Films

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

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

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Still from the Terence Davies Trilogy

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

Glad to be unhappy

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› johnny@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.

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

CLOSELY WATCHED FILMS: TERENCE DAVIES

Feb. 20–27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

IndieFest: “Pop Skull”

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

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

Shocked, G?

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When I first heard Digital Underground in 1989, via "The Humpty Dance," little did I imagine it would someday fall to me to announce the group’s end. After a 20-year run — including five albums, one EP, one rarities disc, solo albums by Shock-G and Money B, and a helluva lot of touring — DU are calling it quits. Their Feb. 22 show at the Red Devil Lounge may be your last opportunity to see these putf8um Bay Area OGs. You’d be a fool to miss it: their shows are a cut above most live-rap, P-Funk-style fests, driven by Shock’s keyboards and an endless array of MCs, including, at one time, 2pac himself.

"Every group from [Public Enemy] to the Stones has experienced a hiatus, some straight-up fallouts," says Shock, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, on the phone from Los Angeles. "I think we hold the record for longest harmonious run without a breakup. I gave it a loyal 20 years — ya can’t be mad at that."

Despite the lack of internal beef, however, Shock’s decision to disband DU is both personal and artistic. Constant touring, for example, has taken its toll, particularly with the group’s partying reputation.

"The energy was gettin’ bad," Shock concedes. "Both the group and the audience were becoming a bunch of alcoholics. That means it’s time for a break.

"I did several sober shows over the past few years, like 1 in every 10. However, when I suggested this to the band, everyone looked at me like I’m crazy, as if I suggested doing the show naked!"

Even more pressing, however, is Shock’s desire to expand as an artist, musically and otherwise.

"I’ve always wanted to give serious musicianship a shot," he says, "to sit down at the piano like a jazz musician and do complicated arrangements and improvisations with other musicians. But it’s hard to be fully present anywhere when I’m outta town every weekend to do DU shows."

While Shock confirms he has about two albums’ worth of unreleased DU he’ll eventually drop and doesn’t rule out the possibility of a reunion — "Ask me in five years," he says — for now he wants to direct his energies in nonmusical directions.

"I wanna go down to Hollywood and see what it do: voice-overs, comedic acting, films, TV — stuff I never had time for from recording and touring. For the first time since 1987, I have time to commit to something else. I’m excited.

"I used to use George Clinton, Sting, and RZA as my models," he concludes. "Now I plan to be more Ice Cube, more Puffy, more Jamie Foxx, more wherever I wanna be."

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

Feb. 22, 8 p.m., $20

Red Devil Lounge

1695 Polk, SF

1-866-468-3399

www.reddevillounge.com

Wherefore art thou, Romero?

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

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

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

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

MyZombieSpace

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

DIARY OF THE DEAD

Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters

www.myspace.com/diaryofthedead

Tiger Beat bard

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROMEO AND JULIET

With Olivia Hussey in person

Thurs/14, 7 p.m., $12.50–$25

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 863-0611

www.castrotheatre.com

From Juliet to Mother Teresa and Mrs. Bates

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Born in Argentina and raised in England, Olivia Hussey was just 15 when she was chosen to play li’l miss Capulet in the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. Since then she’s had a bewilderingly diverse career that encompasses work with Burt Lancaster ("a lovely gentleman"), Vanessa Redgrave ("such a giving lady"), and Michael Jackson (Hussey acted in an unreleased Jackson music video that also featured Lou Ferrigno), as well as legendary softcore directors Radley Metzger and Zalman King. Hussey has played the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa, and Norman Bates’s mom. She’s done voice work on Pinky and the Brain and Nintendo games. She appeared in the infamous 1973 musical version of Lost Horizon and starred in the 1974 mother of all slasher flicks, Black Christmas. She’s been in adaptations of Sir Walter Scott, Stephen King, and Harold Robbins. Her résumé also includes Turkey Shoot (a.k.a. Escape 2000), a particularly nasty and effective 1980 Australian spin on "The Most Dangerous Game."

In addition to acting gigs, the still gorgeous 56-year-old Hussey remains busy with her clothing line of romantic kaftans and tunics, which are quite beautiful. She’s also a sales rep for mangosteen beverage ZanGo (the health benefits of which had not yet been determined as of deadline by yours truly). She recently spoke with me by phone from her Los Angeles home. The interview had been delayed by a home emergency.

OLIVIA HUSSEY I really have to apologize for missing your call earlier.

SFBG No problem, but as punishment my questions will now be limited to Lost Horizon and Turkey Shoot.

OH Oh god! But people do ask me about Turkey Shoot. I laugh about it as one of the worst movies ever made. Yet a friend of mine in Rome loves it — he hosts regular screenings.

SFBG I actually heard your Romeo and Juliet before seeing it. A junior high English teacher played the soundtrack to our class, which laughed uncontrollably because there’s so much panting. Of course, it made sense in context later on.

OH Oh yes. Franco [Zeffirelli] really pushed us for what he called "that breathlessness of youth." He was obsessed with it.

SFBG Speaking of which, your breasts were so pushed-up — you must have been extremely tightly corseted.

OH I was! A lot of the clothes were very imperial style, [with] high-breasted velvet. But to get them even more so I had interior corsets pulled tight — it was really hard to breathe. Sometimes they had to take breaks between shots simply because the costumes drenched me with sweat.

SFBG Your Romeo, Leonard Whiting — are you still in touch?

OH We’re still close; I just spoke to him last week. Most actors do maybe a hundred films, and they’re lucky if they do one real classic that’s remembered. Romeo and Juliet is still shown to students everywhere. I get e-mails from young people all over the world. It’s such an honor.

SFBG What was it like working with Zeffirelli on both Romeo and Juliet and Jesus of Nazareth?

OH He’s the best. In a perfect world I would have worked with him only, forever. People always ask if I had a crush on Romeo, but I had a crush on Franco! The man had so much passion for what he did.

SFBG Your career slowed down for a few years immediately afterward.

OH I was offered all kinds of things. But when I was the hottest young actress in the world, I didn’t feel like acting. I’m that kind of person.

SFBG You got very busy later on, though. What are some of your other personal favorite movies or roles?

OH I loved doing a 1974 low-budget film in Canada with a new director, Bob Clark — Black Christmas. We had a blast. Much later I auditioned for the Steve Martin film Roxanne, and he stuck around just to meet me. He said, "You starred in one of my favorite films of all time." I said, "Oh, Romeo and Juliet?" But it was Black Christmas. He’d seen it 10 or 12 times.

SFBG Any particularly unpleasant experiences?

OH I didn’t like doing [the all-star 1978 Agatha Christie mystery] Death on the Nile. I had agoraphobia at the time, and that was really hard. On the other hand, Peter Ustinov was so much fun, Angela Lansbury an absolute delight, and David Niven lovely. We were all so excited to meet Bette Davis — she was such a legend. But it’s awful to work with someone who’s just unpleasant.

Also, three weeks into rehearsals for Lost Horizon, I knew it was going to be bad. [Costume designer] Jean Louis kept asking me, "Are you eating too much?" and letting out my waistlines. I was afraid to tell the studio I was pregnant.

IndieFest: “Sexina, Popstar PI”

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By Jennique Mason

“She has the boobs and brains of a queen, she’s every man’s dream …” When have truer words been spoken? As sung by Monkees heartthrob Davy Jones in the film’s theme, Sexina: Popstar, P.I. is the long-awaited answer to critically renowned films like Austin Powers and Legally Blonde.

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Directed by Erik P. Sharkey, this East Coast production — complete with villain Adam West (TV’s Batman) — goes inside the pop music machine, literally! On the surface, Sexina may appear to be your average pop star singing sensation, but undercover she’s hot on the trail of a kidnapped scientist manufacturing cyborg boy bands. That sort of crime stopping clearly speaks for itself, but what I wanna know is, where did co-star Allyn Rachel come from? I want her to be in my movie. She may get overshadowed by Sexina (played by Lauren D’Avella), but Rachel’s lezzie publicist was sensational. As for the rest of the movie — chock full o’ elements like high school girls with brigades of vibrators, Paula Abdul fans, some unicorns, and oblique Britney references (“Kevin Tenderloin,” “I did what again?”) — Sexina is like totally crunk. I know that I won’t soon forget the film’s message (delivered in song!) that “having a vagina rules.” Indeed.

Sexina: Popstar, PI screens at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Feb 14 and Feb 16, 9:30 p.m., Roxie Film Center. For additional Guardian coverage of this year’s IndieFest, check out reviews here and here and right here — on upcoming PixelVision posts.

Ficks’s Sundance (and Slamdance) picks

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1. Downloading Nancy (US) As the movie unfolds, the self-destructive couple at the center of Johan Renck’s film enabled me to feel what they could not. I was hypnotized by Nancy‘s bitter, snowy sadness (emphasized by Christopher Doyle’s camera work); it forced me to sob and, at the same time, made me want to run toward the exit. In fact, dozens of people left during the press screening, and not in a casual way. Watching it twice in two days made it clear that knowing the plot would affect the experience. Just watch this film.

2. Momma’s Man (US) A man hides at his parents’ home to figure out his mid-midlife crisis while his wife and newborn child await his return. Filmed with director Azazel Jacobs’s real parents in their real home, this is a throwback to the great films that Sundance showcased in the early 1990s.

