Guns

After the tear gas clears

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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After the tear gas clears

yael@sfbg.com

After a chaotic day of marches and confrontations between police and protesters Jan 28, I was arrested along with about 400 others who were trapped by police in front of the downtown Oakland YMCA. Seven of us were journalists.

The goal of the march was to take over an abandoned building — an the vacant Kaiser Convention Center, a city-owned building that’s been closed since 2005, was a prime target.

I have not yet been able to retrieve my property, including my recorder and notebook, which is being held by the Oakland Police Department. What follows is a pieced-together account and a perspective on what the events of Jan. 28.

I spend 20 hours behind bars, and missed the later parts of the action. But I was able to observe what happened in jail and make some sense of what happened.

Occupy people are constantly debating tactics and goals, and for many, the idea of occupying a vacant building made sense. When Occupy Oakland had a camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza, also known as Oscar Grant Plaza, and commonly shortened to OGP, it created a strong community. That community bridged divides between the homeless and the housed, between students and labor organizers, and between Oakland residents of different races, genders and levels of ability in an unprecedented fashion.

The camp had a kitchen that fed hundreds of people everyday and a network of shared tents and blankets which welcomed in hundreds who otherwise would have slept on the streets, often feeling isolated from other residents of their city and made to feel inferior.

The camp was repeatedly raided, Occupiers were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets, and when OGP was cleared out, the community no longer had a home. And the police started that violence.

That was the practical reason for wanting to occupy a vacant building: to have a social center for Occupy Oakland.

Of course, there are other reasons. There’s the question that many squatters and homeless advocacy groups have been making for decades: why let buildings lie vacant while people freeze on the street?

Remember: The building that Occupy wanted to occupy is public property, and right now nobody is using if for anything.

In one exchange in jail, a guard asked a protester why the activists thought they had the right to take over a vacant building. “I mean, it’s not yours,” he insisted. The protester replied that many vacant buildings are government-owned and therefore public.

“So it’s the government’s,” the cop said.

“But I pay taxes,” the protester responded.

“Me too!” replied the cop. “It’s mine!”

“It’s both of ours,” smiled the protester. “It’s all of ours.”

That’s what made the convention center action such a clear and easy political decision.

A lot of people in Occupy would go further, saying that at a time of a severe housing crisis, it’s perfectly legitimate to take over privately owned buildings that are sitting there vacant. It’s part of the central argument of Occupy — that corporations and the rich unfairly own and continue to acquire much more wealth than the majority of people. For many people, owning a vacant building and doing nothing with it, while hundreds freeze on the streets, is a crime itself.

 

UP AGAINST THE COPS

Then there’s the question of the police — and violence.

The word “nonviolent” has a specific meaning in the history of political movements. Martin Luther King Jr. defined it in his essay “The Meaning of Non-Violence”: “If you are hit you must not hit back; you must rise to the heights of being able to accept blows without retaliating … But it also means that you are constantly moving to the point where you refuse to hate your enemy. You are constantly moving to the point where you love your enemy.”

It’s a philosophy but also, in political terms, a tactic.

Many of the people who make up Occupy Oakland get their start as activists organizing against police brutality in a city that has longstanding problems with violent and undisciplined officers.

Police Chief Howard Jordan said in a press release that “It became clear that the objective of this crowd was not to peacefully assemble and march, but to seek opportunity to further criminal acts, confront police, and repeatedly attempt to illegally occupy buildings.”

It was certainly clear that the intent of the crowd was to illegally occupy a building. And any honest assessment of Occupy Oakland would have to acknowledge that some members are not wedded to King-style nonviolent civil disobedience. (Neither, by the way, were a lot of the protest movements of the 1960s.) Many protesters wore masks and bandanas to disguise their identities and protect them from tear gas and pepper spray, and the march was led by protesters with makeshift shields, which suggests that they expected to be attacked. You could certainly argue that what those people were doing wasn’t confrontation; it was self-defense.

Frankly, it made sense to be prepared: In other Occupy Oakland actions, police have attacked with batons, tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and smoke bombs. And for quite a few Oakland residents, the police have always been seen as an outside force that can’t be trusted.

In fact, violence did break out. Many, including myself, have eyes still stinging from tear gas. I saw several wounds caused by rubber bullets shot at protesters. I spoke individually to at least a dozen people — one of them a pregnant woman — who were struck with police batons.

And protesters did not remain peaceful while this violence was being used against them.

Some picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back towards police; that much I saw. I also saw protesters throw empty plastic bottles at police.

According to the police, they also threw metal pipes, rocks and bricks. According to the protesters, they threw mainly empty plastic bottles and fruit at police. But as protesters often say of the police, “They’re the ones who showed up with the guns.” If the cops didn’t want violence, why unleash such an arsenal of weapons?

People got hurt, protesters and police alike. Several bystanders who had nothing to do with the situation were swept up in the mass arrest.

The city of Oakland, already in dire financial straits, likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars reacting to the protests. Police claim that they were unable to sufficiently respond to violent crimes over the weekend, including five murders, because they were overwhelmed with Occupy troublemakers.

Of course, city officials were the ones who decided to arrest 400 people — with all the expense that involves.

There are, at this point, no reports of serious injuries to any police officers. However, at least a dozen protesters had welts on their faces or bodies from being beaten by clubs or shot with rubber bullets. One woman was shot in both arms with rubber bullet; one man was shot in the face with rubber bullets while holding a video camera to document the events. Several protesters were shoved to the ground and received wounds on their faces while being arrested. Police raised their rubber-bullet rifles to the faces of protesters throughout the day, threatening attacks. A rubber bullet to the face can cause brain damage and blindness.

 

 

DID IT HAVE TO HAPPEN?

How could this have been prevented?

Police say that “while peaceful forms of expression and free speech rights will be facilitated, acts of violence, trespassing, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated.” But 40 people were arrested during an ongoing Occupy Oakland vigil in the first weeks of January for having “illegal property” at OGP in what many saw as clearly a peaceful expression of First Amendment rights.

On KGO radio Jan. 29, Chief Jordan said that he has allowed Occupy Oakland to protest without a permit and would continue to do so, but those early January raids were ostensibly due to permit violations — violations of the terms of a permit that Occupy Oakland did in fact have.

There’s no question: The police response to Occupy Oakland over the past few months has caused some people in the movement to get more radical.

Many Occupy Oakland-affiliated medics condemned those who threw objects at police, saying that they provoked a backlash that caused more injuries. Many Oakland residents who might be in line with the socio-economic critique presented by the Occupy movement feel endangered and confused by marches that result in the massive use of police weapons in broad daylight. A lot of people would rather protest in a lot of ways that less resemble urban warfare.

On the other hand, there are also ways that Oakland officials could have prevented the consequences of weapons deployed and 400 arrested Jan. 28. They could, for example, have allowed protesters to occupy the vacant building.

When protesters seized a building Jan. 20 in San Francisco, police first attempted to prevent them. They lined up in front of the targeted building. They deployed pepper spray and struck several protesters with batons. When they were unsuccessful, and protesters entered the building from the back, they opted to block the surrounding streets and wait until the time seemed right to enter the situation and make arrests. Police spokesperson Carlos Manfredi told me that the cops were not going to rush into the situation and were trying to prevent injury and violence.

The Kaiser Convention Center has been vacant for years. The city of Oakland recently made plans to sell it to its Redevelopment Agency, but that plan fell into legal limbo when Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB26, a bill that dissolved all California redevelopment agencies.

At this point, nobody at Oakland City Hall has any plans whatsoever for the big, empty structure.

Why not allow Occupy to use the convention center? It’s not downtown, where Mayor Quan says businesses have been adversely affected by Occupy Oakland’s presence. It would give the movement a chance to stop focusing on trying to occupy spaces and start focusing on benefiting the community with food, shelter, and community programs that they provided when they had a camp. It would give the building tenants who could be held responsible for maintaining it. It might even help get Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Police Department out of the cycle of violence that they have been spiraling into for months.

Each time arrests occur, each time violence occurs, both sides blame the other. Both sides are correct that they were provoked. Both sides are correct that something that they think is worth defending was violated — for the cops, it’s the law. For the protesters, it’s the right of the people to assemble.

In fact, many Oakland residents have experienced violence at the hands of the Oakland Police Department for years before Occupy began. There was already a mass movement formed around the murder of Oscar Grant, and thousands of people fed up with police murders of unarmed, often black, suspects.

In recent decades, other radical groups, notably the Black Panthers, insisted that their community lacked basic needs because the city of Oakland refused to prioritize them. The Black Panther free breakfast program served food in a strikingly similar way to Occupy Oakland. Black Panthers were also notorious for carrying guns to defend themselves against police violence.

Occupy Oakland protesters (unlike Tea Party members) certainly don’t carry guns. But, more and more, they cry “fuck the pigs” as much as any Panther.

For much of the Occupy movement’s 99 percent, unjust actions by banks, corporations, and the government officials that they have often bought and paid for are the worst problems facing the United States today. For others, particularly the poor and people of color, these problems are magnified and exacerbated by the fact that they feel the threat of police harassment every day. For years, they’ve understood that police disproportionately do not investigate or solve crimes that happen to them and their families.

 

 

THE RADICALS AND THE BROADER MOVEMENT

The Oakland General Assembly Jan. 29 was the biggest it’s been in weeks. While there were still over 300 people in jail, 300 more came out to get involved with the meeting. That happened at the same time that many who felt that inexcusable violence and property destruction occurred Jan. 28 and concluded they could no longer have anything to do with Occupy Oakland.

It’s a challenge for the movement nationally, too: How do you accept and encourage the people whose legitimate anger at economic injustice and police abuse turns them toward more radical responses — and at the same time make room for a people who want nothing to do with the black bloc Fs, vandalism, and confrontation with the police?

There are tactical issues with the way the building occupation was planned. Many who were completely in line with the concept felt unsafe and uncomfortable with the secretive nature of the organizers who planned it. The location of the building targeted for occupation was kept secret for practical reasons; police could easily prevent a successful takeover. Supporters must often be led to the locations of planned takeovers without knowing where the action is and how they’ll get there. But how do you reconcile this with the transparency required when organizers are leading more than 1,000 people who want to use tactics they feel comfortable with and make their own choices?

Occupy Oakland is asking the people to imagine a world where property rights wouldn’t prevent them from doing all the good that they could do with a building like the Kaiser Convention Center. They must also ask themselves to imagine a world in which goals like a building occupation can be achieved in a way that everyone involved is able to consent to their involvement.

These debates continue to occur at Occupy Oakland. Some will leave the movement, some will join. Some will take the ideas and try to manifest them in new and different ways. Participants in Occupy Oakland desperately want basic needs of food and shelter met for their community members, and for the system that governs the city to do so in a way that allows people to thrive when it comes to health, education, and opportunities for creativity and growth. They think that they have the beginnings of a community and a process that can achieve those visions, better than the city government ever has, and they care more about achieving it than respecting the property rights of the owners of abandoned buildings.

Plenty of drama at the Mirkarimi hearing

Zelda Bronstein
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Plenty of drama at the Mirkarimi hearing

I’m glad I got to the courtroom early; by the time Judge Susan Breall called the case of People v. Ross Mirkarimi, there wasn’t a single seat available, and Her Honor wasn’t allowing standing room.

What followed was a quick “not guilty” plea to three misdemeanor charges – and then a session that lasted more than two hours, with a long interruption, as the prosecution and defense argued over whether Mirkarimi was such a threat to his wife and two-year-old son that he should be forced to stay away from them and avoid any form of contact until after what is expected to be an early March trial.

In the process, Mirkarimi’s wife, Eliana Lopez, made a passionate plea against the restraining order and Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth Aguilar-Tarchi introduced new evidence to support her claims that the newly elected Sheriff is not only guilty of domestic violence but too dangerous to allow into his own home.

In the end, Breall – who once worked as a prosecutor in domestic violence cases – issued the order forbidding the sheriff from any contact with his wife and child, and told Mirkarimi and his attorney, Robert Waggener, to return to court Jan. 23 to set a trial date.

Breall angered Lopez – and some courtroom observers – by saying she was concerned that the 36-year-old Venezuelan soap opera star was new to the country and lacked fluency in English and a family support system. Waggener noted that the length of time Lopez had lived in the United States and her language skills weren’t part of the evidence in the case and had nothing to do with the need for a protective order. He later told me that it was unusual for a judge to mention or consider that sort of information in a restraining order.

In fact, Breall noted that she had learned about Lopez’ background from reading the newspapers, leading Waggener to insist that the judge stick to the facts before her and not rely on news accounts that the attorney said were inaccurate.

At times, the proceedings turned bizarre: After Lopez had been identified by her full name and discussed at some length, her attorney noted that the last name and address of a domestic violence victim should not be in the public record. Breall agreed, and from then on referred to her only as “Eliana L.”

A little late for that, of course: The local news media have put her picture and full name on the front pages and the airwaves repeatedly in the past week.

Early in the proceedings, Breall asked if Lopez had seen a victim advocate in the District Attorney’s Office, noting that such a visit was part of standard procedure in these kinds of cases. Shortly afterward, Lopez left the courtroom; we later learned she had walked down the hall to the D.A.’s Office and met with the advocate.

Waggener asked repeatedly during the afternoon that statements from Lopez be taken in a closed courtroom, citing her privacy rights. Breall declined, and refused to put any documents under court seal.

After delaying the case for roughly an hour while Lopez had her meeting and Waggener read over the documents that had already been published in local newspapers but had only that day been provided to him, the judge came back and heard arguments on the stay-away order – and we learned more about the evidence that the D.A. will be presenting in the case.

Waggener noted that after reading the documents he had received, he saw nothing that would justify barring Mirkarimi from seeing his family. Aguilar-Tarchi started to discuss what the now-famous videotape that neighbor Ivory Madison made of Lopez showing a bruise and discussing a confrontation with her husband, but Lopez’s lawyer interrupted with an interesting new claim: She said that when Lopez had met with Madison, who is a lawyer, she believed that everything she said would be protected by attorney-client privilege and thus shouldn’t be admitted as evidence.

That will no doubt come up later – but for now, Breall wasn’t interested.

Then Lopez took the stand.

Speaking in English – relatively fluent English – she first chided the judge for the comments about her language skills and her residency in the U.S. “This idea that I’m a poor little immigrant is insulting,” she said. “It’s a little racist.”

She said that, rather than being adrift without a support system, she was someone who had been living on her own for 16 years, had her own career and her own apartment in Venezuela (one larger and nicer than her home in San Francisco). She said she’s spent time in Los Angeles and New York and had traveled in Mexico, London, Tibet, Europe and all over Latin America.

“I don’t need the support of my (extended) family,” she said. “I support my family.”

She also said that the press coverage, while unfair, was nothing she couldn’t handle: “I’ve been working in TV for 15 years,” she noted. “Check out the press in Venezuela. This is nothing.”

Then she got into her point: She saw no need for a protective order, didn’t fear her husband and found the whole idea abhorrent. “The violence against me is that I don’t have my family together,” she said. “This country is trying to pull my family apart, and that is the real violence.”

Aguilar-Tarchi wasn’t done, though. After Lopez finished, she repeated some of the allegations in the video, but then described text messages that Lopez had allegedly sent to Madison. “She told a neighbor that she was afraid,” the prosecutor said. “She asked if she could change the locks on the door. She asked if she would have to go to the police or if the police would come to her.”
The text messages also stated, Aguilar-Tarchi said, that Mirkarimi was scared and didn’t want the story to come out and that he had taken Lopez and their son, Theo, on a vacation to Monterey in an effort to prove that everything was fine. “My little Theo is so confused,” one of the messages allegedly said.

Waggener argued that the case wasn’t yet on trial and that much of the evidence was hearsay. And, he said, “in terms of what this court sees all the time, broken bones etc., this is on the low end.” He explained that the couple had been together from the day of the incident – New Year’s Eve – until the day the original protective order was issued, “with no complaints or evidence of violence.” He called the description of the videotape (which hasn’t been shown in court) “highly distorted.”

Breall said some nice (if somewhat condescending) things about Lopez, who she called “charming,” but wasn’t swayed. “I am going to treat this case like any other case,” she said, issuing the order that would keep Mirkarimi away from his wife and child until the end of the trial. Waggener later said he would come back to Breall to seek a modification in that order next week. Breall said the trial would start no later than March 5.

(In an interesting side note, the prosecution demanded that Mirkarimi give up the three guns in his possession. I never knew he kept guns in his house. At any rate, they’ve already been turned over to the authorities.)

I walked out thinking: This is just awful. There’s really nothing positive you can say about it.

I’ve known Ross Mirkarimi for years; I’ve never seen any hint of violence in his behavior. Of course, I’m not that close to him, and I don’t know anything about his marriage. Still, somebody who has been part of the progressive community for a long time has been accused of something really terrible, and it has a lot of us shaking our heads and, frankly, wondering what to think. You want to stand by a friend who’s in trouble (and lord knows, I have plenty of friends who’ve been arrested and charged with all manner of crimes, and some of them were guilty as sin, and they’re still my friends).

But I’ve also helped a close friend through episodes of domestic violence, and I can tell you it isn’t a minor deal, or a private family affair (as Mirkarimi foolishly and inappropriately stated). It’s a serious crime, and for many years, the cops and the courts didn’t treat it that way. And because it used to be really hard for women to get stay-away orders (and in some areas, it still is), women have been badly hurt and sometimes killed.

It’s only because progressive political leaders (the same progressives my blog trolls love trash at the slightest provocation) demanded changes in the law that the rules now allow for prosecution even if the alleged victim doesn’t cooperate. It’s only because of progressive reforms that a case like this is even in court.

And I agree with those reforms. As I’ve said before, there’s no excuse for intentionally injuring anyone – and there’s less than no excuse for injuring your spouse. If that’s what Mirkarimi did, he should be held accountable. It doesn’t matter what side of the political divide he’s on. If he’s guilty of domestic violence, I’m not going to make excuses for him.

More than a misdemeanor charge is on the line. All Mirkarimi has done professionally is progressive politics and law-enforcement, and by most accounts, neither one has much room for someone who has a DV rap. (Although I have to say – there are an awful lot of cops who have DV allegations against them and are still on duty.)

If Mirkarimi weren’t the elected sheriff, this case might well have been handled a lot differently. He could have accepted a misdemeanor plea, taken DV courses, gone into therapy, tried to put his marriage back together. That’s pretty standard in first-offense cases. But to do that would be to admit something he can’t easily admit to and remain in office.

So Mirkarimi knows his only real chance is to win a “not guilty” verdict and then try to rebuild his reputation. Given the stakes, I can’t imagine that he would so much as raise his voice half an octave against Lopez over the next few weeks; one more allegation it would be the end of everything. But Breall must be worried (as any modern judge would be in any prominent DV case) that if she refused to issue the restraining order and something bad did happen, her ass would be very much on the line. So she did the obvious thing.

And the media circus continues.

The only possible bright side (and I always look for a bright side) is that a lot of people who weren’t talking about domestic violence are now discussing it, on the front pages. They’re talking about how a lot of women are trapped by batterers, how they’re afraid to testify and can’t (or don’t want to) leave, how all of us, particularly the police and the courts, are responsible for protecting victims who can’t find a way to escape. And that’s a whole lot of women.

