Film

There will be more blood: El Topo returns to the screen of the crime

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By Erik Morse

After its belated 2007 release in a highly anticipated DVD box set, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 midnight masterpiece El Topo – which translates to “The Mole” – will revisit the big screen on March 6 and 8 as a part of SFMOMA’s “Non-Western Westerns” film series.

El Topo has been touted as nothing less than the Philosopher’s Stone of film by certain cineastes, as well as by ars gratia artis anarchists and alchemy students. Much of El Topo‘s religious potency has been connected to the shared, orphic experience found in cheap art-houses and midnight festivals, where the elicit jouissance of its viewing came as a secret cinematic samizdat. Upon the film’s New York debut at Ben Barenholtz’s Elgin Theatre, its philosophical and cultural prescience – between the subterranean art of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol and the apocalyptic violence of Altamont and the Manson murders – secured it a place within the cleaving of two seminal but divergent decades. Although Jodorowsky seemed more entwined with the elder studies of Antonin Artaud and spectral mysticism, his work spoke to the ever-expanding archive of bestiality and immolation that was part of a new postmodern and post-war language.

Yippie! More from ‘Chicago 10’ director Brett Morgan

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chicago10 sml.bmp

By Jamilah King

When I walked into the Berkeley Cinema screening of the Chicago 10, I didn’t know what to expect. I had only a vague idea of the infamous Chicago Seven trial and felt oddly out of place among the aging hippies: I fully was prepared for another boring lesson on why my generation sucks.

Instead I was met with an engaging movie that eschews traditional documentary filmmaking to capture the playful exuberance of the Yippie generation. Through animation and rare video footage, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin came to life with a message of resistance that transcended decades. I spoke to Brett Morgan, the film’s director, over the phone (for the first part of the interview go here):

SFBG: You mentioned that you were trying to really capture the energy of the Yippies. Do you see any of that energy in today’s anti-war movement?

Brett Morgan: The thing about the Yippies that I love is the sense of playfulness and the fun, and I think if you go to YouTube you can see viral videos from Obama Girl to a whole range of stuff that’s pretty illuminating and exciting. I think there are leaders who have the charisma that an Abbie Hoffman had that just aren’t getting the same media play.

Gruesome twosomes

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Grindhouse Psychos!

(Shriek Show)

CULT DVDS Nepotism is hardly absent from mainstream Hollywood. But off-grid exploitation and sexploitation flicks have oft been a family affair by low-budget necessity. Russ and Eve Meyer, Ray Dennis Steckler and Carolyn Brandt, and Ron and June Ormond are only the most stellar names amongst many who purveyed legendary cinematic trash from the sanctimony of holy matrimony.

By coincidence, two of three features in Shriek Show’s not-too-shabby new discount box set Grindhouse Psychos! illuminate comparatively obscure marital exploitation couples. Cop Killers is a 1972 hippie drug-deal meller featuring actors who’d later go on to produce and star in the classic softcore spoof Flesh Gordon (1974). It’s not bad, though nowhere as good as the packaging ("In front of them, cops. Behind them, dead cops!"). Making a punchier impression are early-’80s titles that kept it all in the family.

Actually, Roberta Findlay’s 1985 Tenement, a.k.a. Game of Survival, a.k.a. Slaughter in the South Bronx, was released several years after husband Michael died in a bizarre helicopter-decapitation accident. Together they’d done it all: a kidnapping-rape film with pre-fame Yoko Ono (1965’s Satan’s Bed); an infamous trilogy of ultrasleazy late-’60s "roughies" (1968’s The Curse of Her Flesh, etc.); the 1974 cannibalism-meets-Bigfoot schlock masterpiece Shriek of the Mutilated; porn films both gay (Michael, Angelo, and David) and straight (Funk in 3-D). They engineered 1976’s Snuff, which capitalized on urban legend by intercutting crude new fake-documentary "murder" footage into a 1971 Findlay film shot in Argentina called The Slaughter. That con made millions.

Widowed Roberta soldiered on variably as director, cinematographer, producer, and scenarist for another decade, often under masculine aliases. Her activities ran a short gamut from porn (Lifestyles of the Blonde and Dirty) to horror (1987’s Blood Sisters). Tenement was an exception — an urban thriller à la Death Wish 3 (1985), Class of 1984 (1982), or any other ’80s movie where the evil gang was mixed race, punk, and dedicated to exterminating decent society. Here, one such crew gets arrested for shooting up in a Bronx apartment building’s empty basement. Freed five seconds later, they exact revenge by trapping and killing residents one floor at a time. Natch, the tenants fight back.

Considered so violent in 1985 that it was given an X rating, Tenement survives as the kind of vigorously crass grade-Z exercise that gives vintage exploitation a good name. Findlay is bemused and delightful in her DVD-extra interview, recalling the shoot amongst real junkies and gangs like a retired teacher might remember naughty third graders.

Much less prolific than the Findlays were Joseph Ellison and Ellen Hammill-Ellison, creators of just two New Joisey B flicks. Their incongruous 1986 doo-wop musical, Joey, bombed. But six years earlier, Don’t Go in the House made the full drive-in and grindhouse rounds, achieving disreputable immortality as an oft-cited example of extreme horror misogyny. Emotionally scarred by a late mother who’d used the gas stovetop as a disciplinary tool, Norman Bates–like nebbish Donny (Dan Grimaldi, The Sopranos‘s Patsy Parisi) lures women to his creepy hilltop home, where he gets back at mommy by burning them to death.

The reason this movie became notorious is the first such death. It left a lingering icky stain on my brain — among many others — and is mighty disturbing still. Gentleman Donny offers a ride to a stranded flower-shop proprietress (Johanna Brushay), who’s given enough screen time to seem like a real person rather than slasher-flick cannon fodder. Knocked unconscious after an unsettling buildup, she wakes to find herself naked, suspended from ceiling to floor in a metal-walled room he’s assembled for his new pastime. Entering in a flame-retardant suit, he douses her with gasoline, then applies a blowtorch at length — the grisly result patently faked by FX superimposition but horrible nonetheless.

Nothing else in this flaming Psycho imitation is so vividly appalling. But that sequence alone places House firmly in the special category of overenthusiastically female-abusive films one can’t quite believe a woman actually helped produce, let alone cowrote.

Don’t phunk with my hope

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW WRINKLES

TAKEN BY TREES


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

RICKY LEE ROBINSON


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

MAMMAL AND MANSLAUGHTER


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

LANGHORNE SLIM


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

“Cinema Piemonte”

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PREVIEW The northwestern Italian region of Piemonte is noted for production of wine, wheat, and Fiats. Its principal city, Turin, a.k.a. Torino, was briefly the nation’s capital after unification — and soon afterward became the focus of its early film industry as well. While both crowns were eventually stolen by Rome, the area maintained a role in Italian cinema through the decades. That history is sampled in this weekend of features set in Piemonte, presented by the Associazione Piemontesi of Northern California in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and Regione Piemonte. The four programs run a wide gamut, not least because they span 90 years between them. The closer on Sunday should be a major occasion: a restored print of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 Cabiria, the apex of the lavish costume epics that dominated Turin’s industry and proved a huge influence on the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. This three-hour tale of ancient Rome will be accompanied live by pianist Stefano Maccagno, playing his original score. Another big international hit was 1949’s Bitter Rise, a heady brew of neorealism and noir melodrama that made Silvana Mangano — at the time a very well-developed 19 years old — into the first postwar Euro bombshell. Packed into tight clothes as a scheming peasant rice harvester, she seemed the very embodiment of wanton s-e-x years before Bardot, Monroe, and Loren came along. Mario Monicelli’s 1963 I Compagni, a.k.a. The Organizer, is a somewhat more serious labor drama, with Marcello Mastroianni, superb as usual, portraying a professor agitating for improved textile worker conditions at the dawn of the 20th century. Opening the weekend, and serving as its lightest note, is Davide Ferrario’s Dopo Mezzanote (After Midnight, 2004), a whimsical romantic comedy set in Turin’s Mole Antonelliana — a beautiful 19th-century structure that happens to house Italy’s National Museum of Film.

CINEMA PIEMONTE Fri/29, 7 p.m.; Sat/1, 4 and 7:30 p.m.; Sun/2, 4 p.m., free

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

www.piemontesinoca.com, www.fortmason.org

Grrrl power chords

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Bay Area filmmakers Shane King and Arne Johnson totally know what you’re about to ask them, because it’s the question everyone springs right off the bat: What are a couple of dudes doing behind the camera of Girls Rock!, a film about an all-girls rock ‘n’ roll camp?

The answer is so meaningful that the pair don’t seem to mind sharing it (again). Once King and Johnson (friends since fifth grade) heard about Portland, Ore.’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, they were irretrievably inspired. In the process of scouting out documentary subjects, Johnson caught a talk by Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. Someone asked her if she thought rock was dead, and in response she discussed her experiences teaching at the camp. "The idea that somebody of Carrie Brownstein’s stature would be stumbling around with a bunch of eight-year-olds, teaching them windmills, was just — well, I called Shane up [immediately]," he says.

Having grown up in Portland, where they recall "enthusiastically slam-dancing at L7 shows," King and Johnson felt particularly connected to the topic and eagerly moved forward — though wooing the camp proved difficult at first.

"The camp was, understandably, very skeptical [of us] and protective of the girls," King remembers. The duo shot footage of the camp’s after-school program, Girl’s Rock Institute, and interviewed teachers and young participants; the resulting short proved promising.

The bulk of Girls Rock! takes place in the summer of 2005, focusing on four campers as they practice instruments, form bands, write songs, and build confidence and social skills: teens Misty (a former meth addict) and Laura (a headbanger who worries about her appearance), and eight-year-olds Palace (a girly-girl with anger issues) and Amelia (a budding noise-rocker who has trouble sharing the spotlight). King and Johnson took care in choosing which girls to follow, though they knew they wanted first-time campers.

"We realized that [the camp] really had a huge impact on girls the first time they went," Johnson says. "One father described his daughter as ‘going supernova’ after the camp. So we knew that was going to be the most dramatic thing to show." King and Johnson traveled around the country, meeting 25 girls who were planning on attending camp for the first time.

"From talking to the camp staff, we knew that it was important to girls in ways that weren’t just about music," Johnson says. "Laura was the first person we interviewed, in Oklahoma. She was like, ‘I really love death metal, and I can’t find any boys who will let me be in a band.’ Suddenly we realized there was another metaphor happening, about the tension between our culture and these girls."

The themes of Girls Rock! are further illuminated by fellow Bay Area filmmaker Liz Canning’s animated collages. The sequences spell out what young girls are up against, with colorful graphics backdropping an array of sobering statistics, like "The number-one wish of teenage girls is to lose weight."

"People have told us, having seen the film, that it was upsetting to see those pieces, and that they wish we hadn’t included them — like, ‘Why not just celebrate the girls and leave all that stuff behind?’<0x2009>" Johnson says. "Our response is that we’re two liberal, feminist guys, and we didn’t know these things. How can we assume that everybody else is going to be able to see these girls’ struggles, and contextualize them?"

The filmmakers hope Girls Rock! will lead to camps springing up all over the country — as well as nudge grown-ups toward a new embrace of feminism. Most important, "The [campers] are cool, and loud, and angry, and funny, and sloppy — and yet nobody is saying they’re stupid or ugly," Johnson says. "[If there is] a girl in Indiana or somewhere who’s trying to form a rock band or do something that she thinks she can’t do, if she sees this film, she might think, ‘Wait a minute — why am I afraid of this?’ Then I’ll feel like we’ve done what we came to do."

GIRLS ROCK!

Opens March 7 in Bay Area theaters

www.girlsrockmovie.com

Life during wartime

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Engaging, even experiential, Chicago 10 eschews a traditional documentary approach to capture the playful exuberance of the yippie generation. Through animation and rare video footage, producer-director Brett Morgen brings Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and their experiences of the infamous Chicago 7 trial to life, in turn allowing them to bring a message of resistance that transcends decades. I recently spoke with Morgen.

SFBG What inspired you to make this film?

BRETT MORGEN There was political inspiration and then there was filmic inspiration.

We conceived of the film around 2002, when the US had just invaded Afghanistan and they were talking about going into Iraq. It didn’t seem like there were that many people out protesting. Greg Carter, the producer, came to me and asked what I thought about making a film on the Chicago 7 because those guys were like rock stars, they totally inspired him when he was young.

I told him I grew up in the ’80s, with the weight of the ’60s on my shoulders. My generation was constantly being told that we’d never be as passionate or as vibrant or as impactful. So I said, "I don’t want to make a film with that holier-than-thou attitude. If we’re going to make a film about this period, ultimately to reintroduce it to generations of Americans who haven’t been exposed to this story, let’s do it in the language of the youth movement today."

The world doesn’t need another movie about ’68 scored by Buffalo Springfield and music that’s really the soundtrack to our parents’ lives. This [film] isn’t a history lesson; this isn’t a movie that’s even about ’68. It’s really a fable for all times: there’s a war, there’s opposition to a war, and there’s a government that’s trying to silence the opposition.

CHICAGO 10


Opens Fri/29 at Shattuck Cinemas

Lee Friedlander’s lively American necrologies

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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.

"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

A look into the TV: Warhol Superstar documentaries

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A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory is playing at the Roxie Film Center right now, giving people a sustained glimpse of the competitiveness and back-stabbing that went on during the Factory’s heyday. Paul Morrissey in particular does not come off well, though director (and Williams’ niece) Esther Robinson’s attempts at drawing connections between Andy Warhol and her uncle’s death remain vague. If a documentary about a likely suicide can have a bright side, then Walk does: Robinson uncovers and spotlights Williams’s heretofore obscure film work, which is very impressive – as attractive and arresting in its use of black-and-white contrast as anything that ever came out of the Factory, which was essentially the MGM of underground cinema.

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Andy Warhol and Danny Williams

With A Walk into the Sea currently screening, the time seems right to present a colorful but by no means definitive short guide to other docs or features about characters or Superstars perhaps best-known for floating through the realm of Warhol’s Factory:

“Who were those guys?”

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Anyone who knows me understands — or at least acknowledges — my Freddy Krueger obsession: the holographic Freddy watch, the Freddy sweater, the talking Freddy doll, the glazed-over look in my eyes when I rhapsodize about the human-head pizza served in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master‘s scene at the “Crave Inn” diner. (Best…crunching sound effects…ever).

A Nightmare on Elm Street — specifically the third installment, a.k.a. 1987’s Dream Warriors, possibly the series’ strongest entry — is also the reason I became a Dokken fan. This film has it all: a young Patricia Arquette, a Freddy-propelled sleepwalking human marionette, John Saxon, Freddy’s nun-tastically elaborate backstory, the line “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”, and Nightmare‘s best theme song (apologies to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince). That last item comes courtesy of Dokken’s “Dream Warriors,” co-written by the band’s George Lynch and Jeff Pilson. It was released Feb 10, 1987, just days before my 12th birthday. Being a sick-minded sixth grader, I was already deep into Freddy. “Dream Warriors” quickly became my favorite song.


Ain’t gonna dream no more!

Miserable to be gay: A Q&A with Terence Davies

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If the film director Terence Davies didn’t qualify as a master in his own medium (albeit one who has made only a handful of features), it would be tempting to compare him at length with musicians who have made a career out of either discovering nostalgic melodic magic in every corner and cranny of England’s cities, such as Saint Etienne, or ones who never pass up an opportunity to lament the passing of a country that once was unique, such as Morrissey. Any fan of those iconic soundsters who doesn’t know the work of Davies should dive into his Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) as soon as possible, and then journey from them into The House of Mirth (2000) to see that Davies is also capable of creating classic films set in other countries. On the occasion of his upcoming appearance at Pacific Film Archive, I recently rang him up for a chat that began by the Pacific Ocean and ended in New York society, touching upon Noel Coward, Edith Sitwell, vile bodies, vain gay men, Char Ladies and Hottentots along the way.

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Still from the Terence Davies Trilogy

Terence Davies: Are you looking at some wonderful view of San Francisco?
SFBG: There’s a freeway, and some industrial buildings slightly blocking my view of the Bay.
TD: I was expecting you to say it was a view of the clear blue Pacific and you could see Japan.
SFBG: If I was on that part of the coastline, the side Hitchcock loves, I’d at least be able to see the ocean below me in a manner that would completely terrify me.

Noise Pop: Joy Rides and Darby Crash test dummies

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Noise Pop: Fuck yeah

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Most articles and reviews about Holy Fuck begin with some comment about whether the band’s music did or did not make the writer exclaim, "Holy fuck!" So insert your own exclamatory joke about the group’s name here, and let’s move past the moniker and go on to the music.

Holy Fuck straddle the rock and electronic divide: they mash together techno beats, dirty lo-fi electronics, and loud kinetic-rock rhythms. It’s a perfect of-the-moment sound — the type that indie rock kids love to dance to, balanced with enough chaotic experimentalism to appeal to noise rock and electronic fans. We live in weird times, and this band gets the times.

Perversely, as bad as the war and the economy are, kids are having a great deal of innocent fun these days. You can catch a sweaty, spazzy groove to the not-so-faux-naïf, party-starting sounds of Video Hippos. Or you can bang your head to Holy Fuck’s embodiment of that dance-party spirit.

The songs on their latest record, LP (XL), drive forward kraut rock–style, but the dirty layers of electronic noise on top of their propulsive rhythms have a purer rock vibe: they’re raw, primitive, and energetic. On my MP3 player, "Choppers," the last track on LP, fits snugly up against my next loaded disc, a Can anthology. The sound of Holy Fuck’s recorded output lies somewhere between Trans Am and Suicide, although they don’t stake out the confrontationally icy ground of the latter nor cloak themselves in the distancing self-awareness of the former. Instead, onstage a few weeks ago at the Great American Music Hall, Holy Fuck bopped around unselfconsciously, with quick-change mixes, effects-pedal tweaks, and keyboard jams. It’s a friendly, accessible show, performed by a band dedicated to making electronic music without laptops or sequencers. In fact, not only will you not find a laptop on Holy Fuck’s stage, but you’ll also discover instruments that come with a junkyard aesthetic: film modulators, and a Casio mouth organ.

The group has emerged from a Toronto scene with a vast and supportive music community, one that embraces many genres and in which most performers have more than one musical project going. Although Holy Fuck don’t want to be perceived, as the group’s Brian Borcherdt puts it over the phone, as "hippie lovefest" musicians, their writing process has been somewhat loose, improvisatory, and collaborative. The band has also included a rotating cast of Toronto musicians, which has led some to dub the ensemble an "evil supergroup," Borcherdt says. Still, regardless of what they play and whom they play with, Holy Fuck remain an exciting live band — though I’m still not going to use the easy exclamatory.

HOLY FUCK

With A Place to Bury Strangers, White Denim, and Veil Veil Varnish

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Noise Pop: Little twin stars

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

So are they or aren’t they? A pop twosome that make lovely music together in more ways than one is the irresistible scenario embedded in more rock, soul, and country partnerships than one can count — who doesn’t fall for the notion of torturously entangled C&W soulmates that extends far beyond Walk the Line turf and into the year in and year out of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons territory? Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s affections remained unrequited up to the latter’s 2007 death, as did the palpable chemistry between Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.

Well, gawkers remain out of luck here, says Matt Ward, a.k.a. M. Ward, the manly half of indie rock’s latest sweetheart duo, She and Him. He and actress-singer-songwriter Zooey Deschanel are just friends, friend. "People are always going to think whatever they’re going to want to think, no matter what they read in interviews or what the facts are," the extremely soft-spoken Ward says from Omaha, Neb., where he’s currently mixing his next LP, with Bright Eyes’ Mike Logan. "I think music is a lightning rod for people’s imaginations — and I don’t think that’s a bad thing."

He can hardly expect a listener to stop dreaming while listening to the Deschanel originals. With Ward’s production and arranging input, the tunes take on the luscious feel of gimlet-eyed ’60s-style girl-group protorock ("I Was Made for You"), pedal-steel-sugared, chiming country ("Change Is Hard"), and subtly colored girl-singer pop ("I Thought I Saw Your Face Today"). Leslie Gore, Darlene Love, Julie London, Ronnie Spector, and all of those other dulcet voices of teen agony, ecstasy, and crash-and-burn romantic disaster, move over: Deschanel is the next worthy addition to those ranks — a doll-like upstart cross between Sinatra and Carole King — thanks to She and Him’s maiden outing, Volume One (Merge).

Director Martin Hynes brought Deschanel and Ward together to cover a Richard and Linda Thompson tune for his as-yet-unreleased film The Go-Getter. Deschanel and Ward discovered they were "mutually fans of each other’s work," the latter says. One song led to another and, he adds, "eventually Zooey mentioned she had some demo songs that she had under her hat. I had no idea she was a songwriter — let alone a really incredible songwriter and vocalist. They had really beautiful chord progressions, and as a producer, it makes things easy when you have great songs and amazing vocals." He decided to play Phil Spector to her King.

"We started with a pile of songs that I had written," Deschanel e-mails from her current movie, "and had found their life up to that point completely in the safety of my bedroom. It was amazing to see what such a creative individual as Matt could bring to those songs. He brought a tremendous amount of life to them without killing their original essence. His instincts are dead on."

Deschanel wasn’t above making the bizarre instrumental contribution: the mysterious bazookalike sound on "This Is Not a Test," for instance, "is actually me playing mouth trumpet," she writes. "I said, ‘This song needs a trumpet,’ and then I said, ‘You know, like this’ and I did that bit. Matt liked it. We didn’t have the budget for horns so I just did it."

They took each song as its own "island," as Deschanel puts it. "The compositions tell you where they want to go," adds Ward, who strived for a warm analog production. "We tried keeping it away from computers and digital technology as much as we could. I think that’s the main reason the record sounds good — that and the songs are good."

The approach perfectly jibed with Deschanel’s aesthetic. "I have always been attracted to old music. I have always been a fan but I continue to discover ‘new’ old music," writes the vocalist, who says she started writing at age eight, was in bands in high school, and later had a cabaret act called the Pretty Babies. Elf (2003) gave her a chance to sing on film, but otherwise she had limited her music primarily to demos: "Demoing became sort of a hobby that I found relaxing."

She isn’t concerned with trying to please hipsters or cool kids who might view her as a movie-star dilettante simply passing through the trenches of indie pop. "I hope each person responds to [Volume One] naturally without any agenda of mine seeping into the matter," she offers. "Ideally audience and artist should be uncorrupted by each other."

Not a surprise from a singer in love with the passion and craft of country music. "I think," Deschanel opines, "sincerity is hugely underrated."

SHE AND HIM

With Whispertown2000, Adam Stephens, and Emily Jane White

March 2, 8 p.m., sold out

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

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Noise Pop: Up from under

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Salvation can come to us in the strangest of places, but it takes a special person to search it out in the sordid, cigarette butt-cluttered back alleys where the daylight never creeps in. While most of us might cower in the darkness, vocalists Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan have each built careers from reveling in it, offering contrasting – but curiously compatible – dissections of life in the shadows. As frontman for the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers, Dulli has waxed romantic about tortured love and shady midnight dealings. Meanwhile, Lanegan has focused on matters of mortality and addiction, blowing a ghostly rumble into his former band the Screaming Trees and myriad solo albums and collaborations (Isobel Campbell, Queens of the Stone Age). Somewhere in the murk these two after-hours explorers crossed paths, and from there they walked side by side in search of redemption. A new name for the venture was needed, of course, and the christening was inevitable: the Gutter Twins.

The union has yielded fascinating results: their new disc, Saturnalia (Sub Pop), while still bearing occasional similarities to previous works by Dulli and Lanegan, offers distinctive, dirty-fingered gospel theatrics not found elsewhere in their catalogs. "That was the whole point," Dulli explains by phone from Los Angeles. "We didn’t want to sound like just the two of us put together. We wanted to sound like something new." In lieu of Dulli’s familiar sensitive-lothario stylings and soulful film noir expositions and in place of Lanegan’s inner-demon warfare, the language of the Gutter Twins is one of angels, chariots, and even rapture.

Salvation doesn’t come easy, however: Saturnalia offers glimmers of hope, but reaching them still requires the navigation of a late-night sleazescape studded with dense atmospherics and prickly instrumentation. "God’s Children" opens with an unsettling Nico-recalling harmonium drone, whereas the creeping violin swells at the start of "Circle the Fringes" make for an ominous portent of the twin-guitar melodrama that soon follows. Paradise might be within sight, but it don’t come cheap. Or, as Lanegan puts it on "Seven Stories Underground," "Ooh, heaven – it’s quite a climb."

As if one evocative moniker weren’t enough, Dulli has also referred to the project as "the Satanic Everly Brothers," a tag that fits with velvet-glove snugness once you’ve soaked up the dusky harmonies and bristling vocal interplay of the duo’s feedback-and-folk-driven voodoo. Lanegan’s seismic-rumble baritone finds its perfect foil in Dulli’s leering, sneering rasp, lending a nervy intensity to their declaration "I hear the Rapture’s coming / They say He’ll be here soon" on "The Stations." Elsewhere, particularly over the mellow electro sputter of "The Body," the paired voices exude a soothing soulfulness suited for a spiritual journey.

How, pray tell, did these two larger-than-life figures manage to work together to unleash such devastating beauty on Saturnalia? For Dulli, the answer comes quickly: "Lanegan is the easiest guy to work with, no doubt about it. I think we balanced each other out, and we definitely brought out elements in each other which we hadn’t really used much before this." Maybe the gutter isn’t such a bad place after all….

THE GUTTER TWINS

March 1, 8 p.m., $18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

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Text-messaging the apocalypse

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HORROR FILM Jacob Gentry, one of the three codirectors of The Signal, assures me he’s "fully prepared for the zombie apocalypse." His cohorts, David Bruckner and Dan Bush, agree that they love zombie movies. But they would also like to make it clear that The Signal — which supposes that "a rift in the electromagnetic sector" has infected cell phones, televisions, and other devices, inspiring all who experience it to inflict terrible violence — is not a zombie movie.

"If you took all 360 channels of your satellite TV and spat them out in one single signal and turned the volume up, would you become a little bit more frantic?" Bruckner asks. "If it pushed one person to the point of pushing another person, could it start a giant chain reaction of violence across the country?"

Bush adds, "I look around me and I see a lot of pissed-off people that are really close to some sort of violence as it is. In our movie the people are conscious, they’re rational, they’re aware of their decisions — they’re not bloodsucking morons."

Yep, they’re rational — and that’s what makes them so spooky. The Signal unfolds in three chapters, each helmed by a different director. Every segment is told from the point of view of a different character: cheatin’ wife Mya (Anessa Ramsey), her lover Ben (Justin Welborn), and her jealous husband, Lewis (A.J. Bowen).

"The first section is visceral and straightforward," Bruckner explains. "Then we get into the second section and we get inside the head of someone who’s very, very signalized. From his perspective it takes on a black-comedy tone. Then we get to the third section and we focus on the hero and his journey."

Cinematic gore and chaos are always enjoyable, and The Signal, which taps into the totally legitimate notion that humans are slaves to their technology, conveys an overall feeling of psychic dread. But the film’s middle section, in which a weapons-wielding Lewis home-invades a failed New Year’s Eve party, is the film’s strongest. Perhaps it’s because humor is the most comfortable way to digest the film’s suggestion that anarchy is just one fucked-up frequency away.

THE SIGNAL

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

Mother of all indie?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

KIMYA DAWSON

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

924 Gilman Street Project

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

SIX-SIX-SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE TIME!

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

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

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

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

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Glad to be unhappy

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance — and MGM-level musical magnitude. Davies is one of the greatest directors of the final quarter of the 20th century. He’s created at least two acknowledged classics, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), and I count his 1992 rendering of a movie-mad childhood, The Long Day Closes, as one of my all-time favorite films. In a single shot that passes across the floors of a family apartment, Davies captures the magic of nature mingling with artifice (a waterfall of raindrops, reflected from a window, passing over the leaf pattern of a carpet), then conveys the passage of time with a potency that never fails to bring a tear to my unsentimental eye.

Time, free-flowing through mental mazes of negative space that Manny Farber would have to admire, is at the center of Davies’s autobiographical work. He connects music with memory in a manner that yields greater returns each time one returns to his movies. At the Pacific Film Archive, he’ll appear at screenings of The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), Distant Voices, The Long Day Closes, and The Neon Bible (1995) and lead an audience through a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices. In anticipation of this visit, I recently spoke with him on the phone.

SFBG It’s disheartening to read about the various funding problems you’ve been encountering over the past eight years.

TERENCE DAVIES We don’t have a cinema in this country — we just have an extension of television. You’ve got 25-year-olds who don’t know anything and think cinema started with [Quentin] Tarantino. We’re just little England. We’ve become virtually another state of America. In 20 years’ time, if we don’t watch it, we’ll be just like Hawaii, but without the decent weather.

SFBG Within British cinema, your films don’t fit into the contrasts that place David Lean–like literary adaptations or the documentary base of directors like Lindsay Anderson against more flamboyant directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Joseph Losey. You have elements of all of the above: your work is autobiographical and learned, but it has also has a flamboyance I relate to, though it isn’t outrageous.

TD I suppose my influences were very simple: the British comedies from the period when I was growing up and American melodramas and musicals. I remember being taken by my two older sisters to see Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing [1955] or All That Heaven Allows [1955] and going by myself to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954] or The Pajama Game [1957] and any comedy that attracted Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim.

My films are an amalgam of those things and of the fact that I was brought up Catholic. I was very devout until I was 22. What a waste that was!

Also, I was influenced by classical music, particularly [Jean] Sibelius and [Dmitry] Shostakovich and my beloved [Anton] Bruckner. And poetry. [My family] got our first television in 1961, and about two years later, over the course of four nights, Alec Guinness read [T.S. Eliot’s] entire Four Quartets from memory.

SFBG Your current documentary project, Of Time and the City, is about your hometown of Liverpool. I came across an interview from the era of Distant Voices, Still Lives in which you talk about its utter transformation and deterioration. That interview dates from almost 20 years ago. Have the changes continued?

TD Yes, inevitably. At the time I left, Liverpool was very down at heel. I left it at its worst. It’s getting better now, but there’s still an awful lot to be done. The evocation of war that Humphrey Jennings did in Listen to Britain [1942] I’m trying to do for Liverpool. I wanted to try and capture what it was like when I was growing up. Even I was shocked at some of the footage of the slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. I grew up in one, and when you grow up in one you don’t realize it, because everyone else is in the same boat. But seeing footage of it now, it’s absolutely appalling. When you think that in 1953 this massive amount of money was spent on the coronation of the present queen, it’s just obscene. They get away with it — it’s quite extraordinary. I’m very much a republican; I’m not a monarchist. When you juxtapose the coronation with the footage that we’ve found, it’s shocking.

SFBG Solitude and rich sensory experience are qualities at the core of your movies. Those qualities take on specific aspects in cinema — your use of darkness in relation to light is connected to, and even a few times directly about, the experience of being in a dark movie theater.

TD You have to see the films in the cinema. It’s lovely to see, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948] on the telly, but if you see it projected, it’s even more ravishing. The only way to see a film is in the cinema — nowhere else.

SFBG I first saw my favorite of your films, The Long Day Closes, at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.

TD The Castro is a beautiful theater. But I remember that when I was there, two men were walking down the aisle and one asked, "What did you see last night?" The other said he’d seen the [Terence Davies] Trilogy. The first asked, "What did you think?" And the other said, "Not very good."

SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.

TD Another man said to me, "These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," which I thought was a wonderful insult — practically a compliment. Isn’t that fabulous?

CLOSELY WATCHED FILMS: TERENCE DAVIES

Feb. 20–27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Milked

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OPINION It seems that everyone, from current politicians to former friends and lovers of Harvey Milk, is scrambling to serve as a spokesperson for the new Hollywood movie about the life of Milk, the first openly gay elected official in a major United States city.

Milk joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, only to be assassinated (along with then-mayor George Moscone) one year later by Dan White, another member of the board.

Cleve Jones, who worked as a student intern in Milk’s City Hall office (and later started the AIDS Memorial Quilt), is now serving as a consultant for the Gus Van Sant film. At the Castro Theatre on Feb. 4 he encouraged a crowd of extras gathered to re-create the candlelight march that took place after Milk’s murder by saying, "We made history on these streets, and we’re gonna do it again tonight."

But remaking historical moments from the pain and glory days of the past is hardly the same thing as making history in the present. In the 1970s queers fled abusive and stifling families and places of origin to move to San Francisco by the thousands and join dissident subcultures of splendor and defiance. Of course, queers still flee similar conditions; it’s just that the hypergentrified San Francisco of 2008 barely offers the space to breathe, let alone dream.

The excitement around reenactment obscures the reality that some of the same smiling gay men who came to San Francisco in the 1970s have consistently fought misogynist, racist, classist, ageist battles — from carding policies to policing practices to zoning and real estate wars — to ensure that their neighborhood (Milk’s Castro) remains a home only for the rich, white, and male (or at least those who assimilate to white middle-class norms).

Check out a quote from Dan Jinks, one of the producers of the movie, in the Dec. 27, 2007, Bay Area Reporter: "Our great hope is this will revitalize this district and make it a major tourist destination."

Revitalize the Castro, where you’re lucky if you can rent a flat for less than $4,000 or buy property for less than $1 million? Everyone who’s ever set foot in the Castro knows it’s filled with tourists from around the world!

Oh, I know what Jinks means: straight tourists. Some gay people are so anxious to participate in their own cultural erasure.

After White’s 1979 trial, at which he was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder and given a lenient sentence, rioting queers torched police cars and smashed the windows and doors of City Hall. Later that night vengeful cops went to the Castro and destroyed the windows of the Elephant Walk (now Harvey’s), entered the bar to beat up patrons and trash the place, and swung their batons into anyone they encountered.

I’m wondering if the new Van Sant film will end at the candlelight march, thus avoiding talk about such market-unfriendly issues as systemic police violence and property destruction as a political act.

Unfortunately, San Francisco is now more of a playground for the wealthy than a space for the delirious potential of dissidence. But there are still plenty of reasons to protest. Got housing? Got health care? Got citizenship? Nope, we’re just getting milked.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the editor, most recently, of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal Press, 2006) and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (out in June from Soft Skull Press).

DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist rock SF

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Two turntables and a microphone? Hells no, try EIGHT turntables, four mixers, two DJs on two microphones, a looping system, and some big ass speakers. That’s what DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist used to rock a capacity crowd at the Regency Ballroom last night. That, and stacks of vintage vinyl 45s (not a computer or CD anywhere in sight), a concept that was the subject of a short informational film that kicked off the show. Technically impressive, yes, but whatever this venerable duo was using to rock the place with funky old school beats and inspired scratching, it worked! Great show.

IndieFest: “Pop Skull”

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popskullposter.jpg

Any movie that kicks off with a warning to epileptics — high strobe content ahead! — is gonna attract a certain lurid interest. Adam Wingard’s Pop Skull follows a small-town drug addict (co-writer Lane Hughes) as he lurches from hallucination to barely-tolerable reality; his flash-happy mind often seems garbled from the ghosts of experimental films past. The film’s jarring sound design, in particular, owes a lot to the avant-garde. Disturbing imagery and a sense that the things we’re seeing may or (more likely) may not really be happening to our scruffy hero adds to the film’s overall sense of creepy unsettlement. I watched it on DVD in my living room and it made me jumpy — catch it tonight at the Roxie and the effect will no doubt be amplified to freakish degrees. And yeah, that’s a recommendation.

Pop Skull screens tonight, 9:30pm, at the Roxie. Visit the IndieFest web site for more info.

Wherefore art thou, Romero?

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On returning to his independent filmmaking roots: When we made [1968’s Night of the Living Dead] we were just a bunch of young people in Pittsburgh. We had a commercial production company, so we had our own equipment, and we audaciously decided that we should go out and make a movie. So the first one was real guerrilla filmmaking — but actually the first five or six films that I made were completely independent. After Dawn of the Dead [1978] we hooked up with a distributor-production company, and they financed us to some bigger budgets. But even those films were independent. There was a period when I was courted by Hollywood and made a couple of studio pictures and was getting very discouraged. Finally, the last zombie film that I made, Land of the Dead [2005], was for Universal. And they really let me alone — they let me make that movie. But it was a grueling process. And I realized, "Man, this is all getting too big. It’s approaching Thunderdome here." I felt this incredible disconnect with the roots, with where it all came from. I really wanted to throttle down and back up and see if I had the energy and the chops to go do another really low-budget film. I needed to revitalize myself.

On the trend of movies using the self-filming technique: I haven’t seen Cloverfield. Redacted, I guess, was similar. Vantage Point I haven’t seen. I thought that we would be the originators of it, but now I guess I have to say we’re part of a trend. I think there’s some kind of collective subconscious — all the world has a camera these days. I think it’s rather obvious for fiction writers, filmmakers, whatever, to take note of that and use it. It’s pretty scary, this blogosphere — man, you just wonder who’s out there throwing up all these ideas.

On finding truth in the media, be it mainstream or underground: To me that’s the argument that’s central to [Diary of the Dead]. When there were three networks, sure, [the news] was all being managed and controlled and spun, no doubt. Now it’s completely unmanaged. And it’s not even necessarily all information — it’s opinions, viewpoints. Anybody could get on there with any kind of an idea and find followers. That’s what spooks me. What would you rather have: it being controlled but not be insightful, or would you rather have this chaos? And I don’t have the answer to that. I almost blame the public more than anybody else for being suckered into it and not bothering to do their own homework. People would rather have somebody tell them the way it is, and go along with it.

On the living dead: The zombies, to me, don’t represent anything except the disaster. They could be a hurricane. They could be an approaching asteroid. My stories have always been about the people and how they respond or fail to respond or respond improperly — and keep trying to preserve the world as they knew it instead of readjusting to whatever these changes are on the planet. The zombies are just zombies. They’re the reason that I can get these movies made. They’re the fun part of it! But to me, they don’t represent anything in particular.

MyZombieSpace

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

George A. Romero’s new movie, Diary of the Dead, isn’t really by Romero. It’s not even called Diary of the Dead. It’s actually called The Death of Death, and it’s by ambitious student filmmaker Jason (Joshua Close), who happens to already be shooting a horror movie when zombie o’ clock rolls around. At least that’s the conceit of Diary, a supposedly self-filmed tale that was completed long before Cloverfield stomped its way across New York City but will no doubt be seen as hooking onto that film’s monster success.

Jason and his film-school buddies — including his take-charge girlfriend, Debra (Michelle Morgan) — first learn about the zombie outbreak from a radio broadcast. As the film progresses (it’s a road movie, with much chugging down rural routes in a Winnebago), the kids remain connected to the outside world via television and, more important, the Internet, portrayed as the only reliable information source as chaos takes over and cell phones go dead.

While there are some juicy zombie scenes and a few crowd-pleasing moments (nobody who sees Diary will forget the Amish guy), the film is less concerned with glorious gore than, say, the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. Romero is known for making horror films "with an underlying thread of social satire" (just like Diary protagonist Jason), but here the thread is laid completely bare. Debra’s somber voice-over tends to overexplain, uh, everything; as in Cloverfield, none of the characters are particularly interesting or sympathetic, and the device of having the camera be part of the story rapidly becomes annoying.

Still, you gotta give the director props for his message, no matter how obviously he states it. Most horror films that try to make a statement stop at a vague pronouncement about the world being fucked. Romero’s smart enough to zero in on a particular problem — Internet-age information overload! — and incorporate it in a story that manages to implicate the viewer at the same time. If we’re witnessing The Death of Death, are we not the intended audience that kept Jason’s hand firmly on the record button even as his friends died around him?

DIARY OF THE DEAD

Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters

www.myspace.com/diaryofthedead

Tiger Beat bard

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If 1967 was the Summer of Love, then late 1968 through mid-1969 brought the seasons of mass deflowering. This wasn’t due to LSD, flower power, or even the trickling down of the sexual revolution. Rather, it was the perfidious influence of a nearly 400-year-old play that teenagers had previously read and watched with glazed eyes. Franco Zeffirelli’s big-screen version of Romeo and Juliet made underage sex look extremely hot, virtuous, and stick-it-to-the-man rebellious. And because it was rated G (until the Motion Picture Association of America subsequently wised up and gave it a PG) and based on, you know, the Bard, parents couldn’t object.

Foolish adults, so not with it! As sheer incitement to Get Laid Now, this Romeo and Juliet was the worst celluloid influence on America’s impressionable youth since Splendor in the Grass seven years earlier — and that was an old-fashioned movie whose mature stars (Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty) were only playing at being teens. Plus, they kept their clothes on.

Not so Zeffirelli discoveries Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, age 17 and 15, respectively. It took her frenziedly heaving bosom and his famously bare ass (the shot that perhaps heated up gay lib as much as Stonewall) to add new life to hitherto yawnsville poetry, making everyone under the age of consent desperate to be in love, thwarted, secretive, coital, and tragic. That last is, after all, the ultimate teenage fantasy: to die knowing that grown-ups will finally realize that crushing your delicate feelings drove you to it. Oh, now you’re sorry! Enjoy that eternal guilt! (In 1981, Zeffirelli would film the ultimate camp incarnation of this theme, Endless Love.)

Much was made of the principals’ youth, for once close to that of the characters as envisioned by Shakespeare. The most famous prior screen version, MGM’s 1936 extravaganza, had cast thirty- to fiftysomethings in the lead roles. Onstage, various famed thespians practically portrayed the young lovers into senility. Zeffirelli — who’d successfully tamed famous couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a robust Taming of the Shrew the year before — not only selected young actors but also juiced Romeo and Juliet with a hyperbolic style designed to excite. The film’s color-saturated photography, costumes, and production design make Renaissance-era Veronese life the apex of sensuality. Nino Rota’s score (with a love theme that topped the United States pop charts as a Henry Mancini instrumental) is romantic catnip. Male testosterone — including that of Tybalt, as played by Michael York, who’d never seem so flamingly heterosexual again — jumps off the screen in splendor, with equally rattling sword fights and projectile codpieces.

The goal was intoxication, and as obvious as some of the above tactics might appear now, Romeo and Juliet remains a heady brew. The mega make-out movie’s principals handled such fantastic early pop culture fortunes with varying success. Hussey carved out a long, diverse adult acting career in projects around the globe. Whiting, an unhappy teen idol ("Oh Romeo, Romeo, why are you so difficult to talk to?" Tiger Beat lamented), tried to earn cred in an eccentric array of projects. But most were poorly received, apart from 1973’s exceptional all-star TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, in which he played the bad doctor. The next year he retired to engage in other pursuits.

Zeffirelli — an opera director before, during, and after his relevancy as a screen auteur — revealed himself to be a maestro of overripe kitsch in such films as 1971’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (a now-unwatchable Jesus People Movement–era shampoo-commercial take on St. Francis), 1988’s Young Toscanini (La Liz meets C. Thomas Howell), and 1999’s Cher-starring Fascist Italy soft sell Tea with Mussolini. He’s openly gay, yet a big-time papist (who supports the church’s stance on homosexuality), as well as a member of media magnate and corruption magnet Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia party. One of his greatest legacies may turn out to be inadvertent: Bruce Robinson, who plays Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, later claimed Zeffirelli’s on-set overtures inspired the genius character of Uncle Monty in Robinson’s immortal 1987 directorial debut, Withnail and I.

Thanks to Marc Huestis’s one-night-only 40th anniversary revival at the Castro Theatre — with Hussey in person, interviewed, and no doubt impersonated by local personalities in the preshow — Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet will be celebrated as a cultural phenomenon. The cheesy contemporary amp-up that Baz Luhrmann engineered in 1996, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes doing the heavy breathing, also struck a popular adolescent chord, but its trendy vulgarity has already aged a whole lot worse than Zeffirelli’s version. The latter remains breathless, and is duly classic.

ROMEO AND JULIET

With Olivia Hussey in person

Thurs/14, 7 p.m., $12.50–$25

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 863-0611

www.castrotheatre.com

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