Films

To a pulp

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Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the death of author Cornell Woolrich, darkest of the noir genre’s lost souls. Like so many of the milquetoast protagonists who populated his novels, Woolrich died an anonymous and ignoble death in a New York City hotel room. Years of alcohol abuse and a gangrenous leg amputation had left him an amorphous wad of a man. Though often credited with establishing the American roman noir ("black book") and indirectly developing its cinematic correlate, film noir, his literary legacy has largely been siphoned by hard-boiled mavericks like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky and Victorian poets like F.W. Bourdillon, whose 1878 ode "Light" provided the title to one of Woolrich’s most popular novels (The night has a thousand eyes, / And the day but one). Woolrich’s occasionally hackneyed poetics of the dark became his literary obsession. Besides 1945’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, there was 1959’s Death Is My Dancing Partner, 1948’s I Married a Dead Man, and a 1939 short story, "Through a Dead Man’s Eye." Few American writers so accurately portrayed the crushing boredom and fantasies of violence that existed in the postwar American metropole during the very years when suburbanization and media-driven consumption lavished the middle-class with giddy excesses. Biographer Francis Nevins perspicaciously sums up Woolrich’s life and career with one of the late author’s most nihilistic offerings: "First you dream, then you die."

The Pacific Film Archive’s "One-Two Punch: Pulp Writers on Film" retrospective celebrates the onscreen contributions made by Woolrich and his brethren in pulp — Fredric Brown, Jim Thompson, and Charles Willeford — from the halcyon mysteries of the ’40s to the bloody climaxes of the ’80s and ’90s. While many noir authors established reputations primarily on the page and others failed to make the transition to Hollywood, these four writers have had a particularly enduring relationship with cinema, as their stylized and iconic prose lent itself to arch visual expression.

Along with the über-popular James M. Cain, Woolrich and Thompson were responsible for much of the genre’s early vogue and were able to cash in on the development of the mass paperback (the primary medium for roman noir) precisely because their onscreen popularity had made the format financially viable. Woolrich’s publications-turned-films like The Phantom Lady (1944) and The Black Angel (1946), along with Thompson’s The Kill-Off (1989), signified the breadth of noir’s settings and styles by effectively trading the former’s claustrophobic Gothams for the latter’s dusty, open roads and seaside towns.

Discovered in Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, Woolrich and Thompson were critically acclaimed by French nouvelle vague writers and directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Alain Corneau’s Série noire (1979), written by Oulipo poet Georges Perec and based on the 1954 Thompson novel A Hell of a Woman, is a conscientiously Francophone retelling of a most American narrative.

Fredric Brown, an eccentric innovator of the noir/sci-fi short story, had as much influence on the works of Philip K. Dick as those of Elmore Leonard. His 1949 novel, Screaming Mimi (Gerd Oswald’s film version, 1958), remains his most infamous contribution to the screen. Starring newcomer Anita Ekberg — later of La Dolce Vita (1960) fame — Mimi‘s lewd, serial killer-meets-stripper plot is a thinly veiled exercise in dime novel titillation.

Willeford, the most contemporary of the quartet, comes closest to representing the silver age of the genre, often referred to as neo-noir. Similar in style to Thompson, Willeford forgoes the moribund poetics of Woolrich and the whimsical perversities of Brown for more straightforward prose replete with crisp plotlines, raunchy interludes, and sociopathic villains. Willeford’s most popular novel turned film, 1984’s Miami Blues (George Armitage’s film version, 1990), demonstrated the crossover potential of crime fiction onto the screen at the beginning of the ’90s, anticipating the mega-popularity of Leonard and Quentin Tarantino.

"ONE-TWO PUNCH: PULP WRITERS ON FILM"

Feb. 13–28, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2757 Bancroft, Berk.

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Dirty old town

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It’s been eight years since Terence Davies gifted us with his sublime if slightly inferior film version of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. After various false promises from moneyed folks and battles with bureaucratic fools, he’s returned with a largely found-footage documentary — an extremely mouthy one.

Those who’ve seen Davies in-person know he’s far from the shy misery maven one might assume from autobiographical films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and his peak work, The Long Day Closes (1992). He likes to spout a witticism or three. But even that awareness doesn’t quite prepare one for the full-boar melodramatic recital-ready voiceover of the made-for-TV Of Time and the City. At one point, discussing his first encounters with MGM musicals, Davies declares that he "swallowed them whole." In fact, here, his rich, raspy, megadramatic readings threaten to swallow the imagery he’s gathered just as wholly. He answers a great line about poverty from Willem De Kooning with an equally great insult about rich royalty. At other times he’s simply overwrought.

Of Time and the City is best when Davies lets the montage — or an excellent singer — do the talking. It’s uncanny how he choreographs archival material to perform the same slow retreats that characterize the ever-revealing dolly shots in his movies. As a soundtrack for wartime, the Hollies’ "He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother," is born again, so it’s a drag when Davies stuffily argues that the Beatles are provincial. Davies is a collagist with a strong nostalgia streak. Sometimes it spoils the best of him.

OF TIME AND THE CITY opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Iran here

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER One can tumble into the disconnect between the reactionary brouhaha last year regarding then-candidate Barack Obama’s proposed engagement with Iran, and the reality, as Iranian-born, Indian-raised vocalist Azam Ali knows it.

"I always tell my American friends, ‘People love America so much in Iran, you wouldn’t be able to pay for a meal — they love Americans that much,’" says the Niyaz frontperson by phone from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and bandmate Loga Ramin Torkian and their year-old son Iman Ali. We talk days before Vice President Joe Biden proffers an olive branch to Tehran during the Munich Security Conference. "The one thing that the majority of Americans should realize is that the only country where people are pro-U.S.A. in the Middle East is Iran. The government, of course, is something very different."

"I hope this administration will start some kind of dialogue with the government of Iran," she adds. "It’s really unfortunate that my country is where it is. I’d like to see it flourish and become a part of the world."

Springing from the ashes of Ali’s old band Vas and Torkian’s former ensemble Axiom of Choice, Niyaz is doing its part in bringing together a few seemingly divergent communities: fans of electronica awash with Eastern beats, trance heads, and listeners of traditional Persian, Indian, and Turkish sounds. Their most recent double album, Nine Heavens (Six Degrees, 2008) is the ideal musical unifier for all those parties. One disc unfurls nine electronic originals ornamented with Sufi poetry in Farsi, Urdu, and Turkish, including several by 13th-century mystic and poet Amir Khosrau Dehlavi — who’s credited with inventing the Qawwali and, like Ali, was born in Persia and raised in India — and renditions of Persian and Turkish folk songs. The second, my favorite, delivers acoustic versions of the first disc’s tracks — eons away from the ecstatic pop of Googoosh, but as lush and appealing as the recordings by influential ’80s world-music crossover stars like Najma.

For her part, Ali clearly opens the emotional floodgates on numbers like "Tamana" — something to anticipate when she performs with her multi-instrumentalist husband, oud virtuoso Naser Musa and tabla player Salar Nader at Palace of Fine Arts Feb. 13.

It’s a talent she may not have been able to offer to her native country — "women are not allowed to perform there," she demurs — though Niyaz has played in Dubai and Turkey, where Ali and Torkian plan to relocate soon, and it’s made her popular with soundtrack composers looking for a sonic dose of the so-called Orient. Ali has sung on scores for films like The Matrix: Revolutions (2003) and TV shows such as Alias — all of which was accomplished without an agent.

"You really can’t support yourself doing the music we do," she confesses. "You don’t do world music for money. I’ve been fortunate. I’m not proud of all the projects I’ve worked on, but it has worked for me, though I don’t get to express myself doing that work. For the most part [clients] want the flavor — they don’t want something that is culturally specific. What a lot of Eastern music brings is just that kind of emotional intensity, that depth, they’re looking for."

Instead she looks to Niyaz for that artistic fulfillment. "We work totally backwards from people who do most electronic records," she explains. They record all their acoustic elements, then deliver the tracks to producer-collaborator Carmen Rizzo (Coldplay). "Sometimes we’re not able to incorporate all the acoustic elements because there’s not enough sonic space for them." The group realized halfway through the making of Nine Heavens that they had a rich acoustic album as well an electronic one. "A lot of times when you add electronics it seems like you’re trying to mask something that’s not there," says Ali. "But this reveals us."

NIYAZ

Fri/13, 8 p.m., $27–$53

Palace of Fine Arts Theatre

3301 Lyon, SF.

——-

MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA


Brian Jones imbued the maestros with rock ‘n’ roll glamour, but it was the mesmerizing music that made an impact on figures like Ornette Coleman and William S. Burroughs. Live Volume 1 (Jajouka) ushers in the forthcoming films The Hand of Fatima and Boujeloud on the music, the musicians, and their influence. Wed/11–Thurs/12, 8 and 10 p.m., $30–$35. Yoshi’s, 1330 Fillmore, SF. www.yoshis.com. Also Sat/14, 2 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com

NOFX


Party with them, punkers, in honor of the SF band’s 25th anniversary. The problem: getting into these sold-out blowouts. Wed/11, 8 p.m., $23. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com; Fri/13, 8 p.m., $22.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.livenation.com; Sat/14, 8 p.m., $22. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com; Sun/15, 8 p.m., $23. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

THE WHORESHOES


The Bay’s honky-tonk and old-time honeys bring out the uke and spoons for the SF Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival. Thurs/12, 9 p.m., $12–$14. Café Du Nord, 170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

YO MAJESTY


"Kryptonite Pussy," anyone? Giving that electro a good hard God-fearing, out, and feminist twist, Shunda K and Jwl B will accept your tributes now. Fri/13, 10 p.m., see Web site for price. 103 Harriet, SF. www.hacksawent.com

THE MUSIC TAPES


A haunted symphony comprising singing saw, old-time banjo, magic tape organ, euphonium, and an NBA-size metronome materializes on Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes (Merge). Tues/17, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Import Export

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REVIEW E.M. Forster’s plea to "only connect" is given a scathing work-over in Ulrich Siedel’s Import Export, which makes its U.S. theatrical premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Siedel provides more displays of our species capacity for spite, indifference, and brutality than all the Saw films combined, though nary a drop of blood soils the screen. Siedel has no need for Rube Goldbergian gore machines — the chips dealt by the fall of the USSR to the residents of the Ukraine, now parasitically exploited by its wealthier Western neighbors, are enough. That the film’s title coldly describes the movement of goods and services as well as the cross-border trajectories of its two main characters is no accident: no attempt at empathy or conscientiousness on their part goes un-snuffed under the grind of capitalism. Olga, a pretty Ukrainian nurse who makes money on the side working as a webcam girl, heads to Austria hoping to improve her lot in life. After being fired as an au pair, she winds up working as a cleaning lady in an eldercare facility, where she tentatively attempts to befriend the bedridden patients who are treated no better than used furniture. Olga’s narrative is intercut with that of Pauli, a muscled Austrian hood who aspires to become a security guard but winds up helping his lecherous father-in-law deliver outmoded gaming machines to Ukrainian housing blocks after being humiliated on-duty by a gang of toughs. None of this is easy viewing, and there are several moments — particularly with the elderly cast members who appear to be truly mentally ill — when one wonders if Siedel is in some way contributing to the grotesqueness he’s setting out to document. It is a question perhaps only answered by repeated viewings. That is, if you have the stomach for it.

IMPORT EXPORT plays Thurs/12–Sat/14 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. See Rep Clock.

Dudes and don’ts

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All right, I’m not gonna try and pretend The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans and Deadgirl have all that much in common, other than they’re both playing the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. But they do both focus on folks with peculiar obsessions, healthy and otherwise.

Camera in hand, television commercial director Eddie Chung descended upon the 2004 Lebowski Fest — since 2002, an annual gathering of fans of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult phenom The Big Lebowski — and discovered a bona fide subculture. Who are these people? Why are they addicted to Lebowski? What makes ordinary working stiffs fiendishly create movie-inspired costumes (severed toe, Sioux City Sasparilla bottle, walrus, "camel fucker") as detailed as they are obscure?

At 66 brisk minutes, The Achievers can’t help being fun, although I imagine it would be difficult to enjoy the doc without having seen Lebowski. (If you haven’t seen Lebowski, or you saw it when it came out and — like most audiences and critics at the time — didn’t get it, you’re long overdue for a viewing.) Still, that’s probably not gonna be a problem for IndieFest attendees, considering the fest hosts an annual bowling-infused salute to the Dude. Dilettantes will appreciate The Achievers’ many Lebowski clips, which pop up to contextualize lesser-known references; diehards will thrill to the interviews with bit-part actors like "Saddam," the Hussein look-alike who hands the Dude bowling shoes during his dream sequence. Also featured are the real-life inspirations for the Dude, Walter Sobchak, and Little Larry Sellers (you know, the kid who steals the Dude’s car and leaves his D-grade homework paper behind — incredibly, a true story, more or less.) The Coens are absent, but bemused star Jeff Bridges does make an appearance.

As Chung discovers, the most hardcore of the Lebowski fans found each other over the Internet, becoming acquainted via a message board dedicated to the film and the fest. Many have become real-world friends above and beyond the organized Lebowski gatherings, which now attract thousands of White Russian–drenched revelers. Really, they’re no different than heavy metal fans, or Rocky Horror junkies, or Civil War reenactors, tapping shared interests to build a tribe whose activities (Maude Lebowski tattoo, anyone?) might be viewed by the mainstream as crossing the line into low-level insanity.

Far more wackjobby are the protagonists of IndieFest’s closing-night film, Deadgirl, which is described in the fest program as resembling the early films of David Cronenberg. Body horror? Yes! Disturbing? Indeed! The work of filmmakers (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel) with innovative, artistically daring careers ahead of them? I’m not yet convinced. Deadgirl starts off promisingly enough, as a pair of ne’er-do-well high schoolers (pretty boys Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) stave off boredom by exploring an abandoned mental hospital. But this ain’t slow-burn creepiness like Session 9 (2001); the film’s most original twist — the boys find a zombielike woman chained in the basement — comes early, and the shocks soon revert to tired torture-porn gross-outs. Naturally, the friends are torn apart by the discovery, even as they both become consumed by it. One’s horny enough to declare the woman/monster do-able, while the other’s a tad more sensitive; it’s not long before an unbelievable mix of emo and necrophilia, and a li’l dab of misogyny, oozes to the surface. Queasy does it.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

Hot pink

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Filmmakers like Jonathan Demme who worked for Roger Corman in the early 1970s were delighted by their freedom to include just about anything — radical political issues, wild tonal shifts, etc. — as long as the basic drive-in requirements of gratuitous T&A and violence were shoehorned in. That moment was brief. But something similar has lasted decades in Japan’s "pink film" milieu, where often youthful talent cut teeth on low-budget softcore features typically an hour in length.

With genital display and graphic sex illegal — we’ve all seen Japanese private parts obscured by a digital fogblot — "pink" makers must exercise a little more imagination than Western pornmeisters. No doubt there’s been much unwatchable dross among the diminished but still-active genre’s thousands of titles to date. But there’s also been inspired, sometimes just-plain-weird stuff, like Godardian Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), extreme nunsploitation School of the Holy Beast (1974) and 2003’s Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (a.k.a. Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice), which played the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In a rare moment of retrospection, this year’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival sidebars "I am Curious (Pink): The Second Wave of Japanese Sex Cinema, 1986–Present." Offering two double bills at a sum length barely more than that of one bloated Hollywood prestige flick, this sampler ranges from the goofy to the gloomy. There are some constants — ironic use of Western classical music, variably consensual abuse of women, vigorously mimed sex acts — but these singular films aren’t much like each other, let alone most adult entertainment you’d see here. Even their misogyny often feels like an in-joke at men’s expense.

Not so in The Bedroom (also known, rather misleadingly, as Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture), a 1992 feature by Hisayasu Sato of gay "pink" Muscle — a dismemberment fantasia that set the gold standard for walkouts when bizarrely chosen as 1990’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival opening nighter. This cold, morbid, semi-abstract objet d’art queasily mixes identity blur, voyeurism, tranquilizer excess, marital ennui, homicide, and lewd consumption of chopped lettuce. It’s notorious for giving a small role to one Issei Sagawa, who’d committed real-life murder and cannibalism — only to be just briefly institutionalized before becoming a still-popular multimedia "celebrity" back home. Ick.

On a less appalling note, the other three IndieFest "pinks" take themselves less seriously. Osamu Sato’s New Tokyo Decadence: The Slave from 2007 is supposedly based on the experiences of star Rinako Hirasawa, who discovered early on that she was into masochism — though not averse to playing professional dominatrix. She finds fulfillment under the thumb of her eventual office boss, only to discover he’s a wuss in sadist’s clothing. Often funny, New Tokyo Decadence views its heroine not as victim but a sometimes ambivalent power bottom who actually pulls the strings.

For full-on silliness there’s Motosugu Watanabe’s 1986 Sexy Battle Girls, whose schoolgirl protagonist has an anatomical irregularity her father is hell-bent on using to avenge a long-ago wrong. "The Venus Crush is your secret weapon! Love is not an option!" he insists. Sent to a private school where "bad" students are sold to politicians as sex slaves and ballpoint pens are shot like deadly arrows, she combats perils including one highly exotic dildo you won’t find at Good Vibrations.

Shuji Kataoka’s same-year S+M Hunter features a titular character outfitted spaghetti western–style with cowboy boots, priest’s collar, a skull’s-head eyepatch, Morricone-type musical theme, and extraordinary erotic-lassoing abilities. But he and fellow "Pleasure Dungeon" habitués meet their match in the Bombers, a man-hating (and gay-man molesting) girl gang à la H.G. Lewis’ She-Devils on Wheels (1968). If you’ve yearned for a battle of the sexes encompassing gratuitous Nazi regalia and pervasive retro disco woo! woo! — well, prepare to be satiated.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

Valentine’s Day events

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Click here to see all Valentine’s Day listings on one page


PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

Black Valentine Masquerade Club Mighty, 119 Utah; www.mighty119.com. Feb. 13, 10pm-3am, $15. Sunset Promotions and Blasthaus present this all-out party extravaganza, featuring UNKLE’s leading man James Lavelle, Evil Nine, and revelers dressed in dastardly dark costumes.

Bootie — A Special Valentine’s Party DNA Lounge, 375 11th St.; www.bootiesf.com. Feb. 14, 10pm, $12. Celebrate the holiday mash-up style with DJ Freddy, King of Pants, twisted love songs by house band Smash-Up Derby, and a midnight mashup show by Valentine.

CockBlock Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, cockblocksf.com. Feb. 14, 10pm, $7 . Get your Valentine’s groove on at this queer dance party for lezzies, queers, lovers, and friends, featuring DJ Nuxx.

Date and Dash Noc Noc, 557 Haight; www.dateanddash.com. Feb. 14, 8pm, $35 (free to first 20 people). Speed-dating with a Lower Haight twist. RSVP for red drinks, trendy beats, and a faux auction.

I Heart the Utah Hotel Utah Saloon, 500 Fourth St.; 546-6300, www.thehotelutahsaloon.com. Feb. 14, 9pm, $8. Celebrate the kind of love that lasts — that between a bar and 100 years’ worth of patrons — with oyster shooters, champagne, a costume contest, and live music by El Capitan and Let’s Make Something.

Love on Wheels Dating Game Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com. Feb. 13, 6-9pm, free for SFBC members. Join this dating game exclusively for two-wheelers, where bike bachelors and bachelorettes quiz a panel of three cyclists to select their date — and then roll to hip local spots.

Milonga de Amor Ferry Building; 990-8135. Feb. 13, 5:30-8pm, free. Celebrate V-Day, sensuous tango, and slow food.

Sexy Tour of SF Strip Clubs for Singles or Couples (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com. Feb. 13, 6-10pm, $99/person or $190/couple, includes entry to all clubs, two drinks, and full-course dinner. Peek into a world of fantasy, glamour, and intrigue with the safety of a fun group and a guide whose expertise is leading women and couples.