All of that said, we have to remember that Mirkarimi is still innocent until proven guilty. The mayor has no business removing him from office at this point; he hasn’t been convicted of anything. It’s only a few weeks until his trial (Mirkarimi has made it clear he wants this over as quickly as possible, so by law he has to face a jury within 45 days). After that, if he’s guilty, the mayor and the supervisors can worry about whether to vacate the Sheriff’s Office – unless Mirkarimi makes that decision himself.

SF defends cops who killed an unarmed innocent

Sasha Cuttler
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SF defends cops who killed an unarmed innocent

San Francisco is denying responsibility and aggressively defending the police officers who shot an unarmed man in the darkened attic of a Parkmerced home they entered without a warrant and where no crime had been committed. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week rejected arguments that they were immune from responsibility and allowed the family’s civil lawsuit over the 2006 incident to move forward.

Compounding the fact that the city is pushing hard in the courts in what seems to be a tragic and obviously wrongful shooting is the fact that the officers who did it are still on the streets, with their guns on active patrols, even though one of them was also later indicted for stealing cash from a police evidence locker.

The shooting of 25-year-old Asa Sullivan by Officers Michelle Alvis and John Keesor has been covered extensively by the Guardian, from the early days when police refused to explain why they busted into the home where Sullivan lived to later coverage of communications in which Alvis and Keesor were told to back off by SFPD colleagues but didn’t, instead cornering Sullivan in a dark attic and shooting him 16 times because they say they mistakenly thought he had a gun.

We also covered the criminal indictment of Alvis two years later on charges of stealing $2,000 from a police evidence locker. A San Francisco jury later deadlocked on the case and it was dropped by the DA’s office. SFPD spokesperson Sgt. Michael Andraychak said he can’t comment on any internal discipline actions against the pair or on the current court case, but he did confirm that they are currently assign to Operations, which includes patrol and investigations.

Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith disputed the notion that the city is defending an inexcusable shooting. “We don’t think the shooting was wrongful, we think it was lawful,” he told us. Police were responding to a trespassing call from a security guard in the condo complex when they entered Sullivan’s home, and Keith said that seeing a shirt with blood on it gave them the right to enter the home, where they say Sullivan refused to surrender and threatened police.

But attorneys for Sullivan’s family dispute the police version of events and their story that the dead man threatened the cops that had cornered him, saying that the officers had no right to enter the house and that they attacked aggressively and didn’t heed the recommendation of fellow officers that they back off and de-escalate the situation.

And the court seemed to agree. As Judge Procter Hug wrote in the majority opinion: “Sullivan had not been accused of any crime. He was not a threat to the public and could not escape. He had not initially caused this situation. He had not brandished a weapon, spoken of a weapon or threatened to use a weapon.”

But as the Chronicle reported, the San Francisco Police Officers Association and other police groups fear the ruling will make officers liable for mistakes made during split second decisions. Well guess what, guys: It’s a tough job, for which you’re very well paid, and there need to be consequences when you murder innocent, unarmed civilians. And frankly, I think this precedent is just great because it will hopefully make cops think twice before they err on the side of just opening fire when things get tense.

“In the big butt category, there’s four awards”: What’s it like to vote in the AVN Awards?

Andrew Lam
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Guardian culture editor Caitlin Donohue will be live Tweeting the AVNs this year. For the latest in Lycra and non-judgemental observations, follow her @caitlindonohue

Once a year, the porn industry gathers to honor its own. Cash is dropped on sparkly stripper gowns, breasts are wedged into places that are too small for them, too-little or too-much time is spent on crafting acceptance speeches and: Viagra. Sometimes Flo Rida is there (this year Coolio will captain the official after-party) – but like an enthusiastic blow job, the Adult Video News Awards are always a triumphant good time. This weekend the ceremony and attendant fan expo are at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. The Guardian’s going to be there on the red carpet, obviously – but we thought we’d get you all hot-and-bothered with some sage words from two industry insiders – who happen to be members of the academy to boot.

Your skin flick experts are Chris Thorne and Steve Javors, who graciously submitted to phone interviews with us last week. Thorne is the founding editor of Xcritic.com, a Portland-based website that reviews stacks upon stacks of adult DVDs round-the-calendar. Thorne’s been voting in the awards for two years now, but has been following them “since the Tera Patrick-Jenna Jameson era.”

Javors is the managing editor of AVN Magazine, so he’s not only a voter in the awards, he also decides the nominations. It’s a small porn world, after all. He’s been voting for the awards for five years, our veteran judge. He’s confident that this year’s awards will continue to be the screaming climax of a time they’re always been. “We have a pretty successful formula,” he told us. “I think the challenge is just to top what we did last year.”

On being an AVN voter: 

Chris Thorne: It’s punishing. It’s punishing. I don’t think anybody quite realizes the magnitude of the task that is voting in the AVNs. It is by far the most demanding thing you can do in the adult industry.  The box of DVDs – we had two stacks of them, both around six feet high. We’re talking about high 800s to a thousand titles. Some titles are nominated for specific scenes, so you’re like okay, I’ve watched that scene, I don’t have to watch the rest of [the movie].

Big winner predictions:

CT: This year’s field is not as clear-cut as it was in years past. There were a lot of really good performances and good films, but in years past it was pretty darn clear that one or two movies would take it and go. Digital Playground’s Pirates and Pirates 2 — when those films came out it was pretty clear that they were above and beyond everything else that was going on. In terms of handicapping it, I think it’s going to be a difficult year. 

Steve Javors: I think Bobbi Starr had a spectacular year. She’s been a critics’ favorite for a few years now. She distinguished herself more so this year, she’s one to look out for. Also, the star of Portrait of Call Girl, Jessie Andrews, that movie should do well. With Jessie it’s her wide-eyed innocence that grabs you. She’s naturally beautiful, she’s 19, she looks like a girl form an American Apparel ad. I thinks that’s her appeal. I think this is going to be her star vehicle. She’s so sweet, so accommodating, super-professional.

Dark horse picks:

CT: I am particularly enamored with a company called New Sensations, their Romance series. [Xcritic.com] named one of the films from that series as our top title of the year. That was called Lost and Found. This was an interesting year for porn, it’s adjusted quite a bit for the recession – it’s found in the last couple years that it’s not recession-proof. One of the things it’s done is try to expand its audience. Lost and Found is a romantic comedy with sex. Also, Wicked Picture’s Horizon, Elegant Angel’s Stephen Soderberg-esque Portrait of a Call Girl, and Digital Playground’s Top Guns and Fighters. Vivid did a few notable parodies: Spiderman XXX, Superman XXX, The Incredible Hulk XXX, Wicked’s Rocki Whore Picture Show, that was really good! Sometimes you see something and you’re like, there’s actual filmcraft involved, it’s not just two hours of people fucking with a loose plot attached.

SJ: Brooklyn Lee might be one of those. Last year was her first full year in the business and she came out doing incendiary scenes in Spiderman XXX from Axel Braun and Vivid.

On the best part of the AVN Awards:

CT: In terms of the awards show, it’s gone from cool, to watching-paint-dry-boring, to absolute absurd. You never know if this year it’s going to be a good year or a bad year. My favorite parts are not on the program. Everyone knows each other, especially the performers. Some of them know each other quite intimately. They’re “on” when they’re on the red carpet, but there are some nice moments when they don’t have to be on and performing. Everybody kind of comes together, so there’s this nice opportunity to connect. 

On the worst part:

CT: The middle part of the awards show. It starts out really fun and exciting but there are hundreds of awards. Somewhere in the middle there it can feel like there’s no end in site. It’s like, there’s an award for best porn soundtrack? In the big butt category there’s four awards. Sometimes the acceptance speeches are longer than the Academy Awards. 

On who was cheated this year out of a nomination:

CT: Y’know, they nominate so many people. There are so many nominations. I think the nominations are extensive enough that they cover their bases. Sometimes there’s 15 nominations in a category.

On the evergreen appeal of DVD porn:

SJ: When people say the DVD market is dying – it’s not what it once was, but going through the list of nominees this year, you can see products that people want to buy. Viewership has moved to the Internet, but there’s tons of stuff that people want to own. Parodies have really propped up the DVD market. It’s unbelievable the quality of the parodies that have come out. It needs to be that way because otherwise you upset the fans. If you read the chat boards and go to Comic Con, see what goes on with the fans that are new audiences to porn – they’ve taken to these parodies in a big way. 

On his voting critiera for the Best Double Penetration Scene category: 

CT: How we evaluate sex scenes is not necessarily rocket science. Great sex scenes boil down to a couple key critieria. One, chemistry between the performers. It’s like fine wine, you know it when you see it. When two performers like each other — or maybe they don’t like each other but they have real chemistry. Two, you look at presentation – how do the three performers work with each other? Is it exciting to watch? Do you look at it and say wow, that looks painful? When you look at [a sex act] that’s – I don’t want to say on the fringe – you want to see it presented in a way that is exciting, titillating, it fulfills a fantasy that the viewer might have. Third, how is it shot? Are we close up and center on the penetration? Good directors can present scenes in a way where it’s not just that. 

On the evolution of the awards:

SJ: it’s really evolved, it’s become this gigantic event. Even if you’re not a fan, everyone and their mother has heard of the AVN Awards. It’s now broadcasted on Showtime, seen by millions of people – they’re still repeating last year’s show. It’s in its 29th year and it’s changed from a smaller ceremony for industry people in a small ballroom in Vegas to this grand spectacle that is certainly on par with the Golden Globes or other Hollywood awards show. Girls spend thousands of dollars on their dresses, Dave Attel is hosting this year. Dave’s a perfect fit for our business. He’s a big fan of the business, he knows all the girls. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article identified Rocki Whore Picture Show as a Vivid Entertainment production. It was actually made by Wicked Pictures.

Gun control, race, and the founding fathers

Zelda Bronstein
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27
Gun control, race, and the founding fathers

KPFA’s Mitch Jeserich, one of my favorite people on the radio, had a fascinating discussion this morning with Adam Winkler, who’s written an new book about the history of gun control. Everyone who fights with me on this blog knows I’m not a big fan of guns, and Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, doesn’t completely agree with me.

But there’s some interesting stuff in his book and it’s worth listening to the show — in part because it shows just how inconsistent the gun nuts have been over the years and how their claims about the Second Amendment don’t hold up when you look at history.

For starters, Winkler told Jeserich, the noble founding fathers, those folks who put the right to keep and bear arms in the founding document of this great nation, were not at all opposed to gun control. They had all kinds of gun laws — most notably laws barring black people from owning guns. They also required that all muskets be regularly inspected and registered.

The racial element of gun control is nothing new, but Winkler shows some of the hypocrisy: In the 1960s, when the Black Panthers began carrying loaded guns on the streets (for self-defense against violent, racist white cops) the California Legislature set out to limit the right to bear arms in public — and Ronald Reagan, that staunch Second-Amendment guy who is worshiped by the NRA, fully supported the restrictions. In fact, he said in public that nobody should have the right to carry a loaded weapon on a public street.

At least, not as long as black people were doing it.

Even the NRA was not founded as a pro-gun group. It emerged after the Civil War to teach northerners better marksmanship. That mission continues, to a certain extent — I still have my NRA Marksman First Class medal, earned in summer camp in the 1960s, when they let kids do shit like that. But these days, it’s all about fighting any limits at all on the right to carry any weapons you can imagine.

So it’s worth remembering: The gun lobby didn’t always lobby for free access to guns (particularly not for guns for African-Americans). And the folks who wrote the Second Amendment were all in favor of a “well-regulated militia” whose members — at that time, the general (white) populace — had to declare, register and present to government agents on a regular basis all of their firearms.

 

Our Weekly Picks: December 25-31

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 28

Doe Eye

When Maryam Qudus — sole member of local indie-pop project, Doe Eye — sings “I Hate You,” it’s hard to believe her. It’s cute as hell. But the point of the song is indeed that. She doesn’t hate the faceless “you,” but is tortured by the affection. It’s that kind of thoughtfulness with an added ear for pop charm that makes Doe Eye a project you can espouse. Doe Eye released the EP, Run, Run, Run, in August, and sure, it’s about as radio-friendly as you can get. But the instrumentation, with its orchestral and wavy synth touches, is undoubtedly inspired by indie-rock acts around today, be it Beach House or St. Vincent. (James H. Miller)

With The Trims, Pounders, and Miles the DJ

9 p.m., $8

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

Mara Hruby

Michael Jackson doing “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Al Green doing “Light My Fire.” Nina Simone doing “Rich Girl.” (Yeah, Hall and Oates, look it up.) While a cover rarely make the original irrelevant, a good one should make it the artist’s own. On From Her Eyes, a free EP she reportedly sang, arranged, recorded, and engineered, Oakland’s Mara Hruby lent her sweet, soulfully agile voice to tracks by Mos Def, Andre 3000, Bob Marley, Jamiroquai, and others, rendering each different and new. Since then Hruby has been at work on her debut album, teasing songs “Lucky (I Love You)” and “The Love Below” online, and will be including new material at this show. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Chris Turner

8 p.m., $15

Yoshi’s Oakland

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com


THURSDAY 29

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and A Woman is a Woman

A double bill of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and A Woman is a Woman (1961) at the Castro is the stuff cinephilia is made of. Those sweet on The Artist should be sure to check in with these earlier Gallic interpretations of Hollywood razzle dazzle. The first, Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas is the purer confection in many ways, but the film’s tender sentimentalism and radiant color design flow towards a soulful poetry of the everyday. The second, by Jean-Luc Godard, is an early distillation of his complex movie love and a poignant offering to actress Anna Karina. Both films feature scores by Michel Legrand, so they carry their complex register of emotions with a lightness that escapes words. (Max Goldberg)

3:25 and 7 p.m., $10

Castro Theatre

429 Market, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

Pictureplane

What do you get when you cross a gutter punk b-boy with a space goth? Sprinkle him with a little MDMA and you’ve got Travis Egedy, a.k.a. Pictureplane. Egedy works clubby ’90s vocal samples and celestial beats into infectious pop songs, which he sings over in a breathy, lusty moan. With effervescent dance anthems like “Black Nails” and “Trancegender,” Egedy gives goths something to freak to. And you’re just as likely to shake it as you are to wind up in the center of a mosh pit. We should all thank our lucky stars for the weird amalgam of personas that is Pictureplane. Speaking of stars, did I mention he’s really, really into space? (Frances Capell)

With Popscene DJs

10 p.m., $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Asher Roth

Let’s face it. A lot of us love rap, but many of us can’t relate to carrying guns or moving kilos of cocaine. Luckily there’s Asher Roth, a gifted 26-year-old MC who raps about things the everyman can identify with — like partying with friends and soaking up sunshine. Roth may be a college bro, but he’s legit enough to have earned props from the likes of Ludacris and Slick Rick. Roth prides himself on his live performances and makes them unforgettable by bringing along a full band. If that’s not incentive enough, Thursday is the release show for Roth’s fresh new Pabst & Jazz Sessions mixtape produced by Blended Babies. (Capell)

10 p.m., $25

330 Ritch, SF

(415) 542-9574

www.330ritch.com


FRIDAY 30

Wizard Of Oz

For more than 70 years and counting, The Wizard of Oz has entertained and fascinated viewers; at the time of its original release, the film’s breathtaking color sequences enthralled audiences still stuck on black and white, and the soundtrack’s beloved songs introduced the world to the talents of Judy Garland. For the majority of us who have grown up watching the movie on television, we are in for a special treat tonight when the grand old Paramount hosts a screening, a rare chance to see such a classic piece of cinema on the big screen, the way it was meant to be viewed. Just watch out for flying monkeys! (Sean McCourt)

8 p.m., $5

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakl.

(510) 465-6400

www.paramounttheatre.com

 

X

Taking the same searing energy that propelled its contemporary punk counterparts then add the rock solid drumming of DJ Bonebrake, the guitar virtuosity of Billy Zoom, and the poetic lyrics and intimate vocal interplay of John Doe and Exene Cervenka. Legendary Los Angeles punk rockers X have always distinguished themselves from the other bands of the genre. This holiday season finds the band celebrating with “The Xmas Traveling Rock & Roll Revival,” where fans are sure to hear all of their favorite iconic tunes, and probably a couple of revved-up holiday favorites as well. (McCourt)

With Sean Wheeler & Zander Schloss, and the Black Tibetans.

8 p.m. Fri.; 9 p.m. Sat/31, $33–$50

Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

 

Agent Orange

In the mid through late 1970s, Southern California was one of the hubs of hardcore punk, with bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Wasted Youth all forming in the region. It was also a center of skateboarding, thanks to — among other things — a newly developed polyurethane wheel and a drought that left scores of pools empty. The band Agent Orange was a by-product of both of these phenomenons. Formed in Orange County in 1979 by lead singer and guitar player Mike Palm, bassist James Levesque, and drummer Scott Miller, the band took a Dick Dale spin on hardcore and became synonymous with early incarnations of “skate punk.” Skateboarders needed an identity of their own, and Agent Orange helped with that task. Now, 30 years later, you don’t need to know how to do a kick flip to understand why they were so essential. (Miller)

With Inferno of Joy, Tokyo Raid, The Nerv, Suggies

8:30 p.m., $15

330 Ritch, SF

(925) 541-9574

www.330ritch.com

 

Gavin Russom

“I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator.” James Murphy tipped his hand when he wrote that a decade ago, but while would-be musicians could have gone straight past the irony to eBay, one thing they wouldn’t have was Gavin Russom. The ace up the sleeve, Russom is the tech wizard, creating analog synths for LCD Soundsystem and others. But more guru than a Radio Shack hobbyist, Russon has performed, DJ’ed, and created music on his own and under the aliases of the Crystal Ark and Meteoric Black Star. His latest “Night Sky,” is an epic, speedily slow building, sexually suggestive track that proves, as usual, he knows what you really want. (Prendiville)

With LA Vampires, Bobby Browser, Magic Touch, and Pickpocket

9:30 p.m., $10

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com


SATURDAY 31

Primus

Is one of your New Years’ resolutions to go Sailing The Seas Of Cheese? Do you plan on serving up some Frizzle Fry? Imbibing in some Pork Soda? Well, any way you look at it, the two club shows this week by musical boundary-busting Bay Area rock favorites Primus are a rare treat for local fans to see the band up close and personal. You can choose to ring in the New Year with Les Claypool and company on Saturday, or if you prefer, you can work off your holiday hangover on Sunday with the band, which will be performing two sets each night at its Hawaiian Hukilau-themed parties. (McCourt)

9 p.m.; 8 p.m. Sun/1, $50–$65

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell St., SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com


Thee Oh Sees

There’s no shortage of New Year’s Eve events taking place in the city, but you’re hard-pressed to find a more definitively San Francisco way to spend the evening than with local psych-pop darlings Thee Oh Sees. Though many a band has hopped on the fuzzy garage train in recent years, these guys have been blazing the trail for well over a decade (under various monikers). Each new release, including the spanking new Carrion Crawler/The Dream (In The Red) finds Thee Oh Sees shredding harder and better, but its live shows will melt your face clean off. Enjoy some gnarly guitar riffage, kiss a stranger, and partake in the vices you’ve resolved to quit come sunrise. (Capell)

With The Fresh & Onlys and White Fence

9 p.m., $15–$20

Brick & Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 371-1631

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

“Sea of Dreams NYE 2012”

Part carnivale, part circus, part burn, part Halloween, part massive: the annual Sea of Dreams event takes the promise of a wild New Year’s Eve and adds more. In part it has to do with the crowd, drawing some serious do-it-themself-ers with fantastically creative outfits. But whatever distractions are off stage, there will be hard competition from a triple bill of headliners including local favorites Beats Antique, infectious dance MC Santigold (who has new material to debut live), and the return of Amon Tobin’s deafening, eyeball melting ISAM set. (Prendiville)

With Claude VanStroke, MarchFourth Marching Band, An-ten-nae, Diego’s Umbrella, and more

8 p.m., $75–$145

SF Concourse Exhibition Center

635 8th St., SF

www.seaofdreamsnye.com


SUNDAY 1

Eliza Rickman

With her little toy piano Eliza Rickman makes bewitching alternative folk rock. Listening to her EP, Gild the Lily, is like walking through a life size dollhouse and feeling not sure whether to be frightened or enchanted. There’s something about the nature of the toy piano — its sparkling sound can be at once blood curdling and tender (like John Cages’ Suites for Toy Piano, which popularized the instrument). Similarly, Rickman’s voice has a plucked from the garden pleasantness, but her words tend toward the tragic. This balance between adorable and dreary can even be seen in the titles of her songs, like “Black Rose” and “Cinnamon Bone.” In any event, whether she’s cinnamon, bone, or both, the toy piano under her hands is more than a novelty. (Miller)

7 p.m., free

Amnesia

853 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-0012

www.amnesiathebar.com


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone. *

Cruel revolution

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Cruel revolution

cheryl@sfbg.com

LIT “As one survivor told me,” author Julia Scheeres writes in her introduction to A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown (Free Press, 320 pp., $26), “nobody joins a cult.”

