitors who seems clued in to the searing — and often distressing — tensions that distinguish My Bloody Valentine from followers like Slowdive and Ride. In Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his first official release as Atlas Sound, Cox has worked out an exquisite combination of shoegaze and laptop pop, a fucked-up beauty waiting to be adored.

A self-described "queer art punk," the young Atlantan first turned heads for his Internet indiscretions and outré performances with Deerhunter. The words Cox used to describe author Dennis Cooper in ANP Quarterly may as well be his own propulsive mantra: "The only thing he does to infuriate so many people is to write honestly, expressing things that most people would prefer to stay far under the surface."

While Cox’s transgressions have previously edged up to mawkishness, Let the Blind channels his confessional tendencies into a newly retrospective shape. Atlas Sound’s source material, aesthetic means, and subject are inextricable from one another in the same manner as Jonathan Caouette’s first-person film, Tarnation (2003). Much glitchier than Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (Kranky, 2007), the Atlas Sound home recordings are almost exclusively about the soul-baring, delicious isolation of being alone in your adolescence. Cox has described "Quarantined" as being about children with AIDS, though the main refrain, "I am waiting to be changed," resonates with Morrissey-like wistfulness.

The music on Let the Blind drifts uneasily between bliss and terror, the heavily doctored mélange of glockenspiels and guitars conjuring a narcoleptic glow. Drone pieces like "Small Horror" and "On Guard" concentrate on specific intense emotions, while fuller arrangements like "River Card" and "Bite Marks" entangle youthful romantic obsession in soft-hewn bass melodies and howling vocals. The shoegaze textures may be Cox’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s in the treated, divested vocal tracking that Let the Blind achieves its deepest immersions.

On "Winter Vacation," the chords seem to be pulling each other apart, reaching for different resolutions — so too with the rest of the album’s balancing act of sensuousness and numbness — though never so far apart as we think. Cox has written extensively about aiming for catharsis on his heavily trafficked blog, but Let the Blind comes off more as a prismatic refracting of past intensity and indolence. It’s teenage confusion done in Technicolor, and that ought to be enough to change more than a few kids’ lives.

ATLAS SOUND

With White Rainbow and Valet

Sat/8, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com, deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com

The young untold

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

STILL LIVES: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA

Through April 12

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

SFIAAFF: Multiculti cock-meat sandwich

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› superego@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sat/15, 9:15 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Are you lonesome tonight?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Brad Renfro wasn’t the only cinematic figure neglected in the recent Academy Awards’ "In Memoriam" montage: the academy fumbled even harder in its omission of Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, who died last June of colon cancer in Los Angeles at 59. The self-taught father of Taiwan’s cinematic new wave and a runaway Seattle software engineer who abandoned the tech field that made his classmates wealthy for his true love of filmmaking, Yang only created only eight films during his short, multi-career life, but during that brief span the Shanghai-born, Taipei-raised auteur managed to lend an influential, helping hand in the difficult birth of serious Taiwanese movie making.

Yang’s so-called old drinking buddies, screenwriter Wu Nien-chen and fellow director Hou Hsiao-hsien, were more than just sodden shoulders to cry on; they grappled with manifold frustrations of working independently in the Taiwanese film industry (described by Yang as "fragmented and run-down," with only a limited pool of experienced actors). This gang of three supported each other financially and artistically: according to Jeff Yang’s account in Once upon a Time in China (Atria, 2003), Wu spearheaded the anthology In Our Time (1982), which showcased Yang’s first theatrical film, and Hou mortgaged his house to underwrite Yang’s second feature, Taipei Story (1985), which Hou also starred in — and ended up losing his shirt for after it lasted all of four days in theaters.

Twin brothers by different mothers and both born in 1947, Hou and Yang created their breakthrough films in 1986: the former’s Dust in the Wind was also — surprise! — written by Wu, while the latter’s The Terrorizers is a handsome, cerebral urban psychological drama that flaunts new wave roots like a glittering pop offspring of Jean-Luc Godard. Inspiring critic Fredric Jameson to praise its "archaically modern" textures, The Terrorizers broke down, as writer David Leiwei Li writes in Chinese Films in Focus (BFI, 2003), the hidebound binaries of East and West as "tradition versus modernity, enabling readings that recognize both the border-transcending flow of global commerce and the reflexive capacity of residual local cultures."

It’s easy to read Hou’s and Yang’s early works as responses to one another, a relic of their barroom-pal give-and-take back in the day, and some might view Yang’s masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day (1991), as simply a rejoinder to Hou’s critically acclaimed, box office record-breaker City of Sadness (1989), though it was made amid far more hazardous conditions — 1989 was the year the bottom fell out of the Taiwanese market for locally produced films, and audiences turned to Hong Kong–made entertainments. A few critics might even tag Yi Yi: A One and a Two as Yang’s greatest feature — for its warm, humanist blend of The Terrorizer‘s postmodern urban landscape, Yang’s evocative roundelay of reflective surfaces, and the gentle gaze he levels on its quietly deteriorating family, headed by a software company manager pater familias, played by Yang’s old friend Wu, and a mother in the throes of spiritual crisis (Day‘s Elaine Jin).

