Film

Rat with wings

-
0

SEVENTIES FLASHBACK The ’60s were all about changing society. When that didn’t pan out, the ’70s went all inwardly focused, pursuing pleasure and spirituality. Both goals frequently commingled as fads, cults, and pop religio-psych fixes. The Age of Aquarius dawned no more: Planet Self-Help was rising, and exotic waves washed across the shore of American consciousness.

Perhaps nothing in that era’s landscape of seekerdom spread its populist wings farther — or became a more dated Me Decade punch line — than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Richard Bach’s precious wee tome (of fewer than 10,000 words, stretched to book length by Russell Munson’s black-and-white aviary photos) was first issued in 1970 by Macmillan after numerous other publishers passed. This little-being-that-could tale is about a "one-in-a-million bird" who yearns to transcend his garbage-eating tribe by flying for the pure joy and challenge of it. Expelled from this group, he’s taken in by gull teachers operating on a "higher plane" and ultimately graduates to "working on love" with his original, dumbly materialist flock, which needs schooling the most. It’s kinda Zen, albeit with Western appeal in that the seeker is granted special FasTrak-to-enlightenment status: "You, Jon, learned so much at one time that you didn’t have to go through a thousand lives to reach this one," one teacher tells our protagonist. So Anakin Skywalker!

With collegians steeped in Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda fanning the flame, Seagull became a phenomenon, surpassing Gone with the Wind‘s hardcover-sales record. It topped the New York Times‘ best-seller list for 38 weeks and was translated into umpteen languages (my thrift-shop edition is English-Korean). It inspired a ballet, a spoken word record by "MacArthur Park" crooner Richard Harris, myriad parodies, and a cameo appearance on Brady Bunch daddy Mike’s bedside table. Could a movie version possibly miss?

Oh yes, it could: thanks to Paramount Home Video, the single most ridiculed flop of 1973 is newly out on DVD. Like most such whipping posts (Heaven’s Gate, Inchon, etc.), it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests. Still, some cringing is appropriate. Much is Bach’s fault, even though he sued Paramount over minor textual deviations. The pompous parable and sentiments behind lines like "There’s got to be more to life than fighting for fish heads!" remained all his. Lit crits carped well before film reviews dug a deeper hole. One called the book "a mishmash of Boy Scout–Khalil Gibran–Horatio Alger doing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spouting the Qur’an as translated by Bob Dylan." But full shit-storm blame rested on the decision by the producers and director Hall Bartlett to visualize a live-action narrative starring actual gulls (controlled on set by radar signals) with dubbed Hollywood actors’ voices.

Painfully whisper-intense James Franciscus "beaked" Jonathan. Richard Crenna, Hal Holbrook, Dorothy McGuire, and Nanny and the Professor‘s Juliet Mills were other seagull ventriloquists. Perhaps evocative, simple animation à la 1971 AMC Movie of the Week classic The Point (which had music by Harry Nilsson) would have been a better path. Bartlett (his career a casualty) went on a promotional tour with "star" birds, creating a truly shitty situation in hotel rooms nationwide. That didn’t help to choke back reviewers’ laughter or massive public indifference. Nobody denied Jack Couffer’s stunning, Oscar-nominated cinematography. And Neil Diamond’s original song score — soaring or insipid, choose yer side — took on a commercial life of its own.

But the film was doomed. A second version, replacing dialogue with Sir Lawrence Olivier’s narration, was released. But when a movie’s already branded a dud, such salvage tactics never work. This screen Seagull lives on as a fabled crapsterpiece, designated "Golden Turkey" by the likes of future conservative art warden Michael Medved. Aviator turned novelist turned sage Bach found his audience shrinking, though a faithful core remains, which now forgives and even appreciates the movie he disowned. These days Love Story, Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods?), and pet rocks have little noncamp residual value. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull is still in print.

Ideals made reel

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Joseph Cornell’s cinema remains the central enigma of his work," Anthology Film Archives founder and Visionary Film author P. Adams Sitney wrote in 1980. That’s a tall order for an artist whose near-crippling sense of doubt about his artistic worth, coupled with his hermetic tendencies, further enhances the enigmatic and curious air that surrounds his vitrinelike assemblages of bric-a-brac, Victorian printed matter, old toys, and star charts — ephemera gently scavenged from the scrap heap of history in New York’s dime stores and junk shops. While Cornell the artist and Cornell the man have become more transparent in the years since Sitney’s essay, the mysteriousness of Cornell’s films — their "roughness" and "insidiousness," to use Sitney’s delicious phrasing — still holds.

As with ballet, books, and music, film offered Cornell sustained aesthetic sustenance and pleasure. Though he approached filmmaking tentatively and always at a remove — his films are composed of preexisting footage, bits from films he had either collected or directed others to photograph — he had long been enraptured by the moving image, particularly in its earliest incarnations. Cornell and his invalid brother Robert had even met D.W. Griffith when they were young men, while America’s burgeoning film industry was still largely based in New York. In a 1942 tribute to Hedy Lamarr published in View magazine, Cornell gushed unguardedly in florid prose about silent film’s "profound and suggestive power … to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light."

The synesthetic rapture evoked by the silent star’s face can be seen as the organizing principle behind Cornell’s tribute boxes to 19th-century prima ballerinas such as Fanny Cerrito and silver screen luminaries like Lauren Bacall. Exquisite fan letters and reliquaries, these boxes stave off time’s indifference to their subjects, freezing them like exotic specimens in cerulean amber. Cornell used the same blue glass to filter the projection of his first and best-known film, 1936’s Rose Hobart.

Composed of footage from a decaying copy of East of Borneo, a forgettable Universal jungle drama and early talkie, and named after that film’s star, Rose Hobart radically recuts its source material to become a mesmerizing portrait of the actress. Cornell unstitches the coherence of Hollywood-style editing by colutf8g deliberately mismatched shots of Hobart, the resulting narrative ellipses forming a counterpoint to the rhythm of his montage. Projected at silent speed, its original soundtrack replaced by a repeated junk shop record of Latin music, Rose Hobart is Cornell’s ideal of film made real.

At the film’s now-storied premiere at Julien Levy’s New York gallery, audience member Salvador Dalí knocked over the projector in a rage, ridiculously exclaiming, "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made." Despite the assurances of Gala, Dalí’s wife, that her husband was just having one of his episodes, Cornell never fully recovered from the incident. He wouldn’t seriously consider making another film until nearly 20 years later.

Like Cornell’s earlier shadow boxes, with their carefully arranged minutiae seemingly selected as much for textural as for thematic effect, his other found-footage films present formally thoughtful arrangements of disparate images. Bookstalls (dating from the late 1930s) takes us on a fantastic geographic and literary voyage; stock imagery of the Caledonian Canal and Vietnamese rice paddies is cleverly spliced into the footage of men browsing book stalls. Cotillion and the Midnight Party (1938) mixes footage of acrobats, tightrope walkers, trained seals, and what look like outtakes from an Our Gang short into a fantasy party for children (whom Cornell considered the ideal audience for his work).

The films Cornell made from the 1950s on — with the assistance of then-budding experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt — are much sparser and leave greater gaps between their associative ellipses. Shot at some of Cornell’s favorite haunts around New York, the films are far more flighty in their evocativeness than the boxes. They are records of time’s passing rather than defenses against it.

Focus shifts constantly in these allegories of change, in which the George Méliès–inspired collage of Cornell’s found-footage reels gives way to one trick: the disappearing lady. In A Legend of Fountains (1954) a boyish young girl stares out a window, then flits through New York’s Little Italy before disappearing in a jump cut. The camera finally rests on a junk shop’s window, from which gazes a porcelain doll, the inanimate double of our lost protagonist and also a dead-ringer evocation of Cornell’s most unsettling take on encapsulated women, the early 1940s Untitled (Bebe Marie). In 1957’s Nymphlight another young girl dressed in a white gown with a broken parasol skips through a park, the camera tracking her as she watches the peripatetic launch of a flock of pigeons. She too vanishes, her absence marked in the final shot, of her discarded umbrella.

Sitney writes that in Cornell’s work, "to encounter anything in its fullness was to come into nearly tangible contact with its absolute absence, its unrecoverable past-ness, its evanescence." Nowhere across Cornell’s creative output are the emotional contours of this experience of the ineffable — wondrous and melancholy — so fully explored as in his films. 2

JOSEPH CORNELL: FILMS

Oct. 12–Dec. 14, $7.50–$12

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

www.sfcinematheque.org

Who wrote the book of love?

-
0

At first glance, For the Bible Tells Me So comes across as a fairly conservative film. Technically and aesthetically speaking, there are no surprises: interviews, found footage, a cute short cartoon, and familiar traditional documentary techniques are mixed with a certain amount of predictability and sentimental cheesiness. But is cinematic form all that defines whether a movie is conventional or groundbreaking? In terms of content, Daniel G. Karslake’s first feature is anything but unchallenging.

In fact, no better word than challenge comes to mind when thinking about For the Bible Tells Me So. First, there’s the film’s questioning of the widely held belief that spirituality and same-sex attraction are mutually exclusive. The many different acclaimed and respected theologians featured in the documentary make it clear that popular literalist interpretations of the Bible, according to which homosexuality is an abomination, show complete disregard for the historical and social context in which it was written (a time when the concept of homosexuality wasn’t even existent).

Through interviews with figures such as Rev. Peter Gomes, Rev. Irene Monroe, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the film makes it clear that religion and the church are two different things — and that scripture is used to promote and justify hatred toward homosexuality in the same way that it can be used to defend racism and sexism.

In the process of critiquing church authority, For the Bible Tells Me suggests that one revisit one’s system of belief. This suggestion extends from and connects to the families interviewed in the movie. Focusing on five religious couples who grew up being told that homosexuality is a sin but who later discovered that their children are gay, Karslake portrays people struggling between their love for their offspring and their idea of faith as a guide to truth in life. Some parents get involved in fighting prejudice, while others discover that they can at least try to understand their children. Because Karslake approaches all of his interview subjects with respect and affection, For the Bible Tells Me So‘s plea for tolerance is almost omnipotent. (Maria Komodore)

FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

Opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters

www.forthebibletellsmeso.org

Lovejoy and company

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Think about the children!"

That cry, most memorably a mantra for Reverend Lovejoy’s wife, Helen, on The Simpsons, encapsulates the pervasive movement to childproof American life. Parents no longer have the time, will, or ability (so they claim) to properly censor all aspects of culture their kids might be exposed to, so a rising chorus demands the government do it for them.

Yet these efforts only underline the scattershot nature of an institutional overview of today’s wide-open mediascape. The FCC heavily fines cusswords and wardrobe malfunctions on network TV, yet cable can do whatever the fuck! it pleases. Men lured via fantasy underage chat rooms into bogus real-world meetings by FBI agents can be imprisoned for crimes of intent. Meanwhile, the hugely popular Bratz empire sells trendy updates on Jodie Foster’s Taxi Driver li’l ho look to preteen girls as ersatz self-empowerment.

The closely aligned flip side of that salaciousness is the market for angelic innocence — those Keane-eyed Olsen twins tap into commingled public fascinations with child precocity, with jailbait allure and its righteous condemnation, and with women starving themselves back to a pubescent size-zero ideal. How often has such high-end childsploitation led to balanced adult life? Face it: we already think about the children way too much.

A whole worm can of child adorability, complicity, ability, and above all, parental responsibility (or lack thereof) is opened up by My Kid Could Paint That. Amir Bar-Lev’s excellent documentary starts out as a straight-up chronicle of a way-underage artistic phenomenon, until unforeseen developments suggest some sort of mass-media con job based on dreams of squeaky-clean white suburbia.

The Olmsteads of Binghamton, N.Y., are a catalog family, so wholesomely good-looking you might think they were assembled by a casting agent. They are nice too. You might expect any thirtysomething heterosexual couple this L.L. Bean–clad to be yuppies, but in their modest upstate New York burg, they get along like everybody else. Mother Laura is a dental assistant. Father Mark works at the Frito-Lay factory. And their offspring? Marla and little brother Zane are well adjusted and beyond cute. If you don’t like kids, picture a basket of golden Lab puppies or something.

Not long after she turned two, Marla insisted on joining Daddy’s off-clock pastime as an amateur artist, painting her own pictures. The attractive, oddly sophisticated-looking results were hung at home. Eventually, a friend suggested they be exhibited in his café, where they elicited actual purchase offers. Another friend, professional artist Anthony Brunelli, then proposed a mid-2004 show at his gallery. It all still seemed kind of a lark.

Then a local newspaper story leads to another — in the New York Times. Normal life ends: so-called pint-size Picasso Marla is the human-interest novelty du jour for every national magazine and TV show. Collectors bid up to $25,000 per canvas. Art critics weigh in and are, for the most part, as impressed as they are nonplussed. Both senior Olmsteads apparently take pains not to pressure Marla toward more art making or media glare than her four-year-old temperament desires. (They also try not to make her older brother feel any less special, though a couple of moments in this movie make you think he has years of therapy ahead.) Yet Mark Olmstead does seem eager to seize the moment. Is this the art-world entrée he’d always wanted for himself?

That question becomes a matter of discomfiting public conjecture once something very bad happens. The Sunday-evening staple 60 Minutes — having stationed a surveillance camera in the Olmsteads’ home (with their permission) to observe Marla’s artistic process — airs a segment that strongly implies the whole child-genius thing is a fraud. Footage is shown with Mark rather aggressively directing Marla’s painting. The tide turns: collectors froth at the mouth, journalists and critics harrumph, hate mail arrives in bulk, and the Olmsteads feel shunned in their own community. They take steps at vindication, but things only get more complicated.

If you watch many documentaries these days, you’re sick of filmmakers putting their mugs and ruminations on camera, whether germane to the subject or not. But there’s a real intensity to Ben-Levy’s soul-searching in My Kid Could Paint That, as he weighs emotional attachment to the Olmsteads — and their expectation of loyalty — against his own nagging doubts and the golden prospect of a vérité exposé.

My Kid Could Paint That provokes on numerous levels. Regardless of whether she’s all that or not, can so much scrutiny — cynical or flattering — be good for Marla? As the title suggests, Ben-Levy’s film also examines deep populist hostility toward abstract (as opposed to traditional representational) art. Perhaps the only question this fascinating documentary doesn’t address is one that lands between artistic-value and cult-of-personality terrains. If Marla Olmstead turns out not to be sole creator of these paintings, why are they suddenly worth less? The oil canvases are vividly colored, complex, often ravishing. I’d be thrilled to have a print, let alone an original.

The creepiest folks in My Kid Could Paint That are those whose art appreciation gets turned off the moment it occurs they’ve enjoyed something possibly not created by an adorable, towheaded child. They’ve invested so much in the prodigy image they can’t see the still-beautiful product that remains. They are pederasts of an acceptable sort — people who only wuv something as long as it comes from a certifiably "pure" source. Innocence-fetishizing Mrs. Lovejoys are always the first to condemn adults who might well be damaged former prodigies themselves. It’s a microcosm of the hypocrisy that raises hysteria over mythically elevated levels of child sexual abuse, while caring little about those myriad ill-raised kids who end up welfare mothers or otherwise inconvenient adults.

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

Opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters

www.sonyclassics.com/mykidcouldpaintthat

The Viz

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

I had a third eye once. It rolled off my forehead at a ’93 rave in an abandoned Detroit airplane hangar and across the huge cement dance floor, barely missing getting squashed by hyperkinetic Canadians and nitrous-giddy kiddies swarming after an airborne fleet of inflated latex bananas. People wore bigger shoes back then, so I panicked slightly and gave chase. A kaleidoscopic Marble of Ethos, my third eye led me huffing and puffing past the ecstatic hordes thronging DJ Tommy Tomato, along a vibrating line of indoor porta-potties, and straight to the back of the building, where an ancient water main had burst — right above the chugging generator that powered the big-screen visuals.

Uh-oh. I had seen the future, and it was either blown up or electrocuted. Eek!

Beyond any possible medical emergencies, the situation also posed a personal dilemma: I was the party’s host, and violent death was still, like, totally goth. If something awful happened to the partygoers, would I ever be worthy of my fuchsia JNCO jeans and "Snap, Crackle, and Rave" Freshjive T-shirt again? I launched into damage-control mode. Through the creative use of several rolls of duct tape, a swaying 50-foot ladder, and reams of shocking profanity, I managed to keep the eye candy flowing and my fragile rep intact. Thanks, bodhisattva or whoever! Every time I see a white lady with a rolled-up yoga mat sticking out of her purse, I think of you.

I never really dug rave visuals much. Too many mushrooming acid blobs, clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and primitive Max Headroom avatars flinging their awkward limbs across the blurry cosmos. But the whole rave thing was about much more than the music, thank goddess, and if I had to suffer through 15 hours of mighty morphin’ neon fractals for the cause of "community expression," so be it. Besides, the use of goofy visuals in Clubland has been around since its modern beginning, when Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic lava-lamp projections glanced off silver cloud balloons. It’s historical.

But now that wild optical shenanigans seem to have migrated from the dance floor to the screen saver, conceptual-art gallery, Burning Man shade structure, and stadium JumboTron, I mostly notice them by their absence. The current vogue for projecting pornos onto club walls doesn’t count — far too easy — and don’t get me started on horrendous video bars. Bleh. Even the freakin’ LoveFest skipped the visuals this year, though the music went far into twilight.

Still, there’s a devious little visual world opening up in the clubs these days, one that goes far beyond simple VJs, and, curiously, much of it’s coming from young kids who have no background in rave at all. The most ubiquitous of these new projectionists goes by the name of 3 and claims installation art, noisecore, and Pink Floyd as influences despite working his overlapping-image magic at many house and drag venues, such as the Endup, Underground SF, Trannyshack, Pink, and Supperclub.

"I escaped my extremely conservative family — I’m a recovering Pentecostal — and wound up at 5lowershop," a noisecore artists’ collective, the 27-year-old 3 told me over the phone. "I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what kind. I started taking pictures of people’s artwork, overlaying the images two at a time and adding a found image of my own that I thought knocked everything to another level. Three images into one, thus the name. I got a handle on the technology and started projecting at friends’ parties a few years ago. People seemed hungry for club visuals. Even though I know almost nothing about electronic music, I love adding another dimension, to jump people’s minds off the musical track."

Although self-taught, 3 can get pretty deep with his visual knowledge. He particularly admires the psychosexual design philosophy of Dr. Jallen Rix and the software wizardry of Spot Draves, who created the Electric Sheep communal screen-saver program. Taken from a laptop-stored image bank of hundreds of thousands of manipulated photos and clips and mixed live with Resolume software, 3’s work can seem electrifying in a typical rave-visuals way at first glance (trippy flashback effects, flaming Maori poi twirlers, etc.), but subtexts peek out: a tart-eyed deconstruction of vintage gay photographs in his huge projections at the Castro’s Pink Saturday party, for example, or a tiny yet virulent stream of social commentary splashed across a performing drag queen’s splayed angel wings. And 3 has a knack for dropping startling film clips of Hitler Youth and Vietnam napalm-bombing campaigns into sets designed around softer themes.

"The visual medium is so incredibly powerful right now," he told me. "The world is basically videos. We can’t look away. I hope some of my stuff shakes people up, forms a bubble and then bursts it. That may be strange on a dance floor, and that’s why I do it.

"But in the end, I really just want to make everything pretty," he continued. "I want to take this thing as far as I can go, get incredibly famous, and make the whole world beautiful. How egotistical is that?"
www.visualsby3.com

Casanova Lounge: Vancouver International Film Festival, Part Two

-
0

Fueled by cinema love more than just biz deal BS, the Vancouver International Film Festival offers a chance to not only see films by upcoming directors, but also to see the directors themselves outside the movie theatre. One great example this year was a night in which Serge Bozon, director of the acclaimed La France, transformed into DJ Bozon.

serge1.jpg

At an upstairs bar on Richards Street, Bozon spun 45s from his collection of rare ‘60s garage rock, Northern Soul and Motown vinyl. Cinemascope editor and VIFF programmer Mark Peranson told me that Bozon has paid thousands of dollars on eBay for a single coveted disc. It’s not for nothing that this director has a film (which I’d love to see) titled Mods: he was coiffed and styled like a Gallic cousin of Linton from SF’s gone but not forgotten Popscene progenitors the Aisler’s Set. In a nod to the Northwest, he played the Sonics. But what about his movie?

Cinema is Useless: Vancouver International Film Festival, Part One

-
0

My first morning at this year’s Vancouver International Film festival brought Riri Raza’s 3 Days to Forever. Though a colleague loves Raza’s 2002 Eliana, Eliana, I’ll admit that a more basic form of curiosity drew me to his latest movie. One of its stars is Nicholas Saputra, a pop culture idol in Indonesia, who shared a very rainy boat ride with me and a few dozen other people at the Vancouver fest two years ago. On that particular gray Sunday, Saputra occasionally walked over to a director and I and would talk with us, only to quietly go off and then come back again. Back then, Saputra was at the fest because he had the title role in Gie, Raza’s follow-up to Eliana, Eliana.

3days2.jpg

Acousticity

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com

The Night of the Hunter is at the top of a list of favorite films compiled by Colleen, a.k.a. Parisian musician Cécile Schott, and Iker Spazio’s lovely cover art for the new Colleen album, Les Ondes Silencieuses (Leaf), more than hints at that film’s magic and menace. In Spazio’s paper cut–influenced dark and starry nighttime vision, Colleen is viewed from the back as she plays the viola da gamba at the edge of a forest by a body of water. A bird descends to the ground, a butterfly floats by a tree, and a cat is curled up in a flower bed. The orphans of Charles Laughton’s classic might as well be floating by, so strongly does the imagery evoke The Night of the Hunter‘s famous riverside ballad sequence.

The CD art’s dark allure, mixing a sense of innocence with sinister undercurrents, is also present in the recording’s title. While a relatively literal translation might be "the still waters," the phrase les ondes silencieuses is also meant to evoke the infrasonic sounds detected only by animals before an earthquake. It’s tempting to view the album’s spare, acoustic arrangements as ballads composed for the moment just before this world’s apocalypse, a perspective that strips away any of the whimsy or preciousness that one might attach to Colleen’s use of antiquated instruments — crystal glass, spinet, and the aforementioned viola da gamba — to create and play these latest compositions.

In the past, Colleen has been associated with unique electronic recordings such as last year’s lengthy EP, Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique, which is composed of and constructed from loops of music-box melodies. On that recording, "Rock a Bye Baby" and "Pop Goes the Weasel" are contorted into new shapes, with song titles to match, but most often the enchantment isn’t so easily recognizable, and the atmosphere is haunted rather than whimsical. The minimalist symphonic effect of "What Is a Componium? — Part 2," for instance, suggests Terry Riley in a bad mood. In interviews Colleen has noted that a search for music-box melodies in movies revealed that they were often paired with scenes of rape or murder, an observation that — along with Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique‘s final track, "I’ll Read You a Story," with its oceanic, nighttime waves of classical guitar — brings us right back to the Grimms’ Fairy Tales imagery on the cover of Les Ondes Silencieuses.

Bowed like a cello but with seven strings and guitarlike frets, the viola da gamba is at the center of the disc, which finds Colleen experimenting with acousticity and a live recording style that involves minimal overdubs. This approach yields meditative rewards on "Blue Sands," on which a sea- and seesawing rhythm cuts across delicate fingerpicking. The spidery spinet melodies on "Le Labyrinthe" and forlorn duet between clarinet and acoustic guitar on "Sun Against My Eyes" are as unsettlingly beautiful. There’s a persistent sense of lightlike sound intensifying and then fading into deep empty space, especially on "Echoes and Coral," on which Colleen plays crystal glass in a manner that suggests Aphex Twin at his most ambient as much as it suggests one of her instrumental influences, Harry Partch. As one listens, it’s hard not to think about the precataclysmic aspect of the album title. In fact, while The Night of the Hunter is on the top of Colleen’s list of favorite films, the final position is occupied by Apocalypse Now.

Much like his cousin in classical guitar composition Colleen, Jose Gonzalez employs acoustic reverberation as a musical metaphor for personal or universal being. That sounds heady, but the appeal of Gonzalez’s music stems from its unadorned, understated direct address. On In Our Nature (Mute/Imperial), Gonzalez maintains his trademark tender brevity, but there’s a stronger sense of lingering discord — brought across through the increased force of his open strumming and plucked bass notes — than on his 2003 debut, Veneer (Mute), or the 2005 EP Stay in the Shade (Hidden Agenda). The tension suits a collection of disenchanted songs that apply equally to world affairs and affairs of the heart.

Gonzalez has partly made his name through transformative cover versions of electronic pop songs such as the Knife’s "Heartbeats" and Kylie Minogue’s "Hand on Your Heart," and on In Our Nature he performs similar wonders with Massive Attack’s "Teardrop," using his vulnerable tenor to make the word feathers float and the word breath breathe. Just as contemporary Devendra Banhart can err on the side of poetic whimsy, Gonzalez can tend toward overly literal earnestness.

But both possess special talents. Gonzalez’s is pensive. "Abram" uses the figure from the Torah, Bible, and Koran to chide religion, and throughout "Time to Send Someone Away" his recriminations against obesity and war lust are sung in a voice so sweet and soft it’s a surprise to realize the words are meant to sting. In Our Nature rivals or even matches the bittersweet wisdom of Caetano Veloso’s sublime first album in exile — 1971’s Caetano Veloso (a Little More Blue) (Philips) — on "Down the Line," on which the word compromising gives way to the word colonizing above frantically swaying six-string melodies and rhythms. "Don’t let the darkness eat you up," Gonzalez repeats insistently at the song’s close. There’s paradox in the hopefulness of his ever-beautiful tone, as if a darkness that eats up evil just might be fine.

COLLEEN

With Beirut

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $25

Herbst Theatre

War Memorial Veterans Bldg.

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 551-2000

www.anotherplanetent.com

JOSE GONZALEZ

With Tiny Vipers

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $20–$22

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

Beauty and the beasts

-
0

SCREAM QUEEN What kind of a woman tempts both Dracula and Frankenstein? Gorgeous Veronica Carlson, that’s who — star of Hammer classics Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969). Now an artist and devoted grandmother living in Florida, Carlson’s coming to town to share her memories of the golden age of British goth horror as part of this weekend’s "Shock It to Me!" film fest. I spoke with the classy Carlson over the phone to get some blood-curdling scoop.

SFBG Were you always a fan of horror films?

VERONICA CARLSON Absolutely! I skipped college classes to go and see them. I was a fan of the gothic horror of Hammer. It was absolutely magical. [Movies today, as well as the real world,] are too scary — you could be safely horrified back then.

SFBG What was it like working at the Hammer studios?

VC The set was always beautiful, and [after I got my hair and makeup done] I would wander around and just see everything, all the details. It was quite extraordinary. I loved every minute of it. When I wasn’t in a scene, I would sit and watch the other actors and be part of it.

SFBG Who’s scarier, Dracula or Frankenstein?

VC When [Christopher Lee] is in character, he is really spooky. But then when Peter [Cushing] is his own cold self, he’s really scary too — that cold, calcuutf8g, distant person that’s chopping people up. They’re so convincing in what they do. I can’t choose who’s worse!

SHOCK IT TO ME!

Fri/5–Sun/7, $6–$10 (festival pass, $48)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.shock-it-to-me.com

Take it sleazy

-
0

CULT FILM Erstwhile cofounder of San Francisco’s late, lamented Werepad — a "beatnik space lounge" (among other things) — Jacques Boyreau, also a filmmaker (Candy Von Dewd), lives in Portland, Ore., these days. But he’s dropping into town again with a characteristic surprise package in the form of the Supertrash Peepshow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’re promised a slide show and lecture revealing the "secret schools of design" in vintage exploitation movie posters and other pop ephemera, as showcased in Boyreau’s new coffee-table tome, Supertrash, a sequel to 2002’s eye-popping volume Trash. Then, to dive more deeply into the cinematic sleaze of yore, he’ll present a true rarity: the fragrantly named Fleshpot on 42nd Street, the final sexploitation epic of notorious grade-Z Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan. It was one of his few real hits — if only on the 1973 downtown grindhouse circuit — but has since become one of the least-remembered titles in an already obscure oeuvre (The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!, The Ghastly Ones), since only a single print survives.

Fleshpot juggles Milligan’s usual hysteria, misanthropy, crude technique, and ripe dialogue with more restrained, realistic aspects in line with mainstream counterculture downers of the period like The Panic in Needle Park and Go Ask Alice. Heroine Dusty (Laura Cannon, a.k.a. Diane Lewis) is a morally lax looker who splits when her latest sugar daddy asks her to, like, pick up after herself. She thus goes from "playing house with some guy in Queens" to playing house with a real queen: blond-fright-wigged Cherry (Neil Flanagan), a tranny hooker pal who says, "Why don’t we join forces? We could both turn quite a few each night if we play our cards right!"

Swapping abusive, money-pinching tricks, these two indelicate souls are well matched: she’s a petty thief who hates sex but would rather trick than work a regular job, and he’s an even crasser soul who sobs, "I’m no prize package: a cocksucker — not even a good one. Too weird to be called a man, too old to try and look like one!" It’s a shock when Dusty meets a guy who’s nice, employed, and genuinely likes her — Bob, played by no less than Deep Throat porn legend Harry Reems. Of course, in the Milligan universe this rare glimpse of happiness (let alone good, consensual intercourse) is doomed to end tragically. Lurid, lively, and cheap as a back-alley BJ, Fleshpot embodies a particular brand of movie entertainment that you can’t get anymore in a public space. When it’s over, you’ll want to be hosed off.

SUPERTRASH PEEPSHOW

Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Atmosphere and an actress

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Olivier Assayas’s films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round. Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination. We frequently lose our bearings in cinema Assayas — as in two poetic refractions of the same scene in Irma Vep (1996) and Demonlover (2002): the female lead donning an alter ego, scurrying through hallways, committing a crime in a space that seems to overlap reality, dream, and fantasy — but there is always an underlying trust in the director’s guiding hand, earned by his hyperkinetic narration and apparent devotion to his actors. Assayas’s résumé does indeed resemble the archetypal new wave trajectory (from Cahiers du Cinéma critic to what Manny Farber calls a termite filmmaker), but the connection runs deeper still: like his forebears, he makes films about what it means to live in the modern world.

It’s a world that invariably entails the restless confusion and complex social systems of the globalized marketplace. He arrives in this slipstream through any number of inputs. For starters, his films are multilingual, multilocation affairs (in this respect they resemble spy thrillers, though it’s only Assayas’s most recent film, Boarding Gate, that feels pointedly designed along genre lines). Second, his plots usually revolve around business people. Even in Les Destinées (2000), an intimate fin de siècle period piece, a lapsed minister struggles for "new methods and new machines" to capture the American market for porcelain. This concern for France’s mediated role in global trade — it supplies luxury items in Les Destinées, film production in Irma Vep, and Internet pornography in Demonlover — is a constant in Assayas’s work, as are characters who are swallowed whole by an abstract marketplace. In Irma Vep, the film that still seems like Assayas’s most intuitive work, it’s a film director (played by new wave favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) who succumbs to the impossibilities of postmodern enterprise, in this case remaking a French classic (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires) with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung).

Film Comment critic Amy Taubin is right to point out that Boarding Gate is "closer to Feuillade than [Assayas’s] Irma Vep," though it seems to me that this is as much a matter of the film’s riveting embodiment of Feuillade’s metaphor of society as so many trapdoors and secret passageways as it is "because [Boarding Gate‘s Asia] Argento is a contemporary Musidora [the star of Les Vampires]." Feuillade confined his lucid vision to the backstreets of Paris, whereas Assayas snaps between the City of Light and Hong Kong. More disconcertingly, he evokes virtual realities as well. In Irma Vep and Demonlover, alter egos take on a confusing, extrareal presence befitting the Internet age. Compulsively drawn to modern, floating spaces, Assayas frequently sets his action in glassy airports and offices. In this respect, the director’s use of Brian Eno’s ambient music, in Boarding Gate, seemed a long time coming, though Sonic Youth’s harmonics had previously supplied the same glide to Irma Vep and Demonlover.

Of course, all of these touches are only so much window dressing for Assayas’s mesmerizing female leads. Godard’s dictum that cinema is a matter of "a girl and a gun" falls short with Assayas: for this director it takes atmosphere and an actress. Irma Vep, Demonlover, and Boarding Gate all abide by the "a woman in trouble" scheme espoused by David Lynch, but with cleaner lines and punchier scrambles. Is there any doubt that Irma Vep conveys the plight of an actress lost in the marketplace with greater grace and acuity than Lynch’s slogging Inland Empire (2006)?

Because really, cinema Assayas could hardly be called glum or even despairing in spite of its heavy themes. Indeed, some of the filmmaker’s champions were upset with Demonlover for crossing that line into David Cronenberg country (the film is being screened at the PFA with the Canadian director’s 1983 Videodrome), but in Irma Vep and Cold Water (1994) it’s striking just how light Assayas’s touch remains even when he broaches oceans of malaise. Some of this, of course, is simply a matter of finely honed cinematic storytelling: fluid editing, detailed soundscapes, and restless handheld-camera work all give his films a stylishness that seems miles away from Dogma austerity.

Despite lacking the dreamlike depths of Irma Vep and Demonlover and the closely observed social mores of Les Destinées and Cold Water, Boarding Gate might just be the smoothest machine Assayas has built yet. The film’s minimalist, on-the-run scenario allows the director to intensify his stylistic template — the cutting has never been more electric, the natural light never so beautifully pale. And to return to Taubin’s point, Argento may well be the perfect Assayas heroine for all of her different looks — in Boarding Gate she’s alternately terrifying and terrified, spasmodic and inert, in control and at a loss. Unlike so many damsels in distress, she’s essentially active — as is cinema Assayas.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS IN RESIDENCE: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA WEEK

Oct. 4–11, $5.50–$9.50

See Rep Clock for schedule

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

You rescued my “Battleship”!

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Sergey Eisenstein’s legendary 1925 film Battleship Potemkin was declared a masterpiece from the moment it premiered, and it has placed near the top of greatest-film polls for as long as such polls have existed. According to legend, Douglas Fairbanks imported his own copy and showed it to the Hollywood elite in private screening rooms; no one was converted by its politics, but everyone was euphoric over its pure technical prowess. Apparently, the film’s potential rabble-rousing capacity frightened only authority figures, who banned Battleship Potemkin in countries all over the world.

It’s easy to see why Battleship Potemkin still feels so revolutionary. It shatters any kind of traditional character identification: it has no single protagonist, no constant common face to gaze on. It’s not exactly what you’d call a tone poem (Eisenstein’s countryman Alexander Dovzhenko staked out that category), and it’s not particularly experimental or nonlinear. Moreover, it’s a poor example of cinematic storytelling, especially when compared with works by contemporaries such as D.W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, and Louis Feuillade. Rather, Battleship Potemkin is a collective experience in which the film’s raging mob becomes its main character. (Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is certainly a modern successor.) The resulting emotions — beginning with the mutiny aboard the battleship — ripple like a wave from ship to shore, across hordes of people, and, finally, down the Odessa steps.

Any film student could explain that Eisenstein’s energetic montage injects the film with its dynamic, pumping rhythms. Another look at the film, however, reveals that cinematographer Eduard Tisse deserves half the credit. Each individual shot, regardless of what comes before or after it, makes a striking photograph in itself. In the early moments before the mutiny, the sailors hang listlessly in a bizarre maze of hammocks, arranged like cocoons. Slatted, slanted beams of light slash through the artfully cluttered shots. The film undeniably has erotic and homoerotic images as well, most obviously the giant, greased pokers that slide into waiting cannon barrels. When the moment of mutiny occurs, the action turns more streamlined, with sailors racing around the ship like blood cells shooting through veins.

Eisenstein stressed speed, coordination, and clarity over the shaky jumbles that pass for action today. The celebrated editing doesn’t function like normal cutting, merely changing viewpoints — it’s rhythmic, driving one shot forward by using the momentum of the previous one. Like a song reaching a bridge, the film gives us a break during the midsection, when the murdered inciting sailor is laid to rest in a tent on the Odessa waterfront. The people assemble to pay him homage, first glimpsed in large masses of moving bodies, then in close-ups of faces (some of which recur and some of which do not). In showing these faces, Eisenstein gives his mob a soul and a personality.

If Battleship Potemkin has any failing, it’s that Eisenstein’s soapbox message is stampeded by the sheer potent velocity of the film itself. When a group of officers prepares to gun down the mutineers, one sailor speaks up: "Brothers! Who are you shooting at?" It’s a great question, but not one posed by a revolutionary. It’s one asked by a visionary.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

With live score composed by Dmitry Shostakovich, conducted by Alasdair Neale, and performed by the Marin Symphony

Sun/7 and Tues/9, 7:30 p.m. (also Tues/9, 6:30 p.m. conversation); $27–$65

Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium

Marin Center, 10 Ave. of the Flags, San Rafael

(415) 383-5256

www.mvff.com

Last Tango in Shanghai

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

There’s a moment in Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) in which you can clearly make out the writing, and this most awkward title’s embedded warning, on the wall. The scene: a humid, tryst-friendly boudoir in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Our spunky, beauteous resistance heroine, Wang Jiazhi (the flowerlike Tang Wei, whose long, cheongsam-clad stems resemble those of Maggie Cheung in 2000’s In the Mood for Love), and her supposed prey and the movie’s antihero — secret police head, invading-force collaborator, and mild-mannered torturer in bespoke tailoring Mr. Yee (an appropriately ossified Tony Leung) — are caught up in a series of Kama Sutra–esque sexual positions. Even as she masquerades as Mrs. Mak, a rich man’s cheating spouse, Wang is laid bare, in all her full-frontal, erect-nippled splendor, eyes closed and face contorted, as Yee thrusts at her from across the box spring, as intimate and as far away as a spy satellite.

Yee is far from transported. Looking like a slender, slightly leathery brown lizard on a rock, he levels an unblinking, penetrating stare at Wang-Mak, all while eliciting pleasure and pain from his porcelain-fleshed paramour. Both unflinchingly creepy and unintentionally funny, the scene is as liable to draw nervous chuckles as it is to unsettle the tidy arc of this World War II espionage love story. The glare brings to mind golden age porn films, such as The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), in which the onscreen sex and gaze exchanged between actors and spectators are as likely to disrupt as to arouse. It’s as if Chow, the suave, restrained writer in Wong Kar Wai films like the aforementioned Mood and 2046 (2004), also played by Leung, finally got to shed his skintight suits, only to reveal something truly startling: a glance more charged than — whoa — visible scrotum.

"Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered by Rice" is the title of a chapter in professor and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, referring to the myth — and popular Southeast Asian T-shirt slogan — centered on diminutive, impoverished, highly bangable Asian poonanny, available for a price and rhapsodized in confessional doc-cum-reality porns like 101 Asian Debutantes. In that film, Shimizu points out, the gaze that the LBFMPBRs level at the camera, midcoitus, is their only visible sign of agency or power against their camera-wielding johns. Likewise, Leung’s look threatens to tear through the multiple fictions and revolutionary frictions propelling Lust, Caution. And like all spy-versus-spy stories, Lust, Caution hinges on the threat of betrayal — something Eileen Chang reveled in so bitterly in her original incandescent short story, begun in the 1950s and published in 1979, after she finally perfected the rewrite of her own compromising affair with a WWII collaborator.

A fresh-faced country girl possessing unexpected acting skills, Wang is plucked by her revolution-hungry theater group to play a plum part: that of a married femme fatale in the company’s most daring production — the assassination of influential Japanese collaborator Yee, whom Wang will get to via his wife (Joan Chen). But amid the click of mah-jongg tiles, glittering gossip, and decadent shopping sprees by the Yees, Wang comes to wonder who’s zooming whom, as Yee drops confessional hints of his tough days at work torturing her resistance kindred.

Working in tropes of fatalistic love previously explored in Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), director Ang Lee does his best to overlay a sense of both depth and humanism on Chang’s prismatic pessimism — occasionally at the disservice of genuine, complicating complexity. As Wang-Mak and Yee hotbox in an airless, silk shantung–<\d>lined dream world, Lee faithfully fixes on Wang-Mak’s point of view, choosing — like her, perhaps — not to visualize exactly what Yee is up to on his "business" trips to brutalized Nanking. His violence, like his wartime atrocities, is largely invisible, except in the bedroom, making it easier for us to identify with his monster. Yet why not really show it all — to viewers more accustomed to seeing WWII dramas of occupation and resistance through the filter of the European theater — as Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and even this year’s other WWII resistance narrative revolving around a would-be Mata Hari trading sex for violence, Black Book, did? In even the most notable instance of explicit sex in the Asian art-house cinema, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Nagisa Oshima sent his sybaritic hero against the tide of Japanese soldiers, doubtless marching toward Nanking as well. Yet Lust, Caution bends over backward, as if assuming a new, gymnastic sexual position, to find the misguided, miscommunicated affection — for country, for enemy — between lust and caution, only to tumble into the abyss.

LUST, CAUTION

Opens Fri/5

Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF

(415) 267-4893

SF DocFest: “Breaking Ranks”

-
0

By Kevin Langson

Breaking Ranks, which plays at SF DocFest Oct 2 and 3, will surely be appreciated by anyone still engaged with and infuriated by the war in Iraq. It’s particularly powerful to hear the first hand accounts of US soldiers who have been there and have changed their minds — and have withdrawn their support from an endeavor they now see as a malicious folly. The film tells the story of four Americans who joined the military for reasons as clear and practical as needing a viable economic option, to more abstract motivations such as needing to be a part of something bigger than themselves. The first part of the film interweaves their change-of-heart testimonies with footage from Iraq that correlates with the atrocities they describe. These men all seem clear-headed, assured, and conscientious, so it is hard to imagine their compatriots — or even their own family members — shunning them as cowardly traitors. The film later becomes about their plight to attain official refuge in Canada so as to not face disdain and imprisonment in the US. Their families and wives or girlfriends also figure into this story about torn relationships and standing up for one’s beliefs.

bh_sayno.jpg
Film subject Brandon Hughey.

Breaking Ranks‘ looming question? Whether or not the Canadian government will have the gall to make a move that is not obsequious to the US government and grant these men refuge.

More info on the film here.

Chicago’s Estrojam hits us where we secrete

-
0

chomic sml.bmp
Margaret Cho rocked the mic – and her burleque bone – at Estrojam in Chicago.

By K. Tighe

An estimated 15,000 attendees flocked to venues around Chicago last week, Sept. 18-23, for the fifth annual Estrojam Music and Culture Festival to see women doing what they do best. E-Jam is no touchy-feely Lilith affair: the events ran the gamut from burlesque to boozing, hip-hop to rock, photography to film.

Margaret Cho lit up the festival with a raucous array of ta-tas, tattoos, and tassels. Many eyebrows were raised when the San Francisco-born comedienne took up belly dancing a few years ago, but this week’s stint at the Lakeshore Theatre proved that Cho has taken the cabaret world firmly by the fans and put together a stellar revue. Featuring seasoned pros like New York’s Dirty Martini and LA’s Princess Farhana, up-and-coming transgender comic Ian Harvie, and members of West Hollywood’s Gay Mafia Comedy Troupe, The Sensuous Woman is an edgier take on a burlesque variety show.

The opening fan dance was not your standard pink and frilly affair, but an irreverent pulsing precursor to the sexual themes of the show set to Peaches’ “Boys Wanna be Her.” Here’s the thing – everyone in the cast was flapping a fan, not just the pretty girls – it was clear that Cho intended to blur some lines. As she emerged from the feathered curtains, the audience went ape and Cho began a well-received stand-up routine with “I’m Margaret, Bitch.” Keeping on the current event tip, the comic called out the critics of Britney’s VMA performance, ascribing the commentary on the pop star’s weight to “a symptom of a diseased mind.” Going on to vividly and hysterically describe that fateful day in an airport bathroom for Sen. Larry Craig, Cho introduced her show as “Like Donny and Marie – but with an all-tranny chorus line.”

Porno for peggers…and everyone else

-
0

By Amber Peckham

All dressed up with nowhere to go? Not anymore. Dig those funkalicious duds and worn-out sex toys out of your attic (you know they’re up there) and head over to Oakland’s Parkway Theater tonight, where Babeland is holding a screening of the erotic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The screening kicks off with a “Sexy 70’s” costume contest, where three lucky winners will receive $30 Babeland gift cards, and the film will be followed by a raffle in which three more filmgoers will receive Babeland Body Kits.

movieposter.jpg

Mad chatter

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What flying snacks do not kill me only make me harder, better, faster, stronger — come all ye children of Kanye West and Friedrich Nietzsche. I love San Francisco. Where else can you catch hell and come this close to getting brained by a pupusa hurled by a nattering, nutty nutbag in orangey pink stretch pants? I’m all the rage, ready for the crème de la Salvadoran vittle missiles.

I’m just cranked on shady luck like that, and was oozing my everyday allotment of pure, untrammeled harassability on a recent Sunday, just minding my own bad bidness strolling through the Mission District. Plenty of lukewarm trade in cell chargers and black velvet paintings of howling wolves and solemn American Indians with ghostly hands emerging from over their maws. Fresh-faced, black-eyed kids in Sunday finery toddled by as I finally landed in Las Palmeras to sample yuca frita con chicharrón. The familias around me were busy cracking crab when an elderly lady with an extremely fashion-damaged Phyllis Diller fright wig cruised alongside me and started in with "You better understand …" before launching into a diatribe en espagnol. Oh, to be the object of so much obsession — as she hobbled outside in royal snit, returning only to yell at me further through the restaurant window. Later, when the good folks at Las Palmeras handed her a conciliatory pupusa — balm to all that ails ya — she flung it, as hard as she could, at my offending, chomping image. Oh, but I don’t understand — I really, really don’t.

Ah Ess-Eff, as if you could ever stop providing safe harbor — or serving up mucho psychotic triggers — for so many mad men and women. You needn’t throw a pupusa far to find classic only-in-SF, Emperor Norton–<\d>style eccentrics or lunatics everywhere you wander. Yet my favorite inspired obsessive this week has to be Chicago’s Galactic Zoo Dossier zine impresario and psych king in his own write-right Steve "Plastic Crimewave" Krakow (least beloved: food-fighter lady marma-lardbutt).

Now out in all its hard-to-read yet lovely-to-behold DIY hand-drawn glory, Galactic‘s issue no. seven, published by Drag City, discharges a wealth of info — and interviews with the Incredible String Band’s Clive Palmer, Gary Panter, Ed Askew, the Strawbs, and Kevin Coyne — for all of us acid- and otherwise damaged lysergic eminencies. Ravin’ spot-on spotlights on dark psych creators like Sam Gopal and Crushed Butler make you wanna bolt out the door — or start up the eBay eye strain — to acquire these jewels. Krakow does give you a taste of the mind expansion under way with the included hot-rockin’ double CD of aged rarities like the Ukuleles of Halifax (a more than 30-strong, all-teen-girl ’70s Canadian uke orchestra) and contempo freak-beaters headed up by Bay Area locals like Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Charalambides, and the Stooges’ Steve MacKay and his Radon Ensemble. Shoving in a track by his wondrous Plastic Crimewave Sound and sprinkling his writing with more wells and OKs than a high school speech class, Krakow coughs up 100-plus pages for this issue — making it more booklike than zine-ish.

Still, Galactic foregrounds the fan in fanzine and hews more closely to the spirit of an obsessively handwritten letter than to that of a more sterile blog. And Krakow’s sincerity, knowledge, and breadth of taste — dude delves into Giorgio Moroder and the Banana Splits, revisits overplayed hit makers like the Bee Gees, and resuscitates faded pharaohs like Edwin Starr — inspire you to penetrate his dense scrawl. Also beyond cool: sheets of Astral Folk Goddesses and Damaged Guitar Gods trading cards — collect ’em all, from Jacqui McShee and Erica Pomerance to Jukka Tolonen and Keith Cross, shop hobbits! So this is new reading material for those wondering where to take their Windowpaned stares post–<\d>Ptolemaic Terrascope (now under the editorial leadership of Oakland drummer Pat Thomas of Mushroom and Runt/Water) and Arthur.

Being a lamezoid at crucial moments, I missed the previous six installments of Galactic, but you can catch the first four 300-run issues in the Galactic Zoo Dossier Compendium book-CD (Drag City). Don’t pooh-pooh, sir — you’re as likely to learn about Santa Cruz supergroup Druids as vanguard blues distortion peddler Pat Hare. And you just might like the way your mind feels, blown.

GET THE ROCK OUTTA HERE

N. LANNON


The dreamy former Film Schooler taps a new CD, Pressure (Badman). With Pancho Sanza and the Matinees. Wed/26, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BONDE DO ROLE


Office boys and girls come out for the baile funk cuties’ armed and dangerous With Lasers (Domino). With JuiceBoxxx and Magic Bullets. Fri/28, 9 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LADYTRON


When you’re 21 you’re no fun, but then you can get in to see a rare live performance by the English combo. With Great Northern. Sat/29, 10 p.m., $25 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

REMEMBERING NICK DRAKE


Nick’s sis, Gabrielle Drake; producer Joe Boyd; and songwriter Jolie Holland talk about the late artist. Tues/2, 8 p.m., $19. Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg., 401 Van Ness, SF. www.cityboxoffice.com

Scary Larry

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nature enjoyed rebelling against arrogant, polluting humankind in the paranoid ecosploitation cinema of the 1970s: Prophecy, Phase IV, Frogs, Sssssss, The Food of the Gods, and even the Oscar-winning fake documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle all suggested Mother Nature was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Back then, though, nature was just bitching within safe fantasy confines. Who could have guessed something as nonfictionally apocalyptic as global warming would be a coming attraction by millennium’s end? Where prior generations only suffered nightmares of an unplugged Earth, ours might actually witness the beginning of the self-inflicted end. Kind of makes you feel special, doesn’t it?

Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter isn’t the first global-warming horror film, and it surely won’t be the last, but it’s unlikely there will be a better one anytime soon — or a better horror movie this fall. After Rob Zombie’s lamentable Halloween and at least three major Toronto disappointments (the lesser-sung The Devil’s Chair, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, and Dario Argento’s howlingly bad Mother of Tears), it’s a relief to be reminded the genre isn’t innately allergic to intelligence and nuance.

Actually, those qualities are probably why nobody’s handed Fessenden a remake of some ’70s drive-in classic or Japanese hairy-ghost flick — he can’t be trusted to make a film obvious enough that it will lure the usual suspects to umpteen mall screens on opening weekend. (All the justified bitching about Halloween didn’t stop ’em from lining up like sheep, if only to sound the first Monday-morning complaints behind the Starbucks counter.)

Fessenden’s movies are creepy rather than stab crazed, with genuinely interesting characters and recognizable human emotions. Habit (1997) is about a loser guy (played by the director) who’s seeing a mysterious woman who just might be a vampire — or maybe that’s just his cover for some serious denial issues. Wendigo (2001) involves a man-deer beast, but more disturbing is its dead-on portrait of a crumbling marriage and poor parenting skills. The Last Winter is a comparatively epic endeavor. It boasts a cast of several! It features wide-screen sunset vistas! It includes helicopter shots! But once again, it’s a story in which the peril might be supernatural or might simply be the result of people losing their grip.

In arctic Alaska (played by Iceland — go figure), an advance team preps a multinational oil company’s projected new drill in a hitherto protected national wildlife refuge. Because lip service must be paid to the environment, North Industry is hosting an impact study before drilling begins. As far as North Industry team leader Pollack (Ron Perlman) is concerned, the study is just a useless formality, but eco watchdog James Hoffman (James LeGros) begs to differ. Pollack meets this unwelcome new coworker after a five-week absence dealing with the suits back in civilization, and his homecoming is further soured by the discovery that another change has occurred: where he used to be the designated bed warmer for second in command Abby (Connie Britton), the sensitive Hoffman now enjoys that role.

Dumped, horny, and ornery, the macho Pollack is not receptive to Hoffman’s foreboding statements about the great white flatness outside. Unseasonably warm temperatures are creating logistical problems, and there are signs the permafrost might be melting, yet Pollack greets such news like a Marine boot-camp instructor handed a sachet of patchouli. As in: fuck you, hippie. Then things start going haywire at the station, from unexplained power outages to personnel wig-outs. An intern vanishes, then returns nearly catatonic. What’s going on out there? Whatever it is, it’s as intent on whittling down the North crew’s number as your standard masked dude with machete at a girls’ school. Except The Last Winter isn’t that kind of horror movie.

It’s the kind, rather, that builds an atmosphere of dread from disorientation and psychological fragility instead of things jumping out from behind doors. In fact, as with Wendigo, the least effective elements in The Last Winter are its most literally minded fantastical. Fessenden does ambiguity with such skill that when monster thingies finally arrive, it’s a bit of a tacky letdown. The most harrowing moments in this beautifully crafted film are contrastingly realistic, such as a sudden plunge through thin ice into freezing waters.

Movies like The Last Winter don’t win awards, and sometimes they don’t get distributed. (It’s taken this movie more than a year to reach US theaters; elsewhere, it’s been shunted directly to DVD.) But I can’t think of a genre film I’ve enjoyed more in 2007, let alone another one that has rewarded repeat viewings. Even if The Last Winter weren’t scary, funny, surprising, and gorgeously shot, Fessenden would still warrant all kinds of gratitude for letting the terminally underappreciated and invariably excellent James LeGros carry a movie. He’s so good here that if there were any justice in the world … ah, forget it. There isn’t.

THE LAST WINTER

Opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters

The sound of success

-
0

What does every rock doc tell us? Success in the music biz comes at a price, paid in any manner of ways — from the brawling egos of Dig! to the therapy sessions in Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Inevitably, every film in the genre’s gonna have certain similarities (drama, heartbreak, testimonials as to the subject’s tune-tastic genius); the best of the bunch also feature a compelling story, aided by access that opens up a little corner on a world that makes millionaires of a few while viciously stomping on the dreams of many.

Jeroen Berkvens’s A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake is barely feature length at 48 minutes, which makes sense when you learn that the singer-songwriter was only 26 when he died, leaving behind precious few photos and zero films of his all-too-rare gigs. The talent of the enigmatic Drake — now known as "that guy who sang that song on that Volkswagon ad" — is discussed in worshipful tones by Paul Weller and others; his hushed, folky songs are played over footage of city- and landscapes, with the suggestion that Drake’s music must be the chief means of unlocking his mystique. Other valuable insights are provided by Drake’s sister, Gabrielle, who reads his letters and points out that despite coming from a privileged, supportive family, he was depressed for almost all of his life. "I think he had rejected the world," Drake’s mother recalls on an audio recording made after the musician’s fatal overdose. "Nothing made him happy."

Bummed out yet? Why not? Fortunately, Chris Suchorsky’s Golden Days injects some hope into its tale of Brooklyn band the Damnwell’s long, hard road to discovering that signing with a major label can be more trouble than it’s worth. Technically slick, Golden Days is an engaging tale, even if you don’t care for the Damnwell’s brand of upbeat pop rock — which exactly matches their nice-guy personalities. As two band members are listed among the film’s producers, I can’t help wondering if there were any ugly scenes left on the cutting-room floor. Fistfights? Drug binges? Brawling egos? Not behind this music, apparently.

GOLDEN DAYS

Sat/29, 7 p.m.; Oct. 3, 9:15 p.m.

Roxie Film Center

A SKIN TOO FEW

Oct. 3, 7 p.m.; Oct. 9, 5 p.m.

Roxie Film Center

The works

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Some films glean artful pleasure from the pains of labor. One flourishing subgenre or strain of documentary tackles working conditions in countries across the world, highlighting the plight of the marginalized to make ends meet and maintain dignity in the face of unjust or extreme conditions. In a sense, Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando, two features at this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, belong to this group, but they are most interesting for the ways that they differ from it, in content and style. Both movies highlight the precariousness of labor and favor a less direct and centralized consideration of employment’s role in shaping an individual’s existence.

Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando are like distant cousins; they are blood-bound by an integral interest in the working class, but they reside in different lands and possess divergent personalities. In fact, the title of each film suggests something about its filmmaker’s approach to theme.

Alan Klima’s Ghosts and Numbers is a bit cryptic, with a penchant for interweaving ostensibly unrelated elements. One may wonder what the relationship is between ghosts and numbers, but the more relevant inquiry relates to that between labor and modernity. Convictions and a critique can be discerned amid Klima’s clever array of images and concerns, but no easy conclusions are reached.

Noelle Stout’s Luchando, on the other hand, is more up-front and focused in its presentation of the titular subject matter. Of course, the title’s meaning is obscure for non-Spanish speakers, and, even in Spanish, the term is slang instead of a standard word for people who get paid for having sex. But once the slang is understood (it is explained onscreen by one of the subjects), there is no uncertainty that Luchando is a clear and determined depiction of the lives of Cuban hustlers, without any overt class analysis.

These films share a relatively subtle sense of subversion. Klima’s Thailand-set documentary presents the quagmires of modernization and shows compassion for its victims at a time when the more popular sentiment is to rally patriotically around the Asian country’s entrance into the global community (and thus celebrate a preference for glistening urbania over a bucolic tradition). Klima observes lottery-ticket sellers as they discuss the vulnerable state of their occupation in the face of human-replacing technology and governmental limitations. Their earnest and desperate presence contrasts powerfully with other more reflective components and is part of an almost unsettling mixture of elements. Shots of unfinished Bangkok skyscrapers are matched with a voice-over concerning the Thai economy. Abstracted imagery is paired with stories of encounters with ghosts. Vérité-style footage is used for political protest and for a visit to a fortune-teller. At worst, these methods are a bit desultory, with some scenes in need of truncation. But aside from those moments, Ghosts and Numbers glimmers with a rare blend of mystery and humanity.

The humanity of Luchando is more intimate. Whereas Klima’s film uses cinepoetic musings to break up its direct human engagement, Stout’s presents pure portraiture — though it is difficult not to succumb to awe before Havana’s photogenic splendor. Stout surreptitiously captures the daily lives of four prostitutes, hesitantly heeding the warning of subjects when cops appear on the scene. These moments and bits of testimony give the sense that her subjects exist on the outskirts of safety, perpetually in a danger zone because of their gay identity or association. This is most poignant in the case of the transgender woman who is verbally assaulted as the film opens and later talks about being forced to dress as a man. Perhaps Luchando would be enhanced by a look outside the immediate scope of its subjects, in order to get a larger sense of the social conditions in which they are struggling. But there is also satisfaction to be found in its tightly focused account of lives that are both ordinary and foreign.

The sixth SF DocFest runs Sept. 28–Oct. 10 at the Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF. Information about tickets ($10) and a complete schedule can be obtained by calling (415) 820-3907 or visiting www.sfindie.com.


GHOSTS AND NUMBERS

Tues/2, 7 p.m.; Oct. 7, 2:45 p.m.; $10

LUCHANDO

Sat/29 and Oct. 5, 9:15 p.m.; Oct. 6, 7 p.m.; $10

For an interview with Luchando director Noelle Stout, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

To see or not to see

-
0

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I did not know the screaming man, nor did I know what country he was in. My view of him was shaking — the video was probably taken with a cell phone or cheapo digital camera with limited vid capability. Suddenly another man came into the frame and cut out the first man’s throat, which didn’t stop the screaming but instead turned it into a horrible, high-pitched wheezing. Eventually he sawed off the rest of his victim’s head and threw it around a little bit just for good measure. I had to stop watching, so I killed the tab in my browser.

My first thought was: what the fuck? And then, as the nausea subsided: what the fuck are these people trying to prove by killing a man like this? I was hungry for context.

The next day, I found myself asking more questions, but not about the motives of the murderers. Instead, I wondered about the communications technologies that allowed me to see that video in the first place. A group of bloodthirsty guys had to have handheld video-capture devices, video editing software, and a high-speed Internet connection to upload the finished product. Then they had to host the video somewhere that anybody could see it. In this case, that somewhere was the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco devoted to the preservation of history in digital form.

Most of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) is organized as a physical-world archive would be: curators like film historian Rick Prelinger donate rare and antique collections of media that they’ve digitized, and the archive makes them available to the world. But archive founder Brewster Kahle has a populist streak. He believes the public should have a say in what gets preserved in the historical record, so he invites the public to contribute. That’s why the Internet Archive has a small area on its Web site called the Open Source Movie Collection, where anyone can archive his or her media.

Kahle wasn’t expecting to host raw war footage when he created the open source collection. But curator Alexis Rossi says the archive receives about 30 to 50 Arab-language videos per day that are related to the Iraq war. "About two or three per week are really violent," she adds. "They are taxing to watch." Kahle, for his part, wasn’t sure what to do about them. They are undeniably a legitimate part of the historical record of the war and other conflicts in the Middle East. Watching them provides people in the West with a rare opportunity to see what Iraqi groups, including terrorists, are saying about themselves.

These videos don’t threaten national security, and they aren’t illegal because obscenity laws apply only to sexual content. So Kahle’s worries are purely about social good. Though these videos form a crucial part of the historical record of the war, something about them seems just, well, wrong. Then again, who is to say what is wrong in this case? War is brutal and deadly — hiding that fact isn’t going to help us achieve peace.

After agonizing over how to deal with the archive’s growing collection of war videos and consulting with experts, Kahle has come up with a solution that satisfies both his archivist and populist sides. He’s planning to set up a system on the archive that will allow users to post warnings about violent footage. These warnings will show up before other people see the videos; this way, the community can warn its members not to watch unless they are prepared for extremely graphic content. Rossi also hopes that the Internet Archive community will get involved in other ways too. "I’d love somebody to translate some of these videos for us," she says. (You can find many of the Arab-language videos at www.archive.org/details/iraq_middleeast.)

That warning policy is similar to community-policing systems on the movie-sharing site YouTube. The difference is that the Internet Archive — unlike YouTube — will rarely remove a video. Kahle is committed to preserving history in all its forms, even the ugly ones. It’s a lesson he thinks the mainstream media, with its whitewashed coverage of the war, would do well to learn. If we don’t remember the past, we’re doomed to repeat it.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who always pays attention to what she’s told to forget.

Green City: Reaching critical mass

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Fifteen years ago this month, San Franciscans mobilized for the first Critical Mass, an unpermitted monthly bicycle parade and social protest that has subsequently been exported to cities around the world.

The movement formed in the streets as the Commuter Clot, just a handful of bicyclists seizing their stretch of pavement together. Among them rode former bike messenger Jim Swanson, whom many credit with coining the name Critical Mass, a reference to the traffic-controlling power achieved when enough bicycles join a ride.

Two months into the project, Swanson watched Ted White’s short film The Return of the Scorcher. The surreal footage of bicyclists in China fording intersections inspired Swanson: "When there was enough of them, they crossed and took over the road."

Thus, in September 1992, the autonomous and leaderless collective known as Critical Mass was born, picking up momentum — while enduring an often rocky relationship with the city and its motorists — ever since.

On Sept. 28, around 6 p.m., thousands of bicyclists are expected to convene around Justin Hermann Plaza for the 15th anniversary ride, just as they do on the last Friday of every month. Each rider brings a unique cause and perspective to the ride. Swanson wheels out his 1965 blue Schwinn Tandem each month and makes it a regular date with his sweetheart and friends.

Longtime rider Joel Pomerantz focuses on the political undertones of the event. "For me, the ride is about community. It’s an opportunity for people to take over public space that is usually destructive to the community," he told the Guardian.

During Critical Mass, riders change the use of street space and establish bicycles as the dominant form of transportation, taking control of every intersection they encounter, at least for the 10 or 15 minutes it takes the mass to pass.

Bicyclists in San Francisco have also attained critical mass in other ways, with more and more residents realizing the environmental, health, safety, and monetary benefits of trading the gas pedal for a pair of pedals. The 35-year-old San Francisco Bicycle Coalition now boasts a peak membership of 7,500, and the city has the highest per capita membership in the Thunderhead Alliance, a national conglomeration of cycling and walking advocates.

According to the Urban Transportation Caucus’s 2007 report card, automobiles and trucks account for 50 percent of San Francisco’s carbon emissions, a major cause of climate change and respiratory ailments. "Simply reducing the number of driving vehicles will be the biggest thing in reducing carbon emissions and improving people’s health. Bicycling comes up as the most cost-effective way to reduce private vehicle trips," SFBC director Leah Shahum said.

Some groups want to take big steps toward furthering that trend. For example, San Francisco Tomorrow is pushing a plan to ban private automobiles on Market Street. But for now the city is prevented by a court injunction from undertaking bike-friendly projects after a judge found procedural flaws in how the current Bicycle Plan was approved (see "Stationary Biking," 5/16/07).

Carla Laser, founder of the San Francisco Bicycle Ballet, said getting the plan back on track is also essential to minimizing bike-car conflicts: "The striping of bike lanes is an example of how the Bike Plan educates the public on how to share the streets. Drivers can clearly see that the city actually supports bikes on streets and is willing to give them a nod of space with the stripes. Every street is a bike street."

That’s especially true for Critical Mass, a situation that can cause tensions between motorists and cyclists and fuel a backlash toward bike riders seen as overreaching into the realm of automobiles. Yet Critical Mass remains more popular than ever, and it only seemed to grow larger a few months ago, when the San Francisco Chronicle publicized some motorist-cyclist clashes (see "Did Critical Mass Really Go Crazy?," SFBG Politics blog, www.sfbg.com, 4/4/07).

Yet as the event becomes a popular rolling party, some longtime massers have started openly wondering what’s next for those looking to send a serious message about minimizing dependence on cars.

As transportation activist and former SFBC executive director Dave Snyder told us, "I’m looking forward to the next public phenomenon in San Francisco that inspires a humane use of public space, as Critical Mass was to so many people."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Showbears in Seattle

-
0

I’m getting a hairy kick this afternoon from this little promo, entitled “Showbears: Auditions,” for the 2007 Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Fest, happening in October. And not just because one of my fabulous exes, Jerrod Littlejohn, is the star. But kind of because of that!

(We remain the best of friends.) PANTS BACK UP!

Ficks’s top six

-
0

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu, Romania, 2007). This Romanian debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime. You’ll be holding your breath as the characters dash from one nightmare to the next. There’s a reason this movie won the Palme d’Or at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.

2. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, France, 2007). As a rambling red balloon affectionately takes to Simon, a seven-year-old boy in Paris, his single mother — played to perfection by Juliette Binoche — does her best to care for her child, deal with flaky tenants, and continue her professional career as a puppeteer. Don’t be intimidated by Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s reputation; his latest movie is accessible, as is the 1956 French film that it is based on. This tiny, chaotic journey can help you deal with the frantic contemporary world.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, UK, 2007). Warning: the new Woody Allen movie is not a comedy. Set in the UK, this minimasterpiece pairs Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as middle-class brothers, both of whom want a better financial lifestyle. As the pair close in on their dreams, their moral codes begin to loosen. The acting is extraordinary (Farrell finds finesse), and Vilmos Zsigmond’s camerawork encloses the characters in a strikingly gloomy world immensely heightened by Philip Glass’s original score. Many critics are dismissing this dark drama as a comedic misfire. But like Allen’s 2005 UK production Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream isn’t courting laughs; these films dig into some disturbing human dilemmas at a time when there’s not much of a reason to laugh.

4. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US, 2007). For the follow-up to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach creates another bittersweet coming-of-age exposé of a dysfunctional family. Both Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh contribute some of their best work as sisters who compete with more than support each other. Also, Jack Black is wonderful as a schlub whom Leigh is set to marry, and newcomer Zane Pais is as awkward as a young teenager should be in the role of Leigh’s son. But it’s the sincere and audacious writing that gives Margot at the Wedding its powerful kick.

5. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007). Behold a personal journey through Guy Maddin’s childhood and hometown done by way of archival footage, personal home movies, narration (by Maddin himself!), and reenactments starring his cinematic mother, Ann Savage (the unforgettable leading dame of the 1945 film noir Detour). It’s hilariously self-depreciating and utterly universal — can this man do no wrong?

6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands, 2007). Carlos Reygadas updates Carl Theodor Dreyer. If that gets your beard in a bunch, then you’re gonna be in heaven for two and a half hours.

1...143144145...168Page 144 of 168

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