I remembered this refrain, possibly spoken by the same survivor, from Stanley Nelson’s 2006 Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Recent works like Nelson’s film and Scheeres’ book suggest perceptions about Jonestown are shifting away from sensationalism. The broad strokes are well-known: a charismatic, maniacal preacher; a jungle settlement; over 900 people dead, including a Congressman; a vat of poisoned punch. But the story — explored in A Thousand Lives as a deeply disturbing human tragedy on a nearly unthinkable scale — neither starts nor ends there.

Scheeres, who keeps an office in the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, pored through recently-released FBI files while researching A Thousand Lives. “The FBI released its files on three CDs, without a real index. So a letter that started on CD one, page 20, could end on CD three, page 350,” she remembers. “Organizing the material — 50,000 pages of documents — a lot of it was really boring shipping manifests. Crop reports. But then, oh, hey! Here’s a memo from the camp doctor discussing with [Jim] Jones how they’re gonna kill everyone.” Building from this material, the book focuses on five Peoples Temple members and views the experience of Jonestown through their eyes.

“[I chose my subjects] based on whether they were still alive, and I was able to interview them at length, or whether they had left a lot of primary source documents behind,” she says. “I also wanted to talk about the different demographics of the church, so you have old, young, black, white. A woman who has an MFA from San Francisco State, and a young black man with a GED from Oakland.”

Though A Thousand Lives does offer some background on Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones, “I wanted to know what it was like to be a rank-and-file member of the church,” Scheeres says. She uncovered powerful evidence that Jonestown was not a mass suicide, as the unfortunate phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” suggests. Instead, she says, “it was a mass murder.”

As suggested by that sinister memo from the camp doctor, A Thousand Lives’ most startling revelation is that Jones had been fixated on killing his followers long before the events of November 18, 1978. According to Scheeres, he considered loading his congregation onto buses and plunging them off the Golden Gate Bridge, or onto a plane “and having someone shoot the pilot.” (Eerily, he even sent one of his followers to flight school in preparation.)

Soon, though, he was consumed by the idea of Jonestown: “a new society in the middle of the virgin jungle, a utopia that would be free of sexism, racism, elitism, and all other evil-isms,” Scheeres writes. The promises of Jonestown echoed Jones’ seemingly progressive message of equality, which is what attracted most Peoples Temple members to the church in the first place. It was also what had endeared Jones to San Francisco politicians, who were in awe of his ability to “mobilize thousands of people to vote,” according to Scheeres.

But in reality, “he had no desire to see his followers flourish in South America. He was already fantasizing about their deaths. Would his people die for him if he asked them to?” Turns out they had no choice. While she was writing A Thousand Lives, Scheeres took a trip to Guyana and visited what’s left of Jonestown.

“It’s remote, dense jungle,” she says. “Everything looks the same. It would be so easy to get lost. And as you’re walking through, you can hear things slithering in the leaves. Jim Jones told [his followers] that if they tried to escape, they’d be killed by ‘mercenaries’ — really, his sons that were [hiding and] shooting on the camp — or they would be killed by the jungle animals.”

Of course, when they left San Francisco, more or less willingly, Peoples Temple members — like Scheeres subject Hyacinth Thrash, an elderly African American woman who dreamed of a place where racism didn’t exist — expected to find a “utopia,” as they’d been promised.

“[Jones] was so suave and gentle in San Francisco, and would tell you what you wanted to hear, like the ultimate caring father figure. Then once he got down to Jonestown and had everyone trapped there, he just turned. You can hear him on those tapes just screaming, you know. ‘You old bitch, you’re gonna die!’,” Scheeres shudders. “The rank-and-file had no idea that he had this ideation of ‘revolutionary suicide’ until it was too late. They couldn’t escape. They were surrounded by guards holding crossbows, and behind them, a circle of guards with guns, and basically told, ‘If you don’t drink the poison, we’re going to shoot you.'”

Though she has no direct personal connection to Jonestown, Scheeres’ own background, detailed in her 2005 memoir Jesus Land, made her an unusually sympathetic outsider. “The interests aligned: race, religion, seclusion. When I was a teen, my brother and I were sent to this religious reform school in the Dominican Republic, where all of our communications with the outside world were censored, where all of these horrible things were happening that we couldn’t let anybody know about,” she says. “Obviously my situation wasn’t as bad [as Jonestown]. The head of the school wasn’t goading us toward revolutionary suicide. But the whole sense of powerlessness and feeling trapped and helpless — I could identify with that.”

Decades later, Jonestown continues to fascinate; dozens of books have been written by survivors, relatives of survivors, conspiracy theorists, cult experts, and scholars of macabre history. A Thousand Lives — meticulously researched, and written with clear-eyed, sensitive perspective — is a valuable resource for readers seeking truth, not misinformation, about the tragedy.

“Most people under 40 probably don’t remember Jonestown well, if at all. But most people have heard the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid.’ I find that phrase very offensive, because they didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. First of all, it wasn’t Kool-Aid, it was Flavor Aid. Second of all, they were forced to drink the poison. ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’ implies naïve, stupid, not thinking, kind of dumb, following the leader, and not questioning. And they were questioning. That’s what my book argues throughout,” the author says. “They argued with Jones: ‘We didn’t come down here to die. We came down here for a better life for ourselves and our kids.’ So I think ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ needs to be excised from the cultural lexicon.”

What’s more, “I hope people will reconsider the conclusions of Jonestown after reading the book,” Scheeres says. “I think it’s a tremendously compelling tale; 918 people died that day, as a result of Jim Jones, and younger generations need to be cognizant of that. Again, he had his people trapped in Guyana, so by the time they were saying, ‘I want to go home’ — and that’s another heartbreaking thing, was finding all these notes from people to Jim Jones, saying ‘I want to go home. I want to go back to San Francisco. I hate it here. I’m miserable. My children are afraid and I don’t know how to tell them that death is a good thing’ — [it was too late]. Reading all of those notes, these voices have been silenced. Now, finally, I feel like I am the loudspeaker, or their medium for letting their voices be heard. It’s too late [to save them]. They’ve been dead for 33 years. But for the record — they did not want to die.”

www.juliascheeres.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Occupy hip-hop

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Occupy hip-hop

caitlin@sfbg.com

LIT The Occupy movement, though it’s been criticized by many for the lack of racial diversity among protesters, has certainly attracted its share of black rappers. Here in the Bay, Boots Riley has been a vocal supporter, participating in Oakland’s November 2 general strike. On the other side of the country Occupy Wall Street has met Kanye West, not to mention music mogul Russell Simmons (okay, he’s not a rapper) making space in his predatory debit card-selling schedule to stage rants over the influence of lobbyists on the federal government. And how could forget the furor that erupted over Jay-Z’s line of OWS-inspired Rocawear T-shirts?

The admirable efforts of Boots notwithstanding, there was a time when all of hip-hop was going to save the world, not just sell its most vital revolutions for $22 a shirt. The time is ripe, it seems, for some books to pay homage to that fact. And although they vary in the specifics, there are a few that are doing just that.

THE PLOT AGAINST HIP HOP

By Nelson George

(Akashic Books, 176pp, paper, $15.95)

Hip hop academic par excellence Nelson George is occupying the bottom half of a computer screen for a Skype-conducted interview with the Guardian.

George’s latest novel (his third, though he’s better known for his non-fiction, including the seminal Death of Rhythm and Blues) follows the adventures of D. Hunter, a security guard from the projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Hunter is embroiled in the murder of Dwanye Robinson, a hip hop academic who bears more than a passing resemblance to George himself. To solve the crime, Hunter must plunge into the untoward world of the hip-hoperati — the movers and shakers and producers and makers that may or may not be out to annihilate the culture’s populist powers.

George isn’t an adherent of all the conspiracy theories in the book. But he is concerned about a “chill factor” that has artists considering the views of corporate sponsors before penning lyrics that speak truth to power.

“This stuff they’re making,” he says, speaking of today’s radio stars in his characteristically familiar tone (he is, after years of writing about them and producing VH1’s Hip Hop Honors awards show, on a first name basis with many of the big guns). “They’re not even hoping for art. They’re just hoping to sell sugar water, T-shirts — whatever Jay(-Z)’s selling this week. I don’t think people were feeling that way about L.L., Eazy E.

“There was a whole period when every success, every commercial was a cause for celebration,” he says. “Now, the whole game has to change.”

And in Occupy, he sees an opportunity. Emcees have made their way down to Zuccotti Park — and not just Simmons and Jigga. Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco, and David Banner (of “Whisper Song” fame) have performed and listened at their local Occupy encampment. “I think this will goose people to deal with a lot of things that are going on,” says George.

Reading the rife-with-history Plot Against Hip-Hop can’t hurt one’s knowledge of the institutional forces behind what we hear on the radio. Says George before signing off: “Every book I write is a tool of education.”

THE LEGENDS OF HIP HOP

By Justin Bua

(Harper Design, 160pp, hardcover, $34.99)

Of course, not every one believes in the institutional approach to social change. Hip-hop artist and author Justin Bua follows the personal habit gospel. “Veganism, that would really change the world,” he says. “Everyone should have a garden if they can. When people lead, the leaders follow.”

This individualized vision of change makes sense in relation to Bua’s art. He is a portraitist, famous for “The DJ,” a print of which went viral in the college-dorm-room-poster sense of the word. Though he started out by painting jazz scenes, he created “The DJ” after convincing his distributor that there was a chance that hip-hop images would sell just as well. He was right — that initial foray turned out to be one of the top selling posters of all time.

His most recent project is a love ode to similarly meteoric rises: to the B-boys, graffiti artists, emcees, and producers that made it to the top of the pack. In Legends of Hip-Hop, Bua pairs his trademark expressive faces and limbs with kind-of journal entries that sum up what they to him, or to the world of hip-hop at large. Veganism doesn’t make an appearance — but that’s not to say the book is without social significance for him.

“These people are part of our history,” Bua says during his Guardian interview at vegan Mexican restaurant Gracias Madre. “It’s really in the tradition of the Grecos, the Raphaels, the Rubins.”

And where the old masters painted kings and queens, Bua paints Biggie and Queen Latifah. To Bronx-bred Bua, they are royalty and more than that, the meter sticks of our time. Hip-hop’s effects can even be seen in the Oval Office (President Obama’s is the face that concludes Legends of Hip-Hop).

Bua thinks this power can be harnessed. “If you look at all the money generated by hip-hop — that could change the world.” And by no means does he think that the animal-product-free lifestyle and that of beats and breaks are unrelated.

“I think being vegan is the ultimate expression of hip-hop,” he says before rattling off a list of dairy-free icons. (KRS-ONE, Russell Simmons, Dead Prez, DJ Qbert, and famous breakdancer Mr. Wiggles the are all vegans.) “It’s irreverent, subversive, truth — it’s about having a clear head and mind. The ultimate form of respect is to not eat each other. That’s fucking weird.”

SOME DAY, IT’LL ALL MAKE SENSE

By Common

(Atria Books, 320pp, hardcover, $25)

Common’s autobiography (which he penned with the help of ghostwriter Adam Bradley) debuted in the 20th spot of the New York Times’ hit parade. The book itself is heartrendingly earnest — you’ll find none of the sly jabs of Bua or George hidden among its pages. But in a way, it is the more personal ode to the curative powers of hip-hop than either of those authors’ tomes.

Putting aside the namedropping of ex-lovers (Erykah Badu) and current brothers (Kanye West), Some Day exposes a shocking truth. Common, he himself insists, is no more godly than the rest of us — he just chose the music as the rope that would pull him to that level. Sure, he wrote the woman-worshipping “The Light,” but don’t you still hear him using the word ‘bitch’?

Common has perhaps the most call of the three authors to strike out against Tea Party tomfoolery and mechanized mediocrity in American government. (Lest we forget, when Obama invited him to perform at the White House, the Fox News Palin-Hannity-O’Reilly cabal screeched he was a “vile rapper” in part due to his song for Assata Shakur — something he speaks frankly about.) He also seems to have realized something that many haven’t: hip-hop can be, in fact has proven itself to be, a tool towards whatever ends an artist has in mind.

The player shapes the game. Which is something, I fear, that will take a long time to start making sense to some.

J’Accuse: An open letter from a UC-Davis professor

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Madeline Perez, our correspondent on the scene at the University of California-Davis, reports that Nathan Brown, an untenured  assistant professor in the Department of English, has written an eloquent  open letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi  demanding her  immediate resignation. She emailed his letter to the Guardian. Perez  says it has  further electrified the campus and given an emotional rationale to the Occupy Davis movement and unified the students in calling for Katehi’s resignation. As a result of his letter, Brown has become an instant campus hero and given his department new distinction. He was interviewed Monday morning  on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” show on KPFA Pacifica radio  and then on Monday night  MSNBC cable television shows. 

Brown in his interviews emphasized the point in his letter that “the fact is, the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this.  Many more people are learning it very quickly.”

Brown opens his letter by saying that he is a junior faculty member “who has taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word, I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis. You are not.”

He concludes: “I call  for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.”

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi
Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

*Bedazzled and The Car After several weeks of delivering some fairly purgatorial cinematic meditations on Mephistopheles, the Vortex Room’s final demonic double bill is da bomb. First up is mother of all cult comedies Bedazzled (1967), in which Goon Show regulars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore ramped up their anticipation of Monty Python-esque absurd sketch-humor outrages by positing themselves as wily Devil and major chump in a not-so-swinging contemporary London. Moore’s besotted (with the divine Eleanor Bron) Wimpy Burger employee gets seven wishes for true happiness in exchange for his soul, but each fantasy granted — ranging from animation to killer pop-star satire to nuns on trampolines — somehow comes with a fly in its ointment. Too ahead of its time for popular success (despite an elongated cameo by reigning sexpot Raquel Welch as Lillian Lust), Bedazzled is now a bit dated, but still bloody marvelous. One doubts that compound adjective was ever applied to The Car (1977), which came out a decade later and sort of managed to couple 1975’s Jaws and 1976’s The Omen (albeit without achieving anywhere near their success). A killer car — a black Continental Mark III, to be precise — trolls around the Southwest edging bicyclists off cliffs, mowing down pedestrians, even attacking potty-mouthed schoolteachers inside their homes. (This last scene alone is definitely worth the price of admission.) What’s more, there appears to be no driver, suggesting this vehicle is fueled by pure evil. James Brolin at his hairiest is the local sheriff whose guns alone can’t save the town. Unquestionably silly, The Car nonetheless remains the Rolls Royce of supernaturally-possessed-automotive-transportation movies. Vortex Room. (Harvey)

*El Bulli: Cooking in Progress Oh to be a fly on the wall of El Bulli — back in 2008 and 2009, when director Gereon Wetzel turned his lens on the Spanish landmark, it was considered the best restaurant in the world. This elegantly wrought documentary, covering a year at the culinary destination (now closed), allows you to do just that. Wetzel opens on chef-owner Ferran Adrià shutting down his remarkable eatery for the winter and then drifting in and out of his staff’s Barcelona lab as they develop dishes for the forthcoming season. Head chef Oriol Castro and other trusted staffers treat ingredients with the detached methodicalness of scientists — a champignon mushroom, say, might be liquefied from its fried, raw, sous-vide-cooked states — and the mindful intuition of artists, taking notes on both MacBooks and paper, accompanied by drawings and much photo-snapping. Fortunately the respectful Wetzel doesn’t shy away from depicting the humdrum mechanics of running a restaurant, as Adrià is perpetually interrupted by his phone, must wrangle with fishmongers reluctant to disclose “secret” seasonal schedules, and slowly goes through the process of creating an oil cocktail and conceptualizing a ravioli whose pasta disappears when it hits the tongue, tasting everything as he goes. Energized by an alternately snappy and meditative percussive score, this look into the most influential avant-garde restaurant in the world is a lot like the concluding photographs of the many menu items we glimpse at their inception — a memorable, sublimely rendered document that leaves you hungry for more. (1:48) Embarcadero. (Chun)

Le Havre Aki Kaurismäki’s second French-language film (following 1992’s La Vie de Boheme) offers commentary on modern immigration issues wrapped in the gauze of a feel good fairy tale and cozy French provincialism a la Marcel Pagnol. Worried about the health of his hospitalized wife (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), veteran layabout and sometime shoe shiner Marcel (Andre Wilms) gets some welcome distraction in coming to the aid of Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young African illegally trying to make way to his mother in London while eluding the gendarmes. Marcel’s whole neighborhood of port-town busybodies and industrious émigrés eventually join in the cause, turning Le Havre into a sort of old-folks caper comedy with an incongruously sunny take on a rising European multiculturalism in which there are no real racist xenophobes, just grumps deserving comeuppance. Incongruous because Kaurismäki is, of course, the king of sardonically funny Finnish miserabilism — and while it’s charmed many on the festival circuit, this combination of his usual poker-faced style and feel-good storytelling formula may strike others as an oil-and-water mismatch. (1:43) Clay, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Immortals Tarsem Singh (2006’s The Fall) directs Mickey Rourke and Stephen Dorff in this CG-laden mythology adventure. (1:50) Presidio.

*Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life How remarkable is it that, some 50-plus features along, filmmaker Werner Herzog would become the closest thing to a cinema’s conscience? This time the abyss is much closer to home than the Amazon rainforest or the Kuwaiti oil fields — it lies in the heart of Rick Perry country. What begins as an examination of capital punishment, introduced with an interview with Reverend Richard Lopez, who has accompanied Texas death row inmates to their end, becomes a seeming labyrinth of human tragedy. Coming into focus is the execution of Michael Perry, convicted as a teenager of the murder of a Conroe, Tex., woman, her son, and his friend — all for sake of a red Camaro. Herzog obtains an insightful interview with the inmate, just days before his execution, as well as his cohort Jason Burkett, police, an executioner, and the victims’ family members, in this haunting examination of crime, punishment, and a small town in Texas where so many appear to have gone wrong. So wrong that one might see Into the Abyss as more related to 1977’s Stroszek and its critical albeit compassionate take on American life, than Herzog’s last tone poem about the mysterious artists of 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (and it’s also obviously directly connected to next year’s TV documentary, Death Row). The layered tragedies and the strata of destroyed lives stays with you, as do the documentary’s difficult questions, Herzog’s gentle humanity as an interviewer, and the fascinating characters that don’t quite fit into a more traditional narrative — the Conroe bystander once stabbed with a screwdriver who learned to read in prison, and the dreamy woman impregnated by a killer whose entire doomed family appears to be incarcerated. (1:46) Embarcadero. (Chun)

J. Edgar The usual polished, sober understatement of Clint Eastwood’s directing style and the highlights-compiling CliffsNotes nature of Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay turn out to be interestingly wrong choices for this biopic about one of the last American century’s most divisive figures. Interesting in that they’re perhaps among the very few who would now dare viewing the late, longtime FBI chief with so much admiration tempered by awareness of his faults — rather than the other way around. After all, Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) strengthened his bureau in ways that, yes, often protected citizens and state, but at what cost? The D.C. native eventually took to frequently “bending” the law, witch-hunting dubious national enemies (he thought the Civil Rights movement our worst threat since the bomb-planting Bolshevik anarchists of half a century earlier), blackmailing personal ones, weakening individual rights against surveillance, hoarding power (he resented the White House’s superior authority), lying publicly, and doing just about anything to heighten his own fame. A movie that internalized and communicated his rising paranoid megalomania (ironically Hoover died during the presidency of Nixon, his equal in that regard) might have stood some chance of making us understand this contradiction-riddled cipher. But J. Edgar is doggedly neutral, almost colorless (literally so, in near-monochrome visual presentation), its weird appreciation of the subject’s perfectionism and stick-to-it-iveness shutting out almost any penetrating insight. (Plus there’s Eastwood’s own by-now-de rigueur soundtrack of quasi-jazz noodling to make what is vivid here seem more dull and polite.) The love that dare not speak its name — or, evidently, risk more than a rare peck on the cheek — between Hoover and right-hand-man/life companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, very good if poorly served by his old-age makeup) becomes both the most compelling and borderline-silly thing here, fueled by a nervous discretion that seems equal parts Black’s interest and Eastwood’s discomfort. While you might think the directors polar opposites in many ways, the movie J. Edgar ultimately recalls most is Oliver Stone’s 1995 Nixon: both ambitiously, rather sympathetically grapple with still-warm dead gorgons and lose, filmmaker and lead performance alike laboring admirably to intelligent yet curiously stilted effect. (2:17) Marina. (Harvey)

Jack and Jill Adam Sandler plays a dude who has a Thanksgiving from hell thanks to his twin sister (played by an in-drag Adam Sandler). Somehow Al Pacino is also involved. (runtime not available) Presidio.

*Melancholia Lars von Trier is a filmmaker so fond of courting controversy it’s like he does it in spite of himself — his rambling comments about Hitler (“I’m a Nazi”) were enough to get him banned from the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where Melancholia had its debut (and star Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress). Oops. Maybe after the (here’s that word again) controversy that accompanied 2009’s Antichrist, von Trier felt like he needed a shocking context for his more mellow latest. Pity that, for Melancholia is one of his strongest, most thoughtful works to date. Split into two parts, the film follows first the opulent, disastrous, never-ending wedding reception of Justine (Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), held at a lavish estate owned by John (Kiefer Sutherland), the tweedy husband of Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Amid the turmoil of arguments (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as Justine and Claire’s divorced parents), pushy guests (Stellan Skarsgard as Justine’s boss), livid wedding planner (Udo Kier, amazing), and hurt feelings (Michael is the least-wanted groom since Kris Humphries), it’s clear that something is wrong with Justine beyond just marital jitters. The film’s second half begins an unspecified amount of time later, as Claire talks her severely depressed, near-catatonic sister into moving into John’s mansion. As Justine mopes, it’s revealed that a small planet, Melancholia — glimpsed in Melancholia‘s Wagner-scored opening overture — is set to pass perilously close to Earth. John, an amateur astronomer, is thrilled; Claire, fearful for her young son’s future and goaded into high anxiety by internet doomsayers, is convinced the planets will collide, no matter what John says. Since Justine (apparently von Trier’s stand-in for himself) is convinced that the world’s an irredeemably evil place, she takes the news with a shrug. Von Trier’s vision of the apocalypse is somber and surprisingly poetic; Dunst and Gainsbourg do outstanding work as polar-opposite sisters whose very different reactions to impending disaster are equally extreme. (2:15) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Octubre This downtempo drama directed by Daniel and Diego Vega follows Clemente (Bruno Odar), a stone-faced moneylender living in a shabby apartment in Lima, Peru. Clemente’s days couldn’t be more bleak. When he’s not dealing with clients over his kitchen table — appraising watches and jewelry, handing out or collecting cash — he’s eating egg sandwiches and paying cold visits to prostitutes. When one of them leaves a baby girl in his apartment, Clemente goes on a search for the mother. Meanwhile, he enlists a client, Sofía (Gabriela Velásquez), as a live-in nanny for the baby. Both Sofía and the baby add some life and color to Clemente’s apartment and ultimately, his reclusive existence. Octubre is a slow rolling and muted film that’s interested in detail. Most of the time, you’re searching Clemente’s stony face (Odar’s acting is superb and unbroken), hoping he might betray a thought or even better, a feeling — he does. (1:23) SFFS New People Cinema. (James H. Miller)

ONGOING

Anonymous Hark, what bosom through yonder bodice heaves? If you like your Shakespearean capers OTT and chock-full of fleshy drama, political intrigue, and groundling sensation, then Anonymous will enthrall (and if the lurid storyline doesn’t hold, the acting should). Writer John Orloff spins his story off one popular theory of Shakespeare authorship — that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true pen behind the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Our modern-day narrator (Derek Jacobi) foregrounds the fictitious nature of the proceedings, pulling back the curtain on Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) staging his unruly comedies for the mob, much to the amusement of a mysterious aging dandy of a visitor: the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). Hungry for the glory that has always slipped through his pretty fingers, the Earl yearns to have his works staged for audiences beyond those in court, where Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave as the elder regent, daughter Joely Richardson as the lusty young royal) dotes on them, and out of the reach of his puritan father-in-law Robert Cecil (David Thewlis), Elizabeth’s close advisor, and he devises a plan for Jonson to stage them under his own name. But much more is triggered by the productions, uncovering secret trysts, hunchback stratagems, and more royal bastards than you can shake a scepter at. Director Roland Emmerich invests the production with the requisite high drama — and camp — to match the material, as well as pleasing layers of grime and toxic-looking Elizabethan makeup for both the ladies and the dudes who look like ladies (the crowd-surfing, however, strikes the off-key grunge-era note). And if the inherent elitism of the tale — could only a nobleman have written those remarkable plays and sonnets? — offends, fortunately the cast members are more than mere players. Ifans invests his decadent Earl with the jaded gaze and smudgy guyliner of a fading rock star, and Redgrave plays her Elizabeth like a deranged, gulled grotesque. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) Bridge, SF Center. (Chun)

50/50 This is nothing but a mainstream rom-com-dramedy wrapped in indie sheep’s clothes. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns he has cancer, he undergoes the requisite denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance like a formality. Aided by his bird-brained but lovable best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan), lovable klutz of a counselor Katherine (Anna Kendrick), and panicky mother (Anjelica Huston), Adam gets a new lease on life. This comes in the form of one-night-stands, furious revelations in parked cars, and a prescribed dose of wacky tobaccy. If 50/50 all sounds like the setup for a pseudo-insightful, kooky feel-goodery, it is. The film doesn’t have the brains or spleen to get down to the bone of cancer. Instead, director Jonathan Levine (2008’s The Wackness) and screenwriter Will Reiser favor highfalutin’ monologues, wooden characters, and a Hollywood ending (with just the right amount of ambiguity). Still, Gordon-Levitt is the most gorgeous cancer patient you will ever see, bald head and all. (1:40) Bridge, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Footloose Another unnecessary remake joins the queue at the box office, aiming for the pockets of ’80s-era nostalgics and fans of dance movies and naked opportunism. A recap for those (if there are those) who never saw the 1984 original: city boy Ren McCormack moves to a Middle American speck-on-the-map called Bomont and riles the town’s inhabitants with his rock ‘n’ roll ways — rock ‘n’ roll, and the lewd acts of physicality it inspires, i.e., dancing, having been criminalized by the town council to preserve the souls and bodies of Bomont’s young people. Ren falls for wayward preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore — whose father has sponsored this oversolicitous piece of legislation — and vows to fight city hall on the civil rights issue of a senior prom. Ren McCormack 2.0 is one Kenny Wormald (prepped for the gig by his tenure in the straight-to-cable dance-movie sequel Center Stage: Turn It Up), who forgoes the ass-grabbing blue jeans that Kevin Bacon once angry-danced through a flour mill in. Otherwise, the 2011 version, directed and cowritten by Craig Brewer (2005’s Hustle & Flow), regurgitates much of the original, hoping to leverage classic lines, familiar scenes, and that Dance Your Ass Off T-shirt of Ariel’s. It doesn’t work. Ren and Ariel (Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough) are blandly unsympathetic and have the chemistry of two wet paper towels, the adult supporting cast should have known better, and the entire film comes off as a tired, tuneless echo. (1:53) Four Star. (Rapoport)

*Gainsbourg: The Man Who Loved Women Those hungry for more of the real Serge Gainsbourg — after being tantalized and teased by Joann Sfar’s whimsical comic book-inspired feature — will want to catch this documentary by Pascal Forneri for many of the details that didn’t fit or were skimmed over, here, in the very words and image of the songwriter and the many iconic women in his life. Much of the chanson master’s photographic or video history seems to be here — from his blunt-force on-camera proposition of Whitney Houston to multiple, insightful interviews with the love of his life, Jane Birkin, as well as the many women who won his heart for just a little while, such as Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. Gainsbourg may be marred by its somewhat choppy, mystifying structure, at times chronological, at times organized according to creative periods, but overriding all are the actual footage and photographs loosely, louchely assembled and collaged by Forneri; delightful pre-music-videos Scopitones of everyone from France Gall to Anna Karina; and the gemlike, oh-so-quotable interviews with the mercurial, admirably honest musical genius and eternally subversive provocateur. Quibble as you might with the short shrift given his later career—in addition to major ’70s LPs like Histoire de Melody Nelson and L’Homme à tête de chou (Cabbage-Head Man) — this is a must-see for fans both casual and seriously seduced. (1:45) Roxie. (Chun)

The Ides of March Battling it out in the Ohio primaries are two leading Democratic presidential candidates. Filling the role of idealistic upstart new to the national stage — even his poster looks like you-know-who’s Hope one — is Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), who’s running neck-and-neck in the polls with his rival thanks to veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and ambitious young press secretary Steven (Ryan Gosling). The latter is so tipped for success that he’s wooed to switch teams by a rival politico’s campaign chief (Paul Giamatti). While he declines, even meeting with a representative from the opposing camp is a dangerous move for Steven, who’s already juggling complex loyalties to various folk including New York Times reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei) and campaign intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who happens to be the daughter of the Democratic National Party chairman. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s acclaimed play Farragut North, Clooney’s fourth directorial feature is assured, expertly played, and full of sharp insider dialogue. (Willimon worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the White House.) It’s all thoroughly engaging — yet what evolves into a thriller of sorts involving blackmail and revenge ultimately seems rather beside the point, as it turns upon an old-school personal morals quandary rather than diving seriously into the corporate, religious, and other special interests that really determine (or at least spin) the issues in today’s political landscape. Though stuffed with up-to-the-moment references, Ides already feels curiously dated. (1:51) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

In Time Justin Timberlake moves from romantic comedy to social commentary to play Will Salas, a young man from the ghetto living one day at a time. Many 12-steppers may make this claim, but Salas literally is, because in his world, time actually is money and people pay, say, four minutes for a cup of coffee, a couple hours for a bus ride home from work, and years to travel into a time zone where people don’t run from place to place to stay ahead of death. In writer-director Andrew Niccol’s latest piece of speculative cinema, humans are born with a digitized timepiece installed in their forearm and a default sell-by date of 25 years, with one to grow on — though most end up selling theirs off fairly quickly while struggling to pay rent and put food on the table. Time zones have replaced area codes in defining social stature and signaling material wealth, alongside those pesky devices that give the phrase “internal clock” an ominous literality. Niccol also wrote and directed Gattaca (1997) and wrote The Truman Show (1998), two other films in which technological advances have facilitated a merciless, menacing brand of social engineering. In all three, what is most alarming is the through line between a dystopian society and our own, and what is most hopeful is the embattled protagonist’s promises that we don’t have to go down that road. Amanda Seyfried proves convincible as a bored heiress to eons, her father (Vincent Kartheiser) less amenable to Robin Hood-style time banditry. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

Johnny English Reborn (1:41) Four Star.

*Like Crazy Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet near the end of college; after a magical date, they’re ferociously hooked on each other. Trouble is, she’s in Los Angeles on a soon-to-expire student visa — and when she impulsively overstays, then jets home to London for a visit months later, her re-entry to America is stopped cold at LAX. (True love’s no match for homeland security.) An on-and-off long-distance romance ensues, and becomes increasingly strained, even as their respective careers (he makes furniture, she’s a magazine staffer) flourish. Director and co-writer Drake Doremus (2010’s Douchebag) achieves a rare midpoint between gritty mumblecore and shiny Hollywood romance; the characters feel very real and the script ably captures the frustration that settles in when idealized fantasies give way to the messy workings of everyday life. There are some contrivances here — Anna’s love-token gift from Jacob, a bracelet engraved “Patience,” breaks when she’s with another guy — but for the most part, Like Crazy offers an honest portrait of heartbreak. (1:29) SF Center. (Eddy)

*Love Crime Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance about what sleazy things could potentially be done to this neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller. No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures. Ludivine Sagnier plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. Though it’s no masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his Corneau’s career Corneau (he died at age 67 last August) not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. (1:46) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Margin Call Think of Margin Call as a Mamet-like, fictitious insider jab at the financial crisis, a novelistic rejoinder to Oscar-winning doc Inside Job (2010). First-time feature director and writer J.C. Chandor shows a deft hand with complex, writerly material, creating a darting dance of smart dialogue and well-etched characters as he sidesteps the hazards of overtheatricality, a.k.a. the crushing, overbearing proscenium. The film opens on a familiar Great Recession scene: lay-off day at an investment bank, marked by HR functionaries calling workers one by one into fishbowl conference rooms. The first victim is the most critical — Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a risk-management staffer who has stumbled on an investment miscalculation that could potentially trigger a Wall Street collapse. On his way out, he passes a drive with his findings to one of his young protégés, Peter (Zachary Quinto), setting off a flash storm over the next 24 hours that will entangle his boss Sam (Kevin Spacey), who’s agonizing over his dying dog while putting up a go-big-or-go-home front; cynical trading manager Will (Paul Bettany); and the firm’s intimidating head (Jeremy Irons), who gets to utter the lines, “Explain to me as you would to a child. Or a Golden Retriever.” Such top-notch players get to really flex their skills here, equipped with Chandor’s spot-on script, which manages to convey the big issues, infuse the numbers with drama and the money managers with humanity, and never talk down to the audience. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Martha Marcy May Marlene If Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence was the breakout ingénue of 2010, look for Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s Elizabeth Olsen to take the 2011 title. Both films are backwoodsy and harrowing and offer juicy roles for their leading starlets — not to mention a pair of sinister supporting roles for the great John Harkes. Here, he’s a Manson-y figure who retains disturbing control over Olsen’s character even after the multi-monikered girl flees his back-to-the-land cult. Writer-director Sean Durkin goes for unflashy realism and mounds on the dread as the hollow-eyed Martha attempts to resume normal life, to the initial delight of her estranged, guilt-ridden older sister (Sarah Paulson). Soon, however, it becomes clear that Things Are Not Ok. You’d be forgiven for pooh-poohing Olsen from the get-go; lavish Sundance buzz and the fact that she’s Mary-Kate and Ashley’s sis have already landed her mountains of pre-release publicity. But her performance is unforgettable, and absolutely fearless. (1:41) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Oranges and Sunshine At the center of this saga of lives ripped apart by church and state is Margaret Humphreys, the Englishwoman who uncovered the scandalous mass deportation of children from England to Australia. In one of her most rewarding roles since The Proposition (2005), her last foray to Oz, Watson portrays the English social worker who in the ’80s learns of multiple cases of now-adult orphans in Australia who don’t know their real name or even age but remember that they once lived in the UK. She starts to explore the past of victims such as Jack (Hugo Weaving) and Len (David Wenham) and tries to reunite them with their families, including mothers who were told their youngsters were adopted into real families. In the course of her work, and at the expense of her own family life, Humphreys discovers the horrors that befell many young deportees — as child slave-laborers — and the corruption that extends its fingers into government and the Catholic church. In his first feature film, director Jim Loach, son of crusading cinematic force Ken Loach, turns over each stone with care and compassion, finding the perfect filter through which to tell this well-modulated story in Watson, whose Humphreys faces harassment and post-traumatic stress disorder in her quest to heal the children who were lured overseas in the hope that they would ride horses to school and pick oranges off a tree for breakfast. (1:45) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity 3 A prequel to a prequel, this third installment in the faux-home-movie horror series is as good as one could reasonably hope for: considerably better than 2010’s part two, even if inevitably it can’t replicate the relatively fresh impact of the 2007 original. After a brief introductory sequence we’re in 1988, with the grown-up sisters of the first two films now children (Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown) living with a recently separated mom (Lauren Bitter) and her nice new boyfriend (Christopher Smith). His wedding-video business provides the excuse for many a surveillance cam to be set up in their home once things start going bump in the night (and sometimes day). Which indeed they do, pretty quickly. Brown’s little Kristi has an invisible friend called Toby she says is “real,” though of course everyone else trusts he’s a normal, harmless imaginary pal. Needless to say, they are wrong. Written by Christopher Landon (Paranormal Activity 2, 2007’s Disturbia) and directed by the guys (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman) who made interesting nonfiction feature Catfish (2010), this quickly made follow-up does a good job piling on more scares without getting shameless or ludicrous about it, extends the series’ mythology in ways that easily pave way toward future chapters, and maintains the found-footage illusion well enough. (Excellent child performances and creepy camcorder “pans” atop an oscillating fan motor prove a great help; try to forget that video quality just wasn’t this good in ’88.) Not great, but thoroughly decent, and worth seeing in a theater — this remains one chiller concept whose effectiveness can only be diminished to the point of near-uselessness on the small screen. (1:24) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Puss in Boots (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Real Steel Everybody knows what this movie about rocking, socking robots should have been called. Had the producers secured the rights to the name, we’d all be sitting down to Over The Top II: Child Endangerment. Absentee father Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his much-too-young son Max (Dakota Goyo) haul their remote-controlled pugilists in a big old truck from one underground competition to the next. Along the way Charlie learns what it means to be a loving father while still routinely managing to leave cherubic Max alone in scenarios of astonishing peril. Seriously, there are displays of parental neglect in this movie that strain credulity well beyond any of its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em elements. Fortunately the filmmakers had the good sense to make those elements awesome. The robots look great and the ring action can be surprisingly stirring in spite of the paper-thin human story it depends on. And as adept as the script proves to be at skirting the question of robot sentience, we’re no less compelled to root for our scrappy contender. Recommended if you love finely wrought spectacle but hate strong characterization and children. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness. (Jason Shamai)