Shindig 69 Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com. Thurs/12, 8:30pm, $10. Start your weekend off with a tribute to the sexy ’60s, featuring The Devil-Ettes, Kitten on the Keys, and DJs from Bardot a Go Go and Teenage Dance Craze — all to benefit the Keep a Breast Foundation.

Supperclub Suicide Girls Afterparty Supperclub, 657 Harrison; 348-0900, supperclub.com. Feb. 14, 7:30pm, $100 for dinner and party. Have someone you’re trying to get in bed? Invite them to share a four course menu, bottle of champagne, and special afterparty with Suicide Girls.

Thousand Faces Misera-Ball OmniCircus, 550 Natoma; 701-0686, omnicircus.com. Feb. 14, 8pm, $10. Celebrate the lovelorn with a multifaceted performance and afterparty. Special discounts for the lonely.

Valentine Art and Wine Tasting Party for Singles The Artists Alley, 863 Mission; winesocials.com. Feb. 13, 7:30pm, $20–$30. Sample appetizers and a fabulous selection of wines from California and around the world at one of SF’s premier art galleries, co-sponsored by the Society of Single Professionals.

Valentine’s Day BikeAbout San Francisco Zoo, Sloat at 47th St.; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Feb. 14, 8:30-11am, $25–$30. Woo at the Zoo too rich for your blood? Bring your bike and your sweetie for a leisurely, guided pedal around the zoo followed by a continental breakfast. Discount for tandem cyclists!

Valentine’s Day Poetry Luchadores Sub-mission, 2183 Mission; 863-6303, www.poormagazine.org. Feb. 14, 7pm, $20 to fight, $10 to watch. Your favorite revolutionary poets, poverty scholars, mediamakers, and cultural workers at POOR Magazine mash up poetry, gender, and wrestling for their second annual Battle of ALL of the sexes.

Valentine’s Eve for Singles Orson, 508 Fourth St.; 777-1508, www.orsonsf.com. Feb. 13, 5:45pm-closing, price varies. Choose your own adventure (and price range) at Orson by attending either the Cupid’s Arrow Dinner Party four-course meal or Aphrodisiac Dessert After Party, with dancing for all starting at 10pm.

Woo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo, Sloat at 47th St.; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Sat/7, 6pm; Sun/8, 12pm; Feb. 14, 12pm & 6pm; $75. Enjoy the 20th annual zoo sex tour with Jane Tollini, featuring new animals, new positions, and new kinky information — plus brunch or dinner.

BAY AREA

Charles Chocolates Tasting J Vineyards and Winery, 11447 Old Redwood Hwy, Healdsburg; (707) 431-3646, www.jwine.com. Sat/7, 12:30-3pm, $20. Join the premium artisan chocolatier for a special Valentine’s Day-themed chocolate and wine tasting at J Vineyards.

Family Valentine’s Play Party River of Light Massage & Healing Arts, 256 Shoreline, Mill Valley; (415) 846-8181, laughplayhug.com. Feb. 14, 10am-12pm, $10–<\d>$20. Enjoy heartfelt family fun, sensory games, movement, laughter, and drama with your extended family.

Progressive Dinner for Single Women and Men Ristorante Don Giovanni, 235 Castro, Mt. View; (510) 233-9700, www.meetinggame.com. Sat/7, 7pm, free for newcomers. Find your Valentine among the 20 other singles enjoying a three-course meal.

Sweetheart of the Year Dinner Point San Pablo Yacht Club, 700 W. Cutting, Richmond; (510) 232-1102, www.pointrichmond.com/methodist. Feb. 12, 6:30pm, $35. Honor Pat Dornan at the First United Methodist Church of Richmond’s fun-filled evening of memories and laughter.

Valentine’s Dance 707 W. Hornet, Pier 3, Alameda; (510) 521-8448, www.uss-hornet.org. Feb. 14, 8pm, $40–$75. Don your best ’40s or ’50s attire and dance to jazz and big-band classics aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

Dating, Marriage, Dating Farley’s, 1315 18th St.; www.farleyscoffee.com. Feb. 14, 7:30pm, donations welcome. Get hopped up on coffee while previewing Liz Grant’s new love-and-romance themed stand-up comedy show.

Love Bites Pop Rocks: LGCSF Sings Top-40 Hits of Bitterness and Betrayal Women’s Building, 3543 18th St.; 1-800-838-3006, www.womensbuilding.org. Fri/6, Sat/7, adults-only show Feb. 13, 8pm, $15–$30. Cupid takes a well-deserved beating when the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco presents its sixth annual Valentine’s Day cabaret and musical extravaganza.

Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St.; www.makeoutroom.com, www.getmortified.com. Feb. 12, Feb. 13, 8pm, $12–$15. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen-angst artifacts.

Origins of Love with John Cameron Mitchell Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St.; 863-0611, www.victoriatheatre.org. Fri/13-Sun/15, times vary, $25. Shortbus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron presents a romantic potpourri of song, prose, poetry, and film, including a rare chance to hear Mitchell sing selections from Hedwig.

Sexy Valentine’s Erotica Reading Good Vibrations Polk Street Gallery, 1620 Polk; 345-0400, events.goodvibes.com. Fri/6, 6:30pm, free. Enjoy a glass of wine while talented group of local writers read their sexy short stories, frisky flash fiction, passionate poems, and hot haikus.

Spookshow A Go-Go Kimo’s, 1351 Polk; 885-1535, www.kimosbarsf.com. It’s a Valentine’s Day massacre with performances by Dottie Lux, Alotta Boutte, Kitten on the Keys, Lady Satan, Ruby White, and DJ Miz Margo, and films by Val Killmore and Shadow Circus.

Sweet Cookbook Reading and Eating Red Hill Books, 401 Cortland; www.dogearedbooks/redhill. Feb. 13, 7pm, free. Red Hill welcomes chef Mani Niall to read from his new book Sweet!: From Agave Nectar to Turbinado, as well as share some of his treats.

BAY AREA

Hearts Gathering King Middle School Auditorium, 1781 Rose, Berk.; Feb. 14, 8pm, $15–$20. Enjoy an evening of poetry and music with Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes, U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, and former Poet Laureate Al Young performing with bassist Dan Robbins.

ART/FASHION EVENTS

I Love You Because … Design Guild Gallery, 427 Bryant; www.ilyb.org. Feb. 14, 8pm, $10. Celebrate V-Day at the closing party for photographer and TransportedSF visionary Alexander Warnow’s collaborative photo project exploring why people love who they do. (You can also view the photos at the gallery Wed.-Sat., 12-6pm, starting Feb. 5.)

Love Sick II Muse Studios, 224 Sixth St.; www.lovesickfashion.com. Feb. 14, 7pm, $15–$20. Find flirty fashions and lascivious lingerie at this trunk-and-runway show featuring Hide & Seek Lingerie, Ape’ritif Lingerie, Miss Velvet Cream, and more. A portion of proceeds from tickets and kissing booth benefit The Riley Center, a local domestic violence shelter.

CLASSES, LECTURES, AND WORKSHOPS

Cooking Crush for Singles Crushpad Winery, 2573 Third St.; 1-888-907-2665, www.partiesthatcook.com. Feb. 12, 6:30-9pm, $95. Singles in their 30s and 40s are invited to mix and mingle as they tour the winery, share a nibble and a glass of wine, and pair up for cooking lessons.

The Origins of Love and Love’s Expression Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon; 561-0360, www.exploratorium.edu. Feb. 14, 2pm, with museum admission. Dr. Thomas Lewis offers a Darwinian twist on modern romance, exploring the psychobiology behind human intimacy.

Valentine’s Aphrodisiac Chef Joe’s Culinary Salon, 16 a/b Sanchez; 626-4379, www.theculinarysalon.com. Feb. 14, 11am-1:30pm, $75. Join expert (and hilarious) Chef Joe for a course in cooking food that’ll get you in the mood, including oyster’s mignonette, asparagus in puff pastry, and chocolate fondue.

BAY AREA

Sound Healing for Relationships and Interpersonal Communication Tian Gong International Foundation, 830 Bancroft, Lotus Room 114, Berk.; (510) 883-1920, www.tiangong.org. Feb. 13, 7-8:30pm, $5–$10. Get ready for reutf8g at this qigong practice dedicated to energetically healing relationships, including Celestial Song and Love Activations for soul-to-soul communication.

Revolutionary Love Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, UC Berkeley campus, Berk.; ewocc.berkeley.edu. Explore the foundations of self-love with workshops, music, dancing, discussion, and a keynote address by Cherrie Moraga during the 24th Empowering Women of Color Conference.

Valentine’s Day at Habitot Children’s Museum 2065 Kittredge, Berk.; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Mon/9-Feb. 14, regular admission. Young children can create heart-themed art for loved ones. Visitors who bring craft supplies get free adult admission.

Wholeness Thru Relationship Center for Transformative Change, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr., Berk.; (510) 549-3733, transformativechange.org. Feb. 14, 7am-4pm, $35–$50. Invite a friend, ally, or someone with whom you’re having a hard time to this daylong workshop about developing relationships with yourself, your loved ones, and your community.

Check out more Valentine’s Day events listings on our SEX SF blog.


>>More G-Spot: The Guardian Guide to love and lust

“Wendy and Lucy” and Kelly

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

Ficks interviews Kelly Reichardt, director of Wendy and Lucy, which opens in the Bay Area Fri/30. (For Guardian reviewer Lynn Rapoport’s take on the film, go here.)

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Why are all the hipsters moving to Portland? They heard there were no jobs.  

Kelly Reichardt: That’s a good one. It’s actually not even a joke. Did you know 66,000 people moved to Portland last year? We (filmmakers) Todd Haynes, Gus (Van Sant), myself, we’re all ruining it for Portland by making films there.

SFBG: Both of your last films were shot in Portland. Why did you start making films there?

KR: Todd Haynes is a close friend and moved there about nine years ago. He kept calling me and saying, “These people are so great!” And I was like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up.” So I started visiting him out there and started making some short films. Then Todd introduced me to Jon Raymond who ended up writing Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy and now we’re working on a new film together. Jon also wrote a novel that I really fell for, The Half Life. If you don’t want to take my word for it, it’s one of Thurston Moore’s favorites. In any case, Jon’s writing is so region specific (born and raised in Portland) and his writing ties people into their surroundings in a way that is really appealing to me. There’s also a lot of space in his writing, which makes it easy as a reader to bring your own self to the table. I’m making films again because I found a writer that really fits with my filmmaking style. And the films are so much the better for it.  

SFBG: While watching Wendy and Lucy I kept thinking this film is the perfect antithesis to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007).  

KR: It’s funny, when I saw the trailer for Into the Wild I was like, “oh no, that’s our movie!” But his film is more like, Nature on Speed.

SFBG: Michelle Williams was so wonderful in Wendy and Lucy, especially her scenes with the older man who played the security guard.

KR: The security guard is an interesting guy in real life too! His name is Walter Dalton — Wally. I can’t even remember what the character’s name was suppose to be in the script but it just became Wally because he so embodied it. His other life before Wendy and Lucy was that he was a writer for TV like [for] the Smothers Brothers, Laverne and Shirley and Barney Miller. I love the Smothers Brothers. Plus he’s a total lefty, awesome guy. And he just came down from Seattle to read for us one day. He’s such a good guy, that when he would leave the set, we would all go, “Oh Wally.”

SFBG: Wendy and Lucy, like Old Joy, feels like the answer to what’s dragging down the recent indie cinema scene. Do you make a conscious effort to take that step when making your films?

KR: That’s so nice of you. Come to my class and tell my students that. My students are all like “You’re gonna show us this again?”

Wendy and Lucy trailer:

 

SFBG: I really do think your films are that next step. A neo-indie scene, which is less marketed to them and can deliver something that they didn’t know they wanted.

KR: Well, I teach visual storytelling up at Bard College. It’s a very groovy place. I get to work with a bunch of filmmakers that I really admire like Peter Hutton, Jacqueline Goss, Peggy Ahwesh, Les LeVeque. It’s this hardcore, mostly avant-garde group who are all so badass. And that’s the funny thing with me there; I’m like the sell-out narrative person of the group! (Laughs)

SFBG: What a great role to play!

KR: I’m what they can handle as far as narrative goes. So I teach visual storytelling, and the gist of my class is kinda old school in the way of telling a story through camera placement and movement. I do sort of feel that this is going by the wayside, how to tell a story visually, just by the nature of video cameras and the whole mumblecore movement which is the opposite to what I’m trying to teach. Though I can’t say that my students have embraced mumblecore as much as I feared they would.

SFBG: Are you attracted to working with other filmmakers, or working in a community like the mumblecore directors?

KR: (Laughs) I’m in a community. I swear I am! Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, 2005), Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter, 2006), and I all used to share an office back in the day so we all like showing each other our latest films. It’s true we don’t act in one another films or anything. I have Todd Haynes watch cuts of my films and give me notes as well as Phil Morrison who directed Junebug (2005). Actually Todd Haynes did make an appearance in one of my films once when he stopped by the Wendy and Lucy set, by walking into a really long take, wearing an Old Joy t-shirt! I was like, “Who’s that asshole? Oh Todd, thanks for stopping by.” I also keep up with So-Yong Kim (In Between Days, 2006). So yeah, I’m in a community.

SFBG: Why did you start teaching?

KR: They say, “Those who can’t do, teach” but they never talk about the actual teaching part. When teaching is good, it’s really, really good. Being at Bard College is a place I have wanted to be at for a long time. There’s eight students to a class and they don’t let you just major in film. When my students are coming into my class saying things like, “I just built a theremin in music class!” it really charges me. One of my classes is Intro to Moving Image and all these kids who are growing up with computers are suddenly getting to go into the Cascades with a Bolex in their hands for the first time and it’s awesome. Plus, I love to talk about film. As I said, I’m working on a new film, a Western with Jon (Raymond) and so I’ve been slipping Westerns into my teaching, which keeps me thinking about my own things in a new way. These kids who are studying avant-garde filmmaking more than narrative, will hear me say something I take perfectly for granted like “objective shot” and they’ll bring in a shot of a beetle and ask if it’s objective. And I’ll get to go, “I don’t know, let’s sit here and think about it!”

SFBG: How do you continue to make these little masterpieces?

KR: I haven’t put the burden of having to make my living on filmmaking. I mean it just didn’t work for me. I think these films, the way we’re making them really works because that burden isn’t there. You go off and no one’s paying attention to you and you have privacy and have six months to edit and then you can still go back and shoot and redo some things. There aren’t too many hands in the pie. It’s all just very small stuff. And since no one’s getting paid on these movies, we can take that burden off the filmmaking process and I’m able to be put in the realm that’s more feasible for me.

SFBG: Please just keep making more of these kinds of movies.

KR: Thanks, man.

The mirror stage

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“13 Most Beautiful….” trailer

It’s become almost rote to tag Andy Warhol — that "most financially astute and commercially successful of all the members of the New American Cinema," to quote Winston Wheeler Dixon — as an exploiter of superior but less rich and famous artists, a claim often paired with the declaration that there is nothing left to say about him.

This past week I was thinking about Warhol’s Sleep (1963). The traditional doctrine about that five-hour study of John Giono in slumberland is that it introduced Warhol’s deployment of boredom, an effect that still lingers in feature-length "art" cinema today, where the worst directors are boors, while the best (Tsai; Apichatpong) lead people through trance or dream states. True. And yet — is there a gesture more romantic than watching your lover sleep?

The title of "13 Most Beautiful … Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests" nods to the baker’s dozen format Warhol used to organize and present the boys and girls who stepped in front of his Bolex for almost three minutes slo-mo projected to become four. (This type of tactic prompted plum-phrasing Parker Tyler to declare that Warhol’s films tend "to move at major physical retardation.") There are 300 or so such tests to choose from, and it’s hard not to wish that Dean and Britta’s live soundtrack accompanied some less obvious, more artistic portrait subjects. But I’m looking forward to seeing Mary Woronov vamp for Warhol, whom she felt the impulse to protect, according to her peerless — and scarifying — 1995 Factory account Swimming Underground. And I wonder if Freddy Herko’s beauty will leap off the screen.

"Black and white is easier," said Warhol, who likened watching a film to looking out a window. "In black and white, it’s just a picture." Acts of potent iconography accomplished by sidelit, inky close-up, the screen tests — not to be confused with 1965’s Ronald Tavel-scripted Screen Test #2 — demonstrate Warhol’s talent for simplifying where his peers might complicate. "13 Most Beautiful" also primes any interested audience for yet further adventures in pop this year — the Lou Reed screen test is included (along with screen tests of the other members of the Velvet Underground) in the upcoming "Warhol Live" exhibition at the De Young Museum.

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL … SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS

Tues/3, 8 p.m., $25

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.sffs.org

Art: There’s a little homo cholo in all of us

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By Justin Juul

Art Exhibition: Dino Dinco at Project One

dinco1a.jpg

Who Dino Dinco is a Los Angeles-raised photographer/filmmaker/writer/designer who takes pictures of gangsters engaged in intimate behavior (brews in the bathtub, hairy balls in bed, etc), factory workers engaged in life, people wearing fancy clothes, and graffiti (among other things). His images have appeared in Vogue Brazil, Surface, Tokion, and BUTT and his films have been screened all over the world in fancy galleries and art museums like The Louvre and Tate Modern. Dinco also does television, film, and advertising work.

Get behind him

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Oscar season is upon us. Amid sniping text messages from best actor contenders, I’d like to advance the idea that cinema’s most compelling and perhaps revelatory male stars of cinema in recent years aren’t even thespians. They can be athletes, such as Zinedine Zidane, whose day’s work on the soccer field assumes mythic properties in Douglas Gordon’s 2006 Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. More often, they are musicians. Think of Arthur Russell and Townes Van Zandt, tender ghosts who float through documentaries by Matt Wolf and Margaret Browne. Or the very-much-alive yet enigmatic subject of Stephen Kijak’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, a pop star, lyricist, and composer who was made to be a movie star — though one with, in the words of an observer, "Garboesque leanings toward seclusion."

Foreboding yet luminous in a manner that any film composer might envy, the first minutes of the songs "Big Louise" and "It’s Raining Today" are all it takes to prove that the chief glory of 30 Century Man is the lavish setting that it affords Walker’s recordings. Both the grand orchestration and vocal gestures of his late 1960s solo albums and the dark passages and shock tactics of his more recent ones — Tilt (Fontana, 1995) and The Drift (4AD, 2006) — are born again as they bloom and boom through a movie theater sound system. This music is truly majestic. The digital effects that Kijak sometimes uses to illustrate its sound can be cheesy, but another of his gambits hits paydirt. Instead of presenting David Bowie, Brian Eno, and a host of other figures as simple talking heads, he films their responses as they listen to Walker’s music. This listening party effect is intoxicating, and it triggers improvised, as opposed to rehearsed, insights.

Time stood still yesterday in the music Walker made with arranger Wally Stott (now Angela Morley, and one of the film’s most likable commentators), and it stands still today when 30 Century Man languishes in the songs from Walker’s quartet of self-titled Philips solo albums from 1967 through 1970. A welcome sense of ambiguity thrives throughout Kijak’s movie. Executive producer Bowie shares a back story about a competitive bond he felt he had with Walker, even if Walker wasn’t aware of it — namely, that one of Walker’s girlfriends never got over her love of Walker’s music, even as she was dating Bowie. The anecdote is a perfect illustration of the homo-social electricity that charges so much popular music, and Kijak is wise enough to let the inference speak for itself.

30 Century Man is unique simply for its on-camera interview and studio footage of Walker, who has spent more than a decade on a single album and gone 30 years between live performances. As a leading man, he’s conflicted. He may be a notorious film buff who is fond of Victor Erice and collaborated with Leos Carax, but the physical efforts on his part to cultivate an iconic mystique — hats and sunglasses, for example — come across as almost comic signifiers of a genuine unease about being on-camera. At the beginning of one of the film’s interviews, he jokingly refers to McCarthy-era forms of interrogation, and only truly loosens up past the point of obvious self-consciousness when he’s enmeshed in recording a song. Instead of a full-blown eccentric, Kijak’s movie puts forth a vision of a guy who’d simply rather make art than play the fame game. Of course, in Walker’s case, that art now involves using slabs of meat as rhythmic instruments — and instead of writing for the charts, he’s singing about Pasolini and Mussolini.

SCOTT WALKER: 30 CENTURY MAN opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

Local Artist of the Week

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169-localartist.jpg

LOCAL ARTIST David Young

TITLE Untitled

BIO A San Francisco resident for just over five years, David Young draws inspiration from postapocalyptic films, punk music, street art, graphic novels, and war photography to present a damaged and hostile vision of SF and its place in America. All of the work in his "Live Forever" series is executed with Micron8 pens on Strathmore Bristol and American Masters paper.

SHOW "David Young: Live Forever," Thurs/15 through Feb. 14 (reception Thurs/15, 6–9 p.m.). Babylon Falling, 1017 Bush, SF. (415) 345-1017, www.babylonfalling.com

WEB www.myspace.com/dyoungv

Twice as nice?

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RANT As 2008 wound down, and filmgoers everywhere began to gag on For Your Consideration flicks, one exciting piece of news gurgled out for genre fans: a planned remake of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby had been cancelled. According to a post on Collider.com, producer Andrew Form was stumped by trying to adapt Ira Levin’s 1967 novel for a contemporary audience. "We couldn’t come up with something where it felt like it was relevant and we could add something to it other than what it was," he told the site.

These pearls of wisdom from the guy who produced 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2005’s Amityville Horror, 2007’s The Hitcher, this February’s Friday the 13th, and the slated-for-2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street. Roman Polanski’s paranoia-will-destroy-ya tale of New York City witches is spooky enough on its own, thanks to suspenseful pacing, an overwhelming sense of dread, and its performances, particularly by a bug-eyed Mia Farrow and a grasping, Oscar-winning Ruth Gordon. For current viewers, subtext from the director (the movie predated Charles Manson’s murder party at Sharon Tate’s mansion by a year) and the setting (the Dakota, John Lennon’s last address) further ups the creep factor. The movie itself seems haunted. You think producers who favored lingering shots of Ryan Reynolds’s Amityville abs over any actual scares could replicate that?

But I’m rambling on a moot point. Most horror remakes do get made, and rake in the bucks. Many tend to be hampered by the worst invention in the past 25 years of cinema, the PG-13 rating. (The recent wave of PG-13 horror films really need their own genre distinction that doesn’t have "horror" in it, because there’s no horror in them.) For the most part, post-millennial horror remakes are either J-horror (2002’s The Ring remains the most lucrative) or slashers, like 2007’s Halloween. The selection process for what gets remade seems as arbitrary as the eventual results: Jamie Lee Curtis’s 1980 disco-dance nightmare Prom Night, a cult favorite, became a shitty 2008 release (PG-13!) seen by maybe 15 people. But some seemingly sacrilegious efforts, like the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, were well liked. Even by me.

Up next: 1981’s My Bloody Valentine, a somewhat obscure early-period slasher comin’ at us in 3-D this Friday. (Yes, it’s rated R.) What good is gimmick du jour 3-D if not to enhance flailing limbs and splattering blood? Cynical though I am, I can’t resist. Besides, one of my favorite movies of all time is a horror remake: John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing. (Cheryl Eddy)

MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters

Reel time travel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch

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pimp.jpg
Image from imdb.com’s archive for “American Pimp”.

Text by Sarah Phelan

Folks in Oakland—and those in the parallel universe that makes films about Oakland—are getting their knickers in a twist about a HBO drama that wants to focus on a 40something Oakland-based pimp’s attempts to get out of the world’s oldest profession.

In the right corner, we have Mayor Ron Dellums, who is worried about the impact of the show, called ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” and based on a 1999 documentary called “American Pimp”, on Oakland’s image as a “model city.”

In the left corner, we have folks who are worried about the impact of canceling the show, set to begin 2009, on Oakland’s already flailing economy.

And stuck in the middle, so it seems, are the folks at Oakland’s Film Office.

Reached by phone, Ami Sims, (oops, as one reader just pointed out, her name is Ami Zins, not Sims) Film Coordinator for Oakland’s Film office, told the Guardian that she had heard nothing, in terms of the show actually being nixed.

“The company doesn’t even have a script, so there’s really nothing to talk about,” Zins told me.
Pressed for details of how the City could stop HBO from filming and whether it has taken steps to do so, Zins said, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

So, what in heck is going on in Oakland, a city made infamous by Too Short’s “No love from Oakland” which begins “Ain’t no love in Oakland, bitch/ Niggas always talkin bout ‘I love you’/But ain’t no love, bitch”?

Shortly before Christmas, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the HBO proposal had come under fire from Mayor Ron Dellums and other city officials before filming had even started.

‘It’s the mayor’s view that this project goes against our vision of Oakland as a ‘model city’ and does a disservice to residents and visitors alike,” Dellum’s chief of staff David Chai told the Merc. “The people of Oakland have come too far to have our city’s name trampled upon in the name of entertainment.”

Now, it’s true that folks nationwide hold a negative stereotype of Oakland, and that the City has spent a lot of time, money and effort to clean up its crime-plagued streets.

But that doesn’t take away from the reality the Oakland continues to be crime ridden and that pimps are no strangers to many of its less than pristine streets.

In 2008, Oakland witnessed 124 homicides. That’s three fewer than in 2007. But 25 more than in San Francisco, which saw 99 homicides (its highest since 1995) in 2008. And it’s a stunning 121 more than the city of Alameda, which saw three homicides in 2008 and is only separated from Oak town by a short underground tunnel.

It’s also true that Oakland is in a very dire financial predicament, one that Mayor Dellums predicts will only get worse over the next couple of years. The City’s $42 million deficit in 2008 could balloon to $113 million by 2012.

So, could ‘Gentlemen of Leisure” be Oakland’s financial salvation?

City officials argue that the $150-a-day cost of a film permit is chump change, given that the project would only reinforce the city’s criminal reputation.

But as a film industry source, who prefers to remain anonymous, points out, Oakland would also benefit from the jobs that the show would create, not to mention the trickle down effect of people spending their paychecks locally.

“These are jobs we could have had, that actors who live in the East Bay could have had” our source said, noting that the Emmy-award winning show Dexter “doesn’t mean that everybody who lives in Florida is a serial killer.”

BFFFs!

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Ah, bromance: an idea so mainstream that by the time you read this, the first episode of MTV’s Bromance will have aired. The concept? Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, but for dudes, as erstwhile Hills himbo Brody Jenner seeks what the homeboys of Pineapple Express would call his new BFFF — "best fuckin’ friend forever." According to MTV, "a bromance is an intense brotherly bond that makes two buddies become virtually inseparable." The prize? "The chance of a lifetime — to become best buds with Brody Jenner and live a life right out of the pages of Maxim magazine."

See how they did that? The Bromance description also dangles the possibility that contenders will get to mingle with Playboy babes. So, you know, all that male bonding is carefully balanced out with some seriously hetero skirt-chasing. Bros before hos, always — but hos are still in the equation, and are indeed a key component of any bromantic relationship. Returning to Pineapple Express: the subplot about Seth Rogen’s high school girlfriend was the film’s weakest link, in kind of the same way Step Brothers was only funny when Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly were together onscreen, and it was pretty clear that no chick at the end of any road trip could match the BFFF bond in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. (Also key: a fair amount of overly homoerotic and/or ever-so-homophobic humor, a factor in the Bromance TV show, where contestant eliminations take place in Jenner’s hot tub.)

Before you accuse me of hating on the bromance, though, I’ll admit that I enjoyed all of the above films, along with 2007’s Superbad and various other outputs of Judd Apatow’s brainpan (even 2007’s Knocked Up, which star Katherine Heigl famously branded "a little sexist.") And I’m a chick! Pineapple Express, in particular, delivered some of 2008’s funniest moments, in scenes between average-Joe type Dale (Rogen) and his pot dealer, Saul (James Franco). Just two dudes, talkin’ ’bout cross-shaped joints and weed so rare and dazzling it’s like smoking a unicorn.

Of course, the bromance has kinda been around forever. Throwback Western Appaloosa served as a reminder that oaters, along with sports films, war movies (see: Tropic Thunder), and other XY-centric genres, are crucially dependent on the concept of male bonding. The new-millennium idea is more like dude-bonding, though, and it seems to appear only in a comedic framework. The year’s big comic-book movies — The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk — were macho, and straightforwardly so; ain’t nobody trying to feminize Tony Stark’s emotions, or be Batman’s BFFF.

In the bromance, masculinity is tied into the fact that men are sensitive. Totally sensitive. But their sensitivity either goes to obnoxious extremes (see: Ferrell and Reilly’s stunted-emotional-growth manchildren weeping at the dinner table when their parents announce their impending divorce) or manifests only when the situation itself is extreme — you think Dale and Saul would’ve gotten so tight were they not on the run from that angry drug kingpin? The taboos the bromance exposes, mocks, and embraces are extremely straight-male in nature — yeah, problematic, but kind of necessary to make the films as funny as they are. Everything’s amped up to ridiculous highs, allowing heartfelt connections to occur among dudes under cover of goofy desperation.

This trend appears likely to flop down on your couch, put up its dirty feet, and hog your remote awhile — Apatow can basically print his own money at this point, and he’s got the Adam Sandler-Seth Rogen bro-down Funny People set to roll out in 2009. Also on tap: Jack Black and Michael Cera as slacker hunter-gatherers in The Year One — the first-ever prehistoric bromance?

CHERYL EDDY’S TOP 10

1. Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

2. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

3. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

4. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

5. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

6. Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, USA)

7. Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, USA/UK/France)

8. Viva (Anna Biller, USA)

9. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

10. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA)


>>More Year in Film 2008

Don’t look back

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Cinephilia is a malady that affects the imagination above all. As 2008’s year-end pieces roll across the blogosphere, one encounters the alluring titles and stills of films which won’t reach the Bay Area for months. Against this tempting tide, I turn to the faint echoes of those undistributed movies which lingered in mind long enough after their festival screenings to become pliable to memory. To take one powerful example, the earthiness of John Gianvito’s still frames of the monuments and graves marking American radicalism’s many resting places inflected my own perception of Obama’s soaring rhetoric. Months after seeing it, Profit motive and the whispering wind‘s contemplative chronology kept returning to me as a visual counterpoint to the "long march" of the campaign season. Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, on the other hand, provided the punch lines to the economic meltdown before the fact. The two films have nothing in common except for prescience, but then prescience is no small thing in a year in which the news outpaced the dream factory for twists-of-fate.

An elegiac documentary like Profit motive is a tough sell in any climate, but I fully expected Go Go Tales to score theatrical distribution after catching it at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Asia Argento slobbering a Rottweiler, Sylvia Miles rasping poetic about Bed Bath and Beyond, miles of dialogue, and a depth of staging which rewards concentration and intoxication in equal kind: Ferrara’s nightlife ballad is ripe for a cult following. At the center of film’s enclosed universe is Ray (Willem Dafoe), a small-time dreamer who runs his Manhattan club on less than a shoestring. The strippers are threatening a work stoppage, the landlady (Miles) is waving her pocketbook around about turning the lease over, and Ray’s brother — a hairstylist from Staten Island known at Ray’s Paradise Lounge as the "king of coiffeuse" — is pulling his financial support from the club. Drawing together all his business acumen, Ray invests in a crooked lotto racket.

After-hours in a threadbare nightclub is an ideal stage for waning fortunes, and it does seem that Ferrara was after a certain timeliness with Go Go Tales: gadfly Danny Cash (Joseph Cortese) spins a Jersey-size yarn about a pastrami projectile hitting "Hillary ‘I Might Be Your Next President’ Clinton," a headstrong cook hawks free-range hot dogs, and the staff grouses over the new Chinese customer base. But there’s no way the director could have known what Go Go Tales augured: Lehman Brothers shareholders left holding their own equivalent of "Ray Ray Dollars," budget cuts, drunk real estate agents, Ponzi schemes, and murmurs of the sinking ship.

A comedy of teetotaling fortunes, a musical with a touch of Beckett, Go Go Tales is every bit a Depression movie. Ferrara’s style is steeped in ’70s playbacks — Robert Altman’s wandering long takes, Woody Allen’s softness for showbiz, and John Cassevetes’ own strip-club serenade, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) — but as long as we’re talking about filmmakers who love talkers, let’s not overlook the original screwball savants. The Ray’s crowd bubbles over with the same provincial clamor as Preston Sturges’ stock company in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). In Go Go Tales‘ climactic scene, Ray uncorks a brilliantly obfuscating speech before finding the winning lottery ticket in his front pocket. It’s delirium on the edge of despair and a worthy successor to Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940). Thinking about what Sturges would have done with a world in which "bailout" is Merriam Webster’s "word of the year" makes me want to cry laughing — but there I go imagining things again.

MAX GOLDBERG’S TOP 10 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

Actresses (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France, 2007)

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

Foster Child (Brillante Mendoza, Philippines, 2007)

Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA, 2007)

The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Myth Labs (Martha Colburn, USA)

Profit motive and the whispering wind (John Gianvito, USA, 2007)

Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China/Hong Kong, 2006)

The Witnesses (André Téchiné, France, 2007)

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1. Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2008)

A masterful film was made in San Francisco by someone who doesn’t just live for the city, but does the city know it? Dorsky’s latest (along with the superb companion piece Winter) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was part of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archive, but as far as I know it has yet to have a public screening in his hometown, where he resides on the avenues that separate the filmmakers and film lovers of SF’s streets, and the Film Society in the Presidio. This summer, along with kino21’s Konrad Steiner, I put together a program devoted to Dorsky’s one-time peer and brother filmmaker of sorts, the late Warren Sonbert, whose revelatory explorations of editing and direct vision lead up — in far more frenetic and sprawling sense — to what Dorsky is doing today. Sarabande is the time and place where Dorsky’s devotional cinema reaches the sublime. This country priest of a film critic may be misreading the signs, once again, in making such a claim — but so be it.

2. The Exiles restoration (Kent MacKenzie, USA, 1961)

This night in the life of urban American Indians occupies a one-of-a-kind place and time. The title renders any description superfluous — what form of exile is stronger than the one discovered while drifting through a stolen home? MacKenzie’s movie, with the life-and-death tunnel vision of its gorgeous Weegee-inflected vérité cinematography, revealed a lost United States. Today it’s a haunting marker of a moment before this country’s commercial independent cinema went in countless stupid and phony directions, and of an area of Los Angeles that has vanished. People are rendered disposable. Lonely spirits continue to gather.

3. Wimbledon Men’s Final 2008: Rafael Nadal def. Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (8-10), 9-7

If you believe what you read and what you see, Raise the Red Lantern and Hero director Zhang Yimou’s production of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony was the spectacle of the year — so dazzling it erased the torch’s troubled travels from what’s left of a collective memory. Television networks have it on rerun, art publications like Artforum can’t stop parsing and usually praising it. (It also garnered an excellent lengthy "movie review" in the magazine Cinema Scope.) Yet Zhang’s endlessly-rehearsed and prefabricated festivities paled in comparison to the marathon drama and dazzling finale of this year’s last match at Wimbledon. The spine-tingling aspect came from fate, not machination, as night crept into a stadium that doesn’t use lights, and the victor’s triumph gave way to an outrageous spontaneous ovation of flashbulbs. It didn’t hurt that Rafael Nadal is the sport’s version of his idol, Zinedine Zidane. Lil Wayne said it best: "I love his motivation and his heart is so big. He leaves it on the court."

4. The Juche Idea (Jim Finn, USA, 2008) and Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, USA 2007)

Convulsive cinema is radical cinema, one of the reasons the gut-busting aspects of these two movies are vital. Finn’s look at Kim Jong-Il’s film theories (yes, "Dear Leader" is a film theorist with publications to his name) is uncannily timely, from its clips of North Korean stadium parades — shades of Zhang Yimou’s Beijing bombast — to its satirical insight that little separates dreaded (and oft-ridiculous) socialism from the broken-down ghost of late capitalism. Also, best use of ski jumps, rodents, and fly-face sculptures this year. Robinson finds a Satanic kaleidoscope within the fractured pixels of an episode of Full House, making the discovery roughly around the time one of the Olsen twins re-manifested as an angel of death. His statement for the movie still might be the definitive one: "Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive." Dying of laughter has rarely felt better.

5. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)

The growing wave of top 10 raves and critic’s awards for Alfredson’s deeply subversive eternal preteen romance is a rare heartening aspect of this year’s feature film malaise.

6. California Company Town (Lee Ann Schmitt, USA, 2008), Viva (Anna Biller, USA, 2007), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008), and When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 2008)


The heart of American cinema in 2008 is as wild and strong as these directors’ visions. Schmitt’s scorched-earth exploration of California’s abandoned past, closing with a final chapter on Silicon Valley that refreshingly breaks its own rules and throws down the gauntlet, is the timeliest movie in a year of ever-accumuutf8g economic disaster. Biller’s tribute to the bodaciously vivid soft-core fantasies of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger couples enthusiasm with smarts with kinky results. It also features a character whose incessant cackling laughter practically becomes hallucinogenic. Reichardt starts off what could have been just another shaggy dog story by paying tribute to the Polaroid Kidd (she’s also sussed out the new depression), and allows her lead actress’s offscreen back story to silently color in a thousand shades of loss. In sync with Skuli Sverrisson’s incandescent score, Reeves’ movie makes love to nature. The past-tense in the title proves she’s looking ahead.

7. Wild Combination (Matt Wolf, USA, 2008)

In his feature debut, the talented 25-year-old Wolf chooses a documentary subject he has an affinity for, and Russell’s still-blooming musical legacy automatically gives the film a unique soulful beauty. While the pastoral and waterfront imagery is expected, Wolf’s humane insight as an interviewer is a wonder to behold. It results in one of the year’s most emotionally powerful films, when following the reticent Russell could have been futile. The final 10 minutes are a complete rebuke to all the idiotic discourse that rails against (and perhaps even for?) gay marriage.

8. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK/Ireland, 2008) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008)


Is hunger sated by milk? Can milk alone get rid of hunger? Steve McQueen is the last art star with film director aspirations, and Gus Van Sant is a movieland auteur who always seems to look longingly at the art world’s white cubes. Both have made bio-dramas about political icons: McQueen speculates about the life and death of IRA leader Bobby Sands, while Van Sant, in case you haven’t heard, has realized his fascination with a certain trailblazing gay San Franciscan. Funny, then, that McQueen makes a riveting experimental work that devolves into a standard heroic final passage, while Van Sant crafts a traditional film in drag. In interview, McQueen told me that he thought of Hunger‘s standout confrontational scene as a bit like the 1982 Wimbledon final. (See, tennis is uniquely cinematic.) But his visceral perspective is most effective early on, when scarcely any words are spoken, and his oblique references to everyone from Jean Genet to Van Sant’s old love Alfred Hitchcock don’t seem merely precocious.

9. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008)

I may have enjoyed this movie because I know next to nothing about (and don’t give a damn about) Mickey Rourke’s misadventures. He arrived in my frame of vision as a modern-day American version of Jean Cocteau’s Beast, blinking out some perfectly round tears when he isn’t pulling staples out of his leathery salon-tanned hide. Look no further than the corrupt endgame of Hulk Hogan — better yet, try to avoid looking at it — for proof that such a figure suits the late-Bush era, though of course Rourke’s brawler has true working-class heart. A working class hero is something to be.

10. Manny Farber, 1917-2008

A lot of critics, ranging from musty well-off bores to young upstarts, wrote tributes to Farber upon his passing. But I have to wonder, who in the current era’s echo chamber of Web-bound opinion has actually learned from him? Ten years ago, there were at least a few voices (Chuck Stephens, Edward E. Crouse) whose writing carried traces of Farber’s spiky structures and wonderfully disorienting shifts in point-of-view. Now, I don’t see hear anyone with a voice like his, but more troubling, I don’t see newer generations of film critics picking up on the fact that he approached the medium as something other than a passive "entertain me" observer. Farber’s vision of film was anything but literal. He was, and is, an artist.

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Reel leaders

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MIDNITES FOR MANIACS CURATOR JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’ TOP TEN (AND THEN SOME):

1 Downloading Nancy (Johan Renck, USA) People were literally running out of the Sundance screening of this brutally honest exploration of a couple’s complacent relationship. Maria Bello and Rufus Sewell bare all, while Christopher Doyle’s camera traps them in the year’s coldest blue harshness.

2 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA) After 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream, another tiny gem from the greatest living filmmaker.

3 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA) Quiet and haunting, this follow-up to Reichardt’s wonderful Old Joy (2006) is a perfect antithesis to Sean Penn’s overly romanticized Into the Wild (2007).

4 Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France) I cried throughout this unique family drama and immediately called my parents as soon as it was over. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is the closest thing I can think of.

5 JCVD. (Mabrouk El Mechri, Belgium/Luxembourg/France) Jean-Claude Van Damme is a genuine genre actor and this deconstructive meta-film lovingly proves it.

6 CJ7 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong) Overlooked by adults and kids alike, this little Furby comedy is insanity at its most brilliant!

7 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK) Leigh’s loving tribute to teachers is a dark and lonely place. En-Ra-Ha.

8 Redbelt (David Mamet, USA) Mamet does martial arts: the metaphors are limitless.

9 Funny Games (Michael Haneke (USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy) Mean, lean and totally gene!

10 Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, USA/Germany) Sly captures American destruction and cynicism in half the time as PT Anderson’s meandering There Will Be Blood (2007).

Favorite actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler (Darren Aronfsky, USA) Ignore Aronfsky’s overly sentimental tendencies and Rourke will blow your mind. Then go watch Tsui Hark’s Double Team (1998) for the ultimate ’90s rumble: Rourke vs. Van Damme!

Favorite actress: Emmanuelle Béart, Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, France/Belgium/UK) Wealthy white tourists will stop at nothing to colonize every corner of this planet. Watch Béart and husband Rufus Sewell (see Downloading Nancy) go absolutely nuts as they battle each other and creepy jungle kids in this hypnotic hybrid of The African Queen (1951) and Don’t Look Now (1973).

Favorite animated movie: Wall*E (Andrew Stanton, USA) This unofficial remake of Silent Running (1972) should win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Favorite mumblecore film: Baghead (Duplass Brothers, USA) The brothers continue to nail their jokes hilariously and earnestly.

Favorite trailer: The Class (Laurent Cantet, France) Tears well up every time I see the trailer for this Cannes Golden Palm winner (due in early 2009). Can’t wait.

MICHELLE DEVEREAUX’S "ANTIDOTES TO BROMANCE" LIST

Best pluck: Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Worst pluck: Angelina Jolie, Changeling (Clint Eastwood, USA)

Best train wreck: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

Worst train wreck: Marianna Palka, Good Dick (Marianna Palka, USA)

Best tween vampiress: Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Norway)

Worst teen vampire groupie: Kristen Stewart, Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, USA)

Worst mother in an awful movie: Julianne Moore, Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, Spain/USA/France)

Worst mother in a good movie: Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married

Best outlaw: Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007)

Worst outlaw: Angelina Jolie, Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, USA/Germany)

Best Princess Diana impression: Keira Knightly, The Duchess (Saul Dibb, UK/France/Italy)

Better than a Princess Diana impression: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

ERIK MORSE’S TOP TEN:

1 My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

2 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

3 The long-awaited DVD release of Stranded in Canton (William Eggleston, USA, 1974)

4 The Man From London (Béla Tarr, France/Germany/Hungary)

5 Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

6 Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, France)

7 The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, UK)

8 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/France)

9 In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK/USA)

10 The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

HEIDI ATWAL’S TOP TEN:

1 Towelhead (Alan Ball, USA)

2 The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA)

3 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

4 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK/India)

5 Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, USA)

6 Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

7 Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

9 Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

10 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA)

JIM FINN’S TOP 10 MOVIES LOVED AT 2008 FILM FESTIVALS AROUND PLANET EARTH

1 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)

2 Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina)

3 Lion’s Den (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)

4 Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

5 On the Assassination of the President (Adam Keker, USA)

6 United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan, 2007)

7 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China, 2007)

8 Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007)

9 Brilliant Noise (Semiconductor, USA, 2006)

10 Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 1999)

Jim Finn’s films include The Juche Idea, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, and Interkosmos.

ROSS LIPMAN’S TOP 10

As I’m usually absorbed in restoration and production, my film viewing is erratic, and I’m hopelessly unable to keep up with all the films I’d like to see. Thus this list is not so much a critical 10 "best" list as it is a list of new works which, having somehow cut through the clutter and pulled me to the theater, struck me as excellent — each one in a unique way. I’ve allowed it to include "film events" of 2008, enabling notable restorations and experimental works to stand alongside conventional releases.

In alphabetical order:

Absurdistan (Veit Heimer, Germany/Azerbaijan)

Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowki, Poland/France)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

Once Upon a Time in the West restoration (Sergio Leone, Italy/US, 1968)

The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, Mexico/Spain, 2007)

Quiet Chaos (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi, Italy/UK)

Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi, Iran)

Think of Me First as a Person restoration (George Ingmire, USA, 1975)

Untitled film projector performance (Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, and Olivia Block, USA)

Ross Lipman’s recent film restorations include Killer of Sheep, The Exiles, and Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle.

MICHAEL ROBINSON’S TOP 10

1 Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007)

2 Body ÷ Mind + 7 = Spirit (Shana Moulton, USA, 2007)

3 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

4 Origin of the Species, (Ben Rivers, UK)

5 La France, (Serge Bozon, France, 2007)

6 False Aging (Lewis Klahr, USA)

7 Paranoid Park and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2007 and 2008)

8 Lost, season four (Jack Bender and others, USA)

9 Singing Biscotts (Luther Price, USA)

10 The Fall (Tarsem Singh, India/UK/USA)

Michael Robinson’s films include Light Is Waiting and The General Returns From One Place to Another.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 10

1 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

For the fake political ephemera; the meticulous reconstruction of Harvey’s camera shop; DP Harris Savides’ recurring visions of San Francisco; and Sean Penn’s queer, Jew-y affectation.

2 RR (James Benning, USA, 2007)

A hypnotic structural film about railroads and the romantic landscapes they traverse, devoid of signs from contemporary life.

3 The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown, USA)

A lovingly crafted documentary about Mardi Gras traditions and race in Mobile, Alabama.

4 Happy Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

For Sally Hawkins’ stellar performance as a recklessly childlike schoolteacher, who transforms into a fearless adult.

5 Maggie in Wonderland (Mark Hammarberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark, and Beatrice Maggie Andersson, Sweden)

Swedish documentary about an African immigrant, Maggie, which mixes her poignant video diary with savvy reenactments. A fertile cross between Lukas Moodysson and Spencer Nakasako.

6 Tearoom (William E. Jones, USA, 1962/2007)

An evocative resurrection of archival police footage from the 1960s of public sex crackdowns in the Midwest.

7 Derek (Isaac Julien, UK)

Tilda Swinton’s absorbing monologue about queer-punk filmmaker Derek Jarman thrusts his radical work into the present.

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

A bombastic film about the literary ambitions of a group of post-punk boys in Oslo.

9 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

The sobering alternative to the pre-recession revelry of Sex and the City: The Movie.

10 A Mother’s Promise: Barack Obama Bio Film (David Guggenheim, USA)

Romantic Barack-oganda screened during the DNC.

Matt Wolf is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.

BARRY JENKINS’ TOP 10

1 Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore’eda, Japan)

Perfection.

2 Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, USA)

One of the most unbridled films ever funded by Hollywood coffers. Thank you, Sidney Kimmel.

3 Useless (Jia Zhangke, China, 2007)

Yerba Buena Center. You know, they show films there. And usually, they’re pretty fuckin’ crucial.

4 Flight of The Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

A dream.

5 Phone Banking for Obama @ Four Barrel Coffee

Not cinema, but visual storytelling nonetheless: when Jeremy Tooker brought ironing boards and voter rolls into his glittering café for a few exemplary weeks, we glimpsed a version of San Francisco where shiny new things brought us together rather than separated us.

6 The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude (Josh Weinberg, USA)

My favorite short of the year. Truly independent "cinema."

7 Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, Gemany/France/Israel/USA)

Animation is the ideal medium for the recollection of memories. This film proves it.

8 Che (Steven Soderbergh, Spain/France/USA)

Someday, we’ll look upon Soderbergh’s effort for the sum of its parts: RED.

9 Craig Baldwin interview with SF360 Movie Scene

The most exciting four minutes of local film-speak in all of ’08.

10 There Will Be Bud (P.O.T. Anderson, USA)

Old-school spoofing done right.

Barry Jenkins is the director of Medicine for Melancholy.


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Tuneless, yet tempting

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Mamma Mia! was nominated for Best Picture. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. OK, yes, the category in question is limited to comedies and musicals, and sure, the Golden Globes aren’t the most significant annual awards, but still. This is the best you could come up with, Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Meryl Streep unabashedly flailing on a rooftop? Pierce Brosnan’s nasal tones bringing new lows to the ABBA oeuvre? Best musical of the year, my ass.

Except, well, it kind of was. And I think that’s the real problem here: 2008 sucked for movie musicals. While 2007 offered Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, and Across the Universe, 2008 gave us Mamma Mia!, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, and Repo: The Genetic Opera. Is it too late for re-gifting? In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I enjoyed two of those three films. Mamma Mia! and HSM 3 both have their merits, and I won’t deny getting in on the toe-tapping fun. As movies, though, they’re pretty weak; as musicals, even worse. Don’t get me started on Repo — you know something’s wrong when Paris Hilton is the high point.

Mamma Mia! was lousy from the get-go, despite what endless lines in New York would have you believe. The flimsy story is more of a placeholder for the tunes, which you could hear performed better on ABBA Gold. (You haven’t known true horror until you’ve seen Brosnan in all-singing action — "S.O.S." is right.) Then there’s HSM 3, the guiltiest of my pleasures. Sure, I liked it, because as a fan, I can look past the overproduced songs, mediocre acting, and half-assed plot. Objectively, it’s just not an instant classic.

Finally, we come to Repo, a truly embarrassing, wannabe-cult disaster of a film. If this represents the future of the movie musical, I’ll opt for the film’s dystopian vision instead. Repossess any organs you like, just as long as I don’t have to hear Bill Moseley sing again.

LOUIS PEITZMAN’S TOP TEN GUILTY PLEASURES

1. High School Musical 3 (Kenny Ortega, USA)

2. Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, USA)

3. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, USA)

4. Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, USA)

5. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, USA)

6. The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, USA)

7. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Rob Cohen, USA)

8. Four Christmases (Seth Gordon, USA)

9. Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Raja Gosnell, USA)
10. The Clique (Michael Lembeck, USA)

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Play it again

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Why spend your New Year’s Eve blowing a lot of money to get drunk with douchey strangers when you can curl up with a bottle of Cook’s and some good movies? Here’s my short list of movies I was glad to see receive the DVD treatment in ’08:

•<\!s>White Dog (Criterion) If you missed the Castro’s revival screening of Sam Fuller’s 1982 animal drama, here’s another chance to watch Paul Winfield attempt to retrain a German shepherd that attacks black people. One of the strangest and most profound antiracist films ever made. For a double bill, you can also check out Winfield’s Academy Award–winning turn with a much kinder pooch in 1972’s Sounder (Koch Vision) — but that film is totally Cicely Tyson’s show.

•<\!s>Goodbye Uncle Tom (Blue Underground) Speaking of race, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s infamous 1971 "doc" (the duo kicked off the shockumentary craze with 1962’s Mondo Cane) about the horrors of America’s original sin may indeed be, in the words of Roger Ebert, "the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary." But the film’s hideousness is only matched by its hubris — you really have to see it to believe it.

•<\!s>The Last Laugh (Kino International) If Cristi Puiu’s Mr. Lazarescu had a forefather, it would be Emil Jannings’ sad-sack hotel porter in F.W. Murnau’s 1924 classic of German silent cinema. Watching a man lose his last shred of dignity has never looked so good, thanks to Murnau’s innovative camerawork and Kino International’s loving scrub-job.

•<\!s>Sleeping Beauty (Disney DVD) I totally wanted to be Maleficent as a child, and her devilish hauteur and magenta and black robes have never looked better thanks to Disney’s Blu-ray edition of the studio’s last hand-inked feature film (1959). Watch it on mute and get lost in the Sirk-ian palette.

Honorable mentions: Criterion’s reissues of notable Max Ophüls works, Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket (1996), and Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985); Paramount Home Entertainment’s The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (original film, 1972); Fox Film Noir’s release of Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948); and Lionsgate’s Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve box sets.

MATT SUSSMAN’S TOP TEN LEADING LADIES (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

Julianne Moore in Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, Spain/USA/France, 2007)

Juliette Binoche in Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

Sylvia Miles in Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, Italy/USA, 2007)

Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, USA)

Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Ann Savage in My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007)

Asia Argento in The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA/UK/France)

Jun Ichikawa (as the Harajuku witch) in Mother of Tears (Dario Argento, Italy/USA, 2007)

All the women of In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain, 2007)

Cinematic repression

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REVIEW Falling ill from scarlet fever on a mid-1950s Berlin street, strapping 15-year-old schoolboy Michael Berg (David Kross) experiences kindness from passerby Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) that he seeks to repay when he recovers some months later. The brusque, moody woman more than twice his age brushes him off, initially. But then they commence an affair in which she proves a very astute erotic tutor, though she resists the emotional connection he feels. A decade later, as a law student, he discovers Hanna’s secret while spectating a Nazi war crimes trial. Decades later still, grown-up Michael (Ralph Fiennes) recollects these events as they’ve weighed on his subsequent life. David Hare’s very sharp screenplay takes some liberties adapting Bernhard Schlink’s novel. But in general, the screenplay and director Stephen Daldry (2002’s The Hours, 2000’s Billy Elliot) do an exemplary job transutf8g a primarily interior-voice tome into cinematic terms. Like other recent successful films about emotional repression (2005’s Brokeback Mountain and the forthcoming Revolutionary Road, for instance), The Reader is most moving precisely in its rigorous restraint, directorial and performance-wise.

THE READER opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

“incidental films for an accidental audience”

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PREVIEW The Bay Area is no stranger to outdoor projection: the past few years alone have brought Melinda Stone and Liz Keim’s "A Trip Down Market Street" program; a series of "Illuminated Corridor" get-togethers in Oakland; and of course, numerous installments of Film Night in the Park. But Michael Damm’s "incidental films for an accidental audience" is something new — a more ephemeral, relatively (in the artist’s words) "unannounced" projection event taking place in various transit spaces or zones. "I’m interested in the anonymity of people seeing [the projections] in passing," Damm explains, during a recent phone conversation. "It presents a different way of thinking about how people see things. A glimpse can be an interstice — a glimpse in passing can leave a question hanging."

Though "incidental films" is an extension of an ongoing project with Portland, Ore., curator Stephanie Snyder, Damm happened upon the idea of projections shortly after moving from SF to the East Bay. "Oakland is a lot more about driving, and about the freeway," he says. "I became curious about those transit corridors." Damm found himself drawing ideas from the German architect and urban planning theorist Thomas Sieverts, in particular Sieverts’ idea of the Zwischenstadt, or "in-between city." Though Damm is guarded about the specific visuals he’s projecting, expect to see views of life-in-motion as you speed past his sights or sites.

INCIDENTAL FILMS FOR AN ACCIDENTAL AUDIENCE Through Dec. 21. Evening commute hours. In Oakland: viewable from the westbound platform of the West Oakland BART Station, and from passing trains northwest of the station. In San Francisco: viewable on Folsom (between 15th and 16th streets) and intermittently on the 80, 880, and 101 freeway corridors.

www.davidcunninghamprojects.com, www.invisiblevenue.com, www.suddenly.org

For a new cinema

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Commenting on the relationship between his identity as a filmmaker and his identity as a novelist, the late Alain Robbe-Grillet told the New York Times, "We are friends, but never collaborators." Like many of Robbe-Grillet’s pronouncements concerning his own work, the statement is pithy and guarded, and cannot be taken entirely at face value.

Robbe-Grillet is primarily known as one of the chief proponents and practitioners of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), which sought to extricate literature from its formal, stylistic, and historical precedents. But he was also a prolific filmmaker, and film frequently creeps into the discussions in his essay collection, For a New Novel (1963), as both a frame of reference and as a kind of practical model. Viewers will get a chance to decide for themselves how in cahoots Robbe-Grillet the filmmaker was with Robbe-Grillet the novelist during "Enigmas and Eternity: The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet," a series curated by Joel Shepard of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts which includes several films directed by Robbe-Grillet that have long been unavailable in the United States.

Ironically, Robbe-Grillet’s first foray into film was his much-lauded collaboration with director Alain Resnais, as the screenwriter for his landmark 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (which is part of the series). Marienbad received plenty of acclaim upon its release, netting a Golden Lion in Venice and an Oscar nomination for Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. It also generated nearly as much controversy. Claiming to have sat through the entire thing — let alone, that one "got it" — became a kind of shibboleth for the ’60s intelligentsia.

Two years later, Robbe-Grillet would step behind the camera to direct his first film, L’Immortale, in which Marienbad‘s influence is still fresh. Like Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet’s directorial debut is a gorgeous, obtuse math proof that doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Its characters are merely new variables being plugged into a familiar equation — a man ("N") tries to track down an enigmatic woman ("L") and convince her of their previous meeting against an exotic backdrop — that is designed to shuffle them through time and space. The palaces of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim have been swapped out for the souks and mosques of Istanbul. As the femme fatale, Françoise Brion in Nina Ricci replaces Delphine Seyrig in Chanel, doing her best catalog poses as she insists to her pursuer that the ancient capital around them is, "not a real city, but a musical set for a romantic comedy."

L’Immortale is in some ways Robbe-Grillet’s screen test. Cribbing a few moves from Resnais while trying out a few new tricks, Robbe-Grillet seems to be playing around with, as he describes in a 1956 essay in For A New Novel, the cinematic image’s ability to "suddenly (and unintentionally)" restore the reality of "gestures, objects, movements, and outlines." When watching any film, our field of vision is always bounded by the camera’s frame. But Robbe-Grillet exploits this technological feature, forcing us to focus on the objects and people on screen to the extent that what they signify becomes secondary to their presence.

This makes for lots of shots of empty chairs (Robbe-Grillet has a thing for empty chairs), frozen crowds out of Marienbad‘s manicured gardens, and several "impossible" continuous pans in which the same people keep remarkably reappear in front of the slowly sweeping camera. Despite however many times Brion asserts that "everything is fake," Istanbul is the most obstinately present thing about L’Immortale. The Turkish merchants, maids, souvenir hawkers, and child guides who appear on the sidelines are largely oblivious to the inchoate memories and stifled desires of the film’s European ciphers. In a possible proto-swipe at Orientalism, Robbe-Grillet seems to be saying that Istanbul itself — that survivor of multiple Crusades, invasions, and reconstructions — will continue to endure, outliving the Istanbul of European fantasy.

True to the spirit of Robbe-Grillet, I can only tentatively state to what extent L’Immortale is representative of the rest of his filmography (as of press time, only one other film, 1966’s surprisingly funny meta-noir Tran-Europe Express, was screened). No doubt, he’d be self-conscious about the air of canonicity necessarily implied by a retrospective. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," he writes in one essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history." Undoubtedly, there are times when Robbe-Grillet’s work shows its age — Marienbad in particular has become fodder for countless perfume commercials and parodies of pretentious art cinema. Robbe-Grillet also recognized that prescience could be a double-edged sword. As if writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, he observes,"[Novels] survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future." This idea equally applies to his films.

ENIGMAS AND ETERNITY: THE FILMS OF ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

Through Dec. 18

$6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

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