Films

Who’s cruising who: William Friedkin speaks

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Did Cruising director William Friedkin cruise the gay community without taking responsibility for the consequences? Was he cruising for a bruising, or careless about his film’s impact on gay men’s safety? (Is it a double standard when sexualized slasher-movie killings of gay men draw protests, but the same acts done to women on screen are treated as par for the course?) Friedkin the man may have been ignored while filming a scene from the movie at a bar’s jockstrap night, but Friedkin the director’s 1980 look through — or is it at? — a sexual underground hasn’t gotten the blind-eye from gay men, then or now. In this week’s Guardian and on this blog, you’ll find critical writing and specific history on the subject, some of it scathing.

friedkin.jpg
William Friedkin circa 1970s

Cruising is not a perfect movie, or Friedkin’s best movie. It has ridiculous moments. The faux-Freudian explanation at the end parrots Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as routinely as any Brian DePalma imitation of Hitch. But I’ve been fascinated by it since an era when it was reviled and hard to find on VHS tape. And I like it. I like Cruising‘s ambivalence and its ambiguity, which could be viewed as prophetic in a societal sense and influential in a stylistic sense. (In comparison, a lot of New Queer Cinema still seems rather, um, safe.) I like the movie’s gorgeous but scary shots of Central Park at night. I like its soundtrack. I think it’s interesting that the “killer”‘s disembodied voice — a quality that takes on new meaning the more you consider the story — might very well be the influence behind the killer’s voice in gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s Scream series. Today, Cruising seems most interesting to me as a movie that critiques (hyper)masculinity, straight and gay, as the boundaries between them blur.

I had a 20-minute block of time to talk with Friedkin when he came through town recently in conjunction with Cruising‘s upcoming run at the Castro Theatre and DVD release. Here’s what he had to say about Cruising — and about Mercedes McCambridge being tied to a chair, knocking back hard liquor and swallowing raw eggs for The Exorcist. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Guardian: The Roxie Cinema here in San Francisco has had a role in the changing reputation of Cruising, so I want to ask you about your relationship with them.
William Friedkin: I don’t know if Elliot [Lavine] and Bill [Banning] are still running [the Roxie], but they always ran films that I made, and I came up [from L.A.] whenever I could to answer questions from the audience. I loved what they were doing.
Now it seems the DVD is the true cinematheque.

It goes to 11 (and beyond)

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The MadCat Women’s International Film Festival is back for its 11th consecutive year, with 11 fascinating film programs (two features and nine shorts series). It’s hard to describe the broad variety of themes and filmmaking styles explored in this year’s lineup. Identity issues, life at the fringes of society, the desire to break free from safe but unchallenging environments, and struggles for independence through unconventional means are only some of MadCat’s topics. One unifying factor: these ideas are addressed with equal amounts of sincerity, subtlety, and creativity.

Benidorm, one of the shorts contained in the "ID Docs" program, stands out not only for the respectful and attentive approach it takes to its subjects but also because it focuses on a social group that is wildly neglected in cinema and many other art forms: the elderly. German Carolyn Schmitz visits Benidorm, Spain, which during the off-season becomes a great attraction for retired people who seek to enjoy the sea and the sun. The bittersweet feeling that permeates the whole film is partly created by the confessions some of the people make in front of the camera: that they dislike being old and that they’re afraid of death. This uncomfortable feeling is most effectively complemented by the sadness of a landscape that reminds us how marginalized old people are today and how deprived they often are of taking pleasure in their age.

Elderly people are also featured, though in a lesser extent, in Boreas, a Turkish film that’s part of the "Close to Home" presentation. This time the focus is placed on how they are perceived by a young child. With her mainly stationary camera and her beautiful framing, filmmaker Belam Bas is very successful in reutf8g to the audience all that happens inside a youngster who is growing up in a rural area with no people around who are his age. The child silently but playfully observes the world, imaginatively satisfying his innate curiosity about life.

In 4 Elements, one of the festival’s features, attention is switched from people to the natural environment and how we interact with it. A Dutch-German-Russian-Siberian coproduction, the film references Greek philosopher Empedokles’ cosmogony theory, in which everything in the universe is created by the interplay of fire, water, earth, and air. Filming firemen, fishermen, mineworkers, and astronauts on and off the job, director Jiska Rickels documents the daily efforts of people whose occupations relate immediately to those elements. The outcome is an imposing, mesmerizing, almost mystical movie that reveals not only how dependent we are on nature but also what a struggle it is to exploit our planet’s natural wealth.

On a completely different note, the word fun most adequately describes the retrospective MadCat has prepared for innovative filmmaker Helen Hill, who sadly was murdered six months ago. In her films, Hill mixed home movies, animation, paper figures, drawings, animals, and people demonstrating an unbound resourcefulness and an incredible kindness. In Hill’s world, making films is presented as an enjoyable and potentially inexpensive endeavor that one can undertake in his or her kitchen — an instantly relatable means to self-expression.<\!s>*

MADCAT WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Sept 11–<\d>26

See film listings for info

www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Toshiro worship

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Christy Funsch is tiny, but she commands attention. During a run-through of her solo dance in the upcoming To Mifune, she filled CounterPULSE’s stage with a torrent of lanky, highly detailed movements, out of which tumbled a recognizable character not unlike the breeches-hoisting heroine in Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo. But Funsch’s cowgirl isn’t heading for a hoedown; her eyes are set on loftier horizons. She’s on her way to meet Toshiro Mifune, who played larger-than-life warrior heroes in Akira Kurosawa’s epic films.

Until now Funsch has primarily choreographed solos and duets, but for To Mifune, a work she describes as equally inspired by spaghetti westerns and samurai dramas, she has expanded her Funsch Dance Experience to eight members, including DJ K808, Chinese acrobat Glenn Curtis, and break-dancer Skorpio. As a performer with local companies (currently the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, and as a duo with Sue Roginski), Funsch has been mesmerizing to watch: intense, incisive, but also often lyrical and a little mysterious. So perhaps her fascination with the great actor is not as surprising as it might seem.

Funsch says she admires the range of Mifune’s "intense command of a huge physicality" in such films as Seven Samurai (1954). Even more, she’s in awe of his "ability to pull back, to give with smaller gestures," the way he did in Yojimbo (1961), a film that was remade in Italy as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with Clint Eastwood. Though she is taking a light-hearted approach in her tribute to Mifune, Funsch admits to a fascination with the figure of the morally ambiguous loner who only gradually reveals himself in the context of a film — whether that film was directed by Kurosawa or Sergio Leone.

Skorpio, with whom Funsch performed at the Live Worms Gallery in North Beach in March, interprets Mifune. Funsch and Skorpio hooked up by accident when their rehearsal schedules overlapped. Skorpio calls what he does "true skool," combining old-style break-dance moves with more contemporary dancing. Their Live Worms duet, at once relaxed and intense, showed that these so-different dancers are naturally congenial partners. "A lot of the breaking vocabulary is just as set as our ballet language is," Funsch says, explaining her admiration for Skorpio. "It was immediately apparent that he is about how you put things together and give it your own flavor. I never felt that I was watching a break-dancer." *

TO MIFUNE

With Isak Immanuel’s Illegal Echo

Thurs/6–Sat/8, 8 p.m., $12–$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 435-7552

www.counterpulse.org

Stormy leather

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Cruising for a Bruising By Jason Shamai

FILM William Friedkin, like it or not, has contributed so much to mainstream queer cinema that it’s remarkable his name primarily calls up images of projectile vomiting and Gene Hackman running a lot. The Boys in the Band (1970) and the more high-profile Cruising (1980) are bookends to a decade of comparatively unencumbered gay sex that is legendary to gay men of my generation (I was alive for a gloriously unencumbered two months of it), yet there was almost no mainstream representation of gay men in pop culture between the two films that didn’t involve guest spots on Match Game or The Hollywood Squares.

Last year’s excellent Friedkin offering, Bug, spent its first 15 minutes or so, gratuitously but innocuously, within a lesbian community. And let’s not forget Father Dyer’s gayer-than-gay proclamation in The Exorcist (1973) that “My idea of heaven is a solid white nightclub with me as a headliner for all eternity, and they love me.” Friedkin’s representations of queer people are hardly consistent in their degrees of sophistication, but the venom he’s inspired in so many activists is certainly excessive and arguably not worth the energy. If he can be accused of exploitation, what he’s exploiting is of no mere passing fascination to him. For some reason the man, whether or not he’s welcome, has clearly thrown in his lot with the queers.

Cruising — let’s just get it out of the way — is a pretty terrible movie in most of the major categories: dialogue, acting, and plot all add up to a big fat blecch, and the restored version playing at the Castro Theatre beginning Sept. 7 in anticipation of the DVD release does nothing to remedy the narrative inertia. The murder mystery it purports to be — regarding an undercover cop’s pursuit of a serial killer in the West Village’s leather-clad S-M scene — is a murky and parenthetical excuse for a series of Boschian tableaux of boot licking, fist fucking, and ass ramming. But beyond a frustrating mess of implications about the scene’s negative influence on Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), Friedkin isn’t guilty of much beyond overexuberance.

The initial vitriolic reaction to Cruising, it seems, had more to do with its depiction, embellished a touch, of a significant chunk of the gay world with its legs up in the air. The flatteringly concentrated sexual activity in the bar scenes may be less of an issue nowadays because of the growing number of politically engaged queer people, unconcerned with assimilation and happy to sign off on anything that makes jittery straight people uncomfortable. But does this say enough about the movie’s sexual proclivities? There isn’t much talk about Cruising as a pageant of eroticized violence or as a film eager in its bloodiness for the titillated approval of its viewers. Were Friedkin’s murder scenes — overt visual associations of anal and violent penetration, blood sprayed across the screen in a porn booth — intended as an extension of his conception of S-M play? Would it be wrong for him to do so, or for the audience to be duly turned on?

I’ve always taken for granted that Cruising‘s two major scenes of police harassment were your garden-variety (though highly effective) critiques of injustice, a risk-minimizing way of approaching an unfamiliar culture. But now I’m wondering if these scenes were intended as an indictment of the police at all (was the unnecessarily long, squirm-inducing raid on an all-black bar in The French Connection intended as an indictment?) or if they were simply elaborate fetish scenarios, artistic expansions of the imagery and dynamics already well integrated into the S-M scene? Mr. Friedkin, are you trying to get us off? ——————- ——————-

Stormy Leather by Matt Sussman

When Cruising (1980) finally arrived in Bay Area theaters Feb. 15, 1980, San Francisco’s gay community had long been up in arms. The 1978 murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone were still fresh in many people’s minds. Gay bashing was still a regular occurrence. Word had spread through the gay press about efforts to disrupt the movie’s filming in New York, and the verdict was clear: Hollywood was profiting from gay murder.

In a December 1979 Oakland Tribune article, Konstantin Berlandt, a member of the group Stop the Movie Cruising and perhaps the film’s most vociferous adversary in local gay rags, called Cruising “a genocidal attack on gay people.” Two months later, the STMC helped organize a demonstration at the Transamerica Pyramid, protesting one of Transamerica’s subsidiaries — the film’s distributor, United Artists. On opening day hundreds of protesters picketed the St. Francis Theatre.

“I don’t remember what I thought of the whole thing other than it was kind of stupid and annoying,” recalls Marc Huestis, one of the cofounders of the city’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now the SF International LGBT Film Festival). “As long as I’ve been here, there has always been the battle between the respectable gays and the fringe gays,” Huestis continues. “The respectable gays — many of whom I will say probably went to the leather bars to cruise after their protests — were all into showing a positive face.”

The issue of positive representation — and whether or not Cruising‘s problematic yoking of gay sadomasochism and serial murder warranted merely protest or outright censorship — was at the core of much of the debate. One reader wrote to San Francisco’s Sentinel, “It is ironic that we who have long been victims of prejudice and censorship should attempt to use these weapons of oppression against the movie.” In a February 1980 cover story, “The Men of Cruising,” in Mandate (the gay “international magazine of entertainment and Eros”), Rod Morgan, one of the gay extras in the film’s bar scenes, commented, “If the protesters want progay propaganda, let them get the money together and make their own movie.”

“The stakes of gay representation were very different at the time,” reflects Michael Lumpkin, artistic director of LGBT media nonprofit Frameline. “They were much higher because it was, like, ‘Hollywood hasn’t given us anything, and then they give us this?’ ” However, critic Scottie Ferguson, writing in the Advocate in April 1980, found a thrilling frisson in Cruising‘s portrayal of gay men and asked readers, “What Hollywood film has made the sexual electricity of the gay male seem so vibrant and visceral and unnerving?”

By 1995, when the Roxie Film Center revived Cruising, Ferguson’s observations had been somewhat vindicated. Mainstream LGBT film was taking off, and thanks to the risky work of directors like Gregg Araki and Tom Kalin, new queer cinema had confronted audiences with visceral and unnerving representations of violence-prone gay men.

In contrast to the largely positive reevaluations in the local press, David Ehrenstein implied in the Bay Area Reporter that the Roxie’s revival was tantamount to screening the notorious anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew (1940). Representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showed up to hand out protest literature. “It was hilarious,” former Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine recalls. “There was a line around the block, and 90 percent of those waiting were in the leather crowd, and these GLAAD folks are trying to persuade them not to see the movie.”

Cruising has, to some extent, been defanged by the passage of time, its campier moments and macho signifiers embraced by a younger generation of queers. Clearly, though, the film still touches nerves: flame wars are being ignited as fast as they are being put out on Craigslist.com. And even for this gay fan of slasher movies, the film’s murder scenes are incomparably unsettling.

After a recent local media screening of the restored movie’s DVD release — at which director William Friedkin was present — DJ Bus Station John, whose clubs Tubesteak Connection and the Rod evoke the milieu of gay nightlife at the time Cruising was made, commented in an e-mail that “Friedkin’s present claim that contemporary audiences are more ‘sophisticated’ and therefore more receptive to Cruising, if not more friendly [to the film], doesn’t mitigate the damage done to our community at the time [of its release].”

CRUISING

Sept. 7–13, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

For Johnny Ray Huston’s interview with Cruising director William Friedkin, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

 

Bedsit cinema of ’60s England

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The early ’60s French new wave gets imitations and retrospectives and books galore, but in terms of homage, the British new wave of roughly the same era hasn’t been gifted with much more than a number of Smiths 7- and 12-inch singles covers and some Morrissey lyrics. Such tributes are nothing to sniff at, but an orange Shelagh Delaney on the cover of Louder Than Bombs or a picture of a pouty Rita Tushingham on the packaging of Sandie Shaw’s version of "Hand in Glove" don’t amount to the unanimous praise and canonical status given to, say, Jean-Luc Godard.

The subject of the new Pacific Film Archive series "Look Back at England: The British New Wave," "bedsit" or "kitchen-sink" British film drama of the early ’60s has often been a target for critics. Pauline Kael sneered at its emotions. The films of Tony Richardson and the acting of Tushingham have met no greater naysayer than Manny Farber, who devoted an entire essay, titled "Pish-Tush," to attacking Tushingham as the foremost example of a "megalomaniac star who can make the simplest action have as many syllables as her name." No doubt about it, Tushingham is mannered. But more than 40 years on from Farber’s essay, many and much worse offenses have been committed to celluloid and video, and it’s easy to see the merits of a movie such as 1962’s A Taste if Honey, written and directed by Delaney, whose dialogue and lead-colored riverside scenario provided Morrissey with an entire song ("This Night Has Opened My Eyes," far more doleful than A Taste of Honey) as well as a number of lines to steal for other lyrics.

"Look Back at England," which looks at nearly a decade of filmmaking, kicks off this week with Richard Burton abusing a Claire Bloom much wimpier than his future real-lire and onscreen wife in Richardson’s 1958 adaptation of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and ends with the Stanley Kubrick–tinged Malcolm McDowell antics of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 If… In between, you’ll find Tom Courtenay, madcap in 1963’s Billy Liar (sampled on Saint Etienne’s album So Tough) and haunted in 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; and Albert Finney, loutish in 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Michael Caine posh loutish in 1966’s Alfie. Prototypical angry young men? Yes. But women had major roles as well — the period introduced us to the divine Julie Christie (in Billy Liar, her appeal later inspiring a song by Yo La Tengo, and in 1965’s Darling) as well as Tushingham, who meets her everything-and-the-kitchen-sink directorial match in Richard Lester in The Knack … and How to Get It, a 1965 film as narratively wild as Godard’s work of the era, if not wilder.

Yo La Tengo, Saint Etienne, the Smiths: funny how the seeming dreariness of British bedsit movies inspired maybe even more great pop acts than did the French new wave visions of and for the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. You can also find the seeds of the lurid extravaganzas of Derek Jarman in some of these pictures, if not the phallic frenzies (to borrow the title of Joseph Lanza’s new book) of Ken Russell and the hallucinations of Nicholas Roeg. The hyperextravagant Joseph Losey could find a home within the modest British new wave (his 1963 The Servant is a touchstone, thanks to Dirk Bogarde’s career peak performance). And while a contemporary director such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa loves his French new wave, he’s no stranger to the British corollary either. His Séance (2000) is based on Bryan Forbes’s 1964 Séance on a Wet Afternoon.

Speaking of Forbes, his excellent The L-Shaped Room (1962), starring a low-key Leslie Caron in a Tushingham-style unwed mother role, is one of the few links missing from "Look Back at England." But you can seek it out on video — and discover the source behind the opening moments of The Queen Is Dead. (Johnny Ray Huston)

LOOK BACK AT ENGLAND: THE BRITISH NEW WAVE

Sun/2 through Oct. 26

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.org

I talked with a Zombie

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The busiest guy with an undead name in showbiz? Rob Zombie. Like a certain mask-wearing maniac, the man can’t be stopped – at least when it comes to doing press for Halloween, his latest film, which opens Friday, August 31 (giving you a full two months to prepare for the actual holiday). I zoomed into the office after an ill-advised night out for my 8:45 a.m. interview. My phone was lit up like Vegas – Mr. Zombie was running a bit late, could I hold on for a few minutes? Yeah, I could hold on to talk about Halloween – John Carpenter’s 1978 original is my go-to favorite film citation, and I’m anticipating the remake with every bloody bone in my horror-geek body. I don’t like doing interviews before I’ve seen the film, but again – it’s Halloween, dude. A movie that – let’s be honest – needs no enhancement to be scary, even in 2007. But I’m willing to see what Zombie has to offer. Which leads me to my first question …

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What do you think makes you different from other directors who’ve remade horror films (see: The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Fog, etc. etc.)? I know you’re a huge horror fan…

Rob Zombie: It’s hard to say. All directors are different. And for me to assume I know who they are and what they do and what their motivations are would be presumptuous on my part. But the only thing that I know is that what makes this remake possibly different from others is that it’s not just a job. If you’re gonna take on something, you have to take it on because you have some passion for the project. Because I’ve been offered other things in the past and I’ve turned them all down because I was just kind of like, “Why would you remake that? Who give a shit?” So I mean, maybe that’s different. Sometimes people just take on jobs that they really don’t have a passion for, and it shows.

Fall Arts: Before and after Halloween

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

1. Death Sentence Not to be confused with The Brave One (see "Popcorn — and Human Pies"), but you’re forgiven if you do: old-school vigilantes are the new hotness. Splat packer James Wan (Saw) directs this adaptation of Brian Garfield’s novel — the sequel to Death Wish — in which a brush with violence turns a mild-mannered dude (Kevin Bacon) into the human equivalent of Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance. (Aug. 31)

2. Halloween John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is damn near perfection. Its sequels are no less delightful ("Eight more days till Halloween, Silver Shamrock!"), but all have lacked the artistic impact of the original. This ninth trip to happy Haddonfield is technically a remake, which under normal circumstances would be outright sacrilege. But as I’ve been intrigued by director Rob Zombie’s previous films — and the cast he’s lined up is pretty mind-blowing, with Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Adrienne Barbeau, Clint Howard, Danny Trejo, and about a zillion others — I’ll have to see the thing before I start, uh, screaming for vengeance. (Aug. 31)

3. The Darjeeling Limited So you didn’t really dig The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, except for the Willem Dafoe parts ("Not if I see you first, sonny"). You know you’re duty bound to see Wes Anderson’s latest, which stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman (who cowrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola) as brothers traveling across India. Prediction: there will be quirkiness. (Sept. 28)

4. Into the Wild Director Sean Penn adapted his screenplay from Jon Krakauer’s best-seller about a recent college grad who up and moves to the Alaskan wilderness. Emile Hirsch — one of those young actors who shuttle between arty (The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) and big-budget (2008’s Speed Racer) — stars as the lad yearning for adventure. (Sept. 28)

5. Elizabeth: The Golden Age Whoever heard of Cate Blanchett before Elizabeth? Cast in every movie made since (seems like, anyway), the striking Aussie returns to the character that made her famous with Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 tale about Queen Elizabeth I’s rise to power. Clive Owen appears (as Sir Walter Raleigh). Helen Mirren does not. (Oct. 12)

6. Rogue The director of Wolf Creek does the Australian tourism board another favor. A giant favor, in fact. A giant, crocodile-shaped favor. I believe the phrase you’re looking for is "Fuck yeah!" (Oct. 12)

7. American Gangster This film’s got a checkered backstory — it was supposed to be made a few years ago by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and when the production went south, Denzel Washington got something like $20 million as part of his play-or-pay deal. Ridley Scott’s in the director’s chair now, with Russell Crowe and moneybags Washington having a thesp-off amid the 1970s Harlem drug trade. (Nov. 2)

8. Leatherheads When George Clooney acts, I’ll most likely see the movie. When Clooney directs, my ass hustles to the theater — even for a romantic comedy … about football … set in the 1920s. John Krasinski (The Office) and Renée Zellweger (The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) star alongside the sultan of suave. (Dec. 7)

9. I Am Legend Holy long-in-development blockbuster — can you believe this movie’s finally coming out? The director of Constantine puts wily wisecracker Will Smith through his sci-fi paces in Richard Matheson’s tale of Earth’s last (human) inhabitant. (Dec. 14)

10. Aliens vs. Predator If you go see The Christmas Cottage — the first and hopefully last movie inspired by one of Thomas Kinkade’s stunningly craptastic paintings — you are hereby sentenced to spend all of Jesus’ birthday watching the Predator go mano a tentacle with Alien critters galore. I’ll be the sicko in the seat next to you, bleary-eyed from my traditional holiday Silent Night, Deadly Night–<\d>athon. (Dec. 25)<\!s>*

Fall Arts: I screen, you screen

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Switching Schools Sucks" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up a triple dose of teen alienation: Pump Up the Volume, Footloose, and the Andrew Stevens–starring, Heathers-influenced Massacre at Central High.

Aug. 31. Castro Theatre (info below)

"Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany" Perhaps the most expansive retrospective of East German film in the United States, spanning from the early 1960s to 1990.

Sept. 1–Oct. 27. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"Look Back at England: The British New Wave" Does kitchen-sink cinema deserve classic status? It would be great to witness Manny Farber (who wrote scathingly about Rita Tushingham and Tony Richardson) duke it out with Morrissey on the subject.

Sept. 2–Oct. 26. Pacific Film Archive (info below)

"Devotional Cinema: Films by Dorsky and Ozu" Nathaniel Dorsky shows two of his films and also talks about Late Spring, one of the Yasujiro Ozu films discussed in his insightful book that shares this program’s title.

Sept. 4. Pacific Film Archive

"Send Granny Back to Russia" The 1929 film My Grandmother is screened with Beth Custer’s score to raise funds for an upcoming trip on which Custer’s ensemble will perform the score in Russia and elsewhere.

Sept. 4. Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, Berk. Also Sept. 5. Dolby Laboratories, 100 Potrero, SF. www.bethcuster.com

William Friedkin Series Someone I know who knows all the great actresses calls Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug a "tour de force." That film and others set the stage for more Friedkin freak-outs.

Sept. 4–6. Castro Theatre

"Helmut Käutner: Film Retrospective Part 2" The series continues with the post–World War II period of Käutner’s career, including a 1947 feature shot in Germany’s ruins and a 1954 film featuring a young Klaus Kinski (yes, he was young once).

Sept. 4–Oct. 9. Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe-sf.org

"Fearless Females: Three Films by Shyam Benegal" The director appears at screenings that highlight the feminist currents of his contributions to the Indian new wave of the ’70s.

Sept. 5–7. Pacific Film Archive

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana Lars Laumann’s 16-minute video screens in a loop as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition.

Sept. 6–22. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Darwin Awards A new comedy by Finn Taylor focuses on death by stupidity.

Sept. 7. Roxie Film Center (info below)

"TILT" The Film Arts Foundation presents an evening of films from its media-education program, which works with schools.

Sept. 7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (info below)

Cruising The digital restoration of William Friedkin’s most controversial film finally hits the Castro Theatre, years after being revived from infamy at the Roxie Film Center.

Sept. 7–13. Castro Theatre

Imp of Satan Local queer horror midnight movie screens along with a live comedy drag show.

Sept. 8. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.synchromiumfims.com

"Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master" An extensive series devoted to the undersung Japanese director, whose movies spanned five decades and even more genres, including comedies, samurai films, theatrical adaptations, and police flicks.

Sept. 8–29. Pacific Film Archive

9/11 Truth Film Festival Two days of films and discussions.

Sept. 10–11. Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl. (510) 452-3556, www.renaissancerialto.com

Madcat Women’s International Film Festival Turning 11 this year, Ariella Ben-Dov’s festival includes a tribute to the life and work of Helen Hill and culls 98 films — 76 of them premieres — into 11 programs.

Sept. 11–26. Various venues, SF. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Super Sleazy ’70s Go-go Grindhouse Show Will "the Thrill" Viharo brings together Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama and live dancing by the Twilight Vixen Revue.

Sept. 13. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Honor of the Knights Along with recent works by José Luis Guerín, this idiosyncratic take on Don Quixote by Albert Serra is being heralded as a new highlight of Spanish cinema.

Sept. 13–16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Role Reversal" Midnites for Maniacs strikes again, with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Yentl, and a film that can never be screened enough, The Legend of Billie Jean.

Sept. 14. Castro Theatre

The Warriors Walter Hill’s gang classic comes out to play.

Sept. 14–15. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Film Night in the Park: Rebel Without a Cause Sal Mineo makes eyes at James Dean, and Natalie Wood weeps about her dad rubbing off her lips.

Sept. 15. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

Xperimental Eros PornOrchestra accompanies stag movies in a celebration for OCD’s latest DVD release.

Sept. 15. Other Cinema (info below)

Eros and Massacre Film on Film Foundation presents Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1970 film about anarchist Sakae Osugi.

Sept. 16. Pacific Film Archive

"It’s a Funny, Mad, Sad World: The Movies of George Kuchar" The man appears in person for a screening of five Kuchar classics spanning 15 years, selected by Edith Kramer.

Sept. 18. Pacific Film Archive

Orphans of Delirium What is paratheatre? Antero Alli and a 2004 video provide the answer.

Sept. 18. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

Midnites for Maniacs in 70mm All hail Jesse Hawthorne Ficks for bringing Tobe Hooper’s bodacious nude space vampire classic Lifeforce — one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite movies — back to the big screen. Even Planet of Blood‘s Florence Marly may have nothing on Mathilda May.

Sept. 21. Castro Theatre

Strange Culture The story of Steve Kurtz is discussed and reenacted in San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest feature.

Sept. 21. Roxie Film Center

"Girls Will Be Boys" This series, curated by Kathy Geritz, includes Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich trouser classics, as well as Katherine Hepburn under the eye of Dorothy Arzner in Sylvia Scarlett.

Sept. 21–30. Pacific Film Archive

Amando a Maradona Soccer icon Diego Maradona gets the feature treatment.

Sept. 26. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510)849-2568. www.utf8ofilmfestival.org

In Search of Mozart Phil Grabsky’s digiportrait of the composer works to counter the distortions of Amadeus and the elitism that sometimes hovers around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s legacy.

Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Legendary Composer: Jerry Goldsmith" The salt and pepper to John Williams’s Hollywood sucrose gets a cinematic tribute, with screenings of classics such as Seconds, Poltergeist, and the film with perhaps his best scoring work, Chinatown.

Sept. 28–Oct. 4. Castro Theatre

DocFest It turns five this year, offering more than 20 films and videos, including the Nick Drake profile A Skin Too Few.

Sept. 28–Oct. 10. Roxie Film Center

Film Night in the Fog The increasingly popular Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance, this time at the Presidio.

Sept. 29. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

"Red State Cinema" Joel Shepard curates a series devoted to rural visionaries, including Phil Chambliss and his folk-art videos set at a gravel pit and Spencer Williams and his 1941 Southern Baptist feature The Blood of Jesus.

October. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du Cinema Week" The Pacific Film Archive has screened early Assayas movies that didn’t get distribution, such as the Virginie Ledoyen showcase Cold Water. Now the director visits to show Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (think of Assayas’s Irma Vep, also screening) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (think of his Demonlover), along with Assayas’s latest movie, Boarding Gate.

Oct. 4–11, Pacific Film Archive

Mill Valley Film Festival The biggest Bay Area film fest of the fall turns 30 this year, presenting more than 200 movies from more than 50 countries.

Oct. 4–14. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Helvetica The typeface gets its very own movie.

Oct. 5–7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Shock It to Me: Classic Horror Film Festival" Joe Dante will appear at this fest, which promises a dozen pre-Halloween shockers.

Oct. 5–7, Castro Theatre

"Zombie-rama" Thrillville unleashes Creature with the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau.

Oct. 11. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400. www.thrillville.net

"Joseph Cornell: Films" Without a doubt, this multiprogram series — in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Cornell exhibition — is one of the most important Bay Area film events of the year.

Oct. 12–Dec. 14. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

"Expanded Cinema" Craig Baldwin, Kerry Laitala, Katherin McInnis, Stephen Parr, and Melinda Stone blast retinas with double-projector performance pieces.

Oct. 13. Other Cinema

"Celebrating Canyon: New Films" Under the SF Cimematheque rubric, Canyon Cinema’s Michelle Silva and Dominic Angerame put together a program of recent additions to the Canyon catalogue.

Oct. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Films by Bruce Conner" The long-awaited new Soul Stirrers short His Eye Is on the Sparrow kicks off an hour of Conner magic.

Oct. 16. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival’s 11th year will bring 11 days and nights of movies, including a Tunisian doc about the making of Tarzan of the Arabs.

Oct. 18–28. Various venues, SF. (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org

"I Am Not a War Photographer" Brooklyn-based Lynn Sachs presents a night of short movies and spoken word.

Oct. 20. Other Cinema

"Experiments in High Definition" Voom HD works, including one by Jennifer Reeves, get an SF Cinematheque program.

Oct. 21. SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

"Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure" Brooklyn artist McClure explores projection as performance in this kickoff event in SF Cinematheque’s "Live Cinema" series.

Oct. 24–25. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

Smalltown Boys Arthur Russell documentarian Matt Wolf’s semifictive historical look at David Wojnarowicz loops as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" series.

Oct. 30–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Last Man on Earth Vincent Price fights zombies in this oft-pillaged 1964 US-Italian horror classic, soon to be re-created with Will Smith.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"Día de los Muertos: Honorar las Almas de Cineastas de Avant-Garde Vanguarda" Canyon Cinema and SF Cinematheque founder Bruce Baillie shares some favorites from the Canyon vaults.

Nov. 1. Roxie Film Center. Also Nov. 2. Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

International Latino Film Festival One of three fests to turn 11 this fall.

Nov. 2–18. Various venues, SF. (415) 513-5308, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org.

"Science Is Fiction" Nope, not Jean Painléve — the histories of the Tesla coil, the blimp, and other phenomena hit the screen, thanks to cinematographer Lance Acord and others.

Nov. 3. Other Cinema

Shatfest Get your mind out of the toilet — it’s another Thrillville tribute to William Shatner, including a screening of Incubus.

Nov. 8. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Strain Andromeda The and Cinepolis, the Film Capitol Anne McGuire’s reedit of The Andromeda Strain isn’t exactly backward, but — thanks to Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde" series for SF Cinematheque — it is back. The series continues to beam as Ximena Cuevas’s metamontage attack on Hollywood shares a bill with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99.

Nov. 8. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Showcase A big premiere, some music vids, and a link to the famed Annecy animation fest are possibilities as the SF Film Society event turns two.

Nov. 8–11. Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center (promenade), SF. (415) 561-5500. www.sffs.org

"Celebrating Canyon: Pioneers of Bay Area Filmmaking" Bruce Baillie unpacks some Bay Area experimental cinema treasures from the ’40s and ’50s.

Nov. 11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

My Favorite Things At last! Negativland premiere their first CD-DVD release.

Dec. 1. Other Cinema

"James Fotopoulos/Leah Gilliam" and "Victor Faccinto/James June Schneider" Fotopoulos has had some Bay Area attention before, but Gilliam’s Apeshit — a look at racial politics in Planet of the Apes — might be the highlight in this last evening of Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays" series.

Dec. 13. Roxie Film Center *

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Boom, dream, flow: A look at Independent Exposure’s animation

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By Maria Komodore

The exact moment when I decided to study cinema is very clearly imprinted in my memory. It occurred three years ago while I was watching Man Ray films.

What impressed me most about films such as Return to Reason, Ballet Mécanique, and Emak Bakia was the potential they seemed to add to the film medium. Strange, almost indistinguishable forms and shapes danced around on the screen to generate equally mysterious inner associations. Though at times this colorful and playful montage of images didn’t make sense, at least not in the conventional way that films are supposed to make sense, they had deep impact on my perception.

Independent Exposure‘s Animation Edition 2007 —a series of short animations series that Microcinema Inc. has compiled on DVD and will also be showing all around the world—made me relive that moment. All fifteen shorts are exceptional not only for their subjects and the imaginative manner in which they’re treated, but also simply for their aesthetic value.

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Close up

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REVIEW "One single picture could be the mother of cinema," one of our leading auteurs has observed. Apichatpong Weerasethakul would have said saint, Jean-Luc Godard death, and Quentin Tarantino motherfucker, but only renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami could glimpse in a lone image the maternal nurturing of reel life. With remarkable films such as Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1991), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), Kiarostami has put his country on the world-cinema map in the uneasy decades following the plucking of the feathers from the shah’s Peacock Throne. Faux-vérité documentation, unscripted drama, and deceptively casual construction characterize Kiarostami’s complex narratives, most of which eschew the overt nationalist critique of his more politically trenchant peers (Samira Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi) in favor of to-be-or-not-to-be philosophizing and a quasi-spiritual appreciation of fleeting pleasures — the lengthening of late-afternoon shadows across a park bench, confessional conversations with jovial strangers, ditching homework to watch soccer on TV.

Now approaching 70, the creatively restless and keenly observant Kiarostami has recently refocused on photography, with which he has been intermittently engaged since the 1970s. In conjunction with a retrospective of both his widely celebrated and his lesser-known works at the Pacific Film Archive, which runs through Aug. 30, the Berkeley Art Museum has mounted a bracingly stark exhibition of Kiarostami’s photographs, culled from four distinct series. Sporting the disappointingly generic title "Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker" — one of his film titles, such as The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), would have sufficed — the show fortunately far transcends its unpromising nomenclature and, like a Kiarostami film, slowly and indelibly reveals its aesthetic mastery, meditative rewards, and picturesque wanderlust.

In his introduction to the exhibition — which benefits from handsome, unadorned installation in BAM’s airy upper galleries — Kiarostami notes that still images, unlike films, are not weighed down with viewers’ expectations of narrative progression or conventional entertainment. Stripped of sustained storytelling and freed from the need to posture or pander — not that his films ever stoop to such commercial demands — Kiarostami’s photographs are nonetheless imbued with dramatic arcs, panoramic vistas, hints of intrigue, and a rigorously intellectual yet unrepentantly earthy moviemaker’s sure, sensual approach to framing, sequencing, and characterization, even if the scene-stealers are all blackbirds.

Camera in hand, Kiarostami regularly embarks on long walks across his homeland, frequently crossing hundreds of miles on epic treks on which the journey truly is the destination. Iran’s war-torn topography, haunted by the ghosts of dissidents and withering under the ceaseless gaze of enemies real and imagined, is for the ever-inquisitive Kiarostami a locus of geographic wonder and emotional extremes. Guided only by a moral compass, he traverses desolate roads and loses himself in his country’s seasonal secrets. Kiarostami keeps to himself on these outward- and inward-looking road trips, but as Scottish troubadour Roddy Frame — who for years memorably viewed the world through his Aztec Camera — once noted, loneliness and being alone aren’t always the same. "Not being able to feel the pleasure of seeing a magnificent landscape with someone else is a form of torture," Kiarostami confesses in the exhibition intro. "That is why I started taking photographs. I wanted somehow to eternalize those moments of passion and pain."

Kiarostami fully explores the dichotomy of these heightened instances in a quartet of works unified by the artist’s steady perspective (nothing seems to disturb his calm) and ability to appreciate the hushed prescience of transformation — in mind, body, and physical surroundings — where preoccupied passersby might only see oil slicks and burkas. In the Roads and Trees series, Kiarostami depicts in grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photos the byways and trunks that stretch onward and upward forever, bisecting his country vertically and horizontally into socially segmented fields of ground and sky. Whether smoothly paved or roughly pebbled, the roads are nearly empty, bereft of the comings and going that typically signal industrial progress and limitless options. Stasis defines the stunning Snow White series as well. Absence is palpably present in these bleak yet beautiful images in which anthropomorphized trees are starkly silhouetted against unending fields of pure white snow.

Winter’s monochromatic chill thaws into vibrant color in the Trees and Crows photographs, all taken on the verdant grounds of palaces in Tehran where flocks of birds have taken up residence as the winged heirs apparent to ousted royals. Crows are highly valued in Iran as a special species that lives longer than most and bears witness to national history. Kiarostami reverently views them as birds of pray, pecking and genuflecting on deep green lawns that appear freshly painted.

Kiarostami is back on the road in the Rain series, now behind the wheel of a car and looking through the windshield at patterns of water on glass and raindrops falling on yet more tall trees. ("If I were not a filmmaker, I would have become a truck driver," he told Deborah Solomon in a New York Times interview earlier this year.) Careening across flooded two-lane blacktops, these gorgeous, pictorialist photos drive straight into abstraction.

Many of Kiarostami’s poems begin with the lines "The more I think<\!s>/ The less I understand," an admission of epistemological uncertainty — and unfettered emotional sincerity — that informs every image in this show. Like the archetypal wanderer who quests for a life worth living in his award-winning 1997 film Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami concludes in these photographs that the search for meaning is an affirmation of time well spent on the road to nowhere.<\!s>*

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: IMAGE MAKER

Through Sept. 23, $4–<\d>$8 (free first Thurs.)

Wed. and Fri.–<\d>Sun., 11 a.m.–<\d>5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–<\d>7 p.m.

UC Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Drop hearts

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Is there a more beloved film among critics than Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de … (1953), the penultimate presentation in the Pacific Film Archive’s retrospective "Max Ophüls: Motion and Emotion"? Yes, there are other films (Citizen Kane, L’Avventura, The Seventh Seal) that routinely top critics’ all-time lists. But rarely has a movie so routinely enchanted cineastes as Ophüls’s glittering belle époque love story that swathes its brutal emotional core in sumptuous period finery, mirrors, diamonds, and the dizzying virtuosity of the director’s constantly moving camera. Only Ophüls, in a bit of borrowed Kabuki stagecraft, would have the shreds of unsent letters tossed from the window of a speeding train become a flurry of snowflakes.

As Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman observed in a recent appraisal, fellow critics "Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris didn’t agree on much, but they did find common ground when it came to [Earrings]." Kael characterized the film as "perfection," while Sarris named it his candidate for "the greatest film of all time."

Hyperbole is the form of praise most befitting Ophüls, given the director’s penchant for cinematic grand gestures — namely, the impossibly complex tracking shots for which he is most famous, which follow characters up and down staircases, through walls, and across stretches of time — and his consistent return to the dazzling surfaces of 19th-century high society, as in La Ronde (1950) and Lola Montès (1955).

The faceted surfaces that dazzle in Earrings belong to the eponymous heroine, Comtesse Louise de … (the incomparable Danielle Darrieux), a wholly narcissistic and equally charming beauty, who sells a pair of drop diamond hearts given to her by her husband, General André de … (Charles Boyer), in order to pay off her debts. The earrings wind up back in the hands of the general, who — going along with Louise’s white lie that she lost them at the opera — then gives them to a mistress en route to Constantinople, where they wind up being purchased in a pawn shop by Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio de Sica). The diamonds’ peregrinations trace a circuit of desire that comes full circle, completing its inevitably tragic course when the baron and Louise strike up a passionate affair.

To borrow the general’s characterization of his and Louise’s marriage, the diamonds — if not the whole of Ophüls’s seemingly bottomless bag of spectacular effects — are only "superficially superficial." With every change of hands, the jewels become more transparent as an index of each suitor’s investment in Louise, until they are symbols of tarnished honor and, finally, a memento mori of Louise herself.

In one of the film’s most celebrated sequences, Ophüls’s waltzing camera follows his paramours in a seemingly endless embrace across several ballrooms and months. It is a beautiful trick, one that predates Alfred Hitchcock’s "uninterrupted" takes in Rope and to which many directors have since paid homage. But Ophüls’s suspended dance also gives Louise and the baron the space they so hopelessly pine for, which they can never find in the hothouse confines of their world. The scene is cinematic in that such a space can only exist in the movies. But it could also be argued that such scenes are why film — in its most romantic capacity — exists. Ophüls’s much-celebrated masterpiece, as brilliant and sharp as the diamonds at its center, provides no better example.<\!s>*

THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE …

Fri/17, 7 p.m., $4–<\d>$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.org

Might makes wrong

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A couple of years ago, filmmaker Thom Anderson remarked to me that all films about war, even those that aim to show its injustice, are prowar.

War Made Easy might be the first film I’ve seen since hearing Anderson’s assertion that effectively counters such a claim. Admittedly, Anderson was likely referring only to dramatic movies, especially those produced by Hollywood. Yet even a contemporary doc such as Fahrenheit 9/11 not only takes the honor of military force for granted but spins it into a cause for voice-over dramatics. In contrast, War Made Easy codirectors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s documentary uses Norman Solomon’s recent book to perform an autopsy on the now-zombified propaganda surrounding post-1940s US war.

Alper and Earp’s doc skips smart-ass sarcasm and the usual air of incredulity in order to make complex points clear, and it does so skillfully and quickly. It still has moments when horror and humor commingle, such as when various embedded TV reporters cream their business slacks or loaned camouflage gear during assertions of love for aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the A-10 Wart Hog.

George Santayana’s famous statement that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it is proven without a doubt throughout War Made Easy. A parade of presidents mouths variations of the same theme, which goes something along the lines of “We love democracy and peace so much that we have to murder others to maintain it.”

With the passing of time, the words and phrases used to justify US military action have become increasingly debased and the puppets mouthing them more craven, until today, when we have George W. Bush repeating the word evil more often than an old metal album skipping on a turntable. Yet if evil exists, he and his cronies are exact embodiments of what they decry. Witness a moment in this movie when Bush describes Saddam Hussein as “a homicidal dictator addicted to weapons of mass destruction.” (Johnny Ray Huston)

Americans no longer like the war in Iraq. They know it is not going well. Still, most don’t really want to know how things got so bad. Ergo, there’s probably not much hope No End in Sight will join the ranks of those rare recent must-see documentaries involving penguins, Global Warming 101, or Michael Moore. That’s too bad, because Charles Ferguson’s film has no preaching-to-the-converted tone or snarky on-camera filmmaker.

Ferguson, a sometime lecturer at UC Berkeley, draws on heavyweight connections to show how the administration continually matched arrogant, ignorant policy with new staff, people who — not unlike Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — lacked experience in combat and postwar infrastructure rebuilding, let alone knowledge of Middle Eastern history, culture, and relations.

“I don’t do quagmires!” Rumsfeld quips in one of several gag-inducing moments of news conference levity. It’s repeatedly noted that Bush didn’t read even the one-page summaries crafted for his wee attention span.

No End in Sight includes input from US and Iraqi scholars as well as former Pentagon, CIA, and White House staff, sorely disillusioned American military leaders, and grunts badly wounded by inept policy. This movie should be required viewing for all US citizens currently obsessed with gas prices, the wacky misadventures of Lindsay Lohan, and their navels. The DVD version is going to make a great Christmas present. (Dennis Harvey)

NO END IN SIGHT

Opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.noendinsightmovie.com

WAR MADE EASY

Thurs/9, 7 p.m., $12

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand Lake, Oakl.

(510) 251-1332, ext. 102

www.warmadeeasythemovie.org

 

New! Odd! Fantastic!

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› Cheryl@sfbg.com

Rampaging genitalia, families of half-wits, towns shielding deadly secrets, and the end of the world — yep, there are good times to be had with the selection of new films in Dead Channels: The San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film. The most buzzed-about title, Uwe Boll’s Postal (it’s a war-on-terror comedy that pokes fun at Sept. 11, among other topics; Seinfeld‘s Soup Nazi plays fun guy Osama bin Laden), wasn’t available for prescreening. But no matter — it’ll be far more rewarding to see the thing on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, with the notorious Boll in person, at Dead Channels’ opening night Aug. 9.

Noteworthy picks include Canadian filmmaker Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line, which offers more jolts per capita than much of Dead Channels’ other fare. A sinister dude on the subway is something just about every woman has encountered — but it only gets worse for a psych-ward nurse (Ilona Elkin) whose commute home coincides with an evangelical cult’s realization that the apocalypse is nigh. Piety has seldom been so gruesomely rendered. A more lighthearted look at the end of civilization is crystallized in Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks except Japan, in which freaky natural events cause all the continents to sink into the ocean, save you-know-which island nation. World leaders and American movie stars swarm Japan, which is none too thrilled about playing host to so many refugees. The film is a tad overlong, but there are some juicy moments of satire, including a glimpse at a beleaguered Japan’s most popular television show — which basically involves a giant monster stomping on as many foreigners as possible.

More somber is Simon Rumley’s The Living and the Dead, which features a mentally challenged lead character (played with precious little showboating by Leo Bill) whose descent into madness is witnessed with horror by his bedridden mother (Kate Fahy). The location is a massive English manor house, as frightening and confusing a spot as End of the Line‘s subway tunnels. Some creative camera work, including the use of fast-motion footage to demonstrate what goin’ cuckoo feels like, makes for a more dynamic thriller than the film’s small cast and single setting would suggest.

The most conventional (not always a euphemism for "sucky") Dead Channels flick I watched was Harry Basil’s Fingerprints, dubiously notable for the presence of Laguna Beach hottie and US Weekly fixture Kristin Cavallari in a supporting part. (Hey, rolling your eyes expressively is totally what acting is all about!) Somber teenager Melanie (Leah Pipes) gets out of rehab and moves back in with her varyingly supportive family, who’ve relocated to a bucolic village still haunted by a long-ago train wreck that killed several schoolchildren. Possibly owing to her heroin-tastic past, Melanie proves supernaturally sensitive; after receiving some ghostly nudges, she sets about uncovering the town’s long-buried secrets. Fingerprints plays a little like a Lifetime movie with slasher elements, and it also employs the spooky-kid motif that was all the rage in scary movies a few years back. But besides the curiosity casting of Cavallari — unnecessary bubble-bath scene alert! — and Lou Diamond Phillips (as a sympathetic teacher), the film is actually pretty entertaining and solid, if inevitably derivative.

Fairly unlike any film you have ever seen before, or will after, is Hot Baby!, the seriously bizarre brainchild of Bay Area filmmaker Jeff Roenning. There’s a scene or two that recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other don’t-get-off-the-highway chillers, but mostly it’s an over-the-top array of shifting tones and character arcs, with a high schooler (Adam Scarimbolo) curious about his long-absent mother at its center. Plus: sexual-predator hypnotists, vengeful hookers, and doughnut jokes! Maybe even weirder is The Secret Life of Sarah Sheldon, writer-director-star Annette Ashlie Slomka’s take on a female mad scientist who conducts her sexually charged experiments with Herbert West–<\d>like focus. The film’s interesting premise is hampered by its amateurish execution, but it still features a rather horrifying penis monster — and what more can you really ask for?<\!s>*

Click here for reviews of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Welcome Home Brother Charles

DEAD CHANNELS

Aug. 9 – 16

See Film List for venues and showtimes

www.deadchannels.com

Iron curtain in outer space

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Throughout its history, the Soviet Union felt like the final frontier to many Americans. What was happening on the other side of that iron curtain? The Russians wondered too. Since travel between the countries was so limited, their inhabitants often had to turn for information to the cultural products that made it — both ways — past Russia’s gatekeepers. How better to hide meaning than in fairy tales and outer space? The Pacific Film Archive celebrates an age of anxiety and this age of information with its marvelous series "From the Stars to the Tsars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema."

The films of "From the Stars to the Tsars" span the period from the 1912 short The Cameraman’s Revenge and Aelita, Queen of Mars — the 1924 silent classic that inspired Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World — to 2005’s First on the Moon. The series’s other notable traversal is between high and low culture. Some entries were partly seen at drive-ins in the 1960s thanks to Roger Corman, who bought the rights to The Heavens Call (1959) and Planet of Storms (1961) and scavenged their footage; To the Stars by Hard Ways (1982; reedited 2001) made an appearance as Humanoid Woman on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Then there are the films more familiar to art house patrons; the two by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972’s Solaris and 1979’s Stalker, cemented his reputation, and the former was hailed as the Soviet response to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rest of the series falls between these poles. Although their politics and plots vary, all the films share a joy in the medium’s magic and an affinity for dazzling and provocative visual effects, whether they be ridiculous, sublime (the signal that Stalker‘s mysterious Zone is ready for its visitors is a marvel of quiet beauty), or both.

Another obvious draw is these films’ Russian-ness. Ruslan and Ludmila (1972) is based on an Aleksandr Pushkin epic, and Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1961) is an adaptation of a story by Nikolay Gogol. There is no Soviet Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but some movies manage to work in anti-Western views. The Amphibian Man, shot in Cuba in 1962, offers a damning critique of capitalism in the person of its villain (Mikhail Kozakov), a dishonest, slave-driving, anything-for-a-pearl bastard who wants to marry the girl our hero loves — against her will, of course. Zero City, filmed at the height of perestroika, includes a speech by the town prosecutor (Vladimir Menshov) against European ideas, which he says are all the more fatal for their rationality and practicality.

This is not to say that the Soviet Union escapes its directors’ indignation. The clearest examples come at its end points, the start and finish of the great people’s experiment. Aelita shows class conflict and housing shortages; made more than 60 years later, 1988’s Zero City depicts the denunciation and rehabilitation of rock ‘n’ roll and its partisans as caprices all the worse for their life-destroying results. But the most transparent criticism comes in 2005’s First on the Moon. Made well past the fall of the USSR, the film is a look back, documentary style, at its country’s space program, which in this version beat the Americans’ to the earth’s natural satellite. There are winks to the fictionality of this exercise via sometimes too-cinematic shots, but the most obvious touches are images such as that of a group of children saluting with straight faces "the cause of Stalin and Lenin," then breaking into laughter. The government appears at its worst when it covers up the successful trip and spends years trying to contain the cosmonaut who made it, but the fact that the Soviets never did get to the moon — let alone first — is the movie’s strongest critique.<\!s>*

FROM THE STARS TO THE TSARS

Through Aug. 31, $4–<\d>$8

See Rep Clock or www.sfbg.com for showtimes

Pacific Film Archive

2625 Durant, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The Eclipse: One Day, Two Giants of Art Cinema Gone

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By Max Goldberg

It’s enough to make you wonder. Not twenty-four hours after headlines announcing Ingmar Bergman’s death at 89 news arrived of Michelangelo Antonioni’s end at 94. Both died this past Monday. They seemed on parallel tracks throughout their careers—producing strings of self-consciously intellectual films bent on existential meaning—making their alignment in death all too temptingly neat of a frame for the heavy eulogizing to come. Still, maybe they would have appreciated the coincidence: a flash of suggested meaning, the intimation of magical thinking.

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Pain and fun

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple of economic researchers have proven via scientific experimentation something that artists have known for millennia: people can feel pain and have fun at the same time. At last, we have a scientific theory that explains why the torture-tastic movie Saw is so popular. Not to mention the writings of Franz Kafka.

Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen, both business professors interested in consumer behavior, wanted to know why people are willing to plunk down money for what they called "negative feelings," the sensations of disgust and nastiness that arise during hideous but financially successful flicks like Hostel, the Jason and Freddy franchises, and The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a good question, especially if you’re one of those business types who want to peddle gore to the fake blood–loving masses. As a huge consumer of gore myself, I was immediately intrigued by the scholarly article Andrade and Cohen produced, which sums up four experiments they did with hapless undergraduates paid to watch bad horror movies and describe how this exercise made them feel. The researchers had two basic questions: Do audiences experience fear and pleasure at the same time while watching somebody get dismembered? If yes, how?

First, a word about the researchers’ methods. Let it be known that they did not display discerning taste in horror movies. As a connoisseur of the genre, I’d have made those students watch Hostel, with its shocking scenes of eyeball gouging. Or perhaps 28 Days Later, with its white-knuckle zombie chase scenes. But Andrade and Cohen picked the 1973 seen-it-so-many-times-it’s-no-longer-frightening flick The Exorcist and the craptastic, unscary 2004 version of ‘Salem’s Lot. Hey guys, call me before you do the next round of experiments, OK?

Aesthetic choices aside, the results of these movie-watching experiments were intriguing. Students were shown "scary" clips from both films and asked to rate how they felt during and after watching. Previous scholars had suggested that people who enjoy horror movies have a reduced capacity to feel fear or have fun only when the yuck is over and they leave the theater. What Andrade and Cohen found, however, was that students who loved horror movies reported nearly the same levels of fear as students who avoided these movies. Plus the horror lovers reported having fun during the movies, not just afterward. So, as I said earlier, science uncovered what literary critics have known forever: ambivalent feelings are the shit.

Horror movies appeal because humans like to feel grossed out and entertained pleasurably at the same time. There’s a payoff in coexperiencing two conflicting emotions.

But Andrade and Cohen are careful to explain that the fun of ambivalence doesn’t work for everyone and may not translate into real-world horrors. They suggest that people who enjoy the yuck-yay feeling of horror movies are masters at psychological framing and distancing. Horror viewers who have the most fun are also the ones who are most convinced that what they’re watching isn’t real. People who sympathize too much with tortured characters feel only horror. That also means horror fans who see real-life violence won’t get a kick out of it.

The researchers proved this point by showing people horror films alongside biographies of the actors playing the main characters, constantly reminding viewers that these were just movies and the "victims" were playing roles. Even viewers who normally avoid horror movies reported that they were a lot more comfortable and had some fun when they were reminded that the action was staged.

I would argue that Andrade and Cohen’s research into distancing is the key to understanding horror fans. Our pleasure in horror is not depraved — it is purely a function of our understanding that what we’re seeing isn’t real. This knowledge frees us to revel in the frisson of ambivalent feelings, which are the cornerstone of art both great and small. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose book about horror movies only involved experiments on herself.

Holiest of holies

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If you’ve seen the late, great MTV sketch comedy show The State (look for the long-awaited DVD in October) or 2001’s summer-camp-movie parody Wet Hot American Summer, you can imagine what the Bible’s gonna look like in the hands of director David Wain. Or maybe not — in The Ten, Wain and cowriter Ken Marino interpret the 10 Commandments with typically off-the-wall (and thus completely unpredictable) humor. I recently spoke with Wain, who doesn’t fancy himself the next Cecil B. DeMille ("I never saw [The Ten Commandments], but I’m gonna check it out") but does have a firm grip on the funny.

On how The Ten fits into the slew of films about spirituality: "I certainly don’t think of it as a biblical film. It’s really just using the 10 Commandments as thematic launching-off points for 10 entertaining stories. We’re not out to make any particular point about religion. [Our takes on the commandments] are fast and loose — we’re like the Roger and Me of biblical movies."

On the script: "With each [commandment], we tried to attack it from a different angle and come up with something that was in a slightly different style and genre and yet sort of have a cohesive sensibility. We just said, ‘What is covet thy neighbor’s wife? Probably prison rape.’ And so on."

On the cast, which features members of The State and also several big-name actors: "We were huge fans of Winona Ryder and begged her to do it, and she said yes. We were very lucky, because I think actors saw that it was something different and not a big time commitment, so we were able to get a level of cast that we really never would have dreamed of."

And, of course, one you’ll have to see the movie to appreciate, on Oliver Platt’s Terminator impression: "Not only did he not have it [before the movie], he never got it. I mean, the average guy on the street does a better Arnold Schwarzenegger than Oliver Platt does. And I think that’s what’s funny about it." (Cheryl Eddy)

THE TEN Opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

The closer you get

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

How does one begin to write about Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), a film as layered as an onion? I remember that when I first watched it, I felt touched by what I then perceived to be its affectionate ending. Later viewings not only changed my feelings toward the movie’s conclusion but also left me utterly perplexed.

About 17 years ago, when Hossein Sabzian misled a Tehran family into believing that he was acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami was intrigued by the story and set out to make a film about it — or, to be more precise, he set out not to make a film about it.

Part of Close-Up‘s complexity arises from the way Kiarostami blends his material. Casting all the parties involved in the fraud as themselves, the filmmaker mixes commentary and footage of Sabzian’s trial with reenactments of Sabzian meeting the Ahankhah family and persuading them that he is Makhmalbaf. We see Sabzian explaining himself to the judge and performing in the reenactments. To complicate matters further, Kiarostami, while filming the trial, sets up a camera that is constantly focused on the accused and instructs Sabzian to address it anytime he feels like it. Through these devices, Sabzian gradually unfolds his acting talent, making it harder and harder for us to understand when he is performing and when he isn’t.

But Close-Up‘s motivation — beyond questioning Sabzian’s credibility — is more complicated than a desire to convince us of his guilt. In fact, the only thing we’re sure of is that the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred, if not rendered indistinguishable — a theme particularly dear to Kiarostami.

Things get even more convoluted in two films the director made after Close-Up; along with Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), they form a trilogy. In And Life Goes On (1992), Kiarostami returns to Koker, a village in northern Iran, after a big earthquake practically destroyed it, in order to search for the protagonist of Friend’s Home. Using as his main character a director with the same mission, Kiarostami films his surroundings in a cinéma vérité manner, making us think that what we’re watching is a documentation of the earthquake’s aftermaths.

After And Life Goes On, Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994), a film set in the same earthquake-devastated town, feels akin to a slap in the face. In it, he directs a filmmaker whose attempt to make a movie falls apart when two of his actors refuse to get along. Surprisingly, Through the Olive Trees concentrates on a scene that should feel familiar to anyone who has seen And Life Goes On. The suggestion is that perhaps the film the Through the Olive Trees director is making is none other than And Life Goes On. At least parts, if not everything, of what we’ve watched in the latter are revealed to be fiction. In Through the Olive Trees, Kiarostami has made a film about a director who is filming a movie about a filmmaker who returns to the village he once made a film in.

One might justifiably wonder, why all these self-referential layers? The answer comes in Taste of Cherry (1997), for which Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Throughout the film we follow a Mr. Badii in his desperate search to find someone willing to help him execute his suicide plan. At Taste of Cherry‘s most crucial moment, just as we are about to discover whether Badii actually committed suicide or not, Kiarostami cuts into footage taken from the making of the film. This footage presents him and the rest of the crew in an idyllic atmosphere while a tune that sounds very much like "Saint James Infirmary" plays in the background.

It is as if Kiarostami were constantly trying to remind us that what we are watching is only a film, that unlike Sabzian we should be able to separate fiction from reality, that unlike the Ahankhahs we should not allow ourselves to be deceived by some skillful manipulation of the boundaries between truth and imagination.<\!s>*

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: IMAGE MAKER

Through Aug. 30, $4–<\d>$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Matt and Jason on “Chuck and Larry”

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Guardian film critics Matt Sussman and Jason Shamai have a few things they wanna say about the new film I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Let’s listen in!

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Matt Sussman’s review, as published in the Guardian: Despite passing marks from FireFLAG/EMS of the Fire Department of New York, “the nation’s oldest and largest LGBT firefighter organization,” and GLAAD assuring us that I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is not merely an excuse to trot out tired gay stereotypes and that beneath the disarming and broad humor is a strong message of tolerance, this sophomoric comedy starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as straight firemen who pretend to be gay to gain domestic-partner benefits isn’t so much homophobic as baldly misogynistic and thoroughly unentertaining. Sure, dismissing a Sandler comedy as sophomoric is stating the obvious, but in films such as Punch-Drunk Love, he has proved that he can set aside the flatulence and fat jokes, sit at the adult comedians’ table, and still make us laugh. So let’s add regressive (along with racist, thanks to an extrapainful Rob Schneider) to our list of modifiers. While one could argue that the film sends up regular straight dudes as much as it milks laughs from the standard chain of gay signifiers, this failed reverse La Cage aux Folles doesn’t realize the extent to which it exposes the rickety scaffolding that precariously separates straight buddy love from flaming faggotry. Or maybe that’s the anxiety the film is really trying to allay by declaiming any homophobic culpability. Whatever — I’ve already spent too much brain power thinking over a frat house skit-night sketch that somehow became a film. Someone get me a cock.

Jason Shamai responds, after the jump.

Church of Santino

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› johnny@sfbg.com

It’s no surprise that Santino Rice knows how to serve up a good quote. Five minutes into a phone conversation, the biggest antihero to emerge from TV’s Project Runway has already likened Nina Garcia, Heidi Klum, and Michael Kors to a "three-headed monster." Before the interview’s over, he’ll have quipped, "My everyday life and how it plays out is all the fictional stimulation I need." Since his everyday life includes an appearance at "Bad Boys of Runway" — a Castro Theatre event also featuring recent Runway winner Jeffrey Sebelia, a fashion show, and a screening of The Women (1939) — he isn’t exaggerating.

But what might surprise people who think they know Rice (though really, let’s just call him Santino) is how uninterested he is in playing up to his semivillainous, semiheroic, and oft-bitchy or cantankerous image from Project Runway‘s second and almost inarguably most dynamic season. Two years on from the experience, he’s easygoing — his baritone voice often giving way to a warm laugh — and quicker to praise than criticize. Make no mistake, this is still the same Mississippian who knew he loved Los Angeles when the Rodney King riots began the day of his first visit. "Everything clicked," he remembers. "I realized [L.A.] figured in so many things I loved, from old Hollywood films to gangsta rap, from [fashion designer] Adrian’s films and MGM to Ice-T and Ice Cube and NWA." But Santino’s days of doing free design gigs for "great exposure" are over.

"Now I don’t need any more exposure," he says, chuckling at the understatement.

Yes, the Santino of today is a sunnier Santino — though it helps that our major topic of discussion is movies. Santino knows and loves his cinema. He has a passion for some of the films that follow The Women in Marc Huestis’s Fabulous Fashion in Film Festival, such as 1946’s Gilda, in which (as he says) the undergarments worn and silhouette created by Rita Hayworth add to her "amazingly sexy" image. Even when discussing a selection he doesn’t care for, such as that of last year’s Dreamgirls, he’s diplomatic, observing that it "gets a free pass" yet doesn’t match the fabulous quality of 1975’s Mahogany, a different festival film he prefers.

A glance at Santino’s MiEspacia page reveals the importance of movies within his aesthetic. When I mention that I share his love for 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, he enthuses that "in her heyday, Catherine Denueve is the most beautiful woman ever" and proceeds to throw down for the lesser-known 1970 Demy-Denueve collaboration Donkey Skin. One mention of the flimsy yet highly imaginative fashions sported by Bobby Kendall in James Bidgood’s 1971 Pink Narcissus, and he’s ready with comments that could school critics. "[Pink Narcissus is] colorful, it’s erotic, it has surreal visuals," he observes. "The way it treats the subject matter of a male prostitute conjures up a lot of feelings. It kind of reminded me of some [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder films in the way that he can linger on certain details too long for comfort. The most recent film that’s given me that same sort of overwhelmed feeling is [Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973] Holy Mountain."

It’s a long road from Holy Mountain to Project Runway, and it ain’t yellow brick, but Santino has trekked it. And Project Runway may have scooped up three Emmy nominations, but Santino has already won a few Tonys — Tony Ward and Tony Duquette. In fact, the latter, who often collaborated with Adrian, is a major mentor, which makes Santino’s appearance at an event featuring a screening of The Women even more apt. After all, the centerpiece of the George Cukor classic isn’t Roz Russell’s motormouth routine, Norma Shearer’s sweet plain Jane act, or even Joan Crawford’s fierce shopgirl sexuality. It’s Adrian’s design work, on display in a fashion show sequence. "And it’s [the only scene] in color," Santino notes.

Some Project Runway devotees might be curious about the past nature and current state of Santino’s bond with Andre Gonzalo, but his tie with Ward, revealed within season two’s penultimate episode, is more compelling. Few people seemed to realize that Santino’s best friend Tony — the handsome quiet guy with the beach house — was Madonna’s lover during her wildest pop peak, the star of (and best thing about) Bruce La Bruce’s 1996’s Hustler White, and the muse of John Galliano, and is the cult figure who got into a spat with Marlon Brando when the latter was giving a zonked-out acting class late in his life.

"We met in odd circumstances," Santino says when asked about Ward. "We were flying back to Los Angeles, and the engine on the right side of the plane exploded. We had to emergency-land and had a long layover, and during that time we just talked about everything. A week after we got back to LA, he called and asked me if I’d want to create some pieces for his first fashion editorial [as a photographer], which was based on [Stanley Kubrick’s 1971] A Clockwork Orange. I made all these leather codpieces and other accessories. From that point on, we’ve hung out. He’s a great guy and a loyal friend."

My last question for Santino is a simple and direct one: what are you wearing? After an "Oh no!" punctuated by another easygoing laugh, he concedes an answer. "I have on a pair of shoes I got in Singapore that are Hiromu Takahara," he begins, slowly warming up to the query. "They look like Converse, but they fit like a cowboy boot — they zip up on the side. I’m wearing black Diesel jeans, skinny jeans, and just a T-shirt. And, of course, a hat — a black Bardolino hat."*

BAD BOYS OF RUNWAY

Featuring Santino Rice and Jeffrey Sebelia, with a screening of The Women

Fri/27, 7:30 p.m., $15–>$27.50 ($55 for preferred seats and reception at Mezzanine)

FABULOUS FASHION IN FILM FESTIVAL

July 27–<\d>Aug. 3

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 863-0611

www.castrotheatre.com

For a complete Q&A with Santino Rice, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

San Francisco midnight movie memories (Extended mix)

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We recently put together a cover package on midnight movies. The midnight movie scene is thriving right now, but it also has a long history — in fact some credit SF as a, if not the, birthplace of the phenom. Below you’ll find a mix of direct quotes from local cinema lovers and excerpts from books that outlines what has happened when the clock strikes twelve in the Bay Area. Go ahead and add your stories and sources to this account!

GARY MEYER The Pagoda Palace, known as the Milano in the 30s and early 40s showed Italian movies at midnight prior to World War II.
CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

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GEORGE KUCHAR I remember one midnight show at a theater on upper Fillmore St. It started about 2 hours late because of projection problems. The audience didn’t seem to care and the 16mm feature didn’t care about cohesiveness of plot or theme, so it was a fun, flabby twilight zone of black & white sequences of an occult nature that suited the creatures of the night. The darkness inside and outside the theater was unable to still their noisy appreciation to the avalanche of imagery that descended from the screen like a caffeinated surge of STARBUCK sludge. The movie kept everyone awake so I guess you can consider it a HIT for that un-Godly hour and a half!

Give a hoot (or else)

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WILD WILDLIFE Had director Davis Guggenheim attempted to explore all the creative possibilities that lie behind such a name as Al Gore (get it?), An Inconvenient Truth would have been a much more interesting and way scarier film. Not that turning a pressingly threatening environmental issue into unforgettably blatant propaganda isn’t frightening. It’s just that if the former vice president had played some kind of freakish, global-warming-afflicted mutant — roaming the world, secretly planning to take his revenge by literally boring people to death with his clip show — the movie would have been closer to the truth and a lot more alarming.

Fortunately, the curators at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive have created a film series that gives environmental concerns the exact twist that Truth lacks and the depth that it persistently avoided. The major theme shared by all the earth-friendly flicks in "Eco-Amok! An Inconvenient Film Fest": the antagonistic relationship between science and nature, with the latter always the triumphant victor. Science is responsible for the destruction of the environment and the birth of many mutations, but it’s also the means by which people try to save the ecosystem.

"Eco-Amok!" ‘s selections also display admirably artistic inventiveness. Frogs (1972), Prophecy (1979), and Meet the Applegates (1991) all present the unstoppable power of nature, but they also reveal the reasons why we stay so apathetic to the danger we are facing. In Frogs the members of a wealthy family whose greed overcomes their environmental sensitivities are picked off, one by one, by the croaking (and hissing, and creepy-crawling) inhabitants of the abused swamp on their estate. In Prophecy the cheapskate owner of a lumber company uses mercury to process wood; as a result, the tainted water supply spawns a nasty-looking mutant bear that devours kids while they dream in their sleeping bags. And in Meet the Applegates, Brazilian cockroaches disguise themselves as a middle-class American family to carry out a nuclear explosion but are corrupted by capitalism’s lure.

Phase IV (1974), a film with extraordinary insect photography and many avant-garde qualities, presents nature’s revenge on a whole different level. Instead of getting rid of humans, hardworking and devoted-to-their-cause ants create a new Adam and Eve — a comment on the mutations that might take place in us if the ecosystem keeps changing at a rapid pace.

But even more troublesome is the obsession with creation that’s present in The Mutations (1974), Silent Running (1972), and Habitat (1997). In these three films, mad scientists are credited with the ability to create life. In The Mutations crazed Dr. Nolter (Donald Pleasence) forges humans from plants. In Silent Running delusional botanist Lowell (Bruce Dern) produces forests while floating in space. The wackiest of them all, Habitat‘s microbiologist Hank (Tchéky Karyo), turns into a higher form of energy after he transforms his house into a living "accelerated evolution" rain forest with the ability to kill.

What those three movies make crystal clear is the same thing that all the other films in the series more or less imply: science, even when used with the best of intentions, can only bring into existence abominable forms of life. Luckily, some of the time, no matter how horrid and gruesome these creations are, nature has better plans, including them in its survival scheme. But in a less fortunate and more frequent variation, these grim new species’ sole objective is to spread mayhem and introduce humans to their messy and abhorrent deaths — which some may argue isn’t so bad either.

ECO-AMOK! AN INCONVENIENT FILM FEST

Through Aug. 29

Wed., 7:30 p.m., $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Let there be light

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Remember that old Twilight Zone episode in which the earth and the sun got way too close for comfort? The twist was that the feverish protagonist had actually dreamed the hellish heat wave — and our shivering planet was drifting away from the sun instead. Another deep freeze awaits the human race in Sunshine, which imagines that the sun has begun to die billions of years before its expiration date. It’s 2057, a close-enough future to keep things familiar yet far enough to allow for certain technological advancements, like the invention of a Manhattan-size bomb powerful enough to jump-start the sun, and a spaceship, Icarus II, that can deliver such a cargo to the star’s searing surface.

Guiding what they call "the payload" to its destination is a crew that’s somewhere between the scrappy Alien gang and the perfunctory 2001: A Space Odyssey explorers. Icarus II comes equipped with a supercomputer that runs everything — imagine, uh, Alien‘s Mother crossed with 2001‘s HAL 9000. Sunshine shares other similarities with sci-fi films past (thankfully, beyond some superficial elements, The Core is not among them): the psychological effects of deep-space claustrophobia and the knowledge that there is "literally nothing more important than completing our mission," as engineer Mace (Chris Evans) points out. What individual would jeopardize a quest to ensure survival of the species?

Well, that’s why they call it a conflict. We learn in the first five minutes that the ship, which sets sail less than a decade after the failed Icarus I, is Earth’s last hope. The eight personalities aboard include aloof physicist Capa (Cillian Murphy), practical biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), and medical officer Searle (Whale Rider‘s Cliff Curtis), who lingers in Icarus II‘s observation room, drinking in the approaching sun. The sun’s complicated allure is a key Sunshine theme: It’s mesmerizing. It creates life. To a scientist, it’s God. But it’ll fry you alive, especially in space, where the Icarus II‘s SPF needs are met by a glinting shield covered in gold.

It’s certain that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are nodding to you-know-which Greek myth about what happens when people fly too close to the sun — though mental meltdowns keep pace with literal ones on Sunshine‘s journey. The pair are probably best known for 28 Days Later, which injected a host of post–<\d>Sept. 11 worries into the zombie genre. It’s tempting to look for a similar metaphor here, but as befits the film’s setting, Sunshine‘s concerns are far more metaphysical. The doomsday scenario it suggests — call it anti–<\d>global warming — stirs up fears embedded in humanity’s DNA. "We might get picked off one by one by aliens!" an Icarus II crew member jokes, but Sunshine‘s lingering effects dig deeper than any Ridley Scott rip-off. As realistic and science based as any film about rocketing to the sun can hope to be, Sunshine elegantly, eerily taps into the same anxiety as that Twilight Zone episode — that we’re all part of a particular cosmic scheme that will eventually, inevitably end.*

SUNSHINE

Opens Fri/20 in San Francisco theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Festival Guide

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The opening-night selection at the Jewish Film Festival is Israeli writer-director Dror Shaul’s worldwide prizewinner, Sweet Mud. It views 1974 kibbutz life from a 12-year-old’s perspective, but don’t expect rosy childhood nostalgia. Though it doesn’t lack humor or adventure, it takes on backstabbing and conservatism in kibbutzim.

On a lighter note, the closing-night film Making Trouble: Three Generations of Jewish Funny Women is a TV-style documentary enjoyable simply for its episodic homage to six famous funny ladies, including Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, brassy belter Sophie Tucker, and Saturday Night Live‘s Gilda Radner. Though the career of still-breathing subject Joan Rivers has skewed toward tacky celebrity-culture exploitation, she’s sharp and candid discussing an uphill climb from being the most-hated female sassmouth on the Catskills circuit.

There are several culture-clash comedies at this year’s JFF, and one sure bet is French actor Roschdy Zem’s charming directorial debut, Bad Faith. He and Cécile de France play Parisians of wholly secular Muslim and Jewish backgrounds, respectively. Their romance goes swimmingly until she becomes pregnant, sparking all kinds of familial strife. The fest’s sidebars include a miniretrospective for Berlin-based Jewish director Dani Levi, who made a splash with 2005’s farcical Go for Zucker. Levi is the winner of the fest’s Freedom of Expression award; alas, his latest, My Fuehrer: The Truly Truth about Hitler, strains mightily and uselessly to burlesque the Third Reich’s waning days.

Among the JFF’s Israeli documentaries, one delight is Shlomo Hazan’s hour-long Film Fanatic. It follows entrepreneur Yehuda Grovais’ attempts to create a commercial ultra-Orthodox cinema — even though his constituency is explicitly banned from watching theatrical films. Among US documentaries, one winner is Ilana Trachtman’s world-premiere feature Praying with Lior, a family portrait that illuminates issues of faith, disability, and self-sacrifice.

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