Revenge of the Electric Car The timing is right for Chris Paine to make a follow-up to his 2006 Who Killed the Electric Car?, a celebrity-studded doc examining the much-mourned downfall of GM’s EV1 — with gas prices so high and oil politics so distressing, even drivers who don’t consider themselves radical environmentalists are interested in going electric, as choices aplenty flood the marketplace. The aptly-titled Revenge of the Electric Car makes nice with GM’s Bob Lutz as he readies the release of the Chevy Volt. It also profiles Silicon Valley’s own electric car startup, Tesla; tracks Nissan’s top gun Carlos Ghosn as he pushes the Nissan Leaf into production; and even digs up an off-the-grid mechanical wizard known as “Gadget,” who makes his living converting regular autos (if a Porsche is “regular”) into vehicles with plug-in power. The film makes it clear that for most of these folks, business comes first — sure, it’s great to be green, but you have to make green, too — and there’s some tension when the crash of 2008 threatens the auto industry’s enthusiasm for planet-friendly innovations. But there’s far more optimism here than Paine’s first Electric Car film, not to mention a refreshing lack of Mel Gibson. (1:30) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The Rum Diary Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has been adapted twice before into feature form. Truly execrable Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) suggested his style was unfilmable, but Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) duly captured a “gonzo” mindset filtered through quantities of drugs and alcohol that might kill the ordinary mortal — a hallucinatory excess whose unpleasant effectiveness was underlined by the loathing Fear won in most quarters. Now between those two extremes there’s the curiously mild third point of this Johnny Depp pet project, translating an early, autobiographical novel unpublished until late in the author’s life. Failed fiction writer Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) thinks things are looking up when he’s hired to an English-language San Juan newspaper circa 1960 — though it turns out he was the only applicant. A gruff editor (Richard Jenkins), genially reckless photographer flatmate (Michael Rispoli) and trainwreck vision of his future self (Giovanni Ribisi) introduce him to the thanklessness of writing puff pieces for the gringo community of tourists and robber barons. One of the latter (Aaron Eckhart as Sanderson) introduces him to the spoils to be had exploiting this tax-shelter island “paradise” without sharing one cent with its angrily cast-aside, impoverished natives. Sanderson also introduces Kemp to blonde wild child Chenault (Amber Heard), who’s just the stock Girl here. Presumably hired for his Withnail & I (1987) cred, Bruce Robinson brings little of that 1987’s cult classic’s subversive cheek to his first writing-directing assignment in two decades. Handsomely illustrating without inhabiting its era, toying with matters of narrative and thematic import (American colonialism, Kemp-slash-Thompson finding his writing “voice,” etc.) that never develop, this slack quasi-caper comedy ambles nowhere in particular pleasantly enough. But the point, let alone the rage and outrageousness one expects from Thompson, is missing. On the plus side, there’s some succulent dialogue, as when Ribisi asks Depp for an amateur STD evaluation: “Is it clap?” “A standing ovation.” (2:00) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Skin I Live In I’d like to think that Pedro Almodóvar is too far along in his frequently-celebrated career to be having a midlife crisis, but all the classic signs are on display in his flashy, disjointed new thriller. Still mourning the death of his burn victim wife and removed from his psychologically disturbed daughter, brilliant-but-ethically compromised plastic surgeon Robert (played with smoldering creepiness by former Almodóvar heartthrob Antonio Banderas) throws himself into developing a new injury-resistant form of prosthetic skin, testing it on his mysterious live-in guinea pig, Vera (the gorgeous Elena Anaya, whose every curve is on view thanks to an après-ski-ready body suit). Eventually, all hell breaks loose, as does Vera, whose back story, as we find out, owes equally to 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and perhaps one of the Saw films. And that’s not even the half of it — to fully recount every sharp turn, digression and MacGuffin thrown at us would take the entirety of this review. That’s not news for Almodóvar, though. Much like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar’s métier is melodrama, as refracted through a gay cinephile’s recuperative affections. His strength as a filmmaker is to keep us emotionally tethered to the story he’s telling, amidst all the allusions, sex changes and plot twists torn straight from a telenovela. The real shame of The Skin I Live In is that so much happens that you don’t actually have time to care much about any of it. Although its many surfaces are beautiful to behold (thanks largely to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine), The Skin I Live In ultimately lacks a key muscle: a heart. (1:57) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*Sutro’s: The Palace at Land’s End Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch (2008’s Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong and 2009’s Remembering Playland) explores the unique and fascinating history behind San Francisco’s Sutro Baths in his latest project, an enjoyable documentary that covers the stories behind Adolph Sutro, the construction of his swimming pools, and the amazingly diverse, and somewhat strange collection of other attractions that entertained generations of locals that came to Land’s End for amusement. Told through interviews with local historians and residents, the narrative is illustrated with a host of rarely-seen historic photographs, archival film footage, contemporary video, and images of old documents, advertisements and newspapers. The film should appeal not only to older viewers who fondly remember going to Sutro’s as children, and sadly recall it burning down in 1966, but also younger audiences who have wandered through the ruins below the Cliff House and wondered what once stood there. (1:24) Balboa. (Sean McCourt)

Tower Heist The mildest of mysteries drift around the edges of Tower Heist — like, how plausible is Ben Stiller as the blue-collar manager of a tony uptown NYC residence? How is that Eddie Murphy’s face has grown smoother and more seamless with age? And how much heavy lifting goes into an audience member’s suspension of disbelief concerning a certain key theft, dangling umpteen floors above Thanksgiving parade, in the finale? Yet those questions might not to deter those eager to escape into this determinedly undemanding, faintly entertaining Robin Hood-style comedy-thriller. Josh Kovacs (Stiller) is the wildly competent manager of an upscale residence — toadying smoothly and making life run perfectly for his entitled employers — till Bernie Madoff-like penthouse dweller Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is arrested for big-time financial fraud, catching the pension fund of Josh’s staffers in his vortex. After a showy standoff gets the upstanding Josh fired, he assembles a crew of ex-employees Enrique (Michael Peña) and Charlie (Casey Affleck), maid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and foreclosed former resident Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), as well as childhood friend, neighbor, and thief Slide (Murphy). Murphy gets to slink effortlessly through supposed comeback role — is he vital here? Not really. Nevertheless, a few twists and a good-hearted feel for the working-class 99 percent who got screwed by the financial sector make this likely the most likable movie Brett Ratner has made since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand — provided you can get over those dangles over the yawning gaps in logic. (1:45) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas Delivery of a mystery package to the crash pad Kumar (Kal Penn) no longer shares with now-married, successfully yuppiefied Harold (John Cho) forces the former to visit the latter in suburbia after a couple years’ bromantic lapse. Unfortunately Kumar’s unreconstructed stonerdom once again wreaks havoc with Harold’s well-laid plans, necessitating another serpentine quest, this time aimed toward an all-important replacement Xmas tree but continually waylaid by random stuff. Which this time includes pot (of course), an unidentified hallucinogen, ecstasy, a baby accidentally dosed on all the aforementioned, claymation, Ukrainian mobsters, several penises in peril, a “Wafflebot,” and a Radio City Music Hall-type stage holiday musical extravaganza starring who else but Neil Patrick Harris. Only in it for ten minutes or so, NPH manages to make his iffy material seem golden. But despite all CGI wrapping and self-aware 3D gratuitousness, this third Harold and Kumar adventure is by far the weakest. While the prior installments were hit/miss but anarchic, occasionally subversive, and always good-natured, Christmas substitutes actual race jokes for jokes about racism, amongst numerous errors on the side of simple crassness. There are some laughs, but you know creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are losing interest when the majority of their gags would work as well for Adam Sandler. Cho and Penn remain very likeable; this time, however, their movie isn’t. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Weekend In post-World War II Britain, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, and calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores.” Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes. The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Albert Finney kicked against the pricks in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night. The landscape has changed, but is still nondescript; the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) wakes up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend‘s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple. Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Woman on the Sixth Floor There is a particular strain of populist European comedy in which stuffy northerners are loosened up by liberating exposure to those sensual, passionate, loud, all-embracing simple folk from the sunny south. The line between multicultural inclusion and condescension is a thin one these movies not infrequently cross. Set in 1960, Philippe Le Guay’s film has a bourgeoisie Paris couple hiring a new maid in the person of attractive young Maria (Natalia Verbeke). She joins a large group of Spanish women toiling for snobbish French gentry in the same building. Her presence has a leavening effect on investment counselor employer Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), to the point where he actually troubles to improve the poorly housed maids’ lot. (Hitherto no one has cared that their shared toilet is broken.) But he also takes an inappropriate and (initially) unwanted romantic interest in this woman, lending a creepy edge to what’s intended as a feel-good romp. (For the record, Verbeke is about a quarter-century younger than Luchini — a difference one can’t imagine the film would ignore so completely if the genders were reversed.) Le Guay’s screenplay trades in easy stereotypes — the Spanish “help” are all big-hearted lovers of life, the Gallic upper-crusters (including Sandrine Kiberlain as J-L’s shallow, insecure wife) emotionally constipated, xenophobic boors — predictable conflicts and pat resolutions. As formulaic crowd-pleasers go, it could be worse. But don’t be fooled — if this were in English, there’d be no fawning mainstream reviews. In fact, it has been in English, more or less. And that ugly moment in cinematic history was called Spanglish (2004). (1:44) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Our Weekly Picks November 2-8

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 2

“The Unstable Object”

The PFA hosts the West Coast premiere of The Unstable Object, a mysterious, precisely observed work by Daniel Eisenberg. Nearly wordless (but densely aural), the film surveys three work sites: a glassy Volkswagen plant in Germany which doubles as a tourist destination; a Chicago clock producer staffed by the blind; and the alchemical Zildjian Cymbal factory in Istanbul. Occasionally surreal and completely engrossing, the film poetically analyzes differing degrees of labor and manual reproduction. Tomorrow night Eisenberg visits Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to present his film Persistence (1997) and to continue a conversation with Jeffrey Skoller, a UC Berkeley scholar who has edited a new critical anthology on Eisenberg’s work. (Max Goldberg)

7:30 p.m., $11

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

www.sfcinematheque.org


THURSDAY 3

Fruit Bats

Starting out life as a lo-fi project of Eric D. Johnson (who has stints behind him as a member of the Shins, among other bands) in the mid 1990s, the Fruit Bats came together as an working live band around the turn of the millennium, and has had somewhat of an open/revolving door of a lineup since — but its releases continue to get better and better. The group’s music is full of joyously simple , yet infectiously catchy folk-esque tunes, mixed with a touch of country-fried Southern rock and brightly sung sweet melodies — Johnson keeps the successful formula going on the group’s most recent release, Tripper (Sub Pop), which dropped earlier this year. (Sean McCourt)

With Parson Red Heads

9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s eponymous debut has to be one of my favorite albums of 2011. The brainchild of Portland, Ore., via New Zealand rocker Ruban Nielson, Unknown Mortal Orchestra is like listening to a crate of dusty, warped ’60s psych and Motown records after ingesting a couple mind-altering substances. It may have originated in Portland, but I can’t imagine a place more suited to this fuzzy drugged out basement-pop than San Francisco. Come get weird. (Frances Capell)

With Gauntlet Hair and Popscene DJs 9 p.m., $12–<\d>$14 Rickshaw Stop 155 Fell, SF (415) 861-2011 www.rickshawstop.com

 

Mastodon

Mastodon didn’t please everyone with Crack the Skye, its astral-projecting 2009 concept album, but the band isn’t really in the pleasing business. Ever since mid-aughts underground success propelled the Atlanta quartet into the major label limelight, Mastodon has stuck to its wildly inventive, idiosyncratic guns. Pivoting away from Crack‘s epic song structures and complicated arrangements, The Hunter, released this fall, is an infectious smorgasbord of taut, focused songwriting, heavy on vocal hooks provided by the band’s three singers (guitarist Brent Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and drummer Brann Dailor). Lyrical topics range from meth-addled lumberjacks to lonely octopi, but the star of the show is Mastodon’s boundless, yet disciplined creativity. No note, no matter how unexpected or bizarre, feels out of place. (Ben Richardson)

With the Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang

8 p.m., $30

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

San Francisco Transgender Film Festival

One of the greatest things about San Francisco is that there’s a film festival for everyone: green activists, dog lovers, anti-corporate crusaders, horror fiends, outdoor enthusiasts, kung fu fans, and dozens more. Basically, if you can’t find a festival that excites you, you probably don’t actually like movies. This week alone there’s “Not Necessarily Noir” at the Roxie, the San Francisco Film Society’s “Cinema By the Bay,” the American Indian Film Festival (see Fri/4), and the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. Step out tonight to check out a performance honoring the Transgender fest’s 10th anniversary, with artistic director Shawna Virago among those taking the stage. The films kick in this weekend, showcasing two shorts programs from across the globe; all have a transgender element in common, but topics range from boxing, boobs, and bunnies to the search for true love. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sat/5

8 p.m., $12–$15

CounterPulse

1310 Mission, SF

www.sftff.org


FRIDAY 4

American Indian Film Festival

Hollywood loves to depict indigenous people as creatures who exist only in the past, battling cowboys or stepping forth to offer solemn life lessons to the likes of Kevin Costner. The American Indian Film Festival, now in its 36th year, offers ample cinematic evidence to the contrary, with a jam-packed week of programming. Ok, there’s a Western — supernatural frontier tale Yellow Rock — but there are also documentaries (Wild Horses and Renegades, about the Bureau of Land Management’s controversial stance on wild horses), a thriller set in deepest Alaska (On the Ice, which won “Best Debut Film” at the Berlin International Film Festival), and opening night family drama Every Emotion Costs, a Canadian film making its US premiere. (Eddy)

Nov. 4-12, free–$20

Embarcadero Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, SF

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 554-0525

www.americanindianfilminstitute.com


FRIDAY 4

 

“Cat Lady”

Performance artist, writer, and serious prankster Kristina Wong has a way with stereotypes (cf. her mail-order-bride site, bigbadchinesemama.com), but her work defies categories by virtue of the brilliant wit, creative reach, and restless iconoclasm informing such acclaimed pieces as Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (about the high incidence of suicide among Asian American women) and Going Green the Wong Way (which made its Bay Area debut in July). The SF-born, LA-based Wong normally flies solo, but in her anticipated return to San Francisco this weekend, she unveils her first full-length ensemble piece, a work bringing together “animal psychics, aggressive pick-up artists and musty cat ladies” in a hilarious and unsettling exploration of connection at the social and sexual margins. (Robert Avila)

Fri/4-Sat/5, 8 p.m., Sun/6, 7 p.m.; $17–$20

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org

 

Wild Flag

Wild Flag’s self-titled debut, released in September on Merge, is a breath of fresh air from the former members of Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein, Janet Weiss), Helium (Mary Timony), and the Minders (Rebecca Cole). As tested rockers from Portland, Ore. and Washington D.C. who’ve been playing in bands and listening to them for years (Brownstein also had a blog at NPR Music), Wild Flag’s tough pop rock feels decidedly different from other new bands out today — in other words, not esoteric indie rock awash in reverb. Wild Flag is vivacious, accessible, and catchy. It delivers a multifarious punch of classic hard rock, punk, and post-hardcore that’s downright fun to listen to. And if there’s ever been a great live band, it’s Wild Flag; these women grew up on stage.(James H. Miller)

With Drew Grow & the Pastors’ Wives

Through Sat/5

9 p.m., $19

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

Das Racist

Das Racist is a tough act to define. It’s weed rap; it’s social commentary. It’s catchy and fun; it’s edgy and subversive. Or, as Himanshu Suri (a.k.a. Heems) and Victor Vazquez (a.k.a. Kool AD) put it, they’re not joking — just joking — they are joking. Since the pair first broke into the hip-hop scene with silly cyber-hit “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” Das Racist has released two hugely successful mixtapes and an album, Relax (Greedhead). Suri and Vazquez may be joking, but with remarkably astute lyrics and a crazy amount of talent, Das Racist is taking over the rap game in a very serious way. (Capell)

With Boots Riley (sitting in with Das Racist), Danny Brown, and Despot

8 p.m., $25

Ruby Skye

420 Mason, SF

(415) 693-0777

www.rubyskye.com


SATURDAY 5

SF Symphony Dia de los Muertos

There is musically much more to Day of the Dead than the ominous-humorous beating of drums, the rustle of voluminous skirts through ofrenda-dotted parks, and the clackity-clack of dancing skeletons bumping knees. There is singing at the symphony! Mexican tenor David Lomelí will join the players in a festive, family-oriented afternoon of favorites like “Besame Mucho,” “Granada,” and works by Mexican composers. Starting at 1 p.m., the colorful Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco and musical group Vinikai will lead a procession into Davies Symphony Hall, where musically themed altars will be on display. Plus, complimentary pan de muerto from Bay Baking Co and Mexican hot chocolate will be served, eliciting a few shouts of “Yum!” (Marke B.)

1 p.m. procession, 2 p.m. performance, $15–$68

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF.

(415) 552-8338

www.sfsymphony.org

 

DaM-Funk and Master Blazter

The last few times DaM-Funk was in town for shows — a DJ set at Som Bar; an incredible but barely remembered 45 party at Public Works to cap off Noise Pop — it wasn’t the full deal. Now the ambassador of boogie will cap off his fall tour with live accompaniment from Master Blazter, strapping on the shoulder synth to accomplish his main goal: throwing a party where everyone gets down. And there’s a good chance DaM-Funk has picked up some new old school tricks producing former Slave frontman Steve Arrington’s new album which comes out this month, Love, Peace, and Funky Beats. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Matthew David, Devon Who, and Sweater Funk DJs

9 p.m., $20

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com


SUNDAY 6

“Beyond This Place” with live soundtrack

It makes sense that Sufjan Stevens would compose the soundtrack for Kaleo La Belle’s documentary Beyond This Place. The two have been friends since childhood and the documentary is personal. After 30 years of estrangement, La Belle and his stubborn hippie father, Cloud Rock, embark on a 500-mile bike excursion where La Belle hopes he’ll learn whether there’s an inextricable bond between himself and Cloud Rock — a man without guilt, regret, or compassion. At the Castro Theater, Beyond This Place screens with a live soundtrack performance by Sufjan Stevens and Castanets’ Ray Raposa; a Q&A with La Belle follows. (Miller)

7:30 p.m., $25

Castro Theater

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheater.com


TUESDAY 8

North Sky Cello Ensemble

When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs burst onto the indie rock scene in 2003, singer Karen O and guitarist Nick Zinner were so fashionable and seductive that I couldn’t quite relate to the coolness of it all. I preferred Brian Chase, who looked like a 1980s tech guy by comparison. Besides, the classically trained drummer played phenomenally. All three members have been working on projects outside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lately. O wrote a “psycho opera,” Zinner has been doing photography, and Chase? He’s been pounding at the drums with the North Sky Cello Ensemble, a collection of classical musicians whose players have supported the likes of Beyonce and Elton John. How would, say, Debussy sound with a killer rhythm section? (Miller)

8 p.m., free

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com 

 

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Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Asylum of Satan and The Devil and Max Devlin The Vortex Room’s penultimate program of Satanic cinema weighs deeper into approximating the torments of hell, starting with the 1972 Asylum. The inevitable young lovely (Carla Borelli) is committed to a mental institution against her will. The other patients dress in white robes with heavy hoods like Klan members — in wheelchairs, yet — and the few other “normal” inmates tend to die horrible deaths under “treatment.” Reaching Andy Milligan-level amateurity of performance and filmmaking (complete with a library-music score), this patience-testing horror was the first feature from William Girdler, who stuck with exploitation genres but managed a steep learning curve. During the next few years he ascended to guilty-pleasure blaxploitation Exorcist rip-off Abby (1974) to competent hairy Jaws (1975) rip-off Grizzly (1976) to a true original, 1978’s berserk all-star The Manitou, in which a 400-year-old evil Native American spirit grows as a tumor from Susan Strasberg’s neck. Sadly, we’ll never know where Girdler could have gone from that zenith — he died in a helicopter crash at age 30 the same year. For maximum incongruity, Asylum‘s co-feature is 1981’s The Devil and Max Devlin, in which Elliott Gould plays a mean L.A. slumlord who’s run over by a bus full of Hare Krishnas. Waking up in Hades, Satan (Bill Cosby — what about that casting seems disturbingly just-right?), offers Max a deal: he can get outta jail free if he delivers three souls by making some innocent kids into selfish brats. One of them is a teen singer who, in a strange in-joke, sounds exactly and looks quite a bit like Barbra Streisand (the former Mrs. Gould). With its non-cute representations of Hell and deliberately humorless Cosby, this ersatz comedy made at the height of Disney’s post-Walt wilderness wandering won the Mouse House one of its first PG (as opposed to G) ratings. Mercifully Beelzebub’s further influence was curtailed before the studio reached the logical end point of this path, producing porn. Vortex Room. (Harvey)

I Think It’s Raining In local film curator Joshua Moore’s first feature, screening on opening night at Cinema by the Bay, a young woman named Renata (Alexandra Clayton) returns to her hometown of San Francisco after unspecified wanderings, replants herself loosely (in a motel), and proceeds to drift across the city, connecting with old friends and with strangers and disconnecting in response to internal impulses like panic attacks and drunken vitriol. The film is filled with evocative moments, like a scene in a nightclub where Renata’s musician friends call her up to perform a song (written and sung by Clayton) that seems to sketch out all the charms and failings and pitfalls and misadventures that make up her mysterious biography — Super 8 images flickering across her face, her own image set off in the darkness and isolated from the life and warmth around her. Renata is clearly moving in an atmosphere of emotional disturbances, and her discomfort and unsteadiness transmit powerfully, leaving the viewer equally uneasy and afraid. The mood temporarily lightens during a random, rainy-day encounter with a young man, Val (Andrew Dulman), who seems tuned in to Renata’s frequency without emitting the same anxious bursts of static — or perhaps simply inspires her to try to tune in to his. But it’s painfully unclear how sustaining such a mode can be for a protagonist who admits to lacking the primary skills for holding on to happiness. (1:32) SFFS New People Cinema. (Rapoport)

*Like Crazy Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet near the end of college; after a magical date, they’re ferociously hooked on each other. Trouble is, she’s in Los Angeles on a soon-to-expire student visa — and when she impulsively overstays, then jets home to London for a visit months later, her re-entry to America is stopped cold at LAX. (True love’s no match for homeland security.) An on-and-off long-distance romance ensues, and becomes increasingly strained, even as their respective careers (he makes furniture, she’s a magazine staffer) flourish. Director and co-writer Drake Doremus (2010’s Douchebag) achieves a rare midpoint between gritty mumblecore and shiny Hollywood romance; the characters feel very real and the script ably captures the frustration that settles in when idealized fantasies give way to the messy workings of everyday life. There are some contrivances here — Anna’s love-token gift from Jacob, a bracelet engraved “Patience,” breaks when she’s with another guy — but for the most part, Like Crazy offers an honest portrait of heartbreak. (1:29) (Eddy)

Revenge of the Electric Car The timing is right for Chris Paine to make a follow-up to his 2006 Who Killed the Electric Car?, a celebrity-studded doc examining the much-mourned downfall of GM’s EV1 — with gas prices so high and oil politics so distressing, even drivers who don’t consider themselves radical environmentalists are interested in going electric, as choices aplenty flood the marketplace. The aptly-titled Revenge of the Electric Car makes nice with GM’s Bob Lutz as he readies the release of the Chevy Volt. It also profiles Silicon Valley’s own electric car startup, Tesla; tracks Nissan’s top gun Carlos Ghosn as he pushes the Nissan Leaf into production; and even digs up an off-the-grid mechanical wizard known as “Gadget,” who makes his living converting regular autos (if a Porsche is “regular”) into vehicles with plug-in power. The film makes it clear that for most of these folks, business comes first — sure, it’s great to be green, but you have to make green, too — and there’s some tension when the crash of 2008 threatens the auto industry’s enthusiasm for planet-friendly innovations. But there’s far more optimism here than Paine’s first Electric Car film, not to mention a refreshing lack of Mel Gibson. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Sutro’s: The Palace at Land’s End Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch (2008’s Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong and 2009’s Remembering Playland) explores the unique and fascinating history behind San Francisco’s Sutro Baths in his latest project, an enjoyable documentary that covers the stories behind Adolph Sutro, the construction of his swimming pools, and the amazingly diverse, and somewhat strange collection of other attractions that entertained generations of locals that came to Land’s End for amusement. Told through interviews with local historians and residents, the narrative is illustrated with a host of rarely-seen historic photographs, archival film footage, contemporary video, and images of old documents, advertisements and newspapers. The film should appeal not only to older viewers who fondly remember going to Sutro’s as children, and sadly recall it burning down in 1966, but also younger audiences who have wandered through the ruins below the Cliff House and wondered what once stood there. (1:24) Balboa. (Sean McCourt)

Tower Heist Members of the 99% (real-life zillionaires Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy) team up to get revenge on a sleazy Wall Street 1%-er (Alan Alda). Brett Ratner (also a real-life zillionaire) directs, so don’t actually expect much timely social commentary. (1:45) Balboa, Presidio, Shattuck.

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas The bros are back in this year’s first, and no doubt stoniest, holiday-themed release. (1:30)

ONGOING

Anonymous Hark, what bosom through yonder bodice heaves? If you like your Shakespearean capers OTT and chock-full of fleshy drama, political intrigue, and groundling sensation, then Anonymous will enthrall (and if the lurid storyline doesn’t hold, the acting should). Writer John Orloff spins his story off one popular theory of Shakespeare authorship — that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true pen behind the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Our modern-day narrator (Derek Jacobi) foregrounds the fictitious nature of the proceedings, pulling back the curtain on Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) staging his unruly comedies for the mob, much to the amusement of a mysterious aging dandy of a visitor: the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). Hungry for the glory that has always slipped through his pretty fingers, the Earl yearns to have his works staged for audiences beyond those in court, where Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave as the elder regent, daughter Joely Richardson as the lusty young royal) dotes on them, and out of the reach of his puritan father-in-law Robert Cecil (David Thewlis), Elizabeth’s close advisor, and he devises a plan for Jonson to stage them under his own name. But much more is triggered by the productions, uncovering secret trysts, hunchback stratagems, and more royal bastards than you can shake a scepter at. Director Roland Emmerich invests the production with the requisite high drama — and camp — to match the material, as well as pleasing layers of grime and toxic-looking Elizabethan makeup for both the ladies and the dudes who look like ladies (the crowd-surfing, however, strikes the off-key grunge-era note). And if the inherent elitism of the tale — could only a nobleman have written those remarkable plays and sonnets? — offends, fortunately the cast members are more than mere players. Ifans invests his decadent Earl with the jaded gaze and smudgy guyliner of a fading rock star, and Redgrave plays her Elizabeth like a deranged, gulled grotesque. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Cinematic crate-diggers have plenty to celebrate, checking the results of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson had heard whispers for years that Swedish television archives possessed more archival footage of the Black Panthers than anyone in the states — while poring through film for a doc on Philly soul, he discovered the rumors were dead-on. With this lyrical film, coproduced by the Bay Area’s Danny Glover, Olsson has assembled an elegant snapshot of black activists and urban life in America, relying on the vivid, startlingly crisp images of figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton at their peak, while staying true to the wide-open, refreshingly nonjudgmental lens of the Swedish camera crews. Questlove of the Roots and Om’Mas Keith provide the haunting score for the film, beautifully historicized with shots of Oakland in the 1960s and Harlem in the ’70s. It’s made indelible thanks to footage of proto-Panther school kids singing songs about grabbing their guns, and an unforgettable interview with a fiery Angela Davis talking about the uses of violence, from behind bars and from the place of personally knowing the girls who died in the infamous Birmingham, Ala., church bombing of 1963. (1:36) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Contagion Tasked with such panic-inducing material, one has to appreciate director Steven Soderbergh’s cool head and hand with Contagion. Some might even dub this epic thriller (of sorts) cold, clinical, and completely lacking in bedside manner. Still, for those who’d rather be in the hands of a doctor who refuses to talk down to the patient, Contagion comes on like a refreshingly smart, somewhat melodrama-free clean room, a clear-eyed response to a messy, terrifying subject. A deadly virus is spreading swiftly — sans cure, vaccine, or sense — starting with a few unlikely suspects: globe-trotting corporate exec Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), a waiter, a European tourist, and a Japanese businessman. The chase is on to track the disease’s genesis and find a way to combat it, from the halls of the San Francisco Chronicle and blog posts of citizen activist-journalist Alan (Jude Law), to the emergency hospital in the Midwest set up by intrepid Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), to a tiny village in China with a World Health investigator (Marion Cotillard). Soderbergh’s brisk, businesslike storytelling approach nicely counterpoints the hysteria going off on the ground, as looting and anarchy breaks out around Beth’s immune widower Mitch (Matt Damon), and draws you in — though the tact of making this disease’s Typhoid Mary a sexually profligate woman is unsettling and borderline offensive, as is the predictable blame-it-on-the-Chinese origin coda. (1:42) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) Bridge, SF Center. (Chun)

50/50 This is nothing but a mainstream rom-com-dramedy wrapped in indie sheep’s clothes. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns he has cancer, he undergoes the requisite denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance like a formality. Aided by his bird-brained but lovable best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan), lovable klutz of a counselor Katherine (Anna Kendrick), and panicky mother (Anjelica Huston), Adam gets a new lease on life. This comes in the form of one-night-stands, furious revelations in parked cars, and a prescribed dose of wacky tobaccy. If 50/50 all sounds like the setup for a pseudo-insightful, kooky feel-goodery, it is. The film doesn’t have the brains or spleen to get down to the bone of cancer. Instead, director Jonathan Levine (2008’s The Wackness) and screenwriter Will Reiser favor highfalutin’ monologues, wooden characters, and a Hollywood ending (with just the right amount of ambiguity). Still, Gordon-Levitt is the most gorgeous cancer patient you will ever see, bald head and all. (1:40) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Footloose Another unnecessary remake joins the queue at the box office, aiming for the pockets of ’80s-era nostalgics and fans of dance movies and naked opportunism. A recap for those (if there are those) who never saw the 1984 original: city boy Ren McCormack moves to a Middle American speck-on-the-map called Bomont and riles the town’s inhabitants with his rock ‘n’ roll ways — rock ‘n’ roll, and the lewd acts of physicality it inspires, i.e., dancing, having been criminalized by the town council to preserve the souls and bodies of Bomont’s young people. Ren falls for wayward preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore — whose father has sponsored this oversolicitous piece of legislation — and vows to fight city hall on the civil rights issue of a senior prom. Ren McCormack 2.0 is one Kenny Wormald (prepped for the gig by his tenure in the straight-to-cable dance-movie sequel Center Stage: Turn It Up), who forgoes the ass-grabbing blue jeans that Kevin Bacon once angry-danced through a flour mill in. Otherwise, the 2011 version, directed and cowritten by Craig Brewer (2005’s Hustle & Flow), regurgitates much of the original, hoping to leverage classic lines, familiar scenes, and that Dance Your Ass Off T-shirt of Ariel’s. It doesn’t work. Ren and Ariel (Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough) are blandly unsympathetic and have the chemistry of two wet paper towels, the adult supporting cast should have known better, and the entire film comes off as a tired, tuneless echo. (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Rapoport)

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life Far from perfect, yet imbued with all the playful, artful qualities of the maestro himself, writer-director Joann Sfar goes out of his way to tell singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg’s tale the way that he sees it, as that of an artist, and in the process creates a wonderland of cartoonish perversity from the cradle to the grave. The remainder of A Heroic Life is almost eclipsed by the film’s earliest interludes, which trail the already too-clever-for-his-own-good young musician and painter, born Lucien Ginsburg, as he proudly claims his gold star from the Nazis. With echoes of 400 Blows (1959) resounding with every wayward step, the brash young Lucien lives by his active imagination, dreaming up a fat, spiderlike plaything from the monstrous Jew depicted in Nazi propaganda and conjuring an imaginary alter-ego he dubs his ugly Mug. Though Heroic Life‘s adult Serge is seamlessly embodied by Eric Elmosnino, few of the moments from the grown lothario’s life rival those initial scenes, with the exception of his exuberant love affair with Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and the fantastic music that came out of it. Still, it’s a joy to hear his music, even in short snatches, with subtitles that clearly spell out Gainsbourg’s talents as a stunning, uniquely talented lyricist. (2:02) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Gainsbourg: The Man Who Loved Women Those hungry for more of the real Serge Gainsbourg — after being tantalized and teased by Joann Sfar’s whimsical comic book-inspired feature — will want to catch this documentary by Pascal Forneri for many of the details that didn’t fit or were skimmed over, here, in the very words and image of the songwriter and the many iconic women in his life. Much of the chanson master’s photographic or video history seems to be here — from his blunt-force on-camera proposition of Whitney Houston to multiple, insightful interviews with the love of his life, Jane Birkin, as well as the many women who won his heart for just a little while, such as Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. Gainsbourg may be marred by its somewhat choppy, mystifying structure, at times chronological, at times organized according to creative periods, but overriding all are the actual footage and photographs loosely, louchely assembled and collaged by Forneri; delightful pre-music-videos Scopitones of everyone from France Gall to Anna Karina; and the gemlike, oh-so-quotable interviews with the mercurial, admirably honest musical genius and eternally subversive provocateur. Quibble as you might with the short shrift given his later career—in addition to major ’70s LPs like Histoire de Melody Nelson and L’Homme à tête de chou (Cabbage-Head Man) — this is a must-see for fans both casual and seriously seduced. (1:45) Roxie. (Chun)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) Shattuck. (Chun)

The Ides of March Battling it out in the Ohio primaries are two leading Democratic presidential candidates. Filling the role of idealistic upstart new to the national stage — even his poster looks like you-know-who’s Hope one — is Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), who’s running neck-and-neck in the polls with his rival thanks to veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and ambitious young press secretary Steven (Ryan Gosling). The latter is so tipped for success that he’s wooed to switch teams by a rival politico’s campaign chief (Paul Giamatti). While he declines, even meeting with a representative from the opposing camp is a dangerous move for Steven, who’s already juggling complex loyalties to various folk including New York Times reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei) and campaign intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who happens to be the daughter of the Democratic National Party chairman. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s acclaimed play Farragut North, Clooney’s fourth directorial feature is assured, expertly played, and full of sharp insider dialogue. (Willimon worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the White House.) It’s all thoroughly engaging — yet what evolves into a thriller of sorts involving blackmail and revenge ultimately seems rather beside the point, as it turns upon an old-school personal morals quandary rather than diving seriously into the corporate, religious, and other special interests that really determine (or at least spin) the issues in today’s political landscape. Though stuffed with up-to-the-moment references, Ides already feels curiously dated. (1:51) California, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

In Time Justin Timberlake moves from romantic comedy to social commentary to play Will Salas, a young man from the ghetto living one day at a time. Many 12-steppers may make this claim, but Salas literally is, because in his world, time actually is money and people pay, say, four minutes for a cup of coffee, a couple hours for a bus ride home from work, and years to travel into a time zone where people don’t run from place to place to stay ahead of death. In writer-director Andrew Niccol’s latest piece of speculative cinema, humans are born with a digitized timepiece installed in their forearm and a default sell-by date of 25 years, with one to grow on — though most end up selling theirs off fairly quickly while struggling to pay rent and put food on the table. Time zones have replaced area codes in defining social stature and signaling material wealth, alongside those pesky devices that give the phrase “internal clock” an ominous literality. Niccol also wrote and directed Gattaca (1997) and wrote The Truman Show (1998), two other films in which technological advances have facilitated a merciless, menacing brand of social engineering. In all three, what is most alarming is the through line between a dystopian society and our own, and what is most hopeful is the embattled protagonist’s promises that we don’t have to go down that road. Amanda Seyfried proves convincible as a bored heiress to eons, her father (Vincent Kartheiser) less amenable to Robin Hood-style time banditry. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

Johnny English Reborn (1:41) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

The Legend is Born: Ip Man If you prefer your martial arts movies Zhang Yimou-lush, Jackie Chan-hilarious, or Tsui Hark-insane, you’ll want to skip The Legend is Born: Ip Man, an earnest, unfussy semi-biopic about the early years of Wing Chun grandmaster Yip Man (he taught Bruce Lee … respect). Here, he’s called Ip Man and is played by the bland Dennis To, who might be carved from wood if not for his many nimble fight scenes — playful dispute-settling, grueling training sequences, to-the-death clashes, etc. The Ip Man story has been popular Hong Kong movie fodder in recent years, with the far more charistmatic Donnie Yen playing the lead in a pair of 2008 and 2010 flicks. This apparently unrelated production is less flashier than those films, but purists will appreciate appearances by fightin’ screen legends Sammo Hung and Yuen Bao, plus a cameo by Yip Man’s real-life son. Side note: director Herman Yau co-directed absolutely bonkers crime drama The Untold Story (1993), starring Anthony Wong as a Sweeney Todd type who runs a restaurant famed for its “pork” buns. Worth a look, fiends. (1:40) Four Star. (Eddy)

The Lion King 3D (1:29) SF Center.

*Love Crime Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance about what sleazy things could potentially be done to this neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller. No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures. Ludivine Sagnier plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. Though it’s no masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his Corneau’s career Corneau (he died at age 67 last August) not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. (1:46) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Margin Call Think of Margin Call as a Mamet-like, fictitious insider jab at the financial crisis, a novelistic rejoinder to Oscar-winning doc Inside Job (2010). First-time feature director and writer J.C. Chandor shows a deft hand with complex, writerly material, creating a darting dance of smart dialogue and well-etched characters as he sidesteps the hazards of overtheatricality, a.k.a. the crushing, overbearing proscenium. The film opens on a familiar Great Recession scene: lay-off day at an investment bank, marked by HR functionaries calling workers one by one into fishbowl conference rooms. The first victim is the most critical — Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a risk-management staffer who has stumbled on an investment miscalculation that could potentially trigger a Wall Street collapse. On his way out, he passes a drive with his findings to one of his young protégés, Peter (Zachary Quinto), setting off a flash storm over the next 24 hours that will entangle his boss Sam (Kevin Spacey), who’s agonizing over his dying dog while putting up a go-big-or-go-home front; cynical trading manager Will (Paul Bettany); and the firm’s intimidating head (Jeremy Irons), who gets to utter the lines, “Explain to me as you would to a child. Or a Golden Retriever.” Such top-notch players get to really flex their skills here, equipped with Chandor’s spot-on script, which manages to convey the big issues, infuse the numbers with drama and the money managers with humanity, and never talk down to the audience. (1:45) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Martha Marcy May Marlene If Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence was the breakout ingénue of 2010, look for Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s Elizabeth Olsen to take the 2011 title. Both films are backwoodsy and harrowing and offer juicy roles for their leading starlets — not to mention a pair of sinister supporting roles for the great John Harkes. Here, he’s a Manson-y figure who retains disturbing control over Olsen’s character even after the multi-monikered girl flees his back-to-the-land cult. Writer-director Sean Durkin goes for unflashy realism and mounds on the dread as the hollow-eyed Martha attempts to resume normal life, to the initial delight of her estranged, guilt-ridden older sister (Sarah Paulson). Soon, however, it becomes clear that Things Are Not Ok. You’d be forgiven for pooh-poohing Olsen from the get-go; lavish Sundance buzz and the fact that she’s Mary-Kate and Ashley’s sis have already landed her mountains of pre-release publicity. But her performance is unforgettable, and absolutely fearless. (1:41) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*My Afternoons with Margueritte There’s just one moment in this tender French dramedy that touches on star Gerard Depardieu’s real life: his quasi-literate salt-of-the-earth character, Germain, rushes to save his depressed friend from possible suicide only to have his pretentious pal pee on the ground in front of him. Perhaps Depardieu’s recent urinary run-in, on the floor of an airline cabin, was an inspired reference to this moment. In any case, My Afternoons With Margueritte offers a hope of the most humanist sort, for all those bumblers and sad cases that are usually shuttled to the side in the desperate ’00s, as Depardieu demonstrates that he’s fully capable of carrying a film with sheer life force, rotund gut and straw-mop ‘do and all. In fact he’s almost daring you to hate on his aging, bumptious current incarnation: Germain is the 50-something who never quite grew up or left home. The vegetable farmer is treated poorly by his doddering tramp of a mother and is widely considered the village idiot, the butt of all the jokes down at the cafe, though contrary to most assumptions, he manages to score a beautiful, bus-driving girlfriend (Sophie Guillemin). However the true love of his life might be the empathetic, intelligent older woman, Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus), that he meets in the park while counting pigeons. There’s a wee bit of Maude to Germain’s Harold, though Jean Becker’s chaste love story is content to remain within the wholesome confines of small-town life — not a bad thing when it comes to looking for grace in a rough world. (1:22) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Oranges and Sunshine At the center of this saga of lives ripped apart by church and state is Margaret Humphreys, the Englishwoman who uncovered the scandalous mass deportation of children from England to Australia. In one of her most rewarding roles since The Proposition (2005), her last foray to Oz, Watson portrays the English social worker who in the ’80s learns of multiple cases of now-adult orphans in Australia who don’t know their real name or even age but remember that they once lived in the UK. She starts to explore the past of victims such as Jack (Hugo Weaving) and Len (David Wenham) and tries to reunite them with their families, including mothers who were told their youngsters were adopted into real families. In the course of her work, and at the expense of her own family life, Humphreys discovers the horrors that befell many young deportees — as child slave-laborers — and the corruption that extends its fingers into government and the Catholic church. In his first feature film, director Jim Loach, son of crusading cinematic force Ken Loach, turns over each stone with care and compassion, finding the perfect filter through which to tell this well-modulated story in Watson, whose Humphreys faces harassment and post-traumatic stress disorder in her quest to heal the children who were lured overseas in the hope that they would ride horses to school and pick oranges off a tree for breakfast. (1:45) Albany, Embarcadero. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity 3 A prequel to a prequel, this third installment in the faux-home-movie horror series is as good as one could reasonably hope for: considerably better than 2010’s part two, even if inevitably it can’t replicate the relatively fresh impact of the 2007 original. After a brief introductory sequence we’re in 1988, with the grown-up sisters of the first two films now children (Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown) living with a recently separated mom (Lauren Bitter) and her nice new boyfriend (Christopher Smith). His wedding-video business provides the excuse for many a surveillance cam to be set up in their home once things start going bump in the night (and sometimes day). Which indeed they do, pretty quickly. Brown’s little Kristi has an invisible friend called Toby she says is “real,” though of course everyone else trusts he’s a normal, harmless imaginary pal. Needless to say, they are wrong. Written by Christopher Landon (Paranormal Activity 2, 2007’s Disturbia) and directed by the guys (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman) who made interesting nonfiction feature Catfish (2010), this quickly made follow-up does a good job piling on more scares without getting shameless or ludicrous about it, extends the series’ mythology in ways that easily pave way toward future chapters, and maintains the found-footage illusion well enough. (Excellent child performances and creepy camcorder “pans” atop an oscillating fan motor prove a great help; try to forget that video quality just wasn’t this good in ’88.) Not great, but thoroughly decent, and worth seeing in a theater — this remains one chiller concept whose effectiveness can only be diminished to the point of near-uselessness on the small screen. (1:24) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Puss in Boots (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Real Steel Everybody knows what this movie about rocking, socking robots should have been called. Had the producers secured the rights to the name, we’d all be sitting down to Over The Top II: Child Endangerment. Absentee father Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his much-too-young son Max (Dakota Goyo) haul their remote-controlled pugilists in a big old truck from one underground competition to the next. Along the way Charlie learns what it means to be a loving father while still routinely managing to leave cherubic Max alone in scenarios of astonishing peril. Seriously, there are displays of parental neglect in this movie that strain credulity well beyond any of its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em elements. Fortunately the filmmakers had the good sense to make those elements awesome. The robots look great and the ring action can be surprisingly stirring in spite of the paper-thin human story it depends on. And as adept as the script proves to be at skirting the question of robot sentience, we’re no less compelled to root for our scrappy contender. Recommended if you love finely wrought spectacle but hate strong characterization and children. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Jason Shamai)

The Rum Diary Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has been adapted twice before into feature form. Truly execrable Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) suggested his style was unfilmable, but Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) duly captured a “gonzo” mindset filtered through quantities of drugs and alcohol that might kill the ordinary mortal — a hallucinatory excess whose unpleasant effectiveness was underlined by the loathing Fear won in most quarters. Now between those two extremes there’s the curiously mild third point of this Johnny Depp pet project, translating an early, autobiographical novel unpublished until late in the author’s life. Failed fiction writer Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) thinks things are looking up when he’s hired to an English-language San Juan newspaper circa 1960 — though it turns out he was the only applicant. A gruff editor (Richard Jenkins), genially reckless photographer flatmate (Michael Rispoli) and trainwreck vision of his future self (Giovanni Ribisi) introduce him to the thanklessness of writing puff pieces for the gringo community of tourists and robber barons. One of the latter (Aaron Eckhart as Sanderson) introduces him to the spoils to be had exploiting this tax-shelter island “paradise” without sharing one cent with its angrily cast-aside, impoverished natives. Sanderson also introduces Kemp to blonde wild child Chenault (Amber Heard), who’s just the stock Girl here. Presumably hired for his Withnail & I (1987) cred, Bruce Robinson brings little of that 1987’s cult classic’s subversive cheek to his first writing-directing assignment in two decades. Handsomely illustrating without inhabiting its era, toying with matters of narrative and thematic import (American colonialism, Kemp-slash-Thompson finding his writing “voice,” etc.) that never develop, this slack quasi-caper comedy ambles nowhere in particular pleasantly enough. But the point, let alone the rage and outrageousness one expects from Thompson, is missing. On the plus side, there’s some succulent dialogue, as when Ribisi asks Depp for an amateur STD evaluation: “Is it clap?” “A standing ovation.” (2:00) California, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Sarah’s Key (1:42) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

The Skin I Live In I’d like to think that Pedro Almodóvar is too far along in his frequently-celebrated career to be having a midlife crisis, but all the classic signs are on display in his flashy, disjointed new thriller. Still mourning the death of his burn victim wife and removed from his psychologically disturbed daughter, brilliant-but-ethically compromised plastic surgeon Robert (played with smoldering creepiness by former Almodóvar heartthrob Antonio Banderas) throws himself into developing a new injury-resistant form of prosthetic skin, testing it on his mysterious live-in guinea pig, Vera (the gorgeous Elena Anaya, whose every curve is on view thanks to an après-ski-ready body suit). Eventually, all hell breaks loose, as does Vera, whose back story, as we find out, owes equally to 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and perhaps one of the Saw films. And that’s not even the half of it — to fully recount every sharp turn, digression and MacGuffin thrown at us would take the entirety of this review. That’s not news for Almodóvar, though. Much like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar’s métier is melodrama, as refracted through a gay cinephile’s recuperative affections. His strength as a filmmaker is to keep us emotionally tethered to the story he’s telling, amidst all the allusions, sex changes and plot twists torn straight from a telenovela. The real shame of The Skin I Live In is that so much happens that you don’t actually have time to care much about any of it. Although its many surfaces are beautiful to behold (thanks largely to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine), The Skin I Live In ultimately lacks a key muscle: a heart. (1:57) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*Take Shelter Jeff Nichols directed Michael Shannon in 2007’s Shotgun Stories, released right around the time the actor’s decade-plus prior career broke huge with an Oscar nom for 2008’s Revolutionary Road. Their second collaboration, Take Shelter, is a subtle drama that succeeds mostly because of Shannon’s strong star turn, with an assist from Jessica Chastain (suddenly ubiquitous after The Help, The Debt, and Tree of Life). Curtis (Shannon) and Samantha (Chastain) live paycheck to paycheck in a small Midwestern town; the health insurance associated with his construction job is the only reason they’ll be able to afford a cochlear implant for their deaf daughter. When Curtis starts having horrible nightmares, he can’t shake the feeling that his dreams prophesize an actual disaster to come — or are an indicator that Curtis, like his mother before him, is slowly losing touch with reality. Curtis does seek professional help, but he also starts ripping up his backyard, making expensive improvements to the family’s tornado shelter. You know, just in case. Domestic turmoil, troubles at work, and social ostracization inevitably follow. Where will it all lead? Won’t spoil it for you, but Take Shelter‘s conclusion isn’t nearly as gripping as Shannon’s performance, an skillfully balanced mix of confusion, anger, regret, and white-hot terror. (2:00) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Thing John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is my go-to favorite film (that and 1988’s They Live — I’m a little bit Carpenter-obsessed). So this prequel-which-is-actually-more-like-a-remake is already treading on holy cinematic ground with me. My expectations were low. Pleasantly, first-time director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. doesn’t deliver a total suckfest (as most remakes of sacred movies do, like the abominable 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre); his Thing is rated R, is not in 3D, casts a few actual Norwegians to play the inhabitants of Norway’s Antarctic research lab, etc. It also tries to create continuity with Carpenter’s film by ending exactly where the 1982 film begins. However, all that comes before is basically a weak imitation of Carpenter, whose own film was heavily inspired by 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World (all three versions list John W. Campbell Jr.’s story “Who Goes There?” as source material). Van Heihningen Jr. offers nothing new except for CG (the 1982 organic FX were creepier, though). Oh, there’s also a “we need a final girl” plot device that shoehorns Mary Elizabeth Winstead into the mix. Both this version and Carpenter’s film build up dread with paranoia. But Carpenter’s was also heavy with the Antarctic-long-haul side effects of cabin fever and extreme isolation. Not really a factor when your main character has just jetted in from New York. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Three Musketeers 3D (1:50) 1000 Van Ness.

The Way (1:55) 1000 Van Ness.

*Weekend In post-World War II Britain, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, and calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores.” Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes. The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Albert Finney kicked against the pricks in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night. The landscape has changed, but is still nondescript; the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) wakes up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend‘s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple. Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. (1:36) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Woman on the Sixth Floor There is a particular strain of populist European comedy in which stuffy northerners are loosened up by liberating exposure to those sensual, passionate, loud, all-embracing simple folk from the sunny south. The line between multicultural inclusion and condescension is a thin one these movies not infrequently cross. Set in 1960, Philippe Le Guay’s film has a bourgeoisie Paris couple hiring a new maid in the person of attractive young Maria (Natalia Verbeke). She joins a large group of Spanish women toiling for snobbish French gentry in the same building. Her presence has a leavening effect on investment counselor employer Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), to the point where he actually troubles to improve the poorly housed maids’ lot. (Hitherto no one has cared that their shared toilet is broken.) But he also takes an inappropriate and (initially) unwanted romantic interest in this woman, lending a creepy edge to what’s intended as a feel-good romp. (For the record, Verbeke is about a quarter-century younger than Luchini — a difference one can’t imagine the film would ignore so completely if the genders were reversed.) Le Guay’s screenplay trades in easy stereotypes — the Spanish “help” are all big-hearted lovers of life, the Gallic upper-crusters (including Sandrine Kiberlain as J-L’s shallow, insecure wife) emotionally constipated, xenophobic boors — predictable conflicts and pat resolutions. As formulaic crowd-pleasers go, it could be worse. But don’t be fooled — if this were in English, there’d be no fawning mainstream reviews. In fact, it has been in English, more or less. And that ugly moment in cinematic history was called Spanglish (2004). (1:44) Albany, Clay. (Harvey)

Gear up: Trevor Traynor’s lowrider captures cruise into the Mission

Andrew Lam
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Photographer Trevor Traynor is moved by lowriders. And he says he’s not the only one.

“Lowriders move people,” he wrote to the Guardian in an email interview. “Literally and figuratively. When you’re cruising people smile, wave, they take pictures. The cars connect people of all walks of life and the clubs enjoy it as well. It keeps people productive with a strong passion in cars.”

You can tap into his love for the low on Thu/3, when Traynor’s photo show “Low Life” opens at The Summit SF in the Mission.

Though the Mac-sprouting coffeeshop might seem like an odd venue for a show that celebrates the Mission’s Latino car clubs, the San Francisco-based shutterbug’s exhibition will be hanging just a few blocks away from where his passion for lowriders was first spawned on Cinco de Mayo in 2010. 

“As a native New Yorker, seeing 30-plus lowriders cruising low and slow, hopping on three wheels down Mission Street was something new and exciting and the energy [could] not be ignored,” Traynor recalls. The sight was enough to get him in a ride. “I remember hanging out of the back of a mint 1969 yellow [author’s note: he’s also described it as “flan-colored”] Buick Skylark Convertible while Lexxx from the Padrinos Car Club drove nice and slow for me to steady my camera.”

Traynor’s body of work has tended to specialize in hip-hop culture — he’s shot everyone from Mos Def and E-40 to Lil’ B and N.E.R.D. over the years. But since that Cinco, Traynor has ridden with a score of Bay Area clubs: The Inspirations (the only cars people are stoked to see when Sunday Streets hits the Mission), Padrinos, Pachuco, Aztecas, Excandalow, Frisco’s Finest, Bay Riders, and Fo’ Fifteen Car Club among others. The images from the show come from outside the Bay, too — places like Santa Fe and Sacramento make appearances. On opening night, they’ll be accompanied by shifting motion visuals from John Coyne, and DJs bumping lowrider anthems from the Summit sound system.  

It’s clear from looking at the shots of the cars and their riders that result that he digs the aesthetic (craziest thing he’s ever seen airbrushed on a ride: “A nude angel goddess holding two smoking guns riding a fire-breathing dragon above the pits of hell”) but he insists that these are more than just pretty machines. 

“Lowriders hold history in the Chicano community. [The cars’ purpose is] a sense of pride, passion, and respect. Car clubs are a small community, a family, a group of friends that are all car-loving aficionados.” He’s even seen car clubs that do youth outreach programs and toy drives. 

“Some people wake up on a sunny Sunday and go golfing, go to the park, go to the courts, go hiking. Car clubs cruise. Lowriding is a lifestyle.”

 

“Low Life”

Through Dec. 1

Opening reception: Thu/3 7-10 p.m., free

The Summit

780 Valencia, SF

(415) 861-5330

www.thesummit-sf.com

 

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Anonymous Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays? The suddenly literary Roland Emmerich (1996’s Independence Day, 2009’s 2012) investigates in this political thriller starring Rhys Ifans. (2:10)

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life Far from perfect, yet imbued with all the playful, artful qualities of the maestro himself, writer-director Joann Sfar goes out of his way to tell singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg’s tale the way that he sees it, as that of an artist, and in the process creates a wonderland of cartoonish perversity from the cradle to the grave. The remainder of A Heroic Life is almost eclipsed by the film’s earliest interludes, which trail the already too-clever-for-his-own-good young musician and painter, born Lucien Ginsburg, as he proudly claims his gold star from the Nazis. With echoes of 400 Blows (1959) resounding with every wayward step, the brash young Lucien lives by his active imagination, dreaming up a fat, spiderlike plaything from the monstrous Jew depicted in Nazi propaganda and conjuring an imaginary alter-ego he dubs his ugly Mug. Though Heroic Life‘s adult Serge is seamlessly embodied by Eric Elmosnino, few of the moments from the grown lothario’s life rival those initial scenes, with the exception of his exuberant love affair with Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and the fantastic music that came out of it. Still, it’s a joy to hear his music, even in short snatches, with subtitles that clearly spell out Gainsbourg’s talents as a stunning, uniquely talented lyricist. (2:02) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Gainsbourg: The Man Who Loved Women Those hungry for more of the real Serge Gainsbourg — after being tantalized and teased by Joann Sfar’s whimsical comic book-inspired feature — will want to catch this documentary by Pascal Forneri for many of the details that didn’t fit or were skimmed over, here, in the very words and image of the songwriter and the many iconic women in his life. Much of the chanson master’s photographic or video history seems to be here — from his blunt-force on-camera proposition of Whitney Houston to multiple, insightful interviews with the love of his life, Jane Birkin, as well as the many women who won his heart for just a little while, such as Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. Gainsbourg may be marred by its somewhat choppy, mystifying structure, at times chronological, at times organized according to creative periods, but overriding all are the actual footage and photographs loosely, louchely assembled and collaged by Forneri; delightful pre-music-videos Scopitones of everyone from France Gall to Anna Karina; and the gemlike, oh-so-quotable interviews with the mercurial, admirably honest musical genius and eternally subversive provocateur. Quibble as you might with the short shrift given his later career—in addition to major ’70s LPs like Histoire de Melody Nelson and L’Homme à tête de chou (Cabbage-Head Man) — this is a must-see for fans both casual and seriously seduced. (1:45) Roxie. (Chun)

In Time Justin Timberlake stars in this futuristic thriller, set in a world where people stop aging at 25. Andrew Niccol (1997’s Gattaca) directs. (runtime not available)

The Legend is Born: Ip Man If you prefer your martial arts movies Zhang Yimou-lush, Jackie Chan-hilarious, or Tsui Hark-insane, you’ll want to skip The Legend is Born: Ip Man, an earnest, unfussy semi-biopic about the early years of Wing Chun grandmaster Yip Man (he taught Bruce Lee … respect). Here, he’s called Ip Man and is played by the bland Dennis To, who might be carved from wood if not for his many nimble fight scenes — playful dispute-settling, grueling training sequences, to-the-death clashes, etc. The Ip Man story has been popular Hong Kong movie fodder in recent years, with the far more charismatic Donnie Yen playing the lead in a pair of 2008 and 2010 flicks. This apparently unrelated production is less flashier than those films, but purists will appreciate appearances by fightin’ screen legends Sammo Hung and Yuen Bao, plus a cameo by Yip Man’s real-life son. Side note: director Herman Yau co-directed absolutely bonkers crime drama The Untold Story (1993), starring Anthony Wong as a Sweeney Todd type who runs a restaurant famed for its “pork” buns. Worth a look, fiends. (1:40) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Martha Marcy May Marlene If Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence was the breakout ingénue of 2010, look for Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s Elizabeth Olsen to take the 2011 title. Both films are backwoodsy and harrowing and offer juicy roles for their leading starlets — not to mention a pair of sinister supporting roles for the great John Harkes. Here, he’s a Manson-y figure who retains disturbing control over Olsen’s character even after the multi-monikered girl flees his back-to-the-land cult. Writer-director Sean Durkin goes for unflashy realism and mounds on the dread as the hollow-eyed Martha attempts to resume normal life, to the initial delight of her estranged, guilt-ridden older sister (Sarah Paulson). Soon, however, it becomes clear that Things Are Not Ok. You’d be forgiven for pooh-poohing Olsen from the get-go; lavish Sundance buzz and the fact that she’s Mary-Kate and Ashley’s sis have already landed her mountains of pre-release publicity. But her performance is unforgettable, and absolutely fearless. (1:41) (Eddy)

*Oka! It’s good to know Lavinia Currier’s 1997 Passion in the Desert — a Napoleonic army officer meets Egyptian leopard love story, and yes you read that right — was no fluke. Her latest is at least as nuts. Diagnosed with liver failure from leprosy, or something, New Jersey ethno-musicologist Larry (tall, skinny Brit Kris Marshall with a shovel-flattened Yankee accent) heeds the telepathic call of a witch doctor and journeys back with recording equipment in hand to the African Bayaka pygmies he once documented, whose Central African Republic home is currently being decimated by foreign-funded deforestation. This wonderfully arbitrary adventure is supposedly based on an unpublished real-life memoir, but then Passion was allegedly derived from Balzac — one suspects everything Currier touches turns to Instant Crazy. (No wonder it’s taken her 26 years to make three features; if any filmmaker deserved a patron with an open checkbook to hurry the old artistic process up, it’s her.) There’s not much plot here, but what with hilarious sexual tensions, political intrigue, spectacular wildlife, and a elephant stampede/quasi-production-number/dream climax, your entertainment dollars will be rolling in dividends. To think that just two weeks ago a Mill Valley Film Festival premiere made Marshall seem the most obnoxious actor alive — here he seems pretty near the most delightful. This has been a shit film year so far, with even the good stuff feeling like the same old. Blessedly eccentric exceptions: Machotaildrop, The Arbor, The Mill and the Cross. Don’t let Oka! become yet another you’ve missed. (1:46) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Oranges and Sunshine At the center of this saga of lives ripped apart by church and state is Margaret Humphreys, the Englishwoman who uncovered the scandalous mass deportation of children from England to Australia. In one of her most rewarding roles since The Proposition (2005), her last foray to Oz, Watson portrays the English social worker who in the ’80s learns of multiple cases of now-adult orphans in Australia who don’t know their real name or even age but remember that they once lived in the UK. She starts to explore the past of victims such as Jack (Hugo Weaving) and Len (David Wenham) and tries to reunite them with their families, including mothers who were told their youngsters were adopted into real families. In the course of her work, and at the expense of her own family life, Humphreys discovers the horrors that befell many young deportees — as child slave-laborers — and the corruption that extends its fingers into government and the Catholic church. In his first feature film, director Jim Loach, son of crusading cinematic force Ken Loach, turns over each stone with care and compassion, finding the perfect filter through which to tell this well-modulated story in Watson, whose Humphreys faces harassment and post-traumatic stress disorder in her quest to heal the children who were lured overseas in the hope that they would ride horses to school and pick oranges off a tree for breakfast. (1:45) Albany, Embarcadero. (Chun)

*Programming the Nation? Filmmaker Jeff Warrick investigates the history of subliminal messages in America, touching on everything from commercials to rock music to political campaigns. The question mark in the title suggests that this sort of subconscious brainwashing might not be going on, but the film offers truckloads of evidence to the contrary; basically, every hidden-message rumor you’ve ever heard (in Beatles songs, Disney movies, Camel cigarette ads, and so forth) is compiled here, for talking-head experts to discuss (and, ultimately, for the viewer pass judgment on). He also posits that the current vogue lies less in actual subliminal imagery and sounds, and more in the vein of not-so-subtle suggestion — think product placement in movies, and slanted news coverage underwritten by advertisers. Warrick’s film suffers a bit from his unpolished narration and a slightly dated quality (aside from a quick mention of Obama at the end, much of the film’s political content refers to the George W. Bush era), but it offers quite a bit of food for thought, and not just for paranoid conspiracy theorists. He’ll be in person Fri/28-Sat/29 at the Balboa to answer questions, plus there’ll be live musical performances after each show — presumably without subliminal content. Turn me on, dead man! (1:45) Balboa. (Eddy)

Puss in Boots Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek voice the leads in this Shrek series spin-off. (1:45)

The Rum Diary Johnny Depp stars in this tropical comedy adapted from a Hunter S. Thompson novel. (2:00) California, Piedmont.

ONGOING

The Big Year The weird, kind of wonderful world of bird watching has to be the most unlikely subject to get the mainstream Hollywood movie treatment this year, yet to director David Frankel and his cast’s credit, this project based on the book by Mark Obmascik takes flight with seemingly feather-light effortlessness. The Big Year entwines itself around three birding obsessives: the cocky Kenny (Owen Wilson), the record holder of the most birds sighted in one year, an achievement known as a Big Year; Stu (Steve Martin), a captain of industry who has eschewed corporate life in his pursuit of choice avian specimens; and Brad (Jack Black), the every guy determined to max out his, and his parents’, credit cards to take a stab at Kenny’s record. Frankel winningly seeds his yarn with playful visual devices (scribbling on the screen, say, to point out the sites of key sightings) but in the end, the human back stories of his absurdly driven characters provide the real foundation for The Big Year, while actors Black, Martin, and Wilson — all fully capable of tumbling into too-cute or too-hammy quagmires — respond with empathy to the story’s delicate handling. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Cinematic crate-diggers have plenty to celebrate, checking the results of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson had heard whispers for years that Swedish television archives possessed more archival footage of the Black Panthers than anyone in the states — while poring through film for a doc on Philly soul, he discovered the rumors were dead-on. With this lyrical film, coproduced by the Bay Area’s Danny Glover, Olsson has assembled an elegant snapshot of black activists and urban life in America, relying on the vivid, startlingly crisp images of figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton at their peak, while staying true to the wide-open, refreshingly nonjudgmental lens of the Swedish camera crews. Questlove of the Roots and Om’Mas Keith provide the haunting score for the film, beautifully historicized with shots of Oakland in the 1960s and Harlem in the ’70s. It’s made indelible thanks to footage of proto-Panther school kids singing songs about grabbing their guns, and an unforgettable interview with a fiery Angela Davis talking about the uses of violence, from behind bars and from the place of personally knowing the girls who died in the infamous Birmingham, Ala., church bombing of 1963. (1:36) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Blackthorn This low-key neo-Western imagines what would’ve happened if Butch Cassidy had survived that shootout in 1908 Bolivia and retreated into anonymity as a rural rancher. Sam Shepard stars as the outlaw turned grizzled gringo (in flashbacks to the Sundance Kid days, he’s played by Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Butch, now known as James Blackthorn, longs to return to America, so he empties his bank account and sells off his horses. His plan runs afoul when he loses his cash stash, thanks to a series of unfortunate events set into motion by gentleman bandit Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), who’s just ripped off a nearby mine but is ill-suited for survival in the harsh backcountry. Determined to recoup his losses, Butch reluctantly teams up with Eduardo; there are shoot-outs and escapes on horseback and a nice series of scenes with Stephen Rea as an aging, frequently soused Pinkerton detective. Director Mateo Gil (writer of 1997’s Open Your Eyes, which starred Noriega) delivers an unpretentious spin on a legend highlighted by gorgeous landscapes and, of course, Shepard’s true-gritty performance. (1:38) Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Contagion Tasked with such panic-inducing material, one has to appreciate director Steven Soderbergh’s cool head and hand with Contagion. Some might even dub this epic thriller (of sorts) cold, clinical, and completely lacking in bedside manner. Still, for those who’d rather be in the hands of a doctor who refuses to talk down to the patient, Contagion comes on like a refreshingly smart, somewhat melodrama-free clean room, a clear-eyed response to a messy, terrifying subject. A deadly virus is spreading swiftly — sans cure, vaccine, or sense — starting with a few unlikely suspects: globe-trotting corporate exec Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), a waiter, a European tourist, and a Japanese businessman. The chase is on to track the disease’s genesis and find a way to combat it, from the halls of the San Francisco Chronicle and blog posts of citizen activist-journalist Alan (Jude Law), to the emergency hospital in the Midwest set up by intrepid Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), to a tiny village in China with a World Health investigator (Marion Cotillard). Soderbergh’s brisk, businesslike storytelling approach nicely counterpoints the hysteria going off on the ground, as looting and anarchy breaks out around Beth’s immune widower Mitch (Matt Damon), and draws you in — though the tact of making this disease’s Typhoid Mary a sexually profligate woman is unsettling and borderline offensive, as is the predictable blame-it-on-the-Chinese origin coda. (1:42) Shattuck. (Chun)

The Debt On paper, The Debt has a lot going for it: captivating history-based plot, “it” actor Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren vs. Nazis. And while the latest from John Madden (1998’s Shakespeare in Love) is fairly entertaining, the film is ultimately forgettable. Chastain plays Rachel, a member of an Israeli team tasked with capturing a Nazi war criminal and bringing him to justice. Mirren is the older Rachel, who is haunted by the long-withheld true story of the mission. Although The Debt traffics in spy secrets, it’s actually rather predictable: the big reveal is shrug-worthy, and the shocking conclusion is expected. So while the entire cast — which also includes Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington, and Ciaran Hinds — turn in admirable performances, the script is lacking what it needs to make The Debt an effective drama or thriller. Like 2008’s overrated The Reader, the film tries to hide its inadequacies under heavy themes and the dread with which we remember the Holocaust. (1:54) Balboa. (Louis Peitzman)

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2:02) Lumiere.

Dolphin Tale (1:53) SF Center.

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) Bridge, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

50/50 This is nothing but a mainstream rom-com-dramedy wrapped in indie sheep’s clothes. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns he has cancer, he undergoes the requisite denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance like a formality. Aided by his bird-brained but lovable best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan), lovable klutz of a counselor Katherine (Anna Kendrick), and panicky mother (Anjelica Huston), Adam gets a new lease on life. This comes in the form of one-night-stands, furious revelations in parked cars, and a prescribed dose of wacky tobaccy. If 50/50 all sounds like the setup for a pseudo-insightful, kooky feel-goodery, it is. The film doesn’t have the brains or spleen to get down to the bone of cancer. Instead, director Jonathan Levine (2008’s The Wackness) and screenwriter Will Reiser favor highfalutin’ monologues, wooden characters, and a Hollywood ending (with just the right amount of ambiguity). Still, Gordon-Levitt is the most gorgeous cancer patient you will ever see, bald head and all. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Finding Joe Think of Finding Joe as a noob’s every-hero introduction to mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Director Patrick Takaya Solomon assembles a diverse group of Campbell experts and acolytes such as Joseph Campbell Foundation president Robert Walter, author Deepak Chopra, tai chi master Chungliang Al Huang, A Beautiful Mind (2001) screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and skater Tony Hawk, who expound on every aspect of the hero’s journey, from experiencing spiritual death to finding bliss to summoning the courage to slay dragons. Somewhat predictable clips from Star Wars (1977) and other cinematic sources bring home the ways that pop culture has incorporated and been read through the filter of Campbell’s ideas. All of which makes for an accessible survey of our bro Joe’s work — though despite the inclusion of a few token female talking heads like actress Rashida Jones and Twilight (2008) director Catherine Hardwicke, Solomon’s past shooting action sports and commercials gives the doc a distinctly macho cast. (1:23) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Footloose Another unnecessary remake joins the queue at the box office, aiming for the pockets of ’80s-era nostalgics and fans of dance movies and naked opportunism. A recap for those (if there are those) who never saw the 1984 original: city boy Ren McCormack moves to a Middle American speck-on-the-map called Bomont and riles the town’s inhabitants with his rock ‘n’ roll ways — rock ‘n’ roll, and the lewd acts of physicality it inspires, i.e., dancing, having been criminalized by the town council to preserve the souls and bodies of Bomont’s young people. Ren falls for wayward preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore — whose father has sponsored this oversolicitous piece of legislation — and vows to fight city hall on the civil rights issue of a senior prom. Ren McCormack 2.0 is one Kenny Wormald (prepped for the gig by his tenure in the straight-to-cable dance-movie sequel Center Stage: Turn It Up), who forgoes the ass-grabbing blue jeans that Kevin Bacon once angry-danced through a flour mill in. Otherwise, the 2011 version, directed and cowritten by Craig Brewer (2005’s Hustle & Flow), regurgitates much of the original, hoping to leverage classic lines, familiar scenes, and that Dance Your Ass Off T-shirt of Ariel’s. It doesn’t work. Ren and Ariel (Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough) are blandly unsympathetic and have the chemistry of two wet paper towels, the adult supporting cast should have known better, and the entire film comes off as a tired, tuneless echo. (1:53) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Hell and Back Again This emotionally jagged documentary mingles footage from the war and home fronts to rather nightmarishly evoke one soldier’s very stressful experiences on both. Marine Sgt. Nathan Harris is seen in combat, patrolling Afghan terrain, communicating — sometimes earnestly, sometimes exasperatedly — with skeptical local villagers who are themselves wedged between foreign forces and the Taliban. After surviving a serious injury during his third tour, he has a rough time re-adjusting to civilian life in North Carolina — undergoing physical therapy, often in pain or zonked on prescription drugs, his anger straining relations with wife Ashley. Seldom articulate, forever creepily playing with his handgun, Nathan doesn’t automatically win sympathy. That lends Danfung Dennis’ film a certain extra veracity: with all his foibles (and all the blanks left in his biography), the protagonist here is probably a more typical representation of today’s U.S. fighting forces than most similar recent docs have offered. The director’s soundtrack and editorial strategies further intensify a movie that tries to get inside the unsettled mind within an (at least temporarily) broken body, and to a discomfiting extent succeeds. (1:28) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) SF Center, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Ides of March Battling it out in the Ohio primaries are two leading Democratic presidential candidates. Filling the role of idealistic upstart new to the national stage — even his poster looks like you-know-who’s Hope one — is Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), who’s running neck-and-neck in the polls with his rival thanks to veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and ambitious young press secretary Steven (Ryan Gosling). The latter is so tipped for success that he’s wooed to switch teams by a rival politico’s campaign chief (Paul Giamatti). While he declines, even meeting with a representative from the opposing camp is a dangerous move for Steven, who’s already juggling complex loyalties to various folk including New York Times reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei) and campaign intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who happens to be the daughter of the Democratic National Party chairman. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s acclaimed play Farragut North, Clooney’s fourth directorial feature is assured, expertly played, and full of sharp insider dialogue. (Willimon worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the White House.) It’s all thoroughly engaging — yet what evolves into a thriller of sorts involving blackmail and revenge ultimately seems rather beside the point, as it turns upon an old-school personal morals quandary rather than diving seriously into the corporate, religious, and other special interests that really determine (or at least spin) the issues in today’s political landscape. Though stuffed with up-to-the-moment references, Ides already feels curiously dated. (1:51) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Johnny English Reborn (1:41) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

The Lion King 3D (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Love Crime Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance about what sleazy things could potentially be done to this neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller. No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures. Ludivine Sagnier plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. Though it’s no masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his Corneau’s career Corneau (he died at age 67 last August) not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. (1:46) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Margin Call Think of Margin Call as a Mamet-like, fictitious insider jab at the financial crisis, a novelistic rejoinder to Oscar-winning doc Inside Job (2010). First-time feature director and writer J.C. Chandor shows a deft hand with complex, writerly material, creating a darting dance of smart dialogue and well-etched characters as he sidesteps the hazards of overtheatricality, a.k.a. the crushing, overbearing proscenium. The film opens on a familiar Great Recession scene: lay-off day at an investment bank, marked by HR functionaries calling workers one by one into fishbowl conference rooms. The first victim is the most critical — Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a risk-management staffer who has stumbled on an investment miscalculation that could potentially trigger a Wall Street collapse. On his way out, he passes a drive with his findings to one of his young protégés, Peter (Zachary Quinto), setting off a flash storm over the next 24 hours that will entangle his boss Sam (Kevin Spacey), who’s agonizing over his dying dog while putting up a go-big-or-go-home front; cynical trading manager Will (Paul Bettany); and the firm’s intimidating head (Jeremy Irons), who gets to utter the lines, “Explain to me as you would to a child. Or a Golden Retriever.” Such top-notch players get to really flex their skills here, equipped with Chandