garbage

Repulsed by Recology’s tactics, Kopp strikes name from Adachi initiative

Mary Magee
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Repulsed by Recology’s tactics, Kopp strikes name from Adachi initiative

Who knew that a bunch of garbage could get a taxpayer watchdog like former supe/state senator/judge Quentin Kopp threatening not to endorse Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s pension reform initiative? But that’s what happened according to Kopp, who adds that he was “personally insulted’ by a signature gatherer outside the West Portal post office last week, after he struck his name from a petition he had signed in support of Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s pension reform measure.

Adachi, who has reportedly been paying up to $5 per signature, also came under fire this week from opponents of his measure, who are threatening legal action after an undercover video showed four signature gatherers for Adachi’s measure soliciting signatures while making misleading statements about the proposal.

But this misbehavior had not been made public when Kopp encountered a signature gatherer last Friday, who asked if he would sign the Adachi petition. “I wrote my name and has just started to print it, when he said, how do you feel about Recology?” recalled Kopp, who is backing a ballot initiative that would require competitive bidding and hundreds of millions of dollars in franchise fees from firms who seek to win San Francisco’s garbage collection and recycling contract.

As such, Kopp’s initiative threatens to up-end the terms of an 80-year old charter amendment that resulted in Recology (formerly Norcal Waste Systems) gaining a contractless monopoly on San Francisco’s $226 million-a-year garbage and recycling stream. 

When Kopp asked the signature gatherer, who identified himself as Tim McArdle, why he was asking about Recology, McArdle said he had another petition on hand, which referred to the allegedly satisfactory service that Recology is providing.

At which point, Kopp began to strike his name from Adachi’s $5-a pop petition. McArdle allegedly interrupted, saying, “No, that’s not the same petition as Recology’s.” And when Kopp kept scratching out his name, McArdle allegedly began swearing at him, even allegedly employing the time-honored F-word. “A woman walked by and was shocked,” Kopp said.(So far the Guardian has been unable to locate McArdle, but when we do, we’ll be sure to update this post.)


When McArdle grabbed back his clipboard, Kopp said he was able to see that on its backside was what Kopp describes as ‘Recology’s phony petition.”

So, why is Kopp so repulsed by Recology? According to Kopp. Recology recently signed up the city’s top signature-gathering firms to work on their petition thereby preventing Kopp and his associates from hiring these firms to collect signatures for his competitive bidding initiative. “And they are doing so from our rates, the money we pay, its legalized misappropriation of our money,” Kopp claimed

So far, it seems as if Recology’s strategy is paying off, at least in the short term. This week, sponsors of the competitive bidding initiative announced that they will turn in their signatures by December 11 to qualify their measure for the June 2012 ballot—and not their original target of November 2011.

Their decision followed less than three weeks of signature-gathering, a tight squeeze that occured, in part, because the City Attorney’s Office  took the full 15 days allowed by law to review the language of the Kopp initiative, which was first submitted June 3.

Even so, and despite an extensive Recology-financed media campaign that included push polls and network and cable TV ads against competitive bidding,  proponents and volunteers with Kopp’s campaign managed to gather the 7,168 signatures they needed to qualify his initiative by the city’s July 11 deadline for submitting petitions for the November election. But some signatures could prove invalid, hence the decision to delay the competitive bidding initiative until June.

And the Guardian learned today that the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee has scheduled a July 20 hearing on whether to award Recology the city’s $11 million-a-year landfill disposal contract, with the full Board set to vote on the issue on July 26 and August 2. In other words, the Board is rushing to make a decision on the landfill, which would further consolidate Recology’s monopoly on the city’s waste stream, before the Board’s summer recess.

The Guardian has also learned that the Budget and Finance Committee will hear a resolution July 20 concerning Recology’s existing agreement with the city over garbage. Rumors are swirling that this hearing will allow Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sits on the committee, is running for sheriff and has allegedly been meeting with Mayor Ed Lee and Recology president and CEO Mike Sangiacomo behind closed doors, to insert a clause to allow for the payment of a $4 million franchise fee. But insiders assure the Guardian that Mirkarimi has no such plans, although Mirkarimi himself could not be reached.


Either way, as Kopp points out, the alleged proposed $4 million fee would only amount to 2 percent of Recology’s annual revenue from San Francisco ratepayers. ‘That’s almost an insult,” Kopp said, noting that Oakland, whose population is 340,000, (42 percent of San Francisco’s daytime population) gets a franchise fee of $30 million.

Now, in a recent report to the Board’s LAFCO committee, Recology claimed it provides $18 million annually in “free services” to the city. But the report did not include an independent analysis of Recology’s estimates, and therefore these claims raised the hackles of Kopp, Kelly and other competitive bidding proponents.

Kopp predicts a $4 million franchise fee would allow city leaders who oppose his measure to claim that one of the two objectives of his proposed initiative have been addressed.

In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, Mayor Ed Lee said he felt that Recology “has justified its privilege to be the permit holder in San Francisco because of the things that it has been willing to do with us.”

Kopp said Lee repeated this position in June, and that Board President David Chiu recently said that he is opposed to monopolies in concept, but felt that any effort to allow competitive bidding on garbage services would tear the city apart.

“Chiu spoke in such draconian terms I thought I was in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Kopp said.

But these latest developments have strengthened Kopp and Kelly’s resolve to push ahead with their effort to give local residents a chance to decide whether competitive bidding would be better for San Francisco rate payers. As they point out, such a vote doesn’t mean Recology would be ousted from the city because they stand an excellent chance of winning any competitive bid. But it could mean that Recology is ousted from its current cost-plus arrangement with the city that allows them to make an estimated 10-20 percent profit.

And whatever happens, the upcoming battle threatens to shed light on Recology’s business model, which is based on vertical expansion into other counties and states, and the knowledge that, unlike the competitive bids it submits everywhere else in California, it has a guaranteed annual revenue of $225 million in San Francisco. In its 1996 filings with the Securities Exchange Commission, NorCal Waste and its 45 subsidiaries (now known as Recology) reported that San Francisco accounts for 50 percent of its annual revenue. And while those public filings are 15 years old, it’s clear Recology continues to rely on San Francisco for a large and guaranteed chunk of its income.

Or as one insider put it, “When you have a cost-plus contract, you can start buying things—like the Pier 96 development, and the recycling facility. And you can move profits to a different part of the company. You’re not competitively bidding the composting. And you can shift your profits out of San Francisco. And with a cost-plus contract, you put everything in the rates. For instance, the city says it wants composting. Ok, here’s the cost, here’s the bill. But you take the profit from the composting and invest it in San Jose, or San Bernardino, and use it to advance your other objectives, like buying two large landfills in Nevada and financing political campaigns.”

Meanwhile, Kopp says he plans to take Adachi to task for hiring the same signature gathering firm that is trying to undermine his petition.


“And I’m not planning to sign his petition now, and I might not endorse it,” Kopp said.
 




 

Film Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Beats, Rhymes & Life See “Buggin’ Out.” (1:38) Shattuck.

*”An Evening With Andy and Jonathan” Before the 80s standup craze dredged up so much bottom-feeding crap, the comedy world had room for a few chameleonic improv innovators like the subjects of this Roxie program hosted by Johnny Legend. Making its theatrical debut is his recent DVD assembly Jonathan Winters: Birth of a Comedy Genius, a compilation bringing together clips from various long-forgotten shows like The NBC Comedy Hour and The Steve Allen Plymouth Show. A man of a thousand voices, Winters (who’s still occasionally active — he voices Papa Smurf in the imminent Smurfs feature) anticipated the manic improvisational glee of Jim Carrey and others as he sped through myriad instantly-created characters, often leaving any fellow players silenced and agog. If these segments predating his peak fame in the late 60s aren’t necessarily stellar in terms of material — it was an era when TV allowed very little that was “edgy” — the performer himself is always a marvel to watch. The co-feature is cult fave My Breakfast with Blassie, the 55-minute semi-staged, all-improv vehicle for the late Andy Kaufman — very much “playing” himself — and his older pro wrestler friend Fred Blassie. Legend co-directed that 1983 oddity, made just a year before the “dadaist” comedian’s untimely death; also on the bill is a one-hour program of ultra-rarities featuring Kaufman, Blassie, Legend and more. Roxie. (Harvey)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Game over. (2:10)

If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front traces the roots and development of the controversial environmental activist organization through one of its members, Daniel McGowan, as he faces trial for the newly imagined charge of eco-terrorism. McGowan is thoughtful and open about his participation in numerous actions against perceived enemies of Earth, allowing director Marshall Curry to craft an intelligent documentary as much about McGowan and the E.L.F. as the almost insurmountable ethical murkiness of activism in America. Frustrated by the apparent ineffectuality of peaceful protest and faced with the continued despoiling of our planet, McGowan and his peers pose a difficult question: how far is too far? Or, what price do we pay by failing to go far enough? Curry is careful to allow both sides of the debate ample time on screen in a timely consideration of the viability of direct action and the human face behind a media frenzy. (1:30) Shattuck. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

*Project Nim This is the story of an individual plucked from their native culture even before birth, separated from parents shortly after, handed over to a chaotic if loving urban foster family, yanked from them to a lavish, isolated country estate, then shipped off to a medical experimentation lab, “rescued” only to be placed in prison like solitary confinement, and … well, things finally get a little better, but isn’t this enough abuse for several lifetimes? Before you call Child Services or the ACLU, be informed that this is not the saga of a human being, but one Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee born in U.S. captivity, then set on a highly unusual life course as the subject of a study in animal language acquisition by Columbia University linguist Herbert S. Terrace. Nim did indeed prove remarkably adept at learning sign language to communicate with his teachers/minders — even if Terrace finally belittled that as no more than imitation performed to beg food and other favor. Nim was a prodigy, and for a while a media sensation. He was also a temperamental, physically powerful wild beast who could (and sometimes did) cause considerable harm to those around him. Regardless, both his adaptation to human habitats and animal instincts should have been deal with a great deal more care and consistency — there was no overall plan for his well-being beyond serving (or being abandoned by) whoever his keepers were at any given moment. This latest documentary by James Marsh (2008’s Man on Wire, 1999’s Wisconsin Death Trip) is an involving story whose latter-day interviewees — tumbling rather easily into hero and villain categories, with Prof. Terrance not in the first camp — annotate an enormous amount of archival footage shot throughout Nim’s life. (1:33) (Harvey)

*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Working with Lisa See’s novel, director Wayne Wang returns to the crowd-pleasing territory of his wildly popular Joy Luck Club (1993) — fortunately it’s also material that feels intensely personal, even transposed in 21st century China (one of those modern Chinese women, Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi bought the rights to the book and provides a financial boost here). Modern-day Nina (Bingbing Li) is about to leave her native Shanghai for NYC and certain success in the banking world when she learns that her best friend, her laotong or sworn sister, Sophia (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. She must piece together the mystery of her friend’s life since they last parted, studying the book written about her 19th century forbearer Snow Flower (also Jun) and her own laotong Lily (Li). An uncredited turn by Hugh Jackman as a caddish boyfriend is beside the point here; Wang’s take on the bond of friendship that ties two women together, beyond the pain of foot-binding, marriage, class, and adversity is tremulously sentimental, in way that will have many would-be Joy Luck Club-ers happily identifying with these sisters from other mothers — and leave everyone else sobbing in the darkness. (1:40) Albany. (Chun)

*Tabloid Taking a break from loftier subjects, Errol Morris’ latest documentary simply finds a whopper of a story and lets the principal participant tell her side of it — one we gradually realize may be very far from the real truth. In 1978 former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney flew to England, where the Mormon boy she’d grown infatuated with had been posted for missionary work by his church. What ensued became a U.K. tabloid sensation, as the glamorous, not at all publicity-shy Yankee attracted accusations of kidnapping, imprisonment, attempted rape and more. Her victim of love, one Kirk Anderson, is not heard from here — presumably he’s been trying to live down an embarrassing life chapter ever since. But we do hear from others who shed considerable light on the now middle-aged McKinney’s continued protestations that it was all just one big misunderstanding. Most importantly, we hear from the lady herself — and she is colorful, unflappable, unapologetic, and quite possibly stone-cold nuts. (1:28) California. (Harvey)

*Terri What happens when the camera stops on the quiet, shy and heavy 15-year-old in the corner of the classroom? Terri might be his story — if he cut class regularly to avoid being teased about his man-breasts, wore PJs to school, and befriended an affable, straight-talking Shrek of a teacher. Painfully awkward Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is ignored or mocked by most, left to feed the mice he catches in traps to passing raptors, care for his ailing uncle, and avoid the school bullies as best he can. But assistant principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who has a habit of nurturing the school’s misfits, recognizes Terri’s tender heart and takes him under his wing. It’s catching, apparently, as Terri first befriends the hair-pulling Chad (Bridger Zadina) and then Heather, the girl who allows herself be fingered in home ec (Olivia Crocicchia). What transpires among these school outcasts, shaped by director-writer Azazel Jacobs, subtly subverts your conventional teen identity story arc —Terri isn’t the only one here that’s good-hearted. (1:45) California. (Chun)

Trigun: Badlands Rumble Set in a futuristic western border town with as much variety in firepower as in its inhabitants (think Mos Eisley with way more guns), anime import Trigun: Badlands Rumble follows Vash the Stampede, an apparently bungling but actually expert gunslinger, as he attempts to both woo the beautiful and dangerous Amelia and prevent the infamous robber Gasback from pulling off the most daring heist in history. The orgy of destruction that results wears thin, as does the philosophical side to a movie that employs “rolling the dice” as a metaphor at least seven times. Vash’s staunch thou-shalt-not-kill posturing is somewhat intriguing if not wildly incongruous with the level of chaos celebrated by Badlands Rumble; there’s simply no way that everyone lives with the sheer tonnage of lead in the air. I’m guessing this could be a blast for those more familiar with the manga and animated series it’s based upon, but as for the casual viewer, it may leave you somewhat confused. (1:30) Viz Cinema. (Berkmoyer)

*”TV Noir” This-three night retrospective of broadcast episodes from the boob tube’s formative decade — in which it went from being the luxury of a few to the nation’s primary entertainment — spotlights moody crime, procedural, and morality dramas that fit into the medium’s early fast-cheap requirements. Network TV in the 1950s wasn’t yet mostly L.A.-based, and as a result providing a starting point for a lot of actors, writers and directors who’d soon make a splash on Broadway or in Hollywood, as well as established stars willing to slum a bit. Among those whose work you’ll catch in the series’ six separate programs are Leslie Nielsen, Sidney Lumet, Joanne Woodward, Boris Karloff, James Coburn, Robert Aldrich, Blake Edwards, Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin, and even Harpo Marx. Highlights include Charles Bronson, atypically manic as an ex-con released to terrorize his wife (“Don’t you understand I love you, I’d never hurt you…” [Five seconds later] “You let a cop in here, Laura, and I’ll blow off his head, then yours!”) in an episode from forgotten 1955 series Treasury Men in Action. Jack Palance is swell as usual in “The Kiss Off,” a 1953 segment from long-running omnibus Suspense. And Brian Keith, a long way from the treacle train of Family Affair a decade later, plays Mike Hammer in a failed pilot of that name, the first attempted TV version of Mickey Spillane’s take-no-prisoners private eye. It was excellent but evidently too hardboiled for the tube at the time, although subsequent attempts both big- and small-screen would be more successful. While not all the largely very rare, commercially unavailable materials here qualify as “noir” by even a generous stretch of the imagination, they’re all testaments to the TV’s industry and invention back when many programs were broadcast “live.” Collector-curator Johnny Legend will be on hand to introduce all shows. Roxie. (Harvey)

Winnie the Pooh John Cleese narrates this new animated film about the honey-loving bear and his pals in the Hundred Acre Wood. (1:09)

ONGOING

Bad Teacher Jake Kasdan, the once-talented director of a few Freaks and Geeks episodes and 2002’s underrated Orange County, seems hell-bent on humiliating everyone in the cast of Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is Elizabeth, the title’s criminally bad pedagogue who prefers the Jack Daniels method to the Socratic. Her impetus for pounding Harper Lee into her middle school students’ bug-eyed little heads is to cash in on a bonus check to fund her breast-y ambitions and woo Justin Timberlake and his baby voice. The only likable onscreen presence is Jason Segal as a sad sack gym teacher in love with Elizabeth. But he could do so much better. There’s no shortage of racist jokes and potty humor in this R-rated comedy pandering to those 17 and below. When asked if she wants to go out with her coworkers, Elizabeth ripostes, “I’d rather get shot in the face!” That scenario is likely a better alternative than suffering this steaming pile of cash cow carcass. (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Balboa, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

A Better Life (1:38) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki.