3. Funny Games U.S. (UK/US/France) For those who don’t understand why Austrian bad boy Michael Haneke remade his 1997 intellectual torture-porn classic shot for shot, blow for blow … well, how about the fact that Americans don’t like subtitles? For those who haven’t seen the original, prepare to be traumatized.

4. Paranormal Activity (US) A couple buy a video camera to record the unexplained occurrences happening in their house while they sleep, and I was holding my breath though most of the film’s subtle freakiness. Oren Peli’s chiller, which played at the Slamdance Film Festival and is about to screen at San Francisco IndieFest, is worthy of its comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.

5. Pariah (US) A young lesbian struggles with her identity at school, at the clubs, and at home in this short by Dee Rees, which presents the most honest 27 minutes you’ll see this year. Luckily, it’s going to be extended into a feature. Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire) packs quite a punch as a confused father.

6. My Mother’s Garden (US) Cynthia Lester’s bare-all documentary (winner of the Slamdance Jury Honorable Mention) sensitively explores a mother’s hoarding disorder and her children’s difficult job of helping her understand her problem. Directed by the woman’s daughter, it conveys a similar familial love as Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation.

7. Because Washington Is Hollywood for Ugly People (US) With the best title of the fest, Ken Tin-Kin Hung’s hyperactive video game collage has meticulous designs of political figures fighting one another while inhabiting celebrity bodies. MC Paul Barman narrates this clusterfuck, bringing it to the level of downright genius. Also worth watching is Hung’s five-minute prepresidential election battle Gas Zappers.

8. Hamlet 2 (US) Finally, a movie that made me laugh! This vehicle to help British comedian Steve Coogan make his United States crossover has him playing a Dudley Moore–esque high school teacher who decides to write and direct a sequel to Hamlet. Andrew Fleming’s satire was purchased for one of the highest prices in Sundance history ($10 million, by Focus Features), and its first and last half hours are some of the funniest things I’ve seen in years. Thank gawd, because all of those cynical films were starting to take their toll.

Should you be ‘dancing?

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The Sundance Film Festival is like Los Angeles (in fact, for 10 days Park City, Utah, really is LA, plus snow). Each year you think it can’t possibly get any more congested and shallow, yet it does. This is largely the fault of umpteen opportunists (people who set up celebrity gifting lounges! Paris Hilton!) who show up to exploit the enormous and indiscriminate media spotlight.

But the festival must also share blame, its original "purity" having given way to a marketplace and red-carpet zone often barely distinguishable from the entertainment mainstream. This year found such personalities representing indie cred as U2, Robert De Niro, and Mary-Kate Olsen. Media attention invariably goes to the most high-profile films — for which folks like Josh Hartnett and Tom Hanks suffer pay cuts for art’s sake — which almost invariably disappoint. Ultimately unwanted and unloved this year were such big-noise entries as The Deal (William H. Macy, Meg Ryan, and LL Cool J … together at last!) and What Just Happened? (De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn), both soft satires of that kwazy industry.

There was the ongoing curse of the Sundance selection that plays like a moderately quirky cable flick, this time encompassing The Last Word (Winona Ryder and Wes Bentley), Smart People (Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker), The Year of Getting to Know Us (Jimmy Fallon and Lucy Liu), and so forth. There were literary adaptations (of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), each easier to take if you hadn’t read the book; sophomore slumps (Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, aptly described in the Sundance catalog as "a Happy Meal of a documentary"); and the usual cases of festival acquisition fever likely to look less all that in the sobering light of theatrical release. Principal examples: American Teen, a heatedly bid on doc that smells as manipulated as an MTV reality show (in fact some MTV staff told me so), and Hamlet 2, which is Waiting for Guffman plus Dead Poets Society minus about 45 percent of the laughs that description would lead you to expect. Fifty-five percent ain’t bad, but is it worth Focus Feature’s $10 million?

Of course, there were plenty of good movies at Sundance. Nonfiction cinema is usually where the most quality is concentrated, this year being no exception. There was an astute appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo) and one of Derek Jarman. Anvil! The Story of Anvil paid fond tribute to a Spinal Tap–ish Canadian ’80s metal band that refuses to quit even though it probably ought to. On the "my movie, my self" tip, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster was a funny, surprisingly sympathetic look at steroid use, while Londoner Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures made autohumiliation hilarious.

On the fiction front, there was less to get excited about — The Wackness was yet another teen-angst exercise, albeit a good one, with Ben Kingsley cast more or less as Dennis Hopper. Tuvalu director Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan is definitely the German Azerbaijani Lysistrata whimsy of the year. But only one film at the festival knocked my socks way off: Half Nelson makers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, about a Dominican Republic pitcher’s culture shock when drafted into the United States minor leagues. I don’t even like baseball — but this movie is the rare kind so enjoyably right that after a while you find yourself grinning like a fool from sheer pleasure.

The Fisher queen

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› deborah@sfbg.com

There are two questions that can really get on Carrie Fisher’s nerves: What was it like playing Princess Leia? And what’s it like having Debbie Reynolds for a mom? As if nothing else had ever happened in her life — not the drugs, the bad marriages, the great kid, the best-selling novels, or the wild, manic upswings that colored her world in its brightest hues and caused her to topple everything in her path.

Stupidly, when I enter Fisher’s suite in Berkeley’s Resort and Spa, the first thing I mention to her is that my parents named me after their favorite actor, her mom. Insipid conversation about how I never liked the name and neither did Carrie’s mom, who was born Mary Frances and renamed by MGM, ensues.

"She wouldn’t answer to it for two years," says the fiftysomething offspring of the Singin’ in the Rain star and the heartthrobby ’50s pop crooner Eddie Fisher as she curls her bare feet under her, leans back in a comfy chair, and lights up a smoke.

And yet how could I avoid asking a Hollywood royal about her famous parents and her larger-than-life role in the original Star Wars trilogy? Particularly as these are major subjects in her solo show Wishful Drinking, which opens at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre this week. And because she is wearing a draping black jersey version of the robe she wore in Episode IV. And especially since her mom always wanted her to do some kind of live act, in spite of her daughter’s reluctance.

"In my family the biggest act of rebellion is not doing a nightclub act," Fisher purrs with her throaty voice, oft given to delivering a snappy one-liner. "She wanted me to be a singer, but I had stage fright. Really terrifying."

In fact, Fisher frequently says in interviews that she never really wanted to go into the family business. The whole Star Wars thing was just a lark. She thought it would never make it beyond midnight movie cult-film status. But having made the nightclub rounds with her mom as a young teen — even singing in her act — and having studied drama in London, she seemed perfectly groomed for the thespian life. If you go to YouTube and check out a nowhere-near laughingly bad clip from the Star Wars holiday special, you’ll see Fisher in princess garb singing some hack’s weird idea of an outer-galactic spiritual. As goony as the whole thing is, it’s undeniable that Fisher has impressive pipes.

Despite her talent, she didn’t exactly become a box office giant — preferring to take small roles in good films like Hannah and Her Sisters. To some it might look like Fisher disappeared from the universe, much like Leia’s home planet.

I decide the way to go is ask her about writing instead, since I love her work. She’s funny, nimble with language, and not only has a vivid imagination but also totally delivers on the juicy details of what rich and famous people are really like. I almost envy her bipolar disorder, which has a way of stirring up the winds that take her on her wild flights of wordplay — and make it all too easy for her to compose lines like "They say that religion is the opiate of the masses. Well, I took massive amounts of opiates religiously."

Of her first novel, Postcards from the Edge, which won her a Los Angeles Pen Award for Best Novel in 1987, she says, "Writing was a sort of a way of kind of coping for me. You know, organizing. I used to read books and underline what I loved about them. I love all the things you can do with words, the alchemy of taking something that might in someone else’s hands become some tragic boo-hoo story and making it funny."

If you’ve read her books or seen the movie version of Postcards starring Meryl Streep, you know that post–Star Wars, Fisher was well on her way to self-destructing. The dryly witty roman à clef chronicles the life of a young actor named Suzanne Vale, who, floundering in a sea of drugs, ends up like so many of her colleagues, overdosing and paying her first of many visits to rehab. But as the book demonstrates, Fisher wasn’t just another actress on drugs: she’s gifted, and she transcends the kiss-and-tell genre by aptly capturing the inner lives of Hollywood’s own and revealing the human side — in all of its embarrassing detail — of a woman who turns out to be not unlike our mortal selves.

Fisher tells me none of the material for her show has been gleaned from her novels. It’s all new stuff. And with the help of director Tony Taccone, she’s reworked the premiere version she did in LA two years ago so that it’s more like a conversation you’d have with someone in your living room.

At long last she’s finally following through on her mom’s plans for her. Fisher once said in an interview that when she first read the script for Star Wars she wanted to play Han Solo. She didn’t get that role, but in Wishful Drinking she does get to perform solo. And sing too.

WISHFUL DRINKING

Through March 30, $13.50–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Hungry men

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"This is not a midlife crisis," 51-year-old John Zeigler insists. "I see this as a wonderful adventure." But when the this in question is a 3,000-mile rowboat race across the Atlantic Ocean, it’s hard not to speculate about his motivation. Zeigler’s teammate, 41-year-old Tom Mailhot, shares Zeigler’s determination, not to mention his daddy issues — as Row Hard, No Excuses is quick to point out, both men feel they have something to prove to their respective fathers (perhaps by coincidence, the doc’s director, San Francisco’s Luke Wolbach, coproduced the film with his father). After a failed hockey career and an early exit from college, Mailhot is dead set on rowing his way to victory: "It’s important to me to finish what I’ve said I’m going to do."

But back up a sec. Yeah, I said 3,000 miles, all the way from the Canary Islands to Barbados. The Atlantic Rowing Challenge is no joke, with duos spending 50 to 100 days at sea in hand-built boats that contain all of their food and other supplies. It also requires $19,000 in entry fees, not to mention time away from jobs and families. "This is really a mind game," one of the other participants notes; the race draws a colorful, international crowd of serious athletes who, necessarily, are all a little nuts. At least, that’s what Zeigler and Mailhot discover once they’re adrift on the ocean: close quarters shared between "a perfectionist and a bull" draw subterranean personality conflicts into the boiling sun; the task of rowing, rowing, rowing can cause inconceivably bizarre injuries (including a tremendous butt rash that nearly cripples one of the men); and transcendent moments, when they finally come, can involve some mighty trippy hallucinations.

Row Hard, No Excuses relies quite a bit on video-diary footage shot by the men, and as the days stretch on the film’s themes of competition, masculinity, and — no matter how in shape these dudes are — aging come into undeniable focus. Similar in some ways to Touching the Void (2003), Row Hard is especially effective in illustrating how extreme physical conditions can lay bare a person’s true self; the race also helps both men gain new appreciation for their lives on dry land. The press notes specifically ask reviewers not to reveal how the men fare in the race — so I won’t — but even as it approaches, the finish line seems less important than Row Hard‘s deeper message of self-improvement by any means necessary.

After seeing the muscle-bound geezer posing in the promo photo for The Bodybuilder and I, you might be surprised to hear the film is pretty similar to Row Hard, No Excuses. Made by Canadian Bryan Friedman, it is ostensibly about Friedman’s father, Bill, a 59-year-old who found his way into the competitive bodybuilding world after a self-esteem-crushing second divorce. But Bryan, who spews some unnecessarily literal voice-over, quickly lets us know he never liked his father because Bill was basically AWOL for Bryan’s entire life; he also finds Bill’s new pursuit utterly ridiculous. After witnessing Pops bake under a tanning lamp, Bryan muses, "Here’s a guy who could spend so much time and energy on a bizarre hobby but who could never spend any time and energy on a relationship with his own son."

It soon becomes clear that The Bodybuilder and I is more about the I than anything else. Oh, you get well-oiled, senior-discount-qualifying beefcakery, but you have to sit through some major family drama to get there. Still, the circumstances are so oddball (seriously — would you want to see your estranged dad in a Superman Speedo?) and Bryan Friedman so unflinchingly honest about his misery that the film’s shortcomings are eventually overcome. Once Bill’s big competition rolls around, the weepy father-son bonding feels well earned — plus, you won’t want to miss cinema’s most gob-smacking "How does that head go on that body?" moment since 2001’s Ichi the Killer.

THE BODYBUILDER AND I

Sat/9, 5 p.m.; Sun/10, 2:45 p.m.; Roxie

ROW HARD, NO EXCUSES

Feb. 16, 2:45 p.m.; Feb 17, 9:30 p.m.; Victoria


The 10th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs Feb. 7–20 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF. For tickets (most films $10) and additional information, see www.sfindie.com.

G-Spot: Valentine’s Day events

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

Amor del Mar Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5326, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Feb 14, 6pm, $100. Celebrate San Francisco’s love affair with the bay and support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation at this gala celebration featuring global cuisine, decadent drinks, live music, and exhibitions.

Erotic Playground One Taste, 1074 Folsom; www.tantriccircus.com. Sat/9, 8pm; $30 single women, $50 single men, $60 couples. The Tantric Circus presents a sexy evening of burlesque, striptease, male lap dance, fruit feeding, DJs, and more.

Eternal Spring SomArts Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan; 1-888-989-8748, eternalspring08.com. Sat/9, 2-10pm, $7. Celebrate life, love, arts, and creativity at this all-day event including a fashion show, performances, free classes (hoop, poi, yoga, and more!), DJs, and shopping.

Heroes and Hearts Luncheon Union Square; 206-4478, www.sfghf.net. Feb 14, 11:30am, $300. Celebrate those who have helped the community and support the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation by attending this luncheon and auction of artist-created tabletop heart sculptures.

My Sucky Valentine XIII ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $15-25. Listen to tales of tainted love and bad sex by good writers including Thomas Roche, Carol Queen, Michelle Tea, and mi blue, all to benefit the Women’s Community Clinic and the St. James Infirmary.

One Night Stand X ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Sat/9, 6-11pm, $15-25. Support the Center for Sex and Culture and the SF Artists Resource Center at this sexy multimedia event including live nude models, paint wrestling, erotic food feeding, and performances.

PINK’s 2nd Annual Valentine’s Day Party Look Out Bar, 3600 16th St; 703-9751, www.mypartner.com. Sat/9, 8pm-2am, $25. MyPartner.com cohosts this year’s party and benefit for the GLBT Historical Society. About 300 single gay guys are expected to enjoy an open Svedka vodka bar and hobnobbing with guests like Assemblymember Mark Leno and Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Poetry Battle of (All) the Sexes Beat Museum, 540 Broadway; 863-6306, www.poormagazine.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $20 to fight, $15 to watch. Challenge your partner (or future partner) to a battle of spoken word, hip-hop, poetry, or flowetry in the ring at this benefit for Poor magazine.

Prom Pete’s Tavern, 128 King; 817-5040, www.petestavernsf. Feb 14, 9pm, $10. What’s more romantic than prom? Prom in the ’80s! Enjoy music, decorations, mock gambling, and dancing, all to benefit Voices, a nonprofit that works with emancipated foster youths. Admission includes one drink, gambling chips, and a photo.

Queen of Arts: A Profane Valentine Coronation Sssshh…!, 535 Florida; www.anonsalon.com/feb08. Feb 15, 10pm, $10-20. The production team that brought us Sea of Dreams presents a sexy night of DJs, dancing, art, and performance, including Kitty-D from Glitch Mob, Mancub from SpaceCowboys, Fou Fou Ha!, and Merkley.

Queen of Hearts Ball Mighty, 119 Utah; 974-8985, www.goodvibes.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $25. Good Vibrations and Dr. Carol Queen host this decadent fairy-tale-themed costume party featuring MC Peaches Christ, circus performances by Vau de Vire Society, a fetish fashion show, and dancers from the Lusty Lady.

Romancing the Reptiles: Wild Love! Tree Frog Treks, 2112 Hayes; 876-3764, www.treefrogtreks.com. Sat/9, noon-2pm; $40 adults, $25 kids. Join animal care director Ross Beswick as you learn about how animals pick their mates and where baby animals come from.

Sensualité 111 Minna, 111 Minna; www.celesteanddanielle.com/party.html. Feb 15, 9pm; $15 advance, $20 at the door. Wear something sexy to this multimedia Valentine’s Day event featuring aphrodisiac appetizers, exotic rhythms, tarot readings, performances, a raffle, and a no-host bar.

Sweet Valentine’s Cruise Pier 431/2; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. Feb 14, 5pm; $48 adult, $34 youth. Join the Red and White Fleet for a romantic, fun, two-hour cruise of the San Francisco Bay, including a lavish appetizer buffet by Boudin and a complimentary beverage.

Transported SF Valentine’s Singles Party Pickup at Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom; transportedsf.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm, $21.49. Join DJs Ana Sia and Felina aboard the biodiesel Transported SF bus for sultry sounds, schmoozing with other singles, and stops at gorgeous outdoor dancing locales.

Woo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo; Sloat at 47th St; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Sat/9, Feb 13-15, 6pm; Sun/10, Feb 17, noon; $75. This multimedia event, conducted by Jane Tollini of the now-defunct Sex Tours, explores the sexual and mating behaviors of animals. Also featuring champagne and romantic refreshments.

BAY AREA

Flamenco, Candlelight and Roses Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 287-8700, www.cafedelapaz.net. Feb 14, 5:30, 6, 8, and 8:30pm; Feb 15-16, 6:30pm; $75-115. The nuevo Latino café celebrates the sweet side of love with three days of dinner plus a show, featuring the acclaimed Caminos Flamencos dance company.

Nest Firecracker Valentine Event Nest, 1019 Atlas Peak, Napa; (707) 255-7484. Sat/9-Sun/10, 10am-6pm, $5. Celebrate Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day together while shopping for unique gifts and making art projects with scrapbook artist Janine Beard, all to benefit the "Nest Egg" fund through the Arts Council of Napa.

Sweetheart Tea Yerba Buena Nursery, 19500 Skyline, Woodside; (650) 851-1668, www.yerbabuenanursery.com. Sat/9, noon, $25. Enjoy a traditional tea service with a special Valentine’s Day menu, followed by a stroll through the nursery’s gorgeous gardens.

Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Fri/8-Sat/9, 9:30am-4:30pm; Feb 12-14, 9:30am-1pm; $6 per child, $5 for accompanying adult. Contribute to a large heart sculpture and create handmade cards from recycled materials. Bring valentine-making supplies to receive a free adult admission pass.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave; 1-866-912-6326, www.legionofhonor.org. Feb 14, 5:30pm, $10-20. The Cinema Supper Club at the Legion of Honor presents this film as part of "The Real Drama Queens" series, including a special exhibition opening at 5:30pm, dinner seating at 6pm (reservations made separately; call 750-7633), and film screening at 8pm.

BATS Improv Valentine’s Day Show Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Feb 14, 8pm; $10 advance, $15 at the door. Whether you’re flying solo, with friends, or on a date, this audience-participation show is the perfect place to enjoy the funny side of romance.

The Best American Erotica Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia; 282-9246, www.moderntimesbookstore.com. Feb 13, 7:30pm, free. Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series with this showcase of standout stories, including a hot and edgy piece from Susie Bright.

Boston Marriage Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Feb 7-March 2, call or see Web site for schedule, $15-35. Join Anna and Claire and their crazy maid for Theatre Rhinoceros’s version of David Mamet’s same-sex romp.

Brainpeople Zeum, 221 Fourth St; 749-2228, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 16. $20. American Conservatory Theater presents the world-premiere production of this newest work by José Rivera, screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries, about two women who reckon with their pasts in an apocalyptic future.

The Eyes of Love Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post; 393-0100, www.milibrary.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $15 members, $25 public. Back by popular demand, chanteuse Helene Attia will select from her vast repertoire of love songs, classic and contemporary. Admission includes hors d’oeuvres, libations, and dessert.

Hope Briggs and Friends: A Musical Valentine Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Feb 17, 3pm, $25-50. Celebrated soprano Hope Briggs shares favorite opera arias alongside 15-year-old singing sensation Holly Stell and virtuoso violinist Dawn Harms.

How We First Met Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.howwefirstmet.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $22-35. Real audience stories are spun into a comedy masterpiece in this one-of-a-kind hit show.

In Search of the Heart of Chocolate Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero; 310-0290, www.chocumentary.com. Tues/12, 6:30 and 7:30pm, $10. Bay Area filmmaker Sarah Feinbloom screens her new chocumentary, about Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered and its customers. Screenings followed by a chocolate reception featuring art and live music.

I Used to Be So Hot Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. Feb 14, 7 and 9pm; Feb 15-16, 8pm; $20. InnerRising Productions presents comedian Mimi Gonzalez, a Detroit native who’ll take you on a journey through sexual politics and queer discovery.

Lovers and Other Monsters Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; 377-4202, thrillpeddlers.com. Feb 12-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 7pm; $20-34.50. With a diabolical nod to Valentine’s (and Presidents’) Day, Thrillpeddlers presents a weeklong rotating lineup of live music, exquisite torture, and expert testimony, including Jill Tracy, Jello Biafra, and Creepshow Camp horror theater.

Miss Ann Peterson’s Broken Heart Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom; 1-800-838-3006, www.tangolamelodia.com. Feb 13-16, 8pm, $15. See the premiere of Tango la Melodia’s new multimedia production, a three-night concert featuring original music, poetry, and performance set in the romantic, sexy Roaring ’20s.

Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com, www.getmortified.com. Fri/8, Mon/11, 8pm; $12 advance, $15 at the door. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen-angst artifacts. The creator of the nationwide and NPR phenomenon, David Nadleberg, will be in attendance in celebration of the release of Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield (Simon Spotlight).

Not Exactly Valentine’s Show Purple Onion, 140 Columbus; 567-7488, www.talkshowsf.com. Mon/11, 7pm, $18-20. Presented by Talk Show Live, Beth Lisick talks about her latest work and performs from her slam repertoire, chocolatier Chuck Siegel of Charles Chocolates gives an interview and tasting, Vicki Burns performs a program of "sort-of romantic standards," and Kurt Bodden reads a short story by James Thurber.

Philosophy/Art Salon: What is Erotic? Femina Potens Art Gallery, 2199 Market; 217-9340, www.feminapotens.com. Feb 16, 6:30-8:30pm, $10-25. Philosopher Rita Alfonso joins erotica writer Jennifer Cross and artist Dorian Katz for a brief show-and-tell followed by a Socratic dialogue on the question "What makes for erotic art?"

Romeo and Juliet: Gala 40th Anniversary Screening Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; 863-0611, www.thecastrotheatre.com. Feb 14, 7pm; $25 adult, $12.50 youth. Marc Huestis and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura present a 40th-anniversary screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic classic, with star Olivia Hussey in attendance and a live musical performance.

Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, McBean Theater; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

The Gin Game Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Feb 14, 8pm, $10 special Valentine’s Day price. Bay Area theater vets Norman A. Hall and Shirley Nilsen Hall star in D.L. Coburn’s production of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which two residents of an "aged home" find comfort and competition in the constant shuffling of cards and eventually unravel bits of their past they may rather fold than show.

Giselle Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk; (510) 642-9988. Feb 14-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 3pm; $34-90. Cal Performances presents Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia performing the beloved ballet, accompanied by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

Love Fest La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $12 advance, $14 at the door. HBO Def Poet Aya de Leon hosts this alt-V Day evening of spoken word and music that focuses on love of self, spirit, community, family, peace, and democracy, including readings from her collection of "Grown-Ass-Woman" poems.

Songs of Love Two Bird Cafe, 625 Geronimo Valley, San Geronimo; 488-0105, mikelipskinjazz.com. Feb 14, 7-9pm, free. Jazz vocalist duo Mike and Dinah Lee present a Valentine’s Day concert at Two Bird, which will feature a special menu.

Viva la Musica! St. Mark’s Catholic Church, 325 Marine View, Belmont; (650) 281-9663, www.vivalamusica.org. Feb 14, 8-10pm, $15. Share a romantic musical evening with heart-melting chamber music, intimate solos, sassy choral numbers, and gifts of chocolate for audience members.

ART SHOWS

Flowers from a Nuclear Winter: A Live Art Installation by Rod Pujante Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Phyllis Wattis Webcast Studio; 561-0363, www.exploratorium.edu. Feb 16, 11am-4pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Cosponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation and the Exploratorium, Burning Man artist Rod Pujante performs a live demonstration of transparent-flower making, converting waste into a dreamscape.

Modern Love Lost Art Salon, 245 S Van Ness; 861-1530, www.lostartsalon.com. Feb 14, 5:30-8:30pm, free. Celebrate Valentine’s Day at an opening reception for this show of work selected from Lost Art’s library of more than 3,000 pieces from the mid-20th century.

BAY AREA

Red Cake Gallery: February Open House Call for directions to private home; (510) 759-4516, www.redcakegallery.com. Feb 23, 6-10pm; Feb 24, March 1, 1-4pm; Feb 25-29, 6-8pm; free. Have your cake and eat it too at this post-Valentine showcase of work by Red Cake artists, to be held in a private San Francisco home.

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Aphrodisiac Cooking Class Sur la Table, 77 Maiden; 732-7900, www.surlatable.com. Feb 15, 6:30pm, $170 per couple. Learn to make a delicious, sensual meal at this couples’ class hosted by chef Diane Brown, author of The Seduction Cookbook (Innova, 2005).

Chocolate, Strawberries and Lapdancing Center for Healing and Expression, 1749 O’Farrell; (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com. Tues/12, 8pm; $110 per couple, $160 per threeple. Be the best seat in the house at the Slinky Productions lap dance class for couples, which includes chocolate, strawberries, and champagne.

Letterpress Valentines San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro; 565-0545, sfcb.org. Fri/8, 2-5pm, $65 (including materials). Experienced and novice printmakers alike can enjoy an afternoon making letterpress cards with Megan Adie.

Valentine Special: Xara Flower-Making Workshop Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Skylight Area. Feb 14 and 16, noon-2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Attorney and Burning Man artist Mark Hinkley teaches attendees how to make fake flowers from recycled bottles. All materials provided; ages 6 and up.

BAY AREA

Celebrating the Masculine and Feminine Odd Fellows Hall, 839 Main, Redwood City; (650) 780-0769. Feb 16, 10am-6pm, $150-175. Join Valerie Sher, Jackie Long, and Jim Benson on a journey toward wholeness as we explore who we are as men and women.

A Night of Bond, James Bond Bay Club of Marin, 330 Corte Madera, Corte Madera; 945-3000. Feb 14, 7pm, $35-45 (includes drinks and appetizers). Skip the prix fixe dinner and join certified matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom for a Bond-themed workshop about cultivating passionate relationships, including a contest for best male and female Bond-inspired costumes.

Caine is able

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The opening scene in a tragically forgotten 1968 swinging-London artifact called The Touchables — released stateside to universal catcalls — had four model-gorgeous "birds" breaking into an off-hours Madame Tussaud’s. Goal: stealing the object of their desire, a wax dummy of Michael Caine. This proves too fleet a diversion — the glamorous gang are soon off to their next plot-dominating caper, hijacking a handsome pop star to a countryside inflatable plastic pleasure dome for extended go-go dancing and S-M games. But it does make the point that in 1968, Michael Caine was a huge pop icon. And not just in the United Kingdom but also in the United States, where Beatlemania had temporarily made all things Brit — Twiggy, Tom Jones, even Herman’s Hermits — automatically crushworthy.

We’d certainly emulated and admired England all along, after that unpleasant colonial-separation business. But in the ’60s it was no longer a matter of aristocracy envy. Suddenly the Mick Jaggers and the Lulus and so forth made being working-class British cute and desirable and ever so "now." Caine was the first Cockney sex symbol — which made him a celebrity in America but a downright cultural sensation at home.

The Mechanics’ Institute’s February "Raising Caine" series revisits some of his defining roles, though only one ventures past 1972. The first selection, 1966’s Alfie, was his breakthrough. Casting him as a rascally ladies’ man who strings along women (from Jane Asher to Shelley Winters) while entertaining us with direct-camera-address commentary, it both celebrated the sexual revolution and delivered a reassuring moral spank-down.

Caine had earlier made a major impression in 1965’s The Ipcress Files as Len Deighton’s spy hero Harry Palmer, a scruffier, less impenetrably sophisticated alternative to Sean Connery’s James Bond. The movie’s sequel, 1966’s Funeral in Berlin, is second in the Mechanics’ retrospective. (The third Caine-as-Palmer feature, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, surrendered to Bond-style fantasy excess and a surprisingly prescient anti–Yank imperialism. Recently released to DVD after decades of difficult access, it’s worth a look.)

The resulting fad was weird but laudable: Caine landed on the average side of handsome (complete with spectacles), had bad hair, and spoke like a mensch. (Memorable quotes include "I’m the original bourgeois nightmare — a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.") When Connery ditched Bond, he had to prove himself as an actor. When the Palmer films and Alfie and such were finished, Caine just kept working — sometimes brilliantly but often indiscriminately, in movies that could only have dangled as lure the money he admitted was a deciding factor. The good ones include 1971’s Get Carter and Sleuth (which complete the Mechanics’ series along with the 1983 translation from the stage Educating Rita), John Huston’s 1975 Rudyard Kipling adventure The Man Who Would Be King, and Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters (for which Caine won his first Supporting Actor Oscar).

The bad ones? For starters, twin Irving Allen "disasters" The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979). Not to mention 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge, 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol … need more be said? Only that Caine has his cited On Deadly Ground (1994) costar Steven Seagal as the only person he’d never work with again. (Good choice!) Caine (it’s "Sir Michael" now, which he must find hilarious) hasn’t lost his touch, though. As an aged Cockney hustler in 1998’s Little Voice, he gives a climatic rendition of "It’s Over" that is the most lacerating deliberate bad singing this side of Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia (1995). He was superb handling the more sentimental aspects of 1999’s The Cider House Rules (winning a second Oscar), in the underseen Brit ensemble classic Last Orders (2001), as the true protagonist of 2002’s The Quiet American, and as one brainy holdout amid the Orwellian future of Children of Men (2006).

So is he more served or subservient playing butler to Batman? (I’d say the former.) Caine is an excellent actor who always admitted that selling out was part and parcel of the trade. Sex symbol then, willing tool now (and also then), he never blew pompous public wind or truly embarrassed himself onscreen, even when the films embarrassed themselves. He once said, with bracing honesty, "You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one." Either way, he earns the check.

RAISING CAINE

Feb. 1–29, $10

Fri., 6:30 p.m.

Mechanics’ Institute

57 Post, SF

(415) 393-0100

rsvp@milibrary.org

Noir or not?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nothing brings out the pugilist in film critics like a discussion of what does or doesn’t count as film noir, which is perhaps appropriate, given the number of slugs, sucker punches, fisticuffs, and beatings that occur onscreen in the movies being discussed. As with any kind of canon formation, the issue can prompt trainspotting, finger-pointing, and impassioned arguments. But the question — as much of the scholarship on the subject has shown — is something of a red herring.

Despite the stylistic qualities that seemed to unify them — chiaroscuro lighting, a fixation on the seedy underbellies of urban space and people’s souls, devouring women and browbeaten men, a curiously persistent lack of daylight — the ’30s and ’40s American movies that cinema-starved French critics wolfed down after World War II had originally been marketed at home as different types of genre films. The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946) was a gothic romance; Detour (1945) was a low-budget B-movie thriller; and Joan Crawford vehicles such as Possessed (1947) and Mildred Pierce (1945) were women’s pictures. A number of films now considered noirs began as literary adaptations — take your pick of any inspired by James Cain, Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett, or Robert Siodmak’s 1946 take on Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.

Noir City 6, czar of noir Eddie Muller’s yearly celebration of not-on-DVD rarities and shadow-dappled classics resurrected from studio vaults, offers plenty of fodder for noir-or-not debate. The programming spans from the critically enshrined (Jules Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City) to the relatively unknown (1960’s The 3rd Voice) and the not so old (the Coen brothers’ 2001 neonoir The Man Who Wasn’t There). Perhaps more than past incarnations, Noir City 6 makes a case for film noir as a set of stylistic conventions — or, alternately, for noir as an inspired malaise that permeates a film like stale cigarette smoke — rather than something hard-and-fast that sports a time stamp.

The festival’s second week features two period pieces, which might surprise fans expecting a parade of hired guns in fedoras and femmes fatales in pantsuits. Robert Siodmak’s The Suspect (from 1944, the same year he made the Maria Montez jewel Cobra Woman) follows one husband’s slow road to hell in Edwardian England as he offs his wife at the behest of a new lady friend. Reign of Terror (1949) sets the way-back machine to the French Revolution, but instead of liberté, égalité, fraternité, we get greed, deceit, and betrayal. Celebrated cinematographer John Alton — who has rightly been called noir’s painter of light — is in top form here, transforming the standard back-lot Paris street sets into a backdrop more closely resembling the city’s catacombs.

Reign of Terror screens as part of the festival’s tribute to character actor Charles McGraw, whose rugged visage made him a favorite for cop and tough-guy roles, including a memorably menacing hit man in The Killers and a star turn as a detective in The Narrow Margin (1952) alongside Marie Windsor. "[McGraw’s] guttural rasp of a voice, reminiscent of broken china plates grating around in a burlap sack, was complemented by an intimidating, laserlike glare," critic and Noir City coplanner Alan K. Rode writes in his recently published book Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy (McFarland), which he’ll sign at the tribute.

Also on the McGraw double bill is Anthony Mann’s brutal Tex-Mex mystery Border Incident (1949), in which the actor plays a sadistic ranch owner involved in an illegal-immigrant smuggling and exploitation ring. Again, Alton’s cinematography perfectly frames the standout performances from bronze screen legend Ricardo Montalban as an undercover Mexican federale and Howard Da Silva as the racist crook he has to bust, setting into relief the two characters’ moral distance from each other in one memorable medium shot. (To go back to the subject of canon formation, between Border Incident, Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil, and John Sayles’s 1996 Lone Star, a host of films could pack a frontera-themed noir program.)

Alton’s transformation of the Imperial Valley into a silvery, inhospitable moonscape — especially during the knife-and-quicksand offing of a group of frightened braceros under the cover of night — is an inversion of the sun-baked mesas and sage-scoured plains that typically dominate the western genre. In Border Incident he and Mann show us that corruption lurks in the wide-open spaces as much as it festers in the Piccadilly Circus back alleys of Dassin’s Night and the City or the ritzy enclaves of Chandler’s Los Angeles.

That vision brings us to the Coen brothers, whose No Country for Old Men qualifies as perhaps the latest entry in the group of borderland noirs, though their The Man Who Wasn’t There is the more obvious noir homage. Despite the often bleached-out palette of its mise-en-scène, No Country for Old Men drives home the nihilism that is at the heart of all film noirs with all the force of Javier Bardem’s pneumatic hammer. In noir as in No Country, even the most hardened cop is made to confront the futility of his convictions, Manichaeanism is disproved by double crosses and spilled blood, and the only thing one can bank on is what Noir City 6 promises in its tagline: no happy endings.

NOIR CITY 6

Through Sun/3, $12

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.noircity.com

Home is where the art is

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Margaret Tedesco is often on the move. She’s created flip books, directed plays, narrated films — before neo-benshi events became popular locally — and put together art shows at roving venues in Southern California and San Francisco. Especially because of her curatorial experience connecting and moving between different art forms at sites such as New Langton Arts, it’s great to see Tedesco bringing the movement home, in more than one sense, at [2nd floor projects], a vital new artist-run space inside her Mission apartment.

SFBG What motivated you to start [2nd floor projects], and what do you like about it now?

MARGARET TEDESCO I’ve always enjoyed the surprise element. It’s been interesting to see my living space transform. You see the work and have an idea of how it might be, but its different when it arrives — when you step into the room. I have an ongoing relationship with this place. I’ve lived here for 12 years.

I get to act on my own volition now — I don’t need to check in with anybody. I’m not interested in art-world prerequisites. I’m a self-taught artist, and it feels very natural for me to create a space like this for people.

SFBG How have you selected the artists you have shown to date?

MT Some have been a part of group shows but never really had a [solo] presence. I’m not looking to be a dealer or looking for trends or to rep people. I want to put work out there and see what other people think. With George and Mike [Kuchar], for example, a number of people who’ve gone to the show knew they made paintings or drawings, but others were completely surprised. Some didn’t even know George has a brother!

The Kuchars are dear to my heart because film is a big part of my work. I’ve known of them for many years — I can’t even name the years — and have had the treat of seeing George every Friday while working at the San Francisco Art Institute. When I invited George, he’d just been asked by Bruce Hainley to do a show at Casey Kaplan in New York. I asked him whom he’d like to show with, and he told me his brother was moving back to town.

Political probe

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the final anxiety-ridden whimper to register from the year of the "shmashmortion," and it’s particularly preoccupied with pregnancy and the decisions that come with it. There was an apparently very good doc about abortion politics and some movie about a waitress that I didn’t see, but I caught the two "Papa Don’t Preach" comedies we all went to and can’t say I see much to link those two with Mungiu’s excellent Romanian film.

It was often observed that the dollhouse pregnancies and abortion debates of Juno and Knocked Up — movies that both oscillated between very good and unwatchable — would never have been fodder for a Hollywood (or Hollywood-lite) comedy if the mothers weren’t white and middle-class. The expecting character in 4 Months wouldn’t have looked out of place in either of those films, but her predicament is wildly different. She has to make her decision in Romania in 1986, under the watchful eye of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, whose policies on abortion make the pressures of the current American culture wars — certainly as experienced by the heroines of Juno and Knocked Up — comparable to those of a celebrity roast. Mungiu’s movie differs, additionally, in a refreshingly depressing way: you kind of want to smack the mother.

Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) isn’t even the film’s core. That distinction goes to her college roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who’s relied on to handle nearly every level of preparation necessary for an illegal abortion, from the Kafkaesque frustrations of securing a hotel room to the frightening process of meeting and negotiating with the abortionist. Everyone in Otilia’s unpleasant story is to some degree selfish and irresponsible, and Gabita is no exception. The ultimate impression she gives is of being the kind of person Otilia will never be able to truly feel good about sacrificing so much for. Otilia will always feel vaguely duped.

If 4 Months is only nominally related to those American comedies, its connections with another recent Romanian film about the Ceausescu era, the sad and funny 12:08 East of Bucharest, are just as tangential. Though the titles of both films, interestingly, suggest an obsession with a ticking clock, 12:08 East of Bucharest uses it as an almost absurdist device in relation to a bystander’s attempt to find a personal foothold in history. The characters in 4 Months are all getting more personal history than they could possibly handle, much less want.

Mungiu’s movie is much closer kin, then, to fellow Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu’s dark wonder The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which was also shot by cinematographer Oleg Mutu. Both are gloomy, virtuosic naturalist films inseparable from their sociopolitical backdrops — in Lazarescu‘s case, Bucharest in the middle of this decade — and both traverse their stations through a soup of reluctant humanism and outright moral fatigue. 4 Months feels like a companion piece to Lazarescu, the latter being a tour of the indignities of the Romanian medical bureaucracy and the former negotiating a similar path through the black-market system created in response to those inadequacies of officialdom.

What separates the two primarily and acutely is the distinct emotional tangs brought about by the way they were shot and edited. Lazarescu works with short, unassuming shots (save for the final, fatalistic scene); 4 Months, on the other hand, encumbers the audience with claustrophobically long takes, filled with the tension not only of Otilia’s widening burden but also of the actors sustaining such choreographed naturalism.

The most ambitious example of these crosscurrents is a conceptually ostentatious dinner scene at the birthday party for Otilia’s boyfriend’s mother, into which Otilia must detour before returning to the evening’s greater exigencies. Traumatized and anxious to return to Gabita, she is stuck for the moment in the cross fire of unwittingly oppressive small talk. Though there is a whiff of contrivance in the scene (Lazarescu, marching along its downward spiral with its head bowed, elicits more sympathy by making less conspicuous appeals), it moves quickly beyond a one-note dark joke simply by persisting. Otilia stares off ahead while the surrounding actors deliver their lines at her — in a manner closer to living than acting — in a long, confining take.

Stubbornly stationary, this sequence is as impressive as that famous kinetic take in Children of Men. And the subtleties of the conversation, together with a chillingly apropos conversation with her boyfriend shortly after (he’s a massive shit, but is she also covering her bases?), prove the party to be less a dramatic contrast with the preceding events across town than a thickening of the septic social context in which those events occur. It is, as much as abortion, what the film is about.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

Opens Fri/1 in Bay Area theaters

www.4months3weeksand2days.com

Quixotically yours

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› johnny@sfbg.com

In a multiplex in San Francisco (whose name I do not care to recall) there is at least one movie intent on bludgeoning viewers with a bombastic soundtrack, a mechanical approach to emotion, and a conclusion that is obvious before the story has begun.

In contrast, in a smaller theater, Albert Serra’s Honor of the Knights offers one of the best windows onto a current phenomenon that might be tagged somnambulant cinema.

Amid contemporary sensory overload, it’s unsurprising that somnambulant cinema – meditative and ambient, often set outdoors and yet never fully outside society – has begun to flower. Does the darkness of a movie theater have to be a site of sonic and visual assault? A recent spate of films, perhaps led by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), has answered that question with a low-key rebuff, choosing quietude and nature instead, evoking contemplative wonder in the process. By revivifying a literary classic – Don Quixote de la Mancha – that through sheer proliferation has become a myth of modernity, Serra’s first feature announces itself as a worthy Spanish answer to Apichatpong’s Thai fables.

To be sure, what I’m calling somnambulant cinema might easily be tagged “boring art films” by detractors. Any style or subgenre contains failures and successes. But Serra’s movie succeeds – partly because of its lightness, a quality not found in the hordes of festival films that confuse slowness or idyll with turgidity. In following the progress – or lack thereof – of Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó) and Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), Honor of the Knights immerses viewers in hypnotic rhythms. Using only natural light and shooting primarily during the magic hours of dusk and dawn, Serra gives the moon one of its most gorgeous scenes since the time of Georges Méliès and constructs a symphony from the way an orchestra of insects varies in pitch depending on the time of day or night.

As embodied by Carbó, the Don Quixote of Honor of the Knights is disheveled, with the matted hair of a bear and rusty armor, and he careens convincingly from senility to spryness. One minute he’s muttering to his lumpen sidekick as if Sancho (who still has traces of disobedient boyhood on his face) were nothing more than an extension of himself; the next he’s taking a dip in a stream with renewed vigor – even swimming while wearing heavy boots. Transutf8g an almost 1,000-page work into a 90-minute film with only a few hundred words of dialogue, Serra has inspired more than one critic to claim he’s bringing Samuel Beckett to bear on Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. But while this Don Quixote doesn’t seem to know where’s he’s going or even what time it is, after parrying phantoms with a sword and retreating from the wind, he leads Honor of the Knights to moments of offhand beauty and old joy.

Those last two words are no accident: juxtaposing various degrees of a fraternal bond against a varying but uncaring landscape, Honor of the Knights is closer to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) than it is to Gus Van Sant’s more overtly Beckett-like and aloof Gerry (2002). Comedy moves to the fore when the archaic Don Quixote urges Sancho to look up at the sky and cry, “God, you are the best,” but the character’s final musings on mortality hint that – within himself at least – he isn’t as lost as he might appear. “Chivalry is civilization,” he asserts, and with fealty the movie records his avoidance of all humanity besides Sancho. Serra’s movie ends on literal notes of melancholy, plucked and strummed on Ferrant Font’s solitary acoustic guitar.

When Don Quixote addresses the sky, Honor of the Knights takes on a simple grandeur not far from that found in Marcos Prado’s extraordinary, underseen 2004 documentary Estamira, a portrait of a sage madwoman who lives in an apocalyptic Rio de Janeiro landfill. In appearance, Carbó also somewhat resembles fellow journeyman traveler Vargas, the threatening protagonist of another recent somnambulant cinema work, Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos (2004). Much like Serra’s Apichatpong-influenced debut, the Argentine Alonso’s recent films reflect a conversation between filmmakers from different countries that is beginning to emerge from the somnambulant style. Just as Los Muertos shares traits with Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours, Alonso’s more recent Fantasma (2006) resembles Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn more than it does any recent work of new Argentine cinema.

By moving Tsai’s and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s updates of Michelangelo Antonioni’s slackness from urban settings to mountains and jungles, Apichatpong helped establish the tone, atmosphere, and characteristics of somnambulant cinema, which treats the screen of a movie theater as a wide-open rather than narratively enclosed site for conscious and unconscious dreaming. The most literal example of the form has to be Paz Encina’s 2006 Hamaca Paraguaya, which confronts the audience with an extended shot of a rural hammock, using this sight and the voice-over banter to represent Paraguay’s place in the world.

Certainly, the very idea of somnambulant cinema brings the prospect of loud snoring two seats away or two rows down, but amid the cavalcade of cell phone rudeness in movie theaters today, that possibility is more humorous than annoying. There is a difference between a slow film and a boring film, and Honor of the Knights is lively – it doesn’t require a prescreening blast of black coffee and sugar-free Red Bull (one veteran online critic’s diet before watching Pedro Costa’s literally awesome 2005 Colossal Youth).

What is the dark good for, if not dreaming?<\!s>2

HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS
Thurs/13 and Sat/15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/16, 2 p.m.; $6-<\d>$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Thrower’s flames

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW You can judge a book by its cover when the cover is as scarily impressive as the one for Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (Fab Press, 528 pages, $79.95). It’s a map of the United States, with each state composed of a fragment from a low-budget horror film. Blood drips from the edges of the South. The entire top of the Midwest is blocked by a large image of someone in an asbestos suit. He’s aiming a lively flamethrower directly at you and me.

Also sporting a pair of amazing inset spreads that showcase the title credits of 300 films, Thrower’s tome deserves a spot next to Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn, 1967), Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton University Press, 1992), Michael Weldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (Ballantine, 1983), and Bill and Michelle Landis’s Sleazoid Express (Simon and Schuster, 2002) on a healthily horrific bookshelf. Its closest relative in terms of loose format and interview content might be Incredibly Strange Films (RE/Search, 1986), but Thrower casts aside V. Vale’s coolness for the passion found in Danny Peary’s series of Cult Movies books.

More pointedly, Thrower’s study of American exploitation film from the 1970s through the mid-’80s applies terribly to the current moment. For one thing, recent Hollywood torture porn owes a multimillion-dollar influential debt to the small-time labors of twisted love celebrated by Nightmare USA. For another, Thrower is flashing a spotlight — or beaming a flashlight — on the American death drive at a time when this country seems increasingly or wholly out of touch with, and idiotically clueless about, its violent id. It helps that this catalogue of what United Kingdom censors called video nasties proves as visually and verbally lively as the toothy title grubs in The Deadly Spawn (1982).

And for a book bathed in blood and drawn to depressing and despairing expressions of murder such as the infamous Maniac (1980), Nightmare USA is surprisingly and endearingly warmhearted. "Watching the materialistic beach babes and sexist volleyball hunks of Slumber Party Massacre 3 (Sally Mattison, 1990) driving down a coastal road in an open-topped car listening to awful AM pop-rock, I hug myself with excitement, treasuring my affection for these bubbleheads and jackasses," Thrower writes. "They are my friends and I can’t wait to see them die." Themes of friendship also emerge from the book’s profiles — along with some equally unexpected juxtapositions. Deadly Spawn director Douglas McKeown now runs a storytelling group at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Center. Frederick Freidel, the director of Axe (1974), says his assistant consulted with esteemed critic Manny Farber. Joseph Ellison, director of Don’t Go in the House (1979), discusses jazz and watching Federico Fellini films and shares a photo of his film’s producer with a beaming Frank Capra.

That photo couldn’t be stranger, considering that Ellison’s truly scarifying film provides Nightmare USA with the fire on its front cover. That man in the asbestos suit is grafted from an infamous scene, set in a steel room, that — after decades of deciding it was beyond my threshold of experience — I recently discovered (thanks in part to my brave cohort Cheryl Eddy) is both superior to and an obvious source for Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). "Horror has always been sad to me," Ellison remarks with casual profundity to Thrower, who rightly states that Don’t Go in the House‘s scorching early centerpiece "takes the viewer through shock into a kind of stunned admiration." It’s up to you whether you go in the house, but I’ll be breaking the bank and getting ready for some heavy lifting when Thrower flames readers with volume two of Nightmare USA.

www.lastgasp.com”>wwww.lastgasp.com

Video Mutants: Prince of theme parkness

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>>Click here to view some Damon Packard vids

› cheryl@sfbg.com

Try explaining a Damon Packard film to someone who hasn’t seen one and you will fail. The best you can achieve is a description: "It’s a sequel to Logan’s Run, kind of, but with a lot of 1984, clips from Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, and roller skaters jamming to ‘Never Knew Love like This Before.’<0x2009>"

Seriously, can you even imagine what that’s like? Step inside 2007’s SpaceDisco One and enter the world of a filmmaker who makes movies unlike anything you’ve seen before — except for the parts you have seen before. Every time he uses nonoriginal footage, it’s worth paying extraclose attention; though Packard would rather use only his own material, his choices of appropriated footage are never random. Why else would he include a clip of Dirk Benedict (Starbuck on the original Battlestar Galactica) padding dejectedly around the British Celebrity Big Brother house in a film that pays homage to — and mourns the lost aesthetic of — 1970s sci-fi movies?

"I’m not really into mashup-type stuff," the Los Angeles–based Packard explained to me. It was New Year’s Eve eve, and we were sitting in the basement at Artists’ Television Access — a dark, chilly space crammed with TV monitors and other electronic odds and ends. "In SpaceDisco, I didn’t plan on using any [nonoriginal] footage. It’s just a case of not having the money. It takes money to go out and shoot original footage. You need actors, props, costumes, and locations. That’s the short answer to it. [The nonoriginal footage] was just replacing things that I needed — I needed some shots of spaceships and things like that. For the most part the film is all original."

SpaceDisco One, in which Hollywood’s Universal City Walk stands in for the Ministry of Truth during the film’s 1984-inspired scenes, works real news footage into its narrative. At one point, a giant screen beaming the face of radio host Alex Jones attracts the attention of SpaceDisco‘s Winston Smith character — himself a result of Packard’s interest in recontextualizing familiar or favorite characters.

"I love the idea of taking characters from other films and utilizing them in some way — taking Arthur Frayn from Zardoz [and using him in] SpaceDisco," he said. In keeping with SpaceDisco‘s positioning as a Logan’s Run sequel, several of Packard’s leads are written as the daughters of characters from that film. "And of course Smith and O’Brien from 1984 — all sort of meeting up in the same universe. I like that idea, taking characters and settings from other films and coming up with a new adventure."

Anticipating my next question, he added, "I don’t know how that will ever translate into something in the [mainstream film] world professionally, because of copyright issues."

So far Packard hasn’t run into any cinema-related problems with the law, aside from being booted from a theme park while grabbing shots for 2002’s Reflections of Evil, an epically surreal study of LA paranoia. "[My films have all been] independent films made for no money and no distribution, or very minor distribution," he said. "Once it gets to a point where I have a budget and there’s real distribution, [using copyrighted material] would be a whole different situation."

He’s also never heard a peep from his celebrity targets, specifically Steven Spielberg (his childhood idol, who might frown on Reflections‘ depiction of Schindler’s List: The Ride) or George Lucas, who’s showered with ire in 2003’s The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary. That film manipulates DVD featurettes from the newer Star Wars films, with wraparound footage (reaction shots, responses to conversations, the occasional porn snippet) adding a whole new level to the average Jedi’s beef with Lucas. It’s payback for Greedo shooting first and Jar Jar Binks, but to Packard, Lucas’s addiction to technology is symptomatic of a bigger issue — how Hollywood films have changed dramatically in the past 30 years.

"I don’t dislike Lucas," Packard noted, though a viewing of the hilarious Mockumentary might suggest otherwise. ("Angry black people became a strong inspiration for George," a faux Industrial Light and Magic animator notes while working on the schematics for a character described as Mace Windu’s streetwise brother, pointedly referencing the observation that some of Lucas’s Phantom Menace creatures seem ever so slightly racist.) "I would actually hope that he would have a good laugh at it if he ever saw it. [With Mockumentary] I was just expressing my disappointment in the new generation of Star Wars films and how Lucas has become part of that whole system of becoming obsessed with CGI and digital effects."

But Lucas is hardly alone, according to Packard. "It seems like all of the film industry is operating in this vacuum where they aren’t aware of what they’re doing. They’re out of touch with what audiences are interested in seeing — [although] maybe it’s just the reality that I’m experiencing. I don’t understand how most [mainstream] films get green-lighted; it’s just more of the same thing over and over, just variations on playing-it-safe themes, following the same formulas. Like Transformers. It was a film that I just — why? I was baffled by that film. It was kind of entertaining — I saw it in IMAX — but who would think that was a great idea? There’s nothing new or special about doing a Transformers movie."

That’s not to say Packard hates every new movie; you may have noticed he submitted a top 10 list to the Guardian‘s 2007 year in film issue, with favorites like No Country for Old Men and Paris, Je T’Aime. One of his friends in LA gave him a hard time for not including Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

"He was really upset," Packard said of the Dead fan. "He thinks it’s Sidney Lumet’s best film. I disagreed. I thought it was OK, but it doesn’t compare to his early works at all. It would have been much better if it was made in the 1970s with a sleazier cast, sleazier characters, and not [set in] a modern strip mall. The characters didn’t feel credible — they just weren’t very interesting. Things aren’t that interesting these days."

Watch a Packard film — and if you haven’t, you must; Other Cinema is working on a release of SpaceDisco One for later in 2008, and at least one version of Reflections of Evil is available at Amazon.com — and it’s clear he’s inspired by the 1970s and more than a little nostalgic for them. At 40, he’s too young to have been part of what he views as Hollywood’s last golden age.

"The late ’70s and early ’80s were the beginning of the downfall of cinema — the beginning of the blockbuster film and special effects. Suddenly the quality levels, the character-driven films, were diminishing [in favor of] special-effects extravaganzas," he said. "If I went back in time, it would probably be even more difficult to get into the film business [than it is now]. Still, I think it was a better time in a lot of ways. My films are always making a statement about the way things have changed for the worse."

Though he’s a YouTube user and sees the finer points of shooting on video (though he prefers film), Packard’s view of his future as a filmmaker is surprisingly old-school. Specifically, he would like to make more narratives. His dream projects are an "analog fantasy film without the overuse of CGI" and a longer version of SpaceDisco One, which now clocks in at less than an hour.

"I’ve always wanted to make big films, not small independent art movies. But my creative sensibilities seem to be so off the wavelength of the average person. The way people react to my films — they can’t understand them. They need to have something palatable," he said. He blames Hollywood — at one time a creative haven where up-and-coming directors like Robert Altman could make offbeat films like 3 Women — for creating the apathetic-audience monster. "I don’t know if there’s any hope [for the future of movies]. That should be a theme of [your] article: is there any hope? God only knows." Insert your own A New Hope wraparound — the exploding Death Star, perhaps? — here.

www.myspace.com/choogo

Video Mutants: Eight for 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

1. CORY ARCANGEL


Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) uncovers the beauty of Nintendo clouds. Go to our Pixel Vision blog this week (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for an interview with Jacob Ciocci of Arcangel’s sometime collaborators Paper Rad and an interview with Arcangel that discusses his recent video and performance projects, such as The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum.

2. PHIL COLLINS


Dünya dunlemiyor, the Istanbul, Turkey–set entry in Collins’s World Won’t Listen trilogy of Smiths karaoke videos, wowed those who saw it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The entire trilogy is now on display and garnering raves (including an Artforum essay that pinpoints the lustiness that breaks through even the most programmatic of Collins’s endeavors) at the Dallas Museum of Art. Here’s hoping we get to see it soon.

3. SARAH ENID


Based in San Francisco but often out in the world, Enid has a roving eye. She’s made comic horror short works (in 2005’s Lovelorn Domestic she’s a mute woman with a giant bird that pecks out her husband’s eyes) and more recently ventured into the realm of new age relaxation videos — 3-D ones, to boot. The results are as amazing as they are soothing.

4. DAVID ENOS


One of San Francisco’s best underground talents, Enos has used videotape to craft a number of hand-drawn and hand-spliced animated shorts. Music biography is one recurrent subject: Enos’s trademark deadpan charm adds magic to illustrated and condensed life stories of Jim Morrison (complete with writhing snakes), Dennis Wilson (with a cameo by Charlie Manson), and Leonard Cohen. Look for a Guardian profile of Enos — as well as one of his frequent collaborator Enid — later this year.

5. GEORGE KUCHAR


Ryan Trecartin (see Super Ego) would never have star-wiped himself into art world stardom if not for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink video aesthetic of Kuchar, who has made hundreds of videos since he and his brother Mike helped create underground film. Based in San Francisco and a teacher at the SF Art Institute, Kuchar has taught or influenced every local video person on this list, and his movies continue to be as funny as anyone’s in this issue, and only slightly less energetic than Trecartin’s (maybe a good thing).

6. ANNE MCGUIRE


She’s channeled Judy Garland — in 1997’s tears-and-laughs cabaret spree I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong — and survived. She stalker-serenaded Joe DiMaggio when the slugger was still alive and walking through the Marina (in 1991’s Joe Dimaggio, 1, 2, 3). In addition to these potent short performance works, she’s also unleashed some gargantuan formal projects, such as a pair of features — 1992’s Strain Andromeda and 2007’s Adventure Poseidon The — that rearrange Hollywood films from back to front, treating each shot like a card in a deck.

7. PAPER RAD


You haven’t lived until you’ve been berated about CD-ROMs, DVD menus, and coolness by the cranky-voiced animated character at the beginning of Paper Rad’s 2006 DVD Trash Talking (Load). Turns out that rant is just the preamble to a gloriously anarchic explosion of primary colors and pop-cult iconography that has prompted a thousand commercialized graphic design rip-offs, none of them one-millionth as inspired. Paper Rad recently made mashup lively again with the Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake (now on YouTube). Go to their Web site — www.paperrad.org — for visual pleasure seizures and to get a taste of their new 20-minute video, Problem Solvers.

>>Watch Paper Rad’s “umbrella zombie datamosh mistake”

8. MATT WOLF


Wolf crosses into the realm of full-length features with Wild Combination, his subtly poignant documentary portrait of late musician Arthur Russell, which has been accepted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. But his 2003 short video Smalltown Boys was a standout at a recent Internet-vid group show at SF Camerawork, and his Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of such clips, both found (he uncovers Ryan Phillippe’s time as the first gay teen on American soaps) and made by him (his 2004 Imitation of Imitation mimics the costume-jewelry waterfall from the credits of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life).

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

Heartbroke mountain

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Film intern Jennique Mason pays tribute to Heath Ledger.

“I love you baby…” You remember, those bleachers and Letters to Cleo on the roof? Yup. You heard it. Hunky Heath is dead! Growing up with him, charting his successes, his breakthroughs, his 10 Things I Hate About Yous, quite frankly, I’m devastated. According to the Hollywood Star, and every other internet rag obsessed with celebrity, the Australian-born actor was found dead in his SoHo apartment this afternoon. Naked and unconscious with a bottle of sleeping pills on his night-stand, Ledger appears to have been paying homage to Marilyn Monroe. But Marilyn lived to be 36 — Heath has officially checked out at the tender age of 28. Leaving a fine array of films behind him — including recent triumphs like Brokeback Mountain and I’m Not There, and the next Batman installation, we’ve lost one helluva an actor and a heartthrob. These days, talents with both qualities are becoming increasingly obsolete.

HeathJoker.png
Ledger as Batman nemesis the Joker in The Dark Knight, out this July.

Material world

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The year 1988 marked the apex of David Mamet’s celebrity. He’d won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, and American Buffalo was being produced by every little theater on the planet. He’d scripted several mostly admired films and had just directed his first, the coldly ingenious House of Games.

It must have been a heady time. One doesn’t get the impression that Mamet is the type to enjoy simply being celebrated. So it’s logical that at the moment when whatever he premiered next would be a guaranteed BFD, he both seized the opportunity and fuck-you’d it. Speed-the-Plow was a biting-the-hand-that-feeds-me satire of Hollywood-industry soulessness whose subject alone guaranteed wide attention. Then Mamet cast Madonna as the girl. By all accounts, she was a complete zero. But needless to say, the show was a massive event.

Two decades later the hype has long settled. Loretta Greco’s revival at American Conservatory Theater reveals Speed-the-Plow as what it always was: an acidic comedy that isn’t one of Mamet’s best plays but is too entertainingly brash to resist. The notion that Hollywood is essentially soulless — all about business, not art, as the characters keep repeating — was hardly news back then. And now everybody from key grip to Dairy Queen day manager analyzes what did and didn’t sell in the Monday-morning tally of last weekend’s box office. Why do we care? Is it because Hollywood, more than ever the focus for so many putative proletarian dreams, inspires gloating resentment as much as fascination?

Speed-the-Plow was never really controversial, even within the biz. Mamet clearly loves the winner-take-all crassness of his male characters here, for whom every interaction is a dominance game. Top dog Bobby Gould (Matthew Del Negro) has just been promoted to head of production at a major studio. His expensively minimalist new office (a movable set piece by G.W. Mercier) hasn’t been even been fully assembled when erstwhile coworker Charlie Fox (Andrew Polk) comes calling.

From Polk’s flop-sweating, highly physical performance you immediately glean that Charlie thinks he should be the man behind the desk — but since he’s not, he’ll do all the begging required of him. Actually, he’s got a very big bone to offer: out of the blue, a huge star has offered to make a prison buddy picture Charlie has a temporary option on. This is such a stroke of fortune that both men impulsively share their glee — the language getting a lot more sexual — with pretty, clueless temp secretary Karen (Jessi Campbell).

Once she exits, Charlie wagers this "broad" is too high-minded for Bobby to seduce — though B’s power and influence would lure just about any other Los Angeles underling into the sack in five seconds. Bobby arranges for Karen to visit his house that very night, on the pretext of her giving him a "report" on the loftily symbolic, probably unfilmable literary novel he’s been told to give a "courtesy read."

One shudders to think of Madonna stonewalling in the second-act scene, in which a garrulous Karen tries to sell Bobby on how he could "make a difference" by green-lighting a movie based on this apparently life-changing (though insufferable-sounding) tome. He plays along, trying to steer the evening in a horizontal direction. Yet the next morning, with Charlie anxiously awaiting their planned triumphant prison-flick pitch to the studio chief, Bobby is a changed man — a born-again wishbone pulled between commerce and conscience.

Satisfyingly cruel as this final tug-of-war is, it makes the play’s credibility vanish: Bobby is too content an admitted "whore" to turn Mother Theresa overnight. And with the epically tall, jock-handsome Del Negro in a part Joe Mantegna originated, the character radiates such golden-boy confidence that one can’t believe he’d have much use for a merely cute flunky like Campbell’s Karen.

Greco lets the lines breathe — her cast’s naturalistically varied delivery avoids that Morse-code monotony the playwright prefers for his staccato Mametspeak. But she doesn’t lend much weight to the ultimate question of who’s manipuutf8g whom, as this production’s Karen doesn’t seem capable of calculation. The lack of ambiguity makes this a frequently very funny Speed-the-Plow, but sans much suspense or climactic sting. *

SPEED-THE-PLOW

Through Feb. 3

Tues.–Sat, 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; no matinee Wed/16); Sun., 2 p.m.; $14–$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

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