For its unseen but subtly telegraphed depths, referential richness, and the sheer breadth and long-shot scope of its four-hour running time, Day nonetheless deserves the praise lavished on it. Much like City, writes Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis in Taiwanese Film Directors: A Treasure Island (Columbia University Press, 2005), Day‘s "local history turns the lock on long-suppressed ideas," convincingly plunging the personal into an epic sphere. Rarely screened and unavailable on DVD (much like The Terrorizer), Day has been described as a Taiwanese Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — a true descriptor if one discounts the very specific mise-en-scène of early ’60s Taipei and the film’s dense connective web of cultural, political, and familial allusions, obligations, and affiliations, one that’s as many-tendrilled and enmeshing as that of your average multigenerational Chinese family.

Ensnared by filial duty as well as street gang politics and placed in the sweepingly de-centered core of Day is its proto–James Dean, Xiao Si’r, portrayed by the baby-faced Chang Chen (the nomadic hottie in Yang’s Taiwanese cohort Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000]). The director opens Day with Si’r’s Shanghainese intellectual father arguing with teachers about his son’s grades, and then widens his aperture imperceptibly, ingeniously onto the arboreal byways, flat-lit classrooms, vertigo-inducing corridors, and shadowy hideouts of Si’r’s world. It’s a realm in which the children of the Kuomintang live an uneasy existence much like their elders: residing in Japanese houses less than 20 years after their parents fought the Imperial army on the mainland, these Taiwanese teens listen to American doo-wop and early rock and form street gangs that parallel the battling political factions of the People’s Republic. Tanks rumble by as brownouts underline the sense of rupture.

Resembling in its panorama and chapterlike parts such historical epics as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Day unfurls like a scroll, peppered by the shouts and orders of parents, peddlers, and teachers, and peopled with pungent characters like the Tolstoy-reading, romantically heroic hood Honey and his guilelessly calcuutf8g survivor of a sweetheart Ming — as well as Si’r’s bookish father, who’s torn from his self-absorption when taken into custody by the secret police. All bear the marks of severance from one’s past, papers, homeland, and other familiar signposts of identity. The quiet, troubled, and piercing irony that Yang applies to the scene of Si’r’s father’s arrest, one in which his children repeatedly play Presley’s "Are You Lonesome Tonight" in order to translate the lyric "Does your memory stray to a brighter summer day" to sing at some future sock hop haunted by the specter of Honey’s death — shades of the Jesus and Mary Chain — makes this teeming opus worth turning over again and again in your own memory. It’s like a battle hymn to a faltering family, or a love song to the death of innocence.

TRIBUTE TO EDWARD YANG

The Terrorizer

March 14, 9 p.m.

Yi Yi: A One and a Two

March 20, 7 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

A Brighter Summer Day

March 19, 7 p.m.

Clay Theater

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Take one

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>Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran, 2007) Buddha marks the feature debut of Hana Makhmalbaf, one of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s daughters (she made her first short, The Day My Aunt Was Ill (1997), when she was only 9 years old). It has already won eight awards at different international film festivals, a fact that becomes more impressive when one considers the filmmaker’s age: she’s 19. Reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema, her first feature is shot in a neorealist style in Bamian, Afghanistan, and features a 5-year-old girl named Baktay (the extraordinary Nikbakht Noruz) as its main character. In following the youngster during her struggles to attend school, the film becomes a stunning exploration of how Afghanistan’s violent political history affects its youth. (Maria Komodore) March 15, 12:45 p.m., Castro; Tues/18, 8:45 p.m., Pacific Film Archive.

>Happiness (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2007) One of the most adept melodramatists working in South Korea, Hur casts an affectionate, gently comic glance on the see-sawing declines and resurrections of the hard-partying, handsomely weather-beaten Young-su (the talented Hwang Jung-min), an aging club kid with a raging case of cirrhosis. Luckily, the man is able to rub a few brain cells together and get himself to a rural health retreat that specializes in detoxifying worst-case-scenarios with clean living, herb gathering, fresh air, and outrageously light exercise. Young-su is also lucky enough to win over the clinic’s sweet, fragile princess, Eun-hee (Lim Soo-jung), who suffers from lung disease and just might keel over if forced to break into anything more strenuous than a stroll. But can you keep the playboy down on the farm once his liver is back in business? (Kimberly Chun) March 15, 6 p.m., Castro; March 16, 5 p.m., PFA; March 22, 7 p.m., Camera.

Never Forever (Gina Kim, South Korea/USA, 2007) At first, it’s purely business: as a last-resort response to her Korean American husband’s infertility, Sophie (The Departed‘s Vera Farmiga, sporting an ice-blond ‘do) lurks after a Korean immigrant (Jung-woo Ha) she spots at a fertility clinic. She pays him big bucks to have sex with her and possibly make a baby — therefore saving her husband (David L. McInnis) from depression and getting his intensely Christian family off their backs. Of course, things get complicated mighty fast. Farmiga is riveting in this deliberately quiet (save its melodramatic violin-heavy score) drama, a delicate exploration of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons — and grappling with the sudden realization that wrong and right are often not so easy to define. (Cheryl Eddy) March 15, 9:15 p.m., Clay; March 16, 7:50 p.m., PFA.

>Ping Pong Playa (Jessica Yu, USA, 2007) Energetic direction by Jessica Yu — best-known for docs like the Henry Darger portrait In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and the Oscar-winning short Breathing Lessons (1996) — perfectly complements a star-making turn by Jimmy Tsai as Christopher "C-Dub" Wang, a slacker who discovers he’s got talent as a ping-pong teacher and, eventually, competitor. Yu and Tsai cowrote the hip-hop flavored script, filled with rapid-fire dialogue and culturally targeted zingers (as when C-Dub assures an opponent, "I hope you’re hungry, because I’m about to serve you some Chinese take-out!"). Winning from start to finish, Ping Pong Playa achieves the near-impossible: it makes infectious hilarity seem entirely effortless. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 6:45 p.m., Clay; March 17, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 22, 2:15 p.m., Camera.

Santa Mesa (Ron Morales, USA/Philippines, 2008) Ron Morales’s first feature focuses on 12-year-old Hector (Jacob Kiron Shalov) and his efforts to fit in when he’s forced to leave the United States (where he was born and raised) to be with his grandmother Lita (celebrated Filipino actor Angie Ferro) in Manila, Philippines, after his mother’s death. Despite Shalov’s awkward performance and some uneasy sentimental scenes, Mesa‘s yellow-hued cinematography attractively portrays the colorful, throbbing city, and the young boy’s eagerness to internalize his surroundings without knowing how to speak Tagalog is brave and touching. (Komodore) March 15, 7 p.m., Clay; March 22, 4:30 p.m., Camera.

>3 Days to Forever (Riri Raza, Indonesia, 2007) After a night of partying makes Ambar (Adinia Wirasti) miss a flight to her sister’s wedding, she hitches along with cousin Yusuf (Nicholas Saputra), who’s in charge of driving a set of delicate dishes to the event. Drugs, detours planned and accidental, and frank talk about what it’s like to be a rebellious teen in Indonesia (Ambar’s sister is getting married because her parents caught her having sex) — and an uncertain teen, period — color this road movie. 3 Days to Forever echoes 2001’s Y tu mamá también‘s racy tone and the-journey-is-the-life-lesson message, and boasts similarly photogenic young leads. Bonus for armchair travelers: it also makes Indonesia look like the most magical place on earth. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 18, 9:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2:15 p.m., Castro.

Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara (Koji Sakebe, Japan, 2007) Punk’s not dead! And neither are the wide-eyed little girls, drowsy dogs, and the other indelibly etched creatures that populate Yoshitomo Nara’s oeuvre: they’re alive and evolving in Nara’s studio. Koji Sakabe and his crew tail the artist as he travels to public appearances at museums and radio stations where he’s treated like a rock star; as he creates a massive village installation in his hometown of Hirosaki, Japan; and then follow Nara back to his studio, where he conjures his avatars of cuteness all by his lonesome. That’s where things get interesting: watching the bashful yet driven enigma study his own paintings, one hand on his camouflage-encased hip, and then home in with a brush on a fillip in a wide-eyed tot’s ‘do. (Kimberly Chun) March 16, 12:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2 p.m., Camera.

The Unseeable (Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand, 2006) For those whose eyes are still adjusting from the ultraviolet palette of Wisit Sasanatieng’s stunning debut, the genre-bending 1999 western Tears of the Black Tiger, the clammy greens and dusky grays that hang over The Unseeable feel like so much dust on the lens that can’t be wiped off. Unfortunately, you can still see everything coming from a mile away in this ghost tale of a country mouse trapped in (where else?) a decaying mansion. At least the magical touches of 2005’s Citizen Dog seem like genuine quirks in the fabric of reality. Here, the supernatural is an excuse to trot out tired new Asian horror staples like the crazy old lady or spooky child, and the multiple twists of the Shining-aping finale only work to make an already shaky premise all the more hamstrung. (Matt Sussman) March 16, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; March 21, 9:15 p.m., PFA; March 23, 4:45 p.m., Camera.

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Manila: the drama

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› johnny@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOSTER CHILD

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

March 16, noon, Kabuki

SLINGSHOT

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

March 18, 7 p.m., Kabuki

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

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