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) Castro. (Sussman)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

Cars 2 You pretty much can’t say a bad thing about a Pixar film. Cars 2 is by no means Ratatouille (2007) or Wall-E (2008), but the sequel to the 2006 hit Cars offers plenty of sleek visuals and one-note gags under its hollow hood. If nothing else, Pixar seems to have overcome the dingy, dark glaze that plagues 3-D films. Directors John Lasseter and Joe Ranft return to beloved autos Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and the “extremely American” Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). This time around, secret agents Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) come along for the ride while working to expose sabotage in the alternative fuel industry. Compelling chase sequences, explosions and more than a few jabs at cultural stereotypes follow suit. This is the lightest, silliest Pixar film to date, but you probably don’t have any business seeing it unless you’ve got a kid in tow. (1:52) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Green Lantern This latest DC Comics-to-film adaptation fails to recognize the line between awesome fantasy-action and cheeseball absurdity, often resembling the worst excesses of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. A surprisingly palatable Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, the cocky test pilot who is chosen to wield a power ring as a member of an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. He must face down Parallax, an alien embodiment of fear, who appears here as a chuckle-inducing floating head surrounded by tentacles. Peter Sarsgaard is effectively nauseating as Hector Hammond, who becomes Parallax’s crony after he is transformed by a transfusion of fear energy. The acting is all over the map, with Blake Lively’s blank-faced love interest caricature as the weakest link, and the effects are hit-or-miss, but scenes featuring alien Green Lanterns should please fans, and you could probably do worse if you’re looking for an entertaining popcorn flick. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Stander)

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) SF Center. (Chun)

Happy Happy, a documentary by Roko Belic (1999’s Genghis Blues), traces the contented lifestyles of men and women around the globe. Manoj Singh is a Kolkata rickshaw driver sustained by his son’s smile. Anne Bechsgaard’s life is enriched by her co-housing community in Denmark. These soothingly sentimental profiles are intercut with commentary from leading neuroscientists and psychologists. They provide a cursory guide to the rare balancing act that is happiness in the 21st century. A brisk 75 minutes, the film is saturated with thought-provoking tidbits (the Bhutan government aims for gross national happiness instead of GDP) and an ambient backing track that’s heavy on the chimes. However, sometimes there’s the sense that these mechanics of happiness aren’t cinematically compelling enough, and that rifling through a couple Wikipedia pages might offer just as much insight. At its best, Happy sparks a reflection on how many of the unofficial criteria for joy one has fulfilled, and suggests ideas for simple happiness boosters. (1:15) Roxie. (Getman)

Horrible Bosses Lead by a clearly talented ensemble of comic actors, Horrible Bosses is yet another example of a big-budget summer comedy with a promising conceit (see Bad Teacher) that fails to deliver anything but crude alms to the lowest common denominator. Seth Gordon directs Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day as three pals fed up with their evil employers (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston, respectively) so they hatch a plan to have them killed. Because the answer to their problem obviously lies in a dive bar in the “bad part of town,” Jamie Foxx plays Motherfucker Jones, their murder consultant and the film’s most likable character-stereotype. In the tradition of The Hangover (2009) and its ilk of beer-guzzling, frat-boy cousins, Horrible Bosses is a disastrous pile-up of idiocy that’s more vapid than vulgar despite a few amusing performances. See it for no other reason than Michael Bluth and Charlie Kelly on coke. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Lattanzio)

Larry Crowne While Transformers: Dark of the Moon may be getting all the attention for being the most terrible summer movie, I’d like to propose Larry Crowne as the bigger offender. No, it doesn’t have the abrasive effects of a Michael Bay blockbuster, but it’s surely just as incompetent. And coming from an actor as talented as Tom Hanks — who co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film —Larry Crowne is insulting. The plot, insofar as there is one, centers around the titular Larry (Hanks), a man who goes to community college, joins a scooter gang led by Wilmer Valderrama, and ends up falling for his cranky, alcoholic teacher Mercedes (Julia Roberts). The scenes are thrown together hapharzadly, with no real sense of character development or continuity. Larry Crowne doesn’t even feel like a romantic comedy until a drunk Mercedes begins kissing and dry humping her student. But hey, who can resist a shot of Larry’s middle-aged bottom as he tries to wriggle into jeans that are just too small? (1:39) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Monte Carlo (1:48) 1000 Van Ness.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (1:35) SF Center.

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*Page One: Inside the New York Times When Andrew Rossi’s documentary premiered at Sundance this January, word of mouth on it was respectable but qualified, with nearly everyone opining that it was good … just not what they’d been led to expect. What they expected was (in line with the original subtitle A Year Inside the New York Times) a top-to-bottom overview of how the nation’s most respected — and in some circles resented — arbiter of news, “style,” and culture is created on a day-to-day as well as longer term basis. That’s something that would doubtless fascinate anyone still interested in print media, or even that realm of web media not catering to the ADD nation. But that big picture and the wealth of minute cogs within isn’t Page One‘s subject. Instead, Rossi focuses on the Gray Lady’s wrestling with admittedly fast-changing times in which newspapers and any other information source on paper seem to constitute an endangered species. This particular Times, however, is such a special case that that crisis might better have been explored by training a camera on a less fabled publication, perhaps one of the many that have succumbed to a once unthinkable, market-shrunk mortality in recent years. The film finds its colorful protagonist in David Carr, an ex-crack addict turned media columnist who retains his cranky, nonconformist edge even as he defends the Times itself from the same out-with-the-old cheerleaders who 15 years ago were inflating the dot-com boom till it burst. Facing one particularly smug champion of the blogosphere at a forum, Carr notes that without a few remaining outlets — like the Times — doing the hard work of serious research and reportage, the web would have nothing to purloin or offer but its own unending trivia and gossip. Page One does what it does entertainingly well, but if you’re looking for insight toward this not-dead-yet U.S. institution as a whole, you’d be better off simply picking up this week’s Sunday edition and reading every last word. (1:28) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides The last time we saw rascally Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), he was fighting his most formidable enemy yet: the potentially franchise-ending Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). The first Pirates movie (2003) was a surprise critical success, earning Depp his first-ever Oscar nomination; subsequent entries, though no less moneymaking, suffered from a detectable case of sequel-itis. Overseeing this reboot of sorts is director Rob Marshall (2002’s Chicago), who keeps the World’s End notion of sending Jack to find the Fountain of Youth, but adds in a raft of new faces, including Deadwood‘s Ian McShane (as Blackbeard) and lady pirate Penélope Cruz. The story is predictably over-the-top, with the expected supernatural elements mingling with sparring both sword-driven and verbal — as well as an underlying theme about faith that’s nowhere near as fun as the film’s lesser motifs (revenge, for one). It’s basically a big swirl of silly swashbuckling, nothing more or less. And speaking of Depp, the fact that the oft-ridiculous Sparrow is still an amusing character can only be chalked up to the actor’s own brand of untouchable cool. If it was anyone else, Sparrow’d be in Austin Powers territory by now. (2:05) SF Center. (Eddy)

*Super 8 The latest from J.J. Abrams is very conspicuously produced by Steven Spielberg; it evokes 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as well as 1985’s The Goonies and 1982’s Poltergeist (so Spielbergian in nature you’d be forgiven for assuming he directed, rather than simply produced, the pair). But having Grandpa Stevie blessing your flick is surely a good thing, especially when you’re already as capable as Abrams. Super 8 is set in 1979, high time for its titular medium, used by a group of horror movie-loving kids to film their backyard zombie epic; later in the film, old-school celluloid reveals the mystery behind exactly what escaped following a spectacular train wreck on the edge of their small Ohio town. The PG-13 Super 8 aims to frighten, albeit gently; there’s a lot of nostalgia afoot, and things do veer into sappiness at the end (that, plus the band of kids at its center, evoke the trademarks of another Grandpa Stevie: Stephen King). But the kid actors (especially the much-vaunted Elle Fanning) are great, and there’s palpable imagination and atmosphere afoot, rare qualities in blockbusters today. Super 8 tries, and mostly succeeds, in progressing the fears and themes addressed by E.T. (divorce, loneliness, growing up) into century 21, making the unknowns darker and the consequences more dire. (1:52) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon I’ll never understand the wisdom behind epic-length children’s movies. What child — or adult, for that matter — wants to sit through 154 minutes of assaultive popcorn entertainment? It’s an especially confounding decision for this third installment in the Transformers franchise because there’s a fantastic 90-minute movie in there, undone at every turn by some of the worst jokes, most pointless characters, and most hateful cultural politics you’re likely to see this summer. But when I say a fantastic movie, I mean a fantastic movie. It took two very expensive earlier attempts before director Michael Bay figured out that big things require a big canvas. Every shot of Dark of the Moon‘s predecessors seemed designed to hide their effects by crowding the screen. Finally we get the full view — the scale is now rightly calibrated to operatic and ridiculous. The marquee set pieces are inspired and terrifying, eliciting a sense of vertigo that’s earned for once, not imposed by the editing. The human hijinks are less consistent but ingratiatingly batshit, and without resorting to preening self-awareness and elaborately contrived mea culpas. But unfortunately Bay is too unapologetic even to walk back the ethnic buffoonery that not only upsets hippies like me but also seems defiantly disharmonious with the movie he’s trying to make. Bay is like that guy at the party who thinks amping up the racism will prove he’s not a racist. It’s that kind of garbage (plus, I guess, some universal primal hatred of Shia LaBeouf that I don’t really get) that makes people dismiss these movies wholesale. This time it’s just not deserved. I wouldn’t want to meet the asshole who made this thing, but credit where credit is due. It’s a visual marvel with perfectly integrated, utterly tactile, brilliantly choreographed CG robotics — a point that’ll no doubt be conceded in passing as if it’s not the very reason the movie exists. As if it’s not a feat of mastery to make a megaton changeling truck look graceful. (2:34) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) California, Empire, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

Zookeeper (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Beats, Rhymes & Life See “Buggin’ Out.” (1:38) Shattuck.

*”An Evening With Andy and Jonathan” Before the 80s standup craze dredged up so much bottom-feeding crap, the comedy world had room for a few chameleonic improv innovators like the subjects of this Roxie program hosted by Johnny Legend. Making its theatrical debut is his recent DVD assembly Jonathan Winters: Birth of a Comedy Genius, a compilation bringing together clips from various long-forgotten shows like The NBC Comedy Hour and The Steve Allen Plymouth Show. A man of a thousand voices, Winters (who’s still occasionally active — he voices Papa Smurf in the imminent Smurfs feature) anticipated the manic improvisational glee of Jim Carrey and others as he sped through myriad instantly-created characters, often leaving any fellow players silenced and agog. If these segments predating his peak fame in the late 60s aren’t necessarily stellar in terms of material — it was an era when TV allowed very little that was “edgy” — the performer himself is always a marvel to watch. The co-feature is cult fave My Breakfast with Blassie, the 55-minute semi-staged, all-improv vehicle for the late Andy Kaufman — very much “playing” himself — and his older pro wrestler friend Fred Blassie. Legend co-directed that 1983 oddity, made just a year before the “dadaist” comedian’s untimely death; also on the bill is a one-hour program of ultra-rarities featuring Kaufman, Blassie, Legend and more. Roxie. (Harvey)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Game over. (2:10)

If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front traces the roots and development of the controversial environmental activist organization through one of its members, Daniel McGowan, as he faces trial for the newly imagined charge of eco-terrorism. McGowan is thoughtful and open about his participation in numerous actions against perceived enemies of Earth, allowing director Marshall Curry to craft an intelligent documentary as much about McGowan and the E.L.F. as the almost insurmountable ethical murkiness of activism in America. Frustrated by the apparent ineffectuality of peaceful protest and faced with the continued despoiling of our planet, McGowan and his peers pose a difficult question: how far is too far? Or, what price do we pay by failing to go far enough? Curry is careful to allow both sides of the debate ample time on screen in a timely consideration of the viability of direct action and the human face behind a media frenzy. (1:30) Shattuck. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

*Project Nim This is the story of an individual plucked from their native culture even before birth, separated from parents shortly after, handed over to a chaotic if loving urban foster family, yanked from them to a lavish, isolated country estate, then shipped off to a medical experimentation lab, “rescued” only to be placed in prison like solitary confinement, and … well, things finally get a little better, but isn’t this enough abuse for several lifetimes? Before you call Child Services or the ACLU, be informed that this is not the saga of a human being, but one Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee born in U.S. captivity, then set on a highly unusual life course as the subject of a study in animal language acquisition by Columbia University linguist Herbert S. Terrace. Nim did indeed prove remarkably adept at learning sign language to communicate with his teachers/minders — even if Terrace finally belittled that as no more than imitation performed to beg food and other favor. Nim was a prodigy, and for a while a media sensation. He was also a temperamental, physically powerful wild beast who could (and sometimes did) cause considerable harm to those around him. Regardless, both his adaptation to human habitats and animal instincts should have been deal with a great deal more care and consistency — there was no overall plan for his well-being beyond serving (or being abandoned by) whoever his keepers were at any given moment. This latest documentary by James Marsh (2008’s Man on Wire, 1999’s Wisconsin Death Trip) is an involving story whose latter-day interviewees — tumbling rather easily into hero and villain categories, with Prof. Terrance not in the first camp — annotate an enormous amount of archival footage shot throughout Nim’s life. (1:33) (Harvey)

*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Working with Lisa See’s novel, director Wayne Wang returns to the crowd-pleasing territory of his wildly popular Joy Luck Club (1993) — fortunately it’s also material that feels intensely personal, even transposed in 21st century China (one of those modern Chinese women, Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi bought the rights to the book and provides a financial boost here). Modern-day Nina (Bingbing Li) is about to leave her native Shanghai for NYC and certain success in the banking world when she learns that her best friend, her laotong or sworn sister, Sophia (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. She must piece together the mystery of her friend’s life since they last parted, studying the book written about her 19th century forbearer Snow Flower (also Jun) and her own laotong Lily (Li). An uncredited turn by Hugh Jackman as a caddish boyfriend is beside the point here; Wang’s take on the bond of friendship that ties two women together, beyond the pain of foot-binding, marriage, class, and adversity is tremulously sentimental, in way that will have many would-be Joy Luck Club-ers happily identifying with these sisters from other mothers — and leave everyone else sobbing in the darkness. (1:40) Albany. (Chun)

*Tabloid Taking a break from loftier subjects, Errol Morris’ latest documentary simply finds a whopper of a story and lets the principal participant tell her side of it — one we gradually realize may be very far from the real truth. In 1978 former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney flew to England, where the Mormon boy she’d grown infatuated with had been posted for missionary work by his church. What ensued became a U.K. tabloid sensation, as the glamorous, not at all publicity-shy Yankee attracted accusations of kidnapping, imprisonment, attempted rape and more. Her victim of love, one Kirk Anderson, is not heard from here — presumably he’s been trying to live down an embarrassing life chapter ever since. But we do hear from others who shed considerable light on the now middle-aged McKinney’s continued protestations that it was all just one big misunderstanding. Most importantly, we hear from the lady herself — and she is colorful, unflappable, unapologetic, and quite possibly stone-cold nuts. (1:28) California. (Harvey)

*Terri What happens when the camera stops on the quiet, shy and heavy 15-year-old in the corner of the classroom? Terri might be his story — if he cut class regularly to avoid being teased about his man-breasts, wore PJs to school, and befriended an affable, straight-talking Shrek of a teacher. Painfully awkward Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is ignored or mocked by most, left to feed the mice he catches in traps to passing raptors, care for his ailing uncle, and avoid the school bullies as best he can. But assistant principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who has a habit of nurturing the school’s misfits, recognizes Terri’s tender heart and takes him under his wing. It’s catching, apparently, as Terri first befriends the hair-pulling Chad (Bridger Zadina) and then Heather, the girl who allows herself be fingered in home ec (Olivia Crocicchia). What transpires among these school outcasts, shaped by director-writer Azazel Jacobs, subtly subverts your conventional teen identity story arc —Terri isn’t the only one here that’s good-hearted. (1:45) California. (Chun)

Trigun: Badlands Rumble Set in a futuristic western border town with as much variety in firepower as in its inhabitants (think Mos Eisley with way more guns), anime import Trigun: Badlands Rumble follows Vash the Stampede, an apparently bungling but actually expert gunslinger, as he attempts to both woo the beautiful and dangerous Amelia and prevent the infamous robber Gasback from pulling off the most daring heist in history. The orgy of destruction that results wears thin, as does the philosophical side to a movie that employs “rolling the dice” as a metaphor at least seven times. Vash’s staunch thou-shalt-not-kill posturing is somewhat intriguing if not wildly incongruous with the level of chaos celebrated by Badlands Rumble; there’s simply no way that everyone lives with the sheer tonnage of lead in the air. I’m guessing this could be a blast for those more familiar with the manga and animated series it’s based upon, but as for the casual viewer, it may leave you somewhat confused. (1:30) Viz Cinema. (Berkmoyer)

*”TV Noir” This-three night retrospective of broadcast episodes from the boob tube’s formative decade — in which it went from being the luxury of a few to the nation’s primary entertainment — spotlights moody crime, procedural, and morality dramas that fit into the medium’s early fast-cheap requirements. Network TV in the 1950s wasn’t yet mostly L.A.-based, and as a result providing a starting point for a lot of actors, writers and directors who’d soon make a splash on Broadway or in Hollywood, as well as established stars willing to slum a bit. Among those whose work you’ll catch in the series’ six separate programs are Leslie Nielsen, Sidney Lumet, Joanne Woodward, Boris Karloff, James Coburn, Robert Aldrich, Blake Edwards, Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin, and even Harpo Marx. Highlights include Charles Bronson, atypically manic as an ex-con released to terrorize his wife (“Don’t you understand I love you, I’d never hurt you…” [Five seconds later] “You let a cop in here, Laura, and I’ll blow off his head, then yours!”) in an episode from forgotten 1955 series Treasury Men in Action. Jack Palance is swell as usual in “The Kiss Off,” a 1953 segment from long-running omnibus Suspense. And Brian Keith, a long way from the treacle train of Family Affair a decade later, plays Mike Hammer in a failed pilot of that name, the first attempted TV version of Mickey Spillane’s take-no-prisoners private eye. It was excellent but evidently too hardboiled for the tube at the time, although subsequent attempts both big- and small-screen would be more successful. While not all the largely very rare, commercially unavailable materials here qualify as “noir” by even a generous stretch of the imagination, they’re all testaments to the TV’s industry and invention back when many programs were broadcast “live.” Collector-curator Johnny Legend will be on hand to introduce all shows. Roxie. (Harvey)

Winnie the Pooh John Cleese narrates this new animated film about the honey-loving bear and his pals in the Hundred Acre Wood. (1:09)

ONGOING

Bad Teacher Jake Kasdan, the once-talented director of a few Freaks and Geeks episodes and 2002’s underrated Orange County, seems hell-bent on humiliating everyone in the cast of Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is Elizabeth, the title’s criminally bad pedagogue who prefers the Jack Daniels method to the Socratic. Her impetus for pounding Harper Lee into her middle school students’ bug-eyed little heads is to cash in on a bonus check to fund her breast-y ambitions and woo Justin Timberlake and his baby voice. The only likable onscreen presence is Jason Segal as a sad sack gym teacher in love with Elizabeth. But he could do so much better. There’s no shortage of racist jokes and potty humor in this R-rated comedy pandering to those 17 and below. When asked if she wants to go out with her coworkers, Elizabeth ripostes, “I’d rather get shot in the face!” That scenario is likely a better alternative than suffering this steaming pile of cash cow carcass. (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Balboa, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

A Better Life (1:38) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki.

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) Castro. (Sussman)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

Cars 2 You pretty much can’t say a bad thing about a Pixar film. Cars 2 is by no means Ratatouille (2007) or Wall-E (2008), but the sequel to the 2006 hit Cars offers plenty of sleek visuals and one-note gags under its hollow hood. If nothing else, Pixar seems to have overcome the dingy, dark glaze that plagues 3-D films. Directors John Lasseter and Joe Ranft return to beloved autos Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and the “extremely American” Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). This time around, secret agents Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) come along for the ride while working to expose sabotage in the alternative fuel industry. Compelling chase sequences, explosions and more than a few jabs at cultural stereotypes follow suit. This is the lightest, silliest Pixar film to date, but you probably don’t have any business seeing it unless you’ve got a kid in tow. (1:52) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Green Lantern This latest DC Comics-to-film adaptation fails to recognize the line between awesome fantasy-action and cheeseball absurdity, often resembling the worst excesses of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. A surprisingly palatable Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, the cocky test pilot who is chosen to wield a power ring as a member of an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. He must face down Parallax, an alien embodiment of fear, who appears here as a chuckle-inducing floating head surrounded by tentacles. Peter Sarsgaard is effectively nauseating as Hector Hammond, who becomes Parallax’s crony after he is transformed by a transfusion of fear energy. The acting is all over the map, with Blake Lively’s blank-faced love interest caricature as the weakest link, and the effects are hit-or-miss, but scenes featuring alien Green Lanterns should please fans, and you could probably do worse if you’re looking for an entertaining popcorn flick. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Stander)

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) SF Center. (Chun)

Happy Happy, a documentary by Roko Belic (1999’s Genghis Blues), traces the contented lifestyles of men and women around the globe. Manoj Singh is a Kolkata rickshaw driver sustained by his son’s smile. Anne Bechsgaard’s life is enriched by her co-housing community in Denmark. These soothingly sentimental profiles are intercut with commentary from leading neuroscientists and psychologists. They provide a cursory guide to the rare balancing act that is happiness in the 21st century. A brisk 75 minutes, the film is saturated with thought-provoking tidbits (the Bhutan government aims for gross national happiness instead of GDP) and an ambient backing track that’s heavy on the chimes. However, sometimes there’s the sense that these mechanics of happiness aren’t cinematically compelling enough, and that rifling through a couple Wikipedia pages might offer just as much insight. At its best, Happy sparks a reflection on how many of the unofficial criteria for joy one has fulfilled, and suggests ideas for simple happiness boosters. (1:15) Roxie. (Getman)

Horrible Bosses Lead by a clearly talented ensemble of comic actors, Horrible Bosses is yet another example of a big-budget summer comedy with a promising conceit (see Bad Teacher) that fails to deliver anything but crude alms to the lowest common denominator. Seth Gordon directs Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day as three pals fed up with their evil employers (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston, respectively) so they hatch a plan to have them killed. Because the answer to their problem obviously lies in a dive bar in the “bad part of town,” Jamie Foxx plays Motherfucker Jones, their murder consultant and the film’s most likable character-stereotype. In the tradition of The Hangover (2009) and its ilk of beer-guzzling, frat-boy cousins, Horrible Bosses is a disastrous pile-up of idiocy that’s more vapid than vulgar despite a few amusing performances. See it for no other reason than Michael Bluth and Charlie Kelly on coke. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Lattanzio)

Larry Crowne While Transformers: Dark of the Moon may be getting all the attention for being the most terrible summer movie, I’d like to propose Larry Crowne as the bigger offender. No, it doesn’t have the abrasive effects of a Michael Bay blockbuster, but it’s surely just as incompetent. And coming from an actor as talented as Tom Hanks — who co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film —Larry Crowne is insulting. The plot, insofar as there is one, centers around the titular Larry (Hanks), a man who goes to community college, joins a scooter gang led by Wilmer Valderrama, and ends up falling for his cranky, alcoholic teacher Mercedes (Julia Roberts). The scenes are thrown together hapharzadly, with no real sense of character development or continuity. Larry Crowne doesn’t even feel like a romantic comedy until a drunk Mercedes begins kissing and dry humping her student. But hey, who can resist a shot of Larry’s middle-aged bottom as he tries to wriggle into jeans that are just too small? (1:39) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Monte Carlo (1:48) 1000 Van Ness.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (1:35) SF Center.

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*Page One: Inside the New York Times When Andrew Rossi’s documentary premiered at Sundance this January, word of mouth on it was respectable but qualified, with nearly everyone opining that it was good … just not what they’d been led to expect. What they expected was (in line with the original subtitle A Year Inside the New York Times) a top-to-bottom overview of how the nation’s most respected — and in some circles resented — arbiter of news, “style,” and culture is created on a day-to-day as well as longer term basis. That’s something that would doubtless fascinate anyone still interested in print media, or even that realm of web media not catering to the ADD nation. But that big picture and the wealth of minute cogs within isn’t Page One‘s subject. Instead, Rossi focuses on the Gray Lady’s wrestling with admittedly fast-changing times in which newspapers and any other information source on paper seem to constitute an endangered species. This particular Times, however, is such a special case that that crisis might better have been explored by training a camera on a less fabled publication, perhaps one of the many that have succumbed to a once unthinkable, market-shrunk mortality in recent years. The film finds its colorful protagonist in David Carr, an ex-crack addict turned media columnist who retains his cranky, nonconformist edge even as he defends the Times itself from the same out-with-the-old cheerleaders who 15 years ago were inflating the dot-com boom till it burst. Facing one particularly smug champion of the blogosphere at a forum, Carr notes that without a few remaining outlets — like the Times — doing the hard work of serious research and reportage, the web would have nothing to purloin or offer but its own unending trivia and gossip. Page One does what it does entertainingly well, but if you’re looking for insight toward this not-dead-yet U.S. institution as a whole, you’d be better off simply picking up this week’s Sunday edition and reading every last word. (1:28) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides The last time we saw rascally Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), he was fighting his most formidable enemy yet: the potentially franchise-ending Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). The first Pirates movie (2003) was a surprise critical success, earning Depp his first-ever Oscar nomination; subsequent entries, though no less moneymaking, suffered from a detectable case of sequel-itis. Overseeing this reboot of sorts is director Rob Marshall (2002’s Chicago), who keeps the World’s End notion of sending Jack to find the Fountain of Youth, but adds in a raft of new faces, including Deadwood‘s Ian McShane (as Blackbeard) and lady pirate Penélope Cruz. The story is predictably over-the-top, with the expected supernatural elements mingling with sparring both sword-driven and verbal — as well as an underlying theme about faith that’s nowhere near as fun as the film’s lesser motifs (revenge, for one). It’s basically a big swirl of silly swashbuckling, nothing more or less. And speaking of Depp, the fact that the oft-ridiculous Sparrow is still an amusing character can only be chalked up to the actor’s own brand of untouchable cool. If it was anyone else, Sparrow’d be in Austin Powers territory by now. (2:05) SF Center. (Eddy)

*Super 8 The latest from J.J. Abrams is very conspicuously produced by Steven Spielberg; it evokes 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as well as 1985’s The Goonies and 1982’s Poltergeist (so Spielbergian in nature you’d be forgiven for assuming he directed, rather than simply produced, the pair). But having Grandpa Stevie blessing your flick is surely a good thing, especially when you’re already as capable as Abrams. Super 8 is set in 1979, high time for its titular medium, used by a group of horror movie-loving kids to film their backyard zombie epic; later in the film, old-school celluloid reveals the mystery behind exactly what escaped following a spectacular train wreck on the edge of their small Ohio town. The PG-13 Super 8 aims to frighten, albeit gently; there’s a lot of nostalgia afoot, and things do veer into sappiness at the end (that, plus the band of kids at its center, evoke the trademarks of another Grandpa Stevie: Stephen King). But the kid actors (especially the much-vaunted Elle Fanning) are great, and there’s palpable imagination and atmosphere afoot, rare qualities in blockbusters today. Super 8 tries, and mostly succeeds, in progressing the fears and themes addressed by E.T. (divorce, loneliness, growing up) into century 21, making the unknowns darker and the consequences more dire. (1:52) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon I’ll never understand the wisdom behind epic-length children’s movies. What child — or adult, for that matter — wants to sit through 154 minutes of assaultive popcorn entertainment? It’s an especially confounding decision for this third installment in the Transformers franchise because there’s a fantastic 90-minute movie in there, undone at every turn by some of the worst jokes, most pointless characters, and most hateful cultural politics you’re likely to see this summer. But when I say a fantastic movie, I mean a fantastic movie. It took two very expensive earlier attempts before director Michael Bay figured out that big things require a big canvas. Every shot of Dark of the Moon‘s predecessors seemed designed to hide their effects by crowding the screen. Finally we get the full view — the scale is now rightly calibrated to operatic and ridiculous. The marquee set pieces are inspired and terrifying, eliciting a sense of vertigo that’s earned for once, not imposed by the editing. The human hijinks are less consistent but ingratiatingly batshit, and without resorting to preening self-awareness and elaborately contrived mea culpas. But unfortunately Bay is too unapologetic even to walk back the ethnic buffoonery that not only upsets hippies like me but also seems defiantly disharmonious with the movie he’s trying to make. Bay is like that guy at the party who thinks amping up the racism will prove he’s not a racist. It’s that kind of garbage (plus, I guess, some universal primal hatred of Shia LaBeouf that I don’t really get) that makes people dismiss these movies wholesale. This time it’s just not deserved. I wouldn’t want to meet the asshole who made this thing, but credit where credit is due. It’s a visual marvel with perfectly integrated, utterly tactile, brilliantly choreographed CG robotics — a point that’ll no doubt be conceded in passing as if it’s not the very reason the movie exists. As if it’s not a feat of mastery to make a megaton changeling truck look graceful. (2:34) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) California, Empire, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

Zookeeper (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

 

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide. Due to the Fourth of July holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

OPENING

A Better Life Demian Bichir (Weeds) stars in this drama about an immigrant family struggling to realize the American dream. (1:38)

Horrible Bosses Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston star in this workplace comedy. (1:33)

How to Live Forever After his mother died, documentarian Mark S. Wexler began to seriously contemplate aging and, inevitably, his own death. A certain amount of baby boomer naval-gazing is the inevitable result, but Wexler is curious enough to expand his quest into realms beyond his own graying hair and expanding midsection. The film’s (mostly) tongue-in-cheek title comes into play as he visits scientists, inventors, new age types, cryonics-facility workers, and doctors with various anti-aging philosophies and agendas. But probably the most compelling long-life widsom comes from the elderly folks he visits for practical advice. While the Guinness record-holding 114-year-olds aren’t much for coherent communication, quite a few of the 80-, 90- and 100-somethings Wexler talks to suggest that simply being a spitfire is a key to longevity. Highlights include the late fitness guru Jack LaLanne, enviably energetic in his mid-90s; a 104-year-old Brit who’s a smoker, drinker, and aspiring marathoner; and an 80-year-old tap dancer who decides to compete in a beauty pageant for senior citizens. “I’m older than he is,” she giggles of her boyfriend. “But he can drive at night!” (1:34) (Eddy)

Vincent Wants to Sea An anorexic, an obsessive-compulsive, and someone with Tourette syndrome go on a roadtrip: it’s not the setup to a bad joke, it’s the gist of Vincent Wants to Sea, a mostly fun, sometimes touching, but often improbable film. When Vincent’s mother dies, his father (Heino Ferch) decides it’s time for Vincent (Florian David Fitz — who also wrote the screenplay) to once and for all eradicate his tics and spasms and sequesters him at a summer camp-esque institution in the German countryside. The subsequent escape and journey to the Italian coast (where Vincent hopes to scatter his mother’s ashes) with two fellow patients, the anorexic Marie (Karoline Herfuth) and the Bach-loving compulsive Alex (Johannes Allmayer), is rife with self-discovery and uplifting music, so much so that it sometimes resembles a Levi’s ad more than a feature film. There’s real heart and humor beneath the cheese, but there’s a lot of cheese. (1:36) (Cooper Berkmoyer)

Zookeeper Kevin James graduates from policing mall rats to hanging with talking zoo animals. (1:42)

ONGOING

The Art of Getting By The Art of Getting By is all about those confusing, mixed-up and apparently sexually frustrating months before high school graduation. George (Freddie Highmore) is a trench coat-wearing misanthrope — an old soul, as they say — whose parents and teachers are always trying to put him inside a box and tell him how to think. He finds a kindred sprit in Sally (Emma Roberts) who smokes and watches Louis Malle films. Hot. Heavily scored by the now-ancient songs of early ’00s blog bands, it may all sound like indie bullshit but this one has charm and wit despite its post-trend package. Like a sad little crayon, Highmore is a competent Michael Cera surrogate du jour. Writer-director Gavin Wiesen embraces hell of clichés, but he suitably sums up a generational angst along the way. The film may not always feel real, but it does have real feeling. Look out for great performances from Blair Underwood and Alicia Silverstone. (1:24) (Ryan Lattanzio)

Bad Teacher Jake Kasdan, the once-talented director of a few Freaks and Geeks episodes and 2002’s underrated Orange County, seems hell-bent on humiliating everyone in the cast of Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is Elizabeth, the title’s criminally bad pedagogue who prefers the Jack Daniels method to the Socratic. Her impetus for pounding Harper Lee into her middle school students’ bug-eyed little heads is to cash in on a bonus check to fund her breast-y ambitions and woo Justin Timberlake and his baby voice. The only likable onscreen presence is Jason Segal as a sad sack gym teacher in love with Elizabeth. But he could do so much better. There’s no shortage of racist jokes and potty humor in this R-rated comedy pandering to those 17 and below. When asked if she wants to go out with her coworkers, Elizabeth ripostes, “I’d rather get shot in the face!” That scenario is likely a better alternative than suffering this steaming pile of cash cow carcass. (1:29) (Lattanzio)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) (Peitzman)

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) (Sussman)

Bride Flight Who doesn’t love a sweeping Dutch period piece? Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is pure melodrama soup, enough to give even the most devout arthouse-goer the bloats. Emigrating from post-World War II Holland to New Zealand with two gal pals, the sweetly staid Ada (Karina Smulders) falls for smarm-ball Frank (Waldemar Torenstra, the Dutchman’s James Franco) and kind of joins the mile high club to the behest of her conscience. The women arrive with emotional baggage and carry-ons of the uterine kind. As the harem adjusts to the country mores of the Highlands, Frank tries a poke at all of them in a series of sex scenes more moldy than smoldery. This Flight, set to a plodding score and stuffy mise-en-scene, never quite leaves the runway. Not to mention the whole picture, pale as a corpse, resembles one of those old-timey photographs of your great grandma’s wedding. These kinds of pastoral romances ought to be put out to, well, pasture. (2:10) (Lattanzio)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) (Peitzman)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Smith Rafael. (Sam Stander)

Cars 2 You pretty much can’t say a bad thing about a Pixar film. Cars 2 is by no means Ratatouille (2007) or Wall-E (2008), but the sequel to the 2006 hit Cars offers plenty of sleek visuals and one-note gags under its hollow hood. If nothing else, Pixar seems to have overcome the dingy, dark glaze that plagues 3-D films. Directors John Lasseter and Joe Ranft return to beloved autos Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and the “extremely American” Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). This time around, secret agents Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) come along for the ride while working to expose sabotage in the alternative fuel industry. Compelling chase sequences, explosions and more than a few jabs at cultural stereotypes follow suit. This is the lightest, silliest Pixar film to date, but you probably don’t have any business seeing it unless you’ve got a kid in tow. (1:52) Balboa. (Lattanzio)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) (Eddy)

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop seems less of a movie title and more like a hushed comment shared between one of the many hangers-on during the filming of the “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour.” Throughout 23 cities’ worth of footage, O’Brien seethes, paces, sweats, yells and beats dead jokes so hard that they spring back to life, as he is wont to do. At this point, the Leno/Coco drama is a bit stale — at least in internet time — but the documentary is a fascinating comedian character study nonetheless. It may be hard to sympathize with a man nursing a bruised ego as he cashes a $45 million dollar check, but it’s easy to see that he’s one of the best late night hosts (temporarily off) the air. Split primarily between clips of O’Brien performing songs on stage with a myriad of celebrity guests and bemoaning how exhausted and frustrated he is, Can’t Stop derives most of its hilarity from the off-the-cuff comments that pepper Conan’s everyday conversations. (1:29) (David Getman)

*The Double Hour Slovenian hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) and security guard Guido (Filippo Timi) are two lonely people in the Italian city of Turin. They find one another (via a speed-dating service) and things are seriously looking up for the fledgling couple when calamity strikes. This first feature by music video director Giuseppe Capotondi takes a spare, somber approach to a screenplay (by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo) that strikingly keeps raising, then resisting genre categorization. Suffice it to say their story goes from lonely-hearts romance to violent thriller, ghost story, criminal intrigue, and yet more. It doesn’t all work seamlessly, but such narrative unpredictability is so rare at the movies these days that The Double Hour is worth seeing simply for the satisfying feeling of never being sure where it’s headed. (1:35) (Harvey)

Empire of Silver Love, not money, is at the core of Empire of Silver — that’s the M.O. of a Shanxi banking family’s libertine third son, or “Third Master” (Aaron Kwok) in this epic tug-of-war between Confucian duty and free will. The Third Master pines for his true love, his stepmother (Hao Lei), yet change is going off all around the star-crossed couple in China at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, and the youthful scion ends up pouring his passion into the family business, attempting to tread his own path, apart from his Machiavellian father (Tielin Zhang). Much like her protagonist, however, director (and Stanford alum) Christina Yao seems more besotted with romance than finance, bathing those scenes with the love light and sensual hues reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s early movies. Though Yao handles the widescreen crowd scenes with aplomb, her chosen focus on money, rather than honey, leaches the action of its emotional charge. It doesn’t help that, on the heels of the Great Recession, it’s unlikely that anyone buys the idea of a financial industry with ironclad integrity — or gives a flying yuan about the lives of bankers. (1:52) (Chun)

Green Lantern This latest DC Comics-to-film adaptation fails to recognize the line between awesome fantasy-action and cheeseball absurdity, often resembling the worst excesses of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. A surprisingly palatable Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, the cocky test pilot who is chosen to wield a power ring as a member of an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. He must face down Parallax, an alien embodiment of fear, who appears here as a chuckle-inducing floating head surrounded by tentacles. Peter Sarsgaard is effectively nauseating as Hector Hammond, who becomes Parallax’s crony after he is transformed by a transfusion of fear energy. The acting is all over the map, with Blake Lively’s blank-faced love interest caricature as the weakest link, and the effects are hit-or-miss, but scenes featuring alien Green Lanterns should please fans, and you could probably do worse if you’re looking for an entertaining popcorn flick. (1:45) (Stander)

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) (Chun)

Happy Happy, a documentary by Roko Belic (1999’s Genghis Blues), traces the contented lifestyles of men and women around the globe. Manoj Singh is a Kolkata rickshaw driver sustained by his son’s smile. Anne Bechsgaard’s life is enriched by her co-housing community in Denmark. These soothingly sentimental profiles are intercut with commentary from leading neuroscientists and psychologists. They provide a cursory guide to the rare balancing act that is happiness in the 21st century. A brisk 75 minutes, the film is saturated with thought-provoking tidbits (the Bhutan government aims for gross national happiness instead of GDP) and an ambient backing track that’s heavy on the chimes. However, sometimes there’s the sense that these mechanics of happiness aren’t cinematically compelling enough, and that rifling through a couple Wikipedia pages might offer just as much insight. At its best, Happy sparks a reflection on how many of the unofficial criteria for joy one has fulfilled, and suggests ideas for simple happiness boosters. (1:15) Roxie. (Getman)

Kung Fu Panda 2 The affable affirmations of 2008’s Kung Fu Panda take a back seat to relentlessly elaborate, gag-filled action sequences in this DreamWorks Animation sequel, which ought to satisfy kids but not entertain their parents as much as its predecessor. Po (voiced by Jack Black), the overeating panda and ordained Dragon Warrior of the title, joins forces with a cavalcade of other sparring wildlife to battle Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), a petulant peacock whose arsenal of cannons threatens to overwhelm kung fu. But Shen is also part of Po’s hazy past, so the panda’s quest to save China is also a quest for self-fulfillment and “inner peace.” There’s less character development in this installment, though the growing friendship between Po and the “hardcore” Tigress (Angelina Jolie) is occasionally touching. The 3-D visuals are rarely more than a gimmick, save for a series of eye-catching flashbacks in the style of cel-shaded animation. (1:30) (Stander)

Larry Crowne While Transformers: Dark of the Moon may be getting all the attention for being the most terrible summer movie, I’d like to propose Larry Crowne as the bigger offender. No, it doesn’t have the abrasive effects of a Michael Bay blockbuster, but it’s surely just as incompetent. And coming from an actor as talented as Tom Hanks — who co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film —Larry Crowne is insulting. The plot, insofar as there is one, centers around the titular Larry (Hanks), a man who goes to community college, joins a scooter gang led by Wilmer Valderrama, and ends up falling for his cranky, alcoholic teacher Mercedes (Julia Roberts). The scenes are thrown together hapharzadly, with no real sense of character development or continuity. Larry Crowne doesn’t even feel like a romantic comedy until a drunk Mercedes begins kissing and dry humping her student. But hey, who can resist a shot of Larry’s middle-aged bottom as he tries to wriggle into jeans that are just too small? (1:39) (Peitzman)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Balboa. (Harvey)

Monte Carlo (1:48)

Mr. Nice By the second hour of Mr. Nice, star Rhys Ifans and company have exhausted every possible pot smoking flourish. There’s the seductive French inhale by the pool, the suggestive mouth to mouth, the euphoric dragon release in the deserts of Pakistan: all rendered in extreme close-up with improbably thick plumes of white smoke. Mr. Nice is mostly sexy drug use tutorial, though it’s also part biography of real-life drug smuggler Howard Marks. His claim to fame — at least according to the movie’s tagline — is the sheer number of aliases, phone lines, and children he had (43, 89, and 4, respectively). Unexpectedly, it’s the period costuming, cinematography, and the enchanting listlessness of Chloe Sevigny that redeem the film. Mr. Nice is captivatingly interlaced with vintage news and scenery clips from the period and it’s shot in a way that is both hyper-stylized and erratic. Those twists and turns of Marks’s life turn out to be not nearly as suspenseful onscreen as they should be, making the movie less of a traditional drug thriller and more of a mildly interesting reflection on the culture of the period. (2:01) (Getman)

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (1:35)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*Page One: Inside the New York Times When Andrew Rossi’s documentary premiered at Sundance this January, word of mouth on it was respectable but qualified, with nearly everyone opining that it was good … just not what they’d been led to expect. What they expected was (in line with the original subtitle A Year Inside the New York Times) a top-to-bottom overview of how the nation’s most respected — and in some circles resented — arbiter of news, “style,” and culture is created on a day-to-day as well as longer term basis. That’s something that would doubtless fascinate anyone still interested in print media, or even that realm of web media not catering to the ADD nation. But that big picture and the wealth of minute cogs within isn’t Page One‘s subject. Instead, Rossi focuses on the Gray Lady’s wrestling with admittedly fast-changing times in which newspapers and any other information source on paper seem to constitute an endangered species. This particular Times, however, is such a special case that that crisis might better have been explored by training a camera on a less fabled publication, perhaps one of the many that have succumbed to a once unthinkable, market-shrunk mortality in recent years. The film finds its colorful protagonist in David Carr, an ex-crack addict turned media columnist who retains his cranky, nonconformist edge even as he defends the Times itself from the same out-with-the-old cheerleaders who 15 years ago were inflating the dot-com boom till it burst. Facing one particularly smug champion of the blogosphere at a forum, Carr notes that without a few remaining outlets — like the Times — doing the hard work of serious research and reportage, the web would have nothing to purloin or offer but its own unending trivia and gossip. Page One does what it does entertainingly well, but if you’re looking for insight toward this not-dead-yet U.S. institution as a whole, you’d be better off simply picking up this week’s Sunday edition and reading every last word. (1:28) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Super 8 The latest from J.J. Abrams is very conspicuously produced by Steven Spielberg; it evokes 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as well as 1985’s The Goonies and 1982’s Poltergeist (so Spielbergian in nature you’d be forgiven for assuming he directed, rather than simply produced, the pair). But having Grandpa Stevie blessing your flick is surely a good thing, especially when you’re already as capable as Abrams. Super 8 is set in 1979, high time for its titular medium, used by a group of horror movie-loving kids to film their backyard zombie epic; later in the film, old-school celluloid reveals the mystery behind exactly what escaped following a spectacular train wreck on the edge of their small Ohio town. The PG-13 Super 8 aims to frighten, albeit gently; there’s a lot of nostalgia afoot, and things do veer into sappiness at the end (that, plus the band of kids at its center, evoke the trademarks of another Grandpa Stevie: Stephen King). But the kid actors (especially the much-vaunted Elle Fanning) are great, and there’s palpable imagination and atmosphere afoot, rare qualities in blockbusters today. Super 8 tries, and mostly succeeds, in progressing the fears and themes addressed by E.T. (divorce, loneliness, growing up) into century 21, making the unknowns darker and the consequences more dire. (1:52) (Eddy)

*13 Assassins 13 Assassins is clearly destined to be prolific director Takashi Miike’s greatest success outside Japan yet. It’s another departure for the multi-genre-conquering Miike, doubtless one of the most conventional movies he’s made in theme and execution. That’s key to its appeal — rigorously traditional, taking its sweet time getting to samurai action that is pointedly not heightened by wire work or CGI, it arrives at the kind of slam-dunk prolonged battle climax that only a measured buildup can let you properly appreciate. In the 1840s, samurai are in decline but feudalism is still hale. It’s a time of peace, though not for the unfortunates who live under regional tyrant Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), a li’l Nippon Caligula who taxes and oppresses his people to the point of starvation. Alas, the current Shogun is his sibling, and plans to make little bro his chief adviser — so a concerned Shogun official secretly hires veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to assassinate the Lord. Fully an hour is spent on our hero doing “assembling the team” stuff, recruiting other unemployed, retired, or wannabe samurai. When the protagonists finally commence their mission, their target is already aware he’s being pursued, and he’s surrounded by some 200 soldiers by the time Miike arrives at the film’s sustained, spectacular climax: a small village which Shinzaemon and co. have turned into a giant boobytrap so that 13 men can divide and destroy an ogre-guarding army. A major reason why mainstream Hollywood fantasy and straight action movies have gotten so depressingly interchangeable is that digital FX and stunt work can (and does) visualize any stupid idea — heroes who get thrown 200 feet into walls by monsters then getting up to fight some more, etc. 13 Assassins is thrilling because its action, while sporting against-the-odds ingeniousness and sheer luck by our heroes as in any trad genre film, is still vividly, bloodily, credibly physical. (2:06) (Harvey)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon I’ll never understand the wisdom behind epic-length children’s movies. What child — or adult, for that matter — wants to sit through 154 minutes of assaultive popcorn entertainment? It’s an especially confounding decision for this third installment in the Transformers franchise because there’s a fantastic 90-minute movie in there, undone at every turn by some of the worst jokes, most pointless characters, and most hateful cultural politics you’re likely to see this summer. But when I say a fantastic movie, I mean a fantastic movie. It took two very expensive earlier attempts before director Michael Bay figured out that big things require a big canvas. Every shot of Dark of the Moon‘s predecessors seemed designed to hide their effects by crowding the screen. Finally we get the full view — the scale is now rightly calibrated to operatic and ridiculous. The marquee set pieces are inspired and terrifying, eliciting a sense of vertigo that’s earned for once, not imposed by the editing. The human hijinks are less consistent but ingratiatingly batshit, and without resorting to preening self-awareness and elaborately contrived mea culpas. But unfortunately Bay is too unapologetic even to walk back the ethnic buffoonery that not only upsets hippies like me but also seems defiantly disharmonious with the movie he’s trying to make. Bay is like that guy at the party who thinks amping up the racism will prove he’s not a racist. It’s that kind of garbage (plus, I guess, some universal primal hatred of Shia LaBeouf that I don’t really get) that makes people dismiss these movies wholesale. This time it’s just not deserved. I wouldn’t want to meet the asshole who made this thing, but credit where credit is due. It’s a visual marvel with perfectly integrated, utterly tactile, brilliantly choreographed CG robotics — a point that’ll no doubt be conceded in passing as if it’s not the very reason the movie exists. As if it’s not a feat of mastery to make a megaton changeling truck look graceful. (2:34) (Jason Shamai)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

*Trollhunter Yes, The Troll Hunter riffs off The Blair Witch Project (1999) with both whimsy and, um, rabidity. Yes, you may gawk at its humongoid, anatomically correct, three-headed trolls, never to be mistaken for grotesquely cute rubber dolls, Orcs, or garden gnomes again. Yes, you may not believe, but you will find this lampoon of reality TV-style journalism, and an affectionate jab at Norway’s favorite mythical creature, very entertaining. Told that a series of strange attacks could be chalked up to marauding bears, three college students (Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, and Johanna Morck) strap on their gumshoes and choose instead to pursue a mysterious poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen) who repeatedly rebuffs their interview attempts. Little did the young folk realize that their late-night excursions following the hunter into the woods would lead at least one of them to rue his or her christening day. Ornamenting his yarn with beauty shots of majestic mountains, fjords, and waterfalls, Norwegian director-writer André Ovredal takes the viewer beyond horror-fantasy — handheld camera at the ready — and into a semi-goofy wilderness of dark comedy, populated by rock-eating, fart-blowing trolls and overshadowed by a Scandinavian government cover-up sorta-worthy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). (1:30) (Chun)

*X-Men: First Class Cynics might see this prequel as pandering to a more tweeny demographic, and certainly there are so many ways it could have gone terribly wrong, in an infantile, way-too-cute X-Babies kinda way. But despite some overly choppy edits that shortchange brief moments of narrative clarity, X-Men: First Class gets high marks for its fairly first-class, compelling acting — specifically from Michael Fassbender as the enraged, angst-ridden Magneto and James McAvoy as the idealistic, humanist Charles Xavier. Of course, the celebrated X-Men tale itself plays a major part: the origin story of Magneto, a.k.a. Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor, is given added heft with a few tweaks: here, in an echo of Fassbender’s turn in Inglourious Basterds (2009), his master of metal draws on his bottomless rage to ruthlessly destroy the Nazis who used him as a lab rat in experiments to build a master race. The last on his list is the energy-wrangling Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who’s set up a sweet Bond-like scenario, protected by super-serious bikini-vixen Emma Frost (January Jones). The complications are that Erik doesn’t ultimately differ from his Frankensteins — he pushes mutant power to the detriment of those puny, bigoted humans — and his unexpected collaborator and friend is Xavier, the privileged, highly psychic scion who hopes to broker an understanding between mutants and human and use mutant talent to peaceful ends. Together, they can move mountains—or at least satellite dishes and submarines. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast fill out the cast, voicing those eternal X-Men dualities — preserving difference vs. conformity, intoxicating power vs. reasoned discipline. All core superhero concerns, as well as teen identity issues — given a fresh charge. (2:20) (Chun)

Cleaning up UC’s mess

Andrew Lam
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5
Cleaning up UC’s mess

news@sfbg.com

By 7 a.m., when engineering students begin to trickle into Cory Hall at UC Berkeley, Arnold Meza has already scrubbed the floors, wiped clean the chalkboards, and emptied the trash of 30 offices and many of the classrooms and hallways of the six-floor building.

His early shift as a custodian is a gift, he says, because it is steady compared to his former swing-shift schedule, but Meza is still barely making rent. And he is a single father of four. Like many service workers in the University of California system, Meza wonders how the university can refuse to give him a 3 percent wage increase while top UC executives receive six-figure bonuses every year.

“It falls on broken promises,” Meza said while tying up a bag of trash, one of hundreds he would take out that week. Meza was referring to an agreement in 2009 between the university and its service workers unions, including Meza’s union, AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). At that time, the administration established a minimum wage (currently $13 per hour) for the more than 7,000 service workers and agreed, if funding was available, to increase wages annually to bring their low-wage workers out of poverty.

But the university is going back on its promise, refusing to increase wages with the funding dedicated for that very purpose, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and the Partnership for Working Families (EBASE) notes in its recent report titled “Bad Budgeting, Broken Promises.”

As the UC Office of the President sees it, the 2009 discussion was not an agreement at all, but a “conditional memorandum of understanding” that would only be effective if state funding was available, said UCOP spokeswoman Dianne Klein.

“We’ve already taken $500 million in cuts. We’ll have to take another $500 million in cuts. Because there is no new money, the memorandum of understanding is moot,” Klein told us.

The state budget vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown last week would have set the UC system back $150 million in cuts on top of the $500 million in cuts approved by Brown in January. How much more will actually be cut from UC funding remains to be seen, but the forecast is not promising.

Despite the cuts, the proposed budget bill states that $3 million in distributed state funds should go toward the salaries and benefit of service workers in the UC system. In a March 24 letter to the governor, UC President Mark Yudof requested that the governor veto that restriction so the university could use the dedicated $3 million “to preserve our flexibility in dealing with the $500 million reduction.”

Compared to the total UC budget of $21.8 billion, that $3 million makes up only 0.014 percent — nickels and dimes to give employees a living wage.

Meanwhile, Meza and his fellow coworkers struggle to put food on the table, making ends meet by working two jobs. After his 4 a.m. to noon Monday through Friday shift, Meza works eight-hour shifts as a car mechanic on weekends. Similarly, many UC service workers collect cans to get a few dollars from the recycling center.

“When I started here 20 years ago, I was making close to $9 an hour. That wasn’t enough,” recalled Meza, who put his four children through public high school on that salary. Today, Meza brings home about $2,400 a month, barely enough to cover rent and a few bills at his El Cerrito home.

“I want my kids to go to college. But financially, I can’t afford it,” he said. “For me, it’s a sad reality.”

Meza’s union, AFSCME, is working with UC to lower the workers’ contribution to retirement pensions to 1.5 percent. The university proposes a 3.5 percent pension plan to go into effect this July and 5 percent in July 2012—the same amount requested from top UC executives. At their low wage, that would cost the service workers the equivalent of one biweekly paycheck a year.

Some UC executives, such as UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, receive additional retirement perks. Roughly 200 highly paid UC executives receive a supplemental retirement benefit of 5 percent of their annual pay, said Nikki Fortunato Bas, the executive director of EBASE. That’s a total annual cost to UC of $4 million.

“If UC gets its way in 2011, instead of getting to climb that next rung on the ladder out of poverty, [the low wage workers] will take a step backward through a combination of increased contributions to retirement and healthcare and UC withholding a 3 percent raise,” Bas said. “All the while, UC is showering already highly-paid executives with six-figure bonuses.”

In an infamous budget battle that has required the UC system to restructure its quickly diminishing funding from the state, more than 100,000 employees’ paychecks have been reduced while top execs like UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center CEO David Feinberg receive thousands of dollars in bonuses. In September 2010, Feinberg’s base pay was increased by 22 percent and he received a $250,000 “retention bonus,” for a total compensation of $1.33 million.

These astounding numbers, as part of a $3.1 million package in bonuses for 37 UC executives last September, were quoted in the EBASE report, using data from the UC Regents website (www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents).

UCOP says the retention bonuses are necessary “because we pay below market as it is [for top executives’ salaries],” said Klein, and the UC needs to offer huge bonuses to keep the executives from moving to higher paying universities. “You have two options: sayonara or we’ll match it,” Klein said. “You can’t recruit in the classifieds for these people … and you’ll have to replace them for the same money, anyway.”

The bonuses are not state-funded, said Klein, but are taken from research grants, patient care, and even federal funding. But Bas said the problem is with UC’s priorities: “Time and again, they have shown that they can find money to give bonuses or backfill sports programs,” she said. “UC may look at this as a matter of technicalities, but we cannot ignore the stories of employees and their families who are struggling to get by.”

As it stands, UC is short-staffed when it comes to service workers. “We’ve been short-staffed for the last 10 years,” said Meza, who estimates that UC Berkeley employs about 140 custodians, less than one-third of the 460 or so custodians the university employed in the 1980s. The result is that the students suffer, said Meza. “The students are getting the short end of the stick because we can only clean once a week in some classrooms because we’re short staff. We see the students pay a lot with tuition, and they’re getting less.”

Already, student fees have increased by more than 32 percent, and another 8 percent fee increase is pending, reported EBASE. As the state continues to make cuts, students and low wage service workers suffer the consequences.

According to the California Budget Project, a single-parent family needs to make $68,375 a year just to make ends meet in Alameda County. “UC workers have reduced-cost healthcare, so this number could be adjusted downward to $58,544,” said Bas. “For a custodian at UC Berkeley or UC San Francisco making $30,000 or even $40,000 a year, this means working two jobs and collecting cans just to scrape by.”

When his oldest was nine years old, Meza remembers, he used to drive his family to the recycling center to get cash for cans he had taken out of the garbage. “The kids were happy in the car because I was going to get money for food when I recycled cans,” which meant there would be dinner on the table that night, Meza said, apologizing for getting teary-eyed at the memory.

“I just don’t want people who work here to go through what I went through to raise a family,” he said.

No matter how many cars Meza fixes on the weekend, he never seems to have a break from the stress of trying to cover fuel, rent, heating bills, doctors’ bills, and other necessities. He’s only 43, but he feels much older after 20 years of working two jobs, seven days a week, providing for four children on his own.

UC workers, unions like AFSCME and other stakeholders have proposed $600 million in budget alternatives such as reducing the excessive 7-to-1 employee-to-management ratio (at UC Berkeley, the average is four employees to one manager). Yet UC does not appear to be seriously considering these alternatives; its current goal is to take back the $3 million dedicated to its low-wage service workers.

“We think this is a matter of finding the will within the UC administration to do what’s right by honoring their word to protect working families’ a path out of poverty,” Bas said.

Two months ago, Meza and his fellow union members marched into UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s office and asked him to spend one day in the life of a service worker on campus. He still hasn’t answered their request.

“People are really struggling here. We are committed to working and we give 110 percent — that should be accounted for,” said Meza. “Give us our 3 percent. We earned it.”

Guardian poll: Should the garbage contract be put out to bid?

Zelda Bronstein
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18
Guardian poll: Should the garbage contract be put out to bid?

Since 1932, the company now known as Recology has, in some form or another, controlled the contract to pick up San Francisco’s garbage. Now some people are saying it ought to be put out to bid. The local company, which has an employee stock ownership plan, says it’s doing a heck of a job — and that a bid might open the door for a bad out-of-state conglomerate. On the other hand, 80 years is a long time for a contract — and a bidding process might help San Francisco get some more money out of what is by all accounts a very lucrative deal. Let us know what you think after the jump.





Free polls from Go2poll.com

How Recology will attack the garbage initiative

Zelda Bronstein
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4
How Recology will attack the garbage initiative

We got an interesting call June 5 from a polling company. These folks typically ask if any member of the household works for the news media, and we have to figure out whether to lie and hear the questions or tell the truth and save 20 minutes. This time, the caller didn’t bother. So we agreed to answer “a few questions about the upcoming mayor’s race.”

Except the questions weren’t about the mayor’s race at all. They were about the proposal to mandate competitive bidding in the city’s garbage contract. And the poll, which was clearly testing different pro and con arguments, gave a good sense of how Recology, which holds the current monopoly, will try to frame the issues.

For starters, the pollster kept saying — without any evidence — that the proposal was the work of Waste Management Inc., a giant national garbage company. Among the arguments he presented: “This initiative is pushed by WMI, which puts profits ahead of customer service.” The pollster also charged that WMI had broken environmental laws and had a bad labor record.

Among the other arguments: “San Francisco should stick with a home-grown company that has done a good job.”

“The recycling system works.”

“A multinational Houston-based conglomerate wants to take over San Francisco’s recycling program.”

“Workers would lose their jobs.”

“Garbage rates would go up, and recycling would go down.”

“Politicians would have control over your garbage rates.”

That’s a nice snapshot of the campaign we’re going to see in the fall — and it’s utter bullshit.

The initiative is the work of retired Judge Quentin Kopp, Potrero Hill activist Tony Kelly and a few others. And it’s all about bringing competitive bidding to the city’s garbage contract. Waste Management Inc. has zero involvement.

“They haven’t give us a dime,” Kelly told me. “Nobody from Waste Management was involved in any way in our meetings or discussions. This isn’t about Waste Management Inc.; this has to do with the city and competitive bidding.”

In fact, the original idea came from the board’s budget analyst, Harvey Rose.

David Tucker, Waste Management’s community and public relations director, was happy to go on the record and “let the world know that WM has not contributed any funding to this effort.”

“While it would be nice to be able to compete in San Francisco, the truth is that our focus is on the city’s landfill disposal and facilitation agreements,” Tucker said, referring to the battle that WM has been waging for several years now to have a fair chance at being selected as the company that disposes San Francisco’s trash in a landfill outside city limits. (Right now, WM disposes the city’s trash at its Altamont Landfill near Livermore, and Recology hauls the city’s trash across the Bay Bridge to Livermore. But the city’s Department of Environment has tentatively awarded the landfill disposal AND the facilitation (which refers to transporting the trash) to Recology, essentially giving them a monopoly over the city’s entire waste stream, starting in 2016.)

Kelly told us he has nothing against Recology: “If Recology wins the competitive bid for the next century, it’s fine with me.”

Fine with us, too — and the odds are that’s exactly what will happen. The initiative states clearly that the bids have to include zero waste goals and worker protections — and the city already gives preference to locally owned companies. (You can read the text here (pdf)).

But in the process, Recology will have to accept better controls on rates — and will no doubt have to pay a franchise fee. So the city will get a better deal.

Recology knows that if the question on the ballot is framed as whether the garbage contract should be up for competitive bidding, about 90 percent of the voters will say yes. So the only way to block this initiative is to muddy the waters and make it about another company that has no role in the campaign.

Recology’s got a sweet deal, a no-bid $220 million deal that dates back to the 1930s. The company wants to protect it — and apparently is prepared to use whatever misinformation is necessary to do that.

The Performant 45: Oh Rapture, up yours!

Andrew Lam
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1

Gearing up for the end times with Hoodslam

Well another Armageddon scare has come and gone and we’re all still here, as is my dirty laundry which I was letting pile up on the off chance that I wouldn’t need it again. Not that clean clothes were necessary to attend the Judgment Day edition of Oakland-based, amateur-wrestling-and-sideshow-freak extravaganza, Hoodslam. 

Housed in the strategically ramshackle Victory Warehouse, a couple of scenic blocks from the Oakland Greyhound station, the Hoodslam ring loomed large in the confines of what could be euphemistically referred to as the foyer. Cheerfully inebriated fans crowded in on three sides, a colorful wall of graffiti framed the fourth, a makeshift door led to the “dressing room,” and a chainlink barrier shielded the house band, Einstye, in classic “Blues Brothers at Bob’s Country Bunker” style. “You can cut the tension in this room with a knife,” wry match commentator Kevin Gill remarked. You could have cut the great cloud of cigarette-booze-and-blunt fumes with same.

In the best tradition of punk rock wrestling shows like the sorely-missed Incredibly Strange Wrestling, Hoodslam mixes costumed characters, fabricated grudge matches, aggro posturing, loud music, and theatrical bodyslamming with a healthy dose of humor and a pinch of what-the-fuck. But where the flamboyant weirdness of ISW was definitely a product of San Francisco’s love of themed masquerade parties and the slickly produced Lucha Va Voom is 100 percent LA, the scrappy phenomenon that is Hoodslam retains a thoroughly Oakland vibe. 

The sensation of being a first-time Hoodslam attendee is something akin to having a crack pipe in one hand and a spliff in the other, with a Steel Reserve going five rounds with a half bottle of NyQuil in the fight cage of your alimentary canal. It’s disorienting. It’s vaguely unsettling. And it’s a hell of a crazy ride.

On Friday, in preparation for the end of the world, a good two dozen Hoodslam “legends” showed up to settle some scores and create new ones (just in case we’d all live to fight another day). Contestants included a bi-polar clown, a French mime, an invisible man, a stampeding rhinoceros, a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike armed with a garbage can, an unusually tall leprechaun, an Al Bundy clone, ISW remnant Otis the Gimp, the demonic Reverend Hellfyre and his passle of Zombie slaves, and a fanged Mexican werewolf—the dreaded chupacabra! 

There were even some wrestlers who could really fight: the acrobatic, bare-chested Juiced Lee for one, and native son, the masked El Lucha Magnifico, “the most evenly-matched men in Hoodslam.” 

The unbridled feistiness of the combatants was matched only by the rowdiness of the fans (“fuck the fans,” cheerfully reminded ring announcer Ike Emelio Burner on several occasions), whose profane chanting, frenzied pounding on the mat, and blow-by-blow heckling gave the event a post-apocalyptic edge, though the apocalypse wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the next day.

“Wrestling is a form of theatre designed to generate mass hysteria,” former ISW wrestler and book author Count Dante remarked in his Wired magazine interview. At the smackdown between the mass hysteria of Hoodslam vs. the mass hysteria of the pending Rapture, the former definitely took the win.

The problem with the yellow pages

Zelda Bronstein
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5
The problem with the yellow pages

 


Editors note: We ran an opinion piece this week opposing Sup. David Chiu’s proposal to limit delivery of yellow pages phone books. It’s gotten a lot of comments. Chiu asked if his supporters could respond.


By Michelle Myers and Janet Pomeroy
 
Tired of getting stacks of yellow pages books delivered to your front steps every year when you didn’t ask for them? Most people are.
 
Phone companies distribute 1.6 million phone book directories in San Francisco every year, which is two for every man, woman and child – producing 3,600 tons of waste annually, and costing residents as much as $1 million dollars a year. There are approximately 350,000 residential units in San Francisco and 80,000 businesses. If we had a single phone book in every home and office we would only need a third of what is currently being produced. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that many individuals no longer use the yellow pages to get information, and non-English language speakers don’t use the English print directory.
 
Does anyone in San Francisco need two five-pound yellow pages phone books delivered every year? No. So why does the industry do this? According to the Green Chamber of Commerce and independent research, the companies do it to pump up ad sales, which are based on inflated circulation numbers.
 
San Francisco’s attempt to restrict the mass over distribution of yellow pages, and to force an honest look at the industry, marks some of the most important environmental legislation of the last several years.
 
Supervisor David Chiu’s Yellow Pages legislation is supported by the Sierra Club, Rain Forest Action Network, The Green Chamber of Commerce, the Product Stewardship
Institute, Californians Against Waste, Senior Action Network, numerous small businesses, the San Francisco Small Business Commission, homeowners, tenants, and landlords.
 
The San Francisco city economist did an independent economic impact analysis of the legislation and found that this pilot program was good for business, good for the environment and would create 111 jobs while pumping $12 million dollars back into the local economy. The legislation is considered a no-brainer by serious economists, climate change experts and environmentalists who have examined it.
 
If you oppose this simple legislation, you are inviting a major corporation to come in, dump garbage on our front steps, and then volunteer to pay for the clean up. The financial loss of cleaning up over produced yellow pages is passed down to the residents and businesses of the city. And since the yellow pages are not produced locally the majority of the economic benefit of this industry accrues elsewhere.
 
The legislation will create a three year pilot program to reduce the waste of unwanted yellow page phone books. Under this legislation, anyone who wants a yellow page book can get one — but those who don’t want one won’t be responsible for the disposal of the books. Because this innovative and historic legislation is being set up as a test pilot for the nation, if San Franciscans see any negative impact we can adjust the program or end it altogether.
 
The paper industry is a massive polluter. It is the single largest consumer of water, has a toxic by-product, destroys trees we need to absorb carbon, and is the fourth largest manufacturing source of carbon dioxide in the United States. If we only distributed half as many yellow pages in San Francisco – to the people who actually need and want them — we would save 6,180 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
 
Rather than being a good steward of the environment, the yellow page industry is producing far beyond the demand for their product. The companies do this as a way of inflating the amount they charge to the businesses that advertise with them. Today, this business model is wasteful and unnecessary. It is time to demand that these paper directories are only distributed to the people that want and need them.


Michelle Myers is with the Sierra Club and Janet Pomeroy is with the Green Chamber of Commerce.

5 Things: May 12, 2011

John Elberling
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0
5 Things: May 12, 2011

>>SCOBY SNACKS Lest you think that only barbarians and Bear Grylls eat their food alive, consider the case of fermentation. Sauerkraut, kombucha, bleu cheese, and kim chee are all living foods whose microbial make-ups diversify the tiny critters that live inside you (and we all know diversity is a good thing!) If we didn’t just freak you out, this week is an optimal time to learn more about making and snarfing fermented foods. House Kombucha, Omnivore Books, Cafe Gratitude, and Happy Girl Kitchen are all hosting workshops to teach you the power of a biodiverse kitchen. But the kicker is the Ferment Change festival (May 14-22), a full week of East Bay bike tours to homebrewing abodes, cocktail parties, culture swaps, and appearances by the anointed god of Planet Fermenation, Sandor “Sandorkraut” Katz himself.

>>WHO’S IN CHARGE? We’re big-time boosters of Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so once again we rode, we schmoozed, we accumulated swag — most of it aimed at luring more of us onto the streets with the promise of bigger, better, safer, kinder, gentler bike lanes. Which is why we had to wonder at the cover of the Connecting the City pamphlet, a happy-talk scenario showing a smiling woman and two darling kiddies riding along a reimagined bike lane on Market Street. Sweet — until you notice that the woman (the mother?) isn’t wearing a helmet. And neither is the woman staring off into stage-left space behind her. And that group of huddled people in black hoodies — are they supposed to be chess players? With big plastic bags of garbage at their feet? And what about that guy who appears to be rifling through the garbage? Why do we feel like the sell just got harder.

>>ASSEMBLAGE Collage artist David King was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation last year, and he’ll be showing new work later this month at the Visual Aid booth at the San Francisco Fine Art Fair, one of three different art showcases taking place in SF during the third weekend of May. He’s also showing work, along with Mark Faigenbaum, at Inclusions Gallery from Saturday, May 14 through June 19. The opening reception is this Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

>>CHUCK IT We are all well aware that our days are numbered, and that they are going to be pretty well filled up doing more loads of laundry, cleaning the cat box, working, etc. What we really don’t have time for are any more bucket lists taunting us with 100 more things we have to do, see, eat, and ponder before the old dust to dust thing takes place. That’s why we were disheartened to see that there’s a new bucket list just for Giants fans: Bill Chastain’s 100 Things … . We have nothing against Chastain, but we do wish his publisher had come up with a better marketing scheme than this tired, gimmicky genre. Besides, with post World Series prices what they are, we can barely even afford to cross off item 39, “Attend a Game at AT&T Park,” let alone item 40, “Attend a Spring Training Game in Scottsdale.”

>>THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS If there’s one thing that separates the rubes from the natives, it’s pronunciation. Only a rube-and-proud-of-it would risk the derisive sniggering of Manhattanites by asking directions to Houston Street, pronounced like that city in Texas, or the rolled eyeballs of Show-Me Staters by rhyming the last syllable of their great state with “misery.” That’s why we are mystified that Muni hired such a collection of rubes (who may even be robotic rubes) to announce pending stops on its bus lines. Who approved “Di-VEYE-sa-dero”? And who signed off on “Valen-CHA”? Yo, Muni, you never heard the phrase “hire local”?

Garbage shuffle

Maria Poblet
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1
Garbage shuffle

sarah@sfbg.com

The Department of Public Health has scheduled a May 13 hearing to review allegations that Recology subsidiary Sunset Scavenger overbilled for trash collection at a condominium building for years, resulting in $84,544 in excess charges, erroneously charged the building commercial rates, and is refusing to make a full refund. Recology counters that the building’s managers oversubscribed, and the company gave a three-month refund as a show of good faith, but considers additional refunds punitive.

The hearing should interest the 21 percent of San Francisco residents who own units in condominium buildings. According to the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, 42,478 of the city’s 200,409 recorded parcels are now condominiums, with 3,192 registered as live/work, 38,300 as market rate, 980 as below-market rate, and 958 as commercial condo parcels as of fall 2010.

This struggle between ratepayers and Recology, which controls almost all aspects of the city’s $275 million-a-year waste stream, seems emblematic of the problems that can arise when a monopoly is only partially regulated by local officials (the city does not have oversight of commercial collection rates) and then only in a labyrinthine process.

DPH’s May 13 hearing comes three weeks after the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee voted to wait until July before deciding whether to award the city’s next landfill disposal contract to Recology. And it hits 18 months after the Department of the Environment, which derives half its budget from Recology’s rates, first tentatively awarded the city’s landfill contract to the San Francisco based garbage giant.

Since then critics have questioned how Recology got its monopoly, whether the arrangement benefits rate payers, and whether it makes environmental sense to haul the city’s trash all the way to Yuba County, as Recology is proposing.

In February, the budget and legislative analyst recommended that the city replace existing trash collection and disposal laws with legislation that would require competitive bidding on all aspects of the city’s waste collection, consolidation, and recycling system.

The analyst also recommended requiring that refuse collection rates for residential and commercial services be subject to board approval, noting that competitive bidding could result in reduced refuse collection rates (see “Garbage curveball,” 02/8/11).

“The latest report says that the current system has been in existence since 1932 and let’s put it out to competitive bid,” said budget and legislative analyst Harvey Rose.

A 2002 report by Rose noted that the city has no regulatory authority over commercial refuse rates. “Instead, commercial rates are subject to agreements between the permitted and licensed refuse collectors and individual commercial producers of refuse, commercial tenants and building owners,)” the report stated.

Rose’s report also found that commercial building owners often pay commercial refuse fees to Recology, so tenants don’t know how much they are paying. “Normally, if tenants occupy such buildings for commercial purposes, the commercial refuse fees are passed on to the tenants as part of the overall rent and operating costs. As a result, it is likely that many commercial tenants do not know how much they are actually paying for commercial refuse collection,” the report found.

It also noted that when the analysts attempted to complain about commercial refuse collection and commercial refuse rates (“for audit procedure purposes”) and to inquire how to lodge a complaints with the city, there was “nobody to call.”

Fast-forward nine years, and Golan Yona, who sits on the board of the Alamo Square Board Homeowners Association, which represents 200 residents in a 63-unit building on Fulton Street, claims the city gave him the run-around when he complained that, over a four-year period, Recology subsidiary Sunset Scavenger billed his building to pick up two, two-yard compactor containers three times a week but only picked up one. “Each time one of the bins is being put out for collection, the second bin is connected to the trash chute,” and thus not in service for pickup, Yona said.

But Recology claims that HSM Management, the company the homeowners association hired to manage its building, “oversubscribed” for waste collection. Recology also notes that the commercial rate the association paid resulted in the building being charged a lower monthly cost, but that Sunset recognized this as an “internal error” and therefore is not pursuing collection of the undercharged amounts.

Recology spokesperson Adam Alberti characterized the disagreement as “a pretty simple billing dispute,” even as he claimed that HSM sometimes put two bins curbside.

“Recology has been providing a level of service that was not fully utilized,” Alberti said. “They had two bins and were only setting out one, though there were numerous times throughout the year when they set out two bins.”

Alberti said the responsibility lies with the condo group, which opted for that level of bin service. “At some point they called to discuss ways to reduce their bill, at which point Recology suggested they reduce their service to one bin. At that point, the homeowners association sought compensation,” he said.

“No, this is based on actual consumption,” Yona told the Guardian, claiming that Sunset has no problem charging extra if buildings put out extra bins.

Alberti claims it’s “far more common” for buildings to oversubscribe. “They plan for peak times,” he said. “As a good faith gesture, the company sought to come to terms with the customer — but they weren’t able to do so.”

DPH’s Scott Nakamura confirmed that rate hearings are rare in his department. “This is the first time in 30 years that I have heard of a dispute like this going to the DPH — and I’ve been working here more years than I’d like to admit,” he said.

Based on his experience and Rose’s 2002 report, Yona suspects that the reason for this lack of hearings lies with a lack of process — not a lack of complaints.

Yona held up a flow chart that depicts 17 contacts he had with City Hall in a five-week period as he tried to find out how collection rates are set, how homeowners can determine what their building should be paying, and how they can register complaints.

These included calls to the City Attorney’s Office, Department of Public Works, Department of Public Health, and the DPH’s offices of Environmental Health and Solid Waste.

As a result of his persistence, Yona discovered that the city’s refuse collection and disposal ordinance, adopted Nov. 8, 1932, stipulates that DPH’s director can revoke the license of any refuse collector “for failure in the part of the refuse collector to properly collect refuse, or for overcharging for the collection of same, or for insolence toward persons whose refuse he is collecting.”

In a complaint submitted to DPH director Barbara Garcia on behalf of Alamo Square Board HOA, Yona wrote: “We would like to note that our attempts to talk to the right authority in City Hall have met so far with difficulty. The seriousness of the matter requires intervention of the highest authority in City Hall.” 

Earth Day in City Hall … on Wells Fargo’s dime

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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1

Who was lucky enough to get treated to Mayor Ed Lee’s Earth Day Breakfast in City Hall, with the city’s top politicos and a smattering of high-profile San Franciscans? After noticing that the Board of Supervisors had approved a grant of $12,000 from Wells Fargo a few weeks ago to sponsor the event, the Guardian contacted the Mayor’s Office to ask for the guest list. The response came from the city’s Department of the Environment, which accepted the donation and organized the affair.

The 472-person invite list (we don’t know how many actually attended) included prominent figures such as Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, billionaire investor Warren Hellman, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. All 11 members of the Board of Supervisors were invited, too, as were mayoral hopefuls City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, and state Sen. Leland Yee.
 
Invitations were extended to some truly green organizations, too, such as Green for All, Save the Bay, Rainforest Action Network, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the Sierra Club, the Apollo Alliance, Greenaction, and others.

And many seats were reserved for the corporate sector. A total of nine representatives of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. were on the list. There were seven from Cisco, several from consulting and design firm CH2MHill, and a couple representatives from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — the firm that’s doing the Parkmerced overhaul and which was tapped to envision waterfront venues for the America’s Cup. 

Seven representatives — including the CEO — were invited from Recology, which is in the midst of a debate over its high-stakes, $275 million no-bid garbage contract with the city.

According to Mark Westlund of the Department of the Environment, only half of the Wells Fargo grant went toward the mayor’s Earth Day Breakfast, “the remainder to a series of community events held in the Department’s EcoCenter lobby.” The other sponsors included Blue Shield of California ($2,000); CH2MHill; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; United Airlines; Environmental Science Associates ($4,000); Levi Strauss & Co.; Cisco ($6,000) and Starbucks — which provided BPA-free travel mugs (double green points!).

It’s nice that San Francisco taxpayers didn’t have to shell out the $18,000 for all these people to celebrate Earth Day together. But at an event such as this, with so many millions of dollars in city contracts and major development projects flying around (not to mention the half a dozen or so people in need of campaign contributions), you can bet they weren’t all talking to one another about saving the planet.

Deadlock over Ma’s trash bill

Mary Magee
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0
Deadlock over Ma’s trash bill

A State Assembly committee deadlocked Monday over Assemblymember Fiona Ma’s AB 1178, which opponents say would make it easier for Recology to send San Francisco trash by train to Yuba County.

The bill seeks to ban local governments from restricting or limiting importation of garbage from outside the area, apart from enacting special fees.
“I don’t believe this is a special-interest bill,” Ma reportedly said before the vote. “I have 11 different counties in front of me that export waste to other areas.”

Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who voted against the bill, indicated that he was open to changing his vote, even as he said he didn’t like the idea of not allowing local governments to ban garbage from elsewhere.
“I’m a ‘no’ vote who’s open to becoming a ‘yes’ vote if the language is better,” Huffman said.

Yuba County Supervisor Roger Abe said Ma’s bill fails to protect current processes surrounding the use and oversight of landfills.
“AB 1178 makes me unsure whether planning notions will stand up in future with court actions,” Abe said.

Richard Paskowitz, who leads YUGAG (Yuba Group Against Gargage) went further. “It defines environmental injustice,” Paskowitz said, as he argued that Ma’s bill would makes it easier for wealthier areas to send trash to poorer areas.

PG&E, AT&T, Recology and Malia Cohen

Zelda Bronstein
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PG&E, AT&T, Recology and Malia Cohen

I got a flyer the other day announcing a District 10 merchants meeting featuring Sup. Malia Cohen — no big deal, district supervisors do this stuff all the time, and they should. The invite (PDF) reads:


The Office of Supervisor Malia Cohen, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and local business and merchant associations are pleased to present the District 10 Neighborhood Business Summit. The event will bring merchants together with their Supervisor and other city officials to discuss local business concerns.


Okay, fine. But down at the bottom are the logos of the sponsors: AT&T, Recology and PG&E.


AT&T is trying to get city permission to build hundreds of cable boxes on city sidewalks and is contesting a ban on the delivery of phones books. Recology is in the middle of a huge, high-stakes fight over its $275 million no-bid garbage contract. PG&E is fighting the city over community choice aggregation.


In other words, all three companies have major deals, involving millions of dollars, coming up at the Board of Supervisors. Cohen will be voting in the next few weeks — that is, pretty much right now — on the garbage and cable boxes and phone books. Isn’t it a little unseemly to have these three corporations sponsoring her event?


I called to ask her and she agreed the timing was “unfortunate.” But since it’s a Chamber of Commerce event, she said, it’s not clear what she could do about it.


Um, supervisor: You’re the boss here. Meeting doesn’t happen without you. The Chamber folks should have told you that three companies that need your vote would be sponsoring the event, and if they didn’t, you ought to have a word with them. Either way, those sponsors have to go.


 

1964 all over again?

Zelda Bronstein
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16
1964 all over again?

Outstanding piece on Calbuzz about the new Belva Davis book, “Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism.” The Calbuzzers recount the vicious racist attacks Davis endured during the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, when the Goldwater forces were in control:


As we began our descent down the ramps of the Cow Palace, a self-appointed posse dangled over the railings, taunting. “Niggers!” “Get out of here, boy!” “You too, nigger bitch!” “Go on, get out!” “I’m gonna kill your ass!”


I stared straight ahead, putting one foot in front of the other like a soldier who would not be deterred from a mission. The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hot dogs, half-eaten Snickers bars. My goal was to appear deceptively serene, mastering the mask of dispassion I had perfected since childhood to steel myself against any insults the outside world hurled my way.


Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull. I heard it whack against the concrete and shatter. I didn’t look back, but I glanced sideways at Louis and felt my lower lip began to quiver. He was determined we would give our tormentors no satisfaction.


“If you start to cry,” he muttered, “I’ll break your leg.”


Davis, of course, survived and when on to a storied career locally. The scary thing: There are a lot of parallels between the 1964 Goldwaterites and the tea partiers of today. Calbuzz:


Nearly 50 years later [the Goldwater platform] might serve as a manifesto for today’s Tea Party Republicans.


Attacking Democrats as “Federal extremists,” who have “enslaved” and “seek to master” ordinary Americans, the platform vowed , among other things, that Republicans would make deficit reduction their highest economic priority, oppose the “compulsory Democratic scheme” of Medicare and roll back actions of the Kennedy-Johnson Administration that “violently thrust Federal power into the free market.”


And race is still very much a part of what’s going on:


As evidence of the role that race still plays in conservative politics, Davis cited the Tea Party’s embrace of “birthers,” the slurs and spittle hurled by activists at Representatives and civil rights leaders John Lewis and James Clyburn at health care bill protests, and the recent email depicting Obama as a chimpanzee that was sent out by Tea Partier and Orange County Republican Central Committee member Marilyn Davenport.


 Back to the future. And it isn’t pretty.


 

Stopping the garbage monopoly

Andrew Lam
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2
Stopping the garbage monopoly

A few years back, when Aaron Peskin was president of the Board of Supervisors, he decided that the contract to perform budget and policy analysis ought to go out to bid. Supporters of longtime budget analyst Harvey Rose were aghast — Rose, by all accounts, does a great job watching the city’s dollars and helping the supervisors evaluate proposals. He has more than 30 years of institutional knowledge and memory; the very thought of replacing him seemed insane.

But Rose works as a private contractor, and for decades, he had the equivalent of a no-bid contract — the same sort of deal he and his staff have warned against. So the supervisors took bids — and, to nobody’s surprise, Rose won the contract. That was the right outcome. Except that faced with a competitive bid, he lowered his prices, and the city saved about $500,000.

That’s an important lesson, one the supervisors ought to keep in mind on April 20 when they consider the latest version of a proposal to award the contract for taking the city’s trash to a landfill. Two competing outfits, Recology and Waste Management, are fighting for the lucrative deal. It’s a complex environmental and policy issue: Recology is proposing to haul the trash all the way to Yuba County, and Waste Management would truck it to the existing Altamont landfill. But there’s a critical policy issue hanging in the background.

Since 1932, the company now known as Recology (formerly Sunset Scavenger then Norcal Solid Waste Systems) has had an exclusive, no-bid contract to collect garbage within the San Francisco city limits. The contract to haul the stuff over the bridge and out of town gets put out to bid, but only Recology can pick up residential and commercial garbage. The rates are set by the director of public works. And Recology pays the city nothing — zero — in franchise fees. (The only money the city gets from the garbage company is some $7.5 million a year that goes to the Department of Environment.) Oakland, with about half the number of customers, gets $29 million a year for its general fund from its garbage contractors; by that standard, San Francisco could pull in at least another $14 million a year, maybe more. And it’s not as if Recology is hurting — the company’s San Francisco revenue last year was $275 million.

Both the budget analyst and a private report commissioned by the city’s Local Agency Formation Commission have recommended that San Francisco put its garbage contract out to bid. In fact, the LAFCO report, done by R3 Consulting, notes that San Francisco is the only one of 95 cities surveyed in the Bay Area that had no competitive bidding process for local garbage hauling — and is the only city that has neither a bidding process nor a formal franchise agreement. According to the consultant, “it does not appear that Recology is contractually obligated to 1) negotiate with San Francisco or 2) continue providing service.”

This is utterly unacceptable. Sup. David Campos is absolutely right to be proposing a ballot measure that would mandate competitive bidding. And if he can’t find three more supervisors to sign on (and wouldn’t that be a sad statement), citizen activists are prepared to gather signatures.

We recognize that Recology is a local, worker-owned company with fully unionized employees and good benefits. That should — and will — be a factor in any bidding process. But no $275 million deal should be awarded to anyone in perpetuity, without the city having any leverage to negotiate.

The bid to haul waste to the landfill is directly related: If the board awards Recology that contract too, then the company will have such a monopoly that competitive bidding would be difficult. The committee should continue that item until the board figures out how to handle Recology’s overall contract. Rushing it through now would be a bad mistake.

 

Ma’s bill would make it harder to resist big city trash

Mary Magee
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0
Ma’s bill would make it harder to resist big city trash

Assemblymember Fiona Ma has thrown another curve ball at San Francisco’s already hotly contested plan to dispose trash in Yuba County: Ma recently introduced AB 1178 which would authorize a local agency to assess special fees, rather than local cities and counties. Currently, local cities and counties hold the authority to “assess special fees of a reasonable amount on the importation of waste from outside of the county to publicly owned or privately owned facilities.” And that’s exactly what Yuba County has been discussing in face of having San Francisco’s trash buried in its backyard, starting 2015.
Equally importantly, Ma’s bill seeks to prohibit a city, county, or local agency from otherwise restricting or limiting in any way the importation of solid waste into that city or county based on place of origin. And that’s another topic that’s been hotly debated in Yuba County as residents there have come to realize that their local dump will quickly get filled by San Francisco’s big city trash–ultimately forcing Yuba County to export its own trash elsewhere in coming years.The rationale given in Ma’s bill for trying to amend the law to stop local municipalities from being able to restrict waste importation?

“Because ensuring adequate and appropriate capacity for disposal of solid waste is a matter of state and regional concern,” AB 1178 states.

So far there have been no votes on this bill, which was introduced in mid-February, and was referred to the Committee on Natural Resources on March 17, read and amended, then re-referred to the Committee on Natural Resources at the beginning of April.

But lest anyone doubts who is supporting or opposing this bill, an analysis of contributions undertaken by Maplight.org show that
a) supporters outspent the opposition by a ratio of 5:1. ($243,347 v $46, 165).
b) California Refuse Recycling Council, Recology Inc and Waste Connections, which would benefit from the legislation support the bill, and
c) the Sierra Club Solano County, Yuba Group Against Garbage, and Sustainability, Parks, Recycling and Wildlife Legal Defense Fund.

Maplight’s analysis also reveals that Ma received $5,000 from “interest groups that support” this bill.

And the Sacramento Bee has a detailed account of other municipalities, including Solano County, that stand to be impacted if Ma’s bill, which argues that decisions about how much trash goes where are better made at the state and regional level rather than by individual counties, endures. And the Sac Bee article includes a revealing quote from Ma spokesperson Nick Hardeman: “If every county decides to adopt ordinances that discriminate based on the waste’s (origin), then the system breaks down,” Hardeman said.

All this is coming to a head as the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) is preparing to hold a hearing on its recently commissioned report examining how other municipalities handle their trash collection, consolidation and disposal process compared to San Francisco…The LAFCO hearing will be held at City Hall at 10 a.m. on Monday April 18.

Fishing for plastic

Andrew Lam
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Fishing for plastic

sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN ISSUE For the past two summers, scientists and environmentalists with Project Kaisei, a Sausalito nonprofit focused on increasing public awareness of marine debris, have sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge to survey trash in the North Pacific gyre.

A gyre is a naturally occurring system of rotating currents in the ocean that is normally avoided by sailors because of its light winds. The North Pacific Gyre is the largest of the five major oceanic gyres in the world, and the one with the biggest known accumulation of trash, most of which is plastic. Some folks call this vortex the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But Project Kaisei founder Mary Crowley calls the vortex “the eighth continent” to convey its size and impact.

Now, as Project Kaisei prepares for its 2011 expedition, which will likely take place in June — depending on funding, marine conditions, and equipment collection — team members are taking the next steps in the project’s mission to capture the plastic in the gyre. These steps include testing for efficient ways to clean up trash mid-ocean and exploring if some captured plastic can be turned into liquid fuel to power future clean-ups.

“We’ll be focusing on testing marine debris collection equipment, doing some clean-up, further recording what’s out there, and working with ocean current experts. But we need good sponsorship,” Crowley said. “Down the line, we’re looking to have a recycling plant on deck with smaller vessels feeding it so we can do clean-ups mid-ocean. And we’re going to recycle. It’s not going to end up in a dump with plastic blowing back into the ocean.”

Crowley believes unemployed fishermen should be paid to clean up the gyres. “And we should start in our own towns and states and countries,” she said. “We need to produce a solution locally to take effect globally. Part of the response has to come from multinational corporations that are selling stuff throughout world. It’s shocking to me that 90 percent of our pelagic fish are gone and we’ve killed 50 percent of the corral reefs.”

Project Kaisei’s preparations are taking place in the wake of a tsunami that devastated Japan in March, sucking a big pulse of debris into the ocean and crippling four nuclear reactors that continue to leak radiation into the water, raising fears of damage to sea life.

Experts predict that some of the debris from the tsunami will eventually wash up on beaches in Hawaii and California, but Crowley doubts the state will be affected radiologically. “The majority [of the debris] got whooshed out by the tsunami before the leaks began,” she explained.

She says that at a marine debris conference in Honolulu shortly after the tsunami, attendees expressed concern about “land-sourced” debris — trash that flows into the ocean by way of rivers and streams or is dumped directly into the ocean from ships.

“People said that in recent years there’s also been all this debris from natural disasters, including tsunamis,” Crowley noted. “Well, I see debris from natural disasters as all the more reason to develop effective ways to get trash out of the ocean.”

But Captain Charles Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994 to restore disappearing kelp forests and wetlands along the California coast, thinks a moratorium on plastic production would make the most sense.

Moore’s focus shifted in 1997, when he encountered trash, mostly plastic, scattered across the North Pacific Gyre, and subsequent studies by his foundation claim that trash outweighs zooplankton in the gyre by a factor of six to one.

“Mary Crowley really wants to go out there with big boats and get big pieces of plastic out,” Moore said. “I’m not really opposed to that, but it’s a lot of time and money that could be spent trying to stop the waste getting there in the first place. It’s like having a leaking faucet and bailing out the sink rather than calling the plumber. The time has come for society to draw a line in the sand and say no more plastic. Our plastic footprint is causing more problems than our carbon footprint.”

Moore believes it’s time to withdraw from globalized production and support locavore and slow-food movements instead. “We send stuff to be produced in the cheapest locations possible, package it in plastic, then send it back here. It’s nuts,” he said.

But Crowley says not all plastic use is bad, even as she advocates for getting larger pieces of plastic out of the water, and supporting companies that use less on no packaging.

“Plastic is an amazing material for construction and railroad ties, decking, and some medical uses,” she said. “It’s just not right material for throw-away items because it lasts for centuries. I subscribe to oceanographer Sylvia Earle’s view that a plastic bottle can last for 500 to 600 years. That’s why it’s important to get out these bigger pieces of plastic. We don’t want them broken down in the belly of a whale or the stomach of an albatross.”

Studies suggest that 100,000 marine mammals — possibly more — along with thousands of sea birds die each year from debris entanglement, and that thousands more marine mammals, sea birds, fish and sea turtles die from ingesting marine debris, including plastic bags, which bear an unfortunate resemblance to jellyfish, once in water.

Crowley recalls how in 2009, when Project Kaisei had 25 people on board, including scientists, sailors, filmmakers, graduate students, and engineers, the team was surprised to find plastic in sampling taken 400 miles off the West Coast.

“We were anticipating clean water,” Crowley said. In the end, the project’s research vessel, the Kaisei, whose name means “ocean star” in Japanese, and the New Horizon, a Scripps Institute vessel that participated in the project’s first mission, found some plastic in every single trawl.

“A lot was smaller microparticulates of plastics and preproduction plastic pellets,” Crowley said, noting that she also saw Clorox bottles, plastic bags, ghost nets, toothbrushes, children’s toys, and plastic chairs floating on, or lurking up to nine feet below the surface of the ocean.

“If you’re in still water, you sometimes see confetti-like pieces of plastic. And if you’re up on the crow’s nest and going two to three knots, you see bigger pieces,” she said.

No one knows exactly how many bits of debris are already floating in the ocean or have been ground up into tiny particles on our beaches. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that, to date, “there has not been a comprehensive marine debris abundance assessment for the world‘s oceans, or even for a single ocean.“

Moore‘s foundation says 80 percent of marine debris comes from land and only 20 percent from marine-related activities like fishing. To Crowley‘s mind, the main problem is that only 5 percent to 7 percent of plastics are recycled.

“Plastic was invented in the 1880s to replace ivory for pool balls and didn’t proliferate until the last 60 years,” she said. “But even when plastic is dumped into a landfill, it has this insidious way of blowing about and ending up in drains, rivers, and oceans because plastic is a very light, easy material to move around.”

Crowley grew up sailing on Lake Michigan, ran away to sea at age 19, and ended up sailing around the world and founding an international boat chartering business. Somewhere along the line, she says, she started describing the vast, continuous expanse of water that covers 71 percent of the planet and creates most of our air as “the global ocean.”

“It really is all connected,” she said. “The health of the oceanic ecosystem is very important to the health of the planet. There’s a terrible misconception that the oceans are so vast they can be used as a garbage pail.”

When she began to see trash underwater, Crowley realized that future generations wouldn’t be able to enjoy the oceans the way she has. She decided to take action four years ago when she began to see an increase in the garbage covering the North Pacific Gyre.

“I kept seeing the message that there’s a terrible problem, but there’s nothing we can do,” Crowley said, recalling how that messaging and her own sense of urgency prompted her to found Project Kaisei to increase public understanding of what’s in the gyre.

“If you’re in the area for a couple of weeks, you have days when you feel you’re voyaging through a field of scattered garbage,” she said. “And when you look out, you see garbage on the horizon.”

 

Animal instinct

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Animal instinct

PETS A pet-free existence — who needs it? Creature comfort can’t be underestimated, whether you’re ready for a one-time volunteer session, a casual relationship, or some long-term lovin’.

 

ADOPT AWAY

In this country of serious pet overpopulation, there’s no need to buy your next animal companion from a pet store. Whatever you’re looking for — cats, dogs, parakeets, rabbits, mice, rats, chickens, snakes, lizards, even chinchillas — the odds are good that some local shelter or rescue group will have one waiting to be adopted.

Animal advocates (and even some pet stores) urge seekers of furry, scaly, or feathered companions to think adoption first. “That’s been our message for years,” said Jennifer Scarlett, co-president of the San Francisco SPCA.

In most cases adopted pets work out better for the animal and the human, notes Deb Campbell, spokesperson for the city’s Animal Control Commission. “People who impulsively buy pets tend to have more problems,” she said.

In this city alone, there are too many unwanted dogs and cats — many the result of backyard breeders and owners who fail to get their animals spayed or neutered. And with the recession, more people have been forced to give up their pets. So adoptable creatures abound.

If dogs are your thing, the SPCA (www.sfspca.org) and the city shelter (www.animalshelter.sfgov.org) have dozens waiting for the right home. So do several local rescue groups. Wonder Dog Rescue (www.wonderdogrescue.org), Rocket Dog Rescue (www.rocketdogrescue.org), Family Dog Rescue (www.norcalfamilydogrescue.org), and Grateful Dogs Rescue (www.gratefuldogsrescue.org) all offer large and small pups of all ages and breeds for adoption— you can even snag a ex-racer from Golden State Greyhound Rescue (www.goldengreyhounds.com).

Many adoption programs are able to give you the lowdown on your prospective pet’s personality. “Our dogs all live in foster homes, so we have a real sense of what they’re like and how they interact,” says Wonder Dog’s Linda Beenau.

Muttville (www.muttville.org) specializes in placing older dogs. “With a senior dog, you know exactly what you’re going to get,” said Sherri Franklin, the group’s founder. “We evaluate the people who are looking to adopt, evaluate the dogs, and try to fill everyone’s need. We’re matchmakers.”

Shelters and rescue groups spend a lot of money making sure the animals they adopt out are in good medical condition (and won’t reproduce).

Cats are the most popular pets in the city, and the SPCA and the city shelter both offer cat adoptions. “We adopt out about 4,000 animals a year, and two-thirds are cats,” said Scarlett. There’s even a working-cat program for feral cats that may not be cuddly but can offer businesses an organic solution to rodent problems.

But the list doesn’t stop there. The city shelter “adopts out small exotic animals, fish, birds, poultry — you name it,” Campbell said. “It’s illegal to buy a rabbit in San Francisco, but you can adopt one from us.”

“Chickens are very popular pets these days,” she added. “They can give you breakfast.” (Tim Redmond)

 

FOSTER BLISS

We don’t know about you, but seeing precious pets cooped up in cramped shelter cages — well, it makes us knock over garbage cans, spray urine on an expensive sofa, and caterwaul at the moon. And this is a country that euthanizes between 50 percent and 70 percent of its shelter animals. Sorry to be a bummer. But you can help, even if you’re not ready for a 10-year commitment. Really — you can!

Fostering a pet serves a lot of purposes. First, for us flighty city creatures, it provides a low-commitment avenue to pet ownership. Second, to foster is to play a vital role in the shelter system. Many of the city’s smaller animal rescue organizations and humane societies couldn’t exist without a network of caring foster homes to nurture pets while their shelter facilities are full. And for some, saving animals from shelter euthanasia wouldn’t be possible without temporary homes.

“We’re a grassroots organization that doesn’t have a brick and mortar location besides our three adoption sites,” says Lana Bajsel of Give Me Shelter cat rescue, a group that typically cares for 54 cats at a time. “The fosters serve as our safety net. Their role is crucial.”

Cats and dogs aren’t the only cuddly creatures that can join your family for a short period of time. Wonder Cat (wondercatrescue.petfinder.com), Pets in Need (www.petsinneed.org), Furry Friends Rescue (www.furryfriendsrescue.org), and Rocket Dog Rescue do concentrate on dogs and cats, but you can also foster a rabbit through Save A Bunny (www.saveabunny.org) or birds through Mickaboo Companion Bird Rescue (www.mickaboo.org).

Foster systems provide a way for many shelters to save furry friends that are long-shot adoptees or would fare poorly in cages. The SPCA’s “fospice” program can match you with a chronically ill (but not contagious) pet that needs your love. As in most foster programs, the SPCA will pay for any medical care fospice animals need (although as a foster parent, you’re usually responsible for food and other daily needs).

Organizational requirements vary from group to group, but Bajsel says that most of the time all it takes to be a foster parent is a safe home (for example, no windows without screens that open onto busy streets), your landlord’s permission, and preferably, a little animal savvy. “But we’ve placed cats with fosters who have never had one before. In those cases, we can provide a little more hand holding” she says.

With such demonstrable need, most organizations will accept any help you can give — even if it means a little something before you leave on your summer vacation. It’s really contingent on you, the foster parent. “The time commitment can be as little as two weeks,” Bajsel says. (Caitlin Donohue)

 

VICARIOUS

Say your flea trap apartment or Scrooge-like landlord prohibits adopting or fostering — you can always volunteer at one of the many Bay Area organizations dedicated to animal welfare. Once you catch the scent of the needy pooches, cats, rats, and people dedicated to saving them, it’ll be tough not to volunteer.

Cat lovers will feel right at home at Give Me Shelter cat rescue, which can use your help with anything from petting a purr-er to cleaning cages to lending a hand at adoption events. If you’re more of a man’s best friend kind of gal or boy, lend a hand at one of the city’s incredible dog shelters. Muttville can hook you up with a variety of ways to get involved, including matching elderly dogs with lonely older folks as part of its heart-melting “seniors for seniors” program.

Rocket Dog Rescue is another all-breed dog rescue organization with a mission to save animals “at the speed of light.” Learn more at one of its volunteer orientations on second Sundays of the month.

Bad Rap (www.badrap.org) stands for Bay Area Dog Lovers Responsible About Pit Bulls, a group that’s serious about reeducating the public about pits, as well as getting perfectly adoptable pits placed with loving owners. Volunteers with the group will discover the secret world of big, barrel-headed sweethearts — and their ardent admirers. Bad Rap needs volunteers who can show up on Saturdays to train pits on leash skills at Berkeley Animal Care Service.

It doesn’t take an overly sappy soul to see the appeal in puppies and kitties, but can all our rodent people please stand up? Rattie Ratz (www.rattieratz.com) is a sweet-hearted organization in Woodside that rescues rats and treats these surprisingly amenable pets with respect. The group is all about rat rescue, resources, and referrals, and needs volunteers to help with animal therapy programs, adoption, fostering, and education.

Finally, we know that some of the sweetest creatures can’t be happily held — but they can still use your help! You can lend a hand at the Marine Mammal Center (www.marinemammalcenter.org) by getting trained to find and transport stranded animals and bring them to medical centers. Wild Care also (www.wildcarebayarea.org) has plenty of volunteer opportunities to help save Bay Area wildlife — it needs folks to work the hotline call center, do outreach education, and work directly with pet hospital staff. (Hannah Tepper)

American Idol: Elvis and the Lion Queen

Zelda Bronstein
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American Idol: Elvis and the Lion Queen

I was out at the SPJ FOI Awards event early in the evening, so I missed the first few performances, but no worries: Vivian and Michael were taking excellent notes and filled me in. And the best stuff came at the end anyway.


First: What was UP with J-Lo’s hair? I can’t find any pix on the web (Idol is insanely protective of its imagery) but trust me: She looked like something out of the Lion King. And the leopard-print dress didn’t help much. It’s a jungle out there, Jennifer. Grrr.


Next: The background video/light show continues to be utterly moronic, mixing psychedelia and syrup pretty much at random. With the millions they’re making from the Ford commercials, they could get a decent designer.


Also: These people are all so young. The night’s theme was picking a song from the year you were born; for Scotty, that was 1993. As his backstage producers noted, “I have a pair of jeans that were born in 1993.” Five of the finalists aren’t even old enough to buy a drink. No OGs in the lineup this year; Paul clocks in as the senior citizen at 26.


The baby and kid pics were cute; I loved watching Scotty as Halloween Elvis. And with 12 contestants, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for nonsense; the show kept moving. Oh: Casey’s back form the hospital and seems fine.


The details: Naima does “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” Eh. From Viv: “J-Lo thought it was a little pitchy and Randy agreed. Really, it was just okay.”


Paul: Elton John. “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” Not Sir Elton’s best song, not Paul’s best performance.


Thia: “Colors of the Wind.” Again, nothing special.


So overall a slow start — until James hit the stage with Bon Jovi. Steven Tyler was so impressed he offered to quit Aerosmith (can you really quit a band that isn’t really there anymore?) and join him onstage. The kid can rock.


Haley: Whitney Houston. Oops.


Stefano, the guy who almost got sent home, turned the entire show around with “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” His parents weren’t out of diapers when Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes first released that, but somebody else did it 22 years ago, so it counts. Perfect song for him, perfect rendition of a tough piece.


Pia: Whitney Houston, too. The girl is drop-dead beautiful and has a stunning voice — but that horrid white outfit looked like someone had wrapped her in a plastic garbage bag. (“You can’t say it made her look fat,” Jean told me harshly. And it didn’t, really, because she isn’t, but it might have.) Hideous, I almost couldn’t listen to the song. 


Scotty is always solid, born to be a country singer. He’s so good it’s almost boring.


Karen: Marge Simpson hairdo. Devo-meets-Vegas outfit. The song was okay, and the interview with her mom was too cute for words, but next time let mom check the look before you go out the door, okay?


Casey went on with his bass and tried to be Kurt Cobain — and oddly, it worked. Kind of scary, actually. But it worked. Steven: “Crazy and talented — that’s the goop that great stuff was made of.” J-lo still thinks he’s sexy. Grrrr, Lion Queen.


Lauren’s got the flu, but did a great job with Melissa Ethridge. Jacob tried Heart, and failed.


Naima, Haley and Jacob — bottom three. And Naima’s going home. Tune in tomorrow; I’m never right.

Waste not

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Waste not

sarah@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has delayed consideration of a city waste disposal contract while officials investigate a broad range of questions ranging from logistical considerations to whether to break up Recology’s current garbage collection monopoly.

Is it feasible to move the city’s entire infrastructure for waste and recycling to the Port of San Francisco? Would it be more sustainable to barge or rail the city’s trash directly from the port rather than drive it across the Bay Bridge to Oakland every day? Considering that recyclables get shipped from Oakland to Asia anyway, why not send them by barge rather than truck? Or is that idea just an empty gesture since recycles, mostly paper products, consitute only 10 percent of the waste stream?

Some of these questions are being studied as part of a survey the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) is trying to complete by April, others as part of a longer-term investigation by the Department of Environment (DoE). At LAFCO’s Feb. 28 meeting, commissioners requested a survey of how other jurisdictions in the Bay Area procure trash collection, hauling, and disposal contracts.

Although the studies differ in scope and duration, both were triggered by a Feb. 3 Budget and Legislative Analyst (BLA) report that revealed that the annual cost to ratepayers of San Francisco’s waste system is $206 million. Yet only the $11 million landfill contract is being put out to competitive bid (see “Garbage Curveball,” 02/08/11).

The BLA report revealed that a 1932 ordinance intended to address territorial disputes around trash collection and transportation in San Francisco ultimately gave Recology (formerly NorCal Waste) a monopoly on all post-collection recycling, consolidation, composting, long-distance transport to landfills, and waste disposal contracts. The report triggered a political firestorm by recommending that the city replace existing trash collection and disposal laws with legislation that would require competitive bidding on all waste contracts and that rates for residential and commercial trash collection become subject to Board of Supervisors approval.

Faced with these recommendations, the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee asked Feb. 9 for a two-month delay on DoE’s proposal to award Recology a 10-year contract to dispose of San Francisco’s municipal solid waste at Recology’s Ostrom Road landfill Yuba County when its contract at Waste Management’s Altamont landfill expires.

DoE officials predict the WM contract will expire in 2015. But company representatives estimate the contract will last much longer, based on reduced volumes that San Francisco has been trucking to Altamont.

Sup. John Avalos, a LAFCO commissioner, requested that the LAFCO study include a map to give folks “a visual” of landfill locations throughout the greater Bay Area. “And there’s been an interesting discussion about the use of barging,” Avalos said, pointing to the flotilla of barges involved in building the Bay Bridge, which could be repurposed when that jobs ends. “A new maritime use could help the port raise revenue and reinvigorate other maritime uses on its property.”

At that point in the hearing, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, the vice chairman of LAFCO, floated his “alternative barge plan,” under which only recyclables would get sent across the Bay to Oakland. Noting that he has met with Port Director Monique Moyer and Office of Economic and Workforce Development staff, Mirkarimi said that “the port is not equipped to deal with solid waste. But it is equipped to deal with recyclables, so this is something we should pursue.”

But Sup. David Campos, the chairman of LAFCO, clarified that the survey should still include a study of barging all trash. “Barging is complicated, but this is about providing basic information,” he said.

Records show the port reached out to DoE in 2009 with a letter that identified rail (but not barging) as an environmentally sustainable mode for moving waste from the city to its next landfill site.

In a June 23, 2009 letter to the DoE, Moyer and David Gavrich, president and CEO of the SF Bay Railroad (SFBR), stated that “rail directly from the port can not only minimize environmental impacts, it can provide an anchor of rail business for the port and a key economic development engine for the Bayview-Hunters Point community and the city as a whole.”

Recology’s trucks currently collect and haul about half the city’s waste to its recycling center, which sits on port-owned land at Pier 96. After the recyclables are offloaded for processing, the trucks haul the rest of the garbage through the Bayview and back onto the freeway to Brisbane, where it is loaded onto bigger trucks that haul the trash over the Bay Bridge each night to WM’s Altamont landfill near Livermore.

“It would seem most efficient to not double- or triple-handle the waste but to put it directly onto rail at the port instead,” Moyer and Gavrich wrote in 2009. “Collection vehicles could then go directly back out onto their routes, reducing time, fuel, emissions, and traffic impacts.”

The pair noted that SFBR and its affiliate Waste Solutions Group have used rail to haul more than 2 million tons of waste directly from the port in the past 15 years, using gondolas and 12-foot high municipal solid waste (MSW) containers on flat cars. They included an aerial photo showing Recology’s central recycling facility at Pier 96 and the extensive rail infrastructure and barge options that surround the facility.

But DoE never got back to them, Gavrich recalled last week as he fired up a SFBR locomotive and rode the rail tracks that crisscross the 20-acre port-owned facility that lies between SFBR’s outfit, Recology’s Pier 96 recycling facility, and the bay that is currently home to idle barges and rail cars that sit rusting a stone’s throw from the economically depressed Bayview.

“All that’s needed is two to four acres for an excellent transfer station,” Gavrich said. “Barge and rail access could not be better. It’s just waiting to be developed.”

In February, DoE officials told the Budget & Finance Committee that they had looked into and rejected barging as an option. But it turns out they did not conduct an official study. “There hasn’t been a study to date,” DoE’s Assmann said March 7, when the Guardian requested DoE’s barging report. “We had a discussion about it, but no formal policy.”

Assmann noted that DoE asked waste management companies that bid on the city’s landfill disposal contract to include a barging option. “But nobody did,” Assmann said, referring to Recology and Waste Management, the two finalists in the city’s landfill disposal contract bid process.

Assmann said DoE is currently doing a long-term study into three transportation and facilities options for waste using port facilities: the first option would involve moving the entire infrastructure for waste and recycling to the port. The second would be to use the port as a transfer facility for garbage, and truck, barge, or rail haul garbage from the port. The third would involve barging recyclables only from Pier 96.

Assmann notes that the majority of infrastructure for the city’s waste system is at Recology’s Tunnel Road facility on the San Francisco-Brisbane border, a situation he claims would make it impossible to design, permit, finance, and build new facilities at the port before 2015.

But Barry Skolnick, WM’s vice president for Bay Area operations, told the Guardian that 2016 is a more realistic estimate of the landfill expiration date. “At the current disposal rate, we do not believe San Francisco will exhaust its disposal volumes under the existing Altamont landfill contract until 2016 at the earliest,” Skolnick said. “There is plenty of time for the Board of Supervisors and LAFCO to explore best practices and options for its collection, recycling, composting, transferring, and residual waste disposal services.”

Skolnick noted that WM discussed extending the Altamont contract at the Budget & Finance Committee hearing and the LAFCO hearing, and is proposing to extend the city’s current contract by several years.

“We are preparing a proposed three-year extension of the disposal agreement for San Francisco’s review this week,” Skolnick said. “The extension would involve a price increase for disposal but less than the disposal rate offered under the proposed Recology rail haul to Ostrom Road in Yuba County. The three-year extension would provide disposal at the Altamont until 2019 or 2020.”

But Assmann noted that Recology, which currently pays the port $1 million a year to lease Pier 96, wants to expand its Brisbane facility on Recology-owned land. “We have offered to analyze [the Brisbane expansion] option,” Assmann said, estimating that a new transfer facility would cost $40 to $60 million, while a new integrated facility would cost $200 to $450 million.

“If the infrastructure moved to the port, that would have big positive implications for the port,” Assmann said, acknowledging that the port would lose money if Recology relocates entirely to Brisbane. Plus, Brisbane might demand fees from a new facility, he noted. “But consolidation would save ratepayers money in the long run because the operation would become more efficient.”

Unlike the LAFCO study, DoE won’t have its report ready by April, when the city needs to decide on the landfill contract.

“Our proposal is to look at the bigger picture,” Assmann said. “If the board approves Recology’s landfill contract, we’ll still go ahead and do it. The board can always delay its landfill decision. But this looks at infrastructure the landfill agreement won’t impact.”

DoE recommends working with Recology to implement a pilot program to barge recyclables from Pier 96 to the Port of Oakland as it studies long term infrastructure options including locating infrastructure at the port, Assmann said. DoE also recommends that the proposed plan to award Recology the landfill contract and facilitation agreement remain the same “since our analysis shows (and the port concurs) that all options for utilizing the port for any kind of landfill transportation would require a permitting process that would last a minimum of five years and a total timeline of at least seven to nine years.”

So far, the landfill contract has not come before the full board because of delays and continuations at the Budget & Finance Committee. As Judson True, legislative aide to Board President David Chiu, recently observed, the process over the last few months has raised more questions than answers, including unexpected angles such as how the port can be better utilized and the implications of the 1932 refuse collection and disposal ordinance. “We need to get these answers before we can move forward,” True said. “We all have a lot of work to do before we can figure out what’s best for the city and pick a path.”

But Gavrich hopes history doesn’t repeat itself and that Chiu shows some leadership on the garbage contract hornet’s nest. “There are so many compelling reasons and benefits for the city — but that hasn’t stopped the city from doing the wrong thing in the past,” Gavrich said. Gavrich pointed to 2007, when all members of the board except Sup. Chris Daly voted to give the sewage sludge contract to Recology even though its bid was $3 million higher than the competitor, S&S Trucking.

A Dec. 14 2007 San Francisco Chronicle article by Robert Selna quoted Mirkarimi as saying that a key reason for awarding the contract to Recology was that it was a union company. “That’s the elephant in the room,” Mirkarimi said, framing the board’s decision to go with Recology as being about “the devil we know.” Selna recently left the Chronicle to work as Mirkarimi’s legislative aide.

Mirkarimi’s recent suggestion that LAFCO explore barging recyclables as a pilot program has Gavrich worried. “Saying let’s explore simply barging recyclables makes no sense. It’s a fraction of what makes barge/rail haul economically viable.” Gavrich said. “It would put a greater burden on the ratepayer than the economic and environmentally inefficient system they have in place at Pier 96. The port should get the deal. It would be a cash cow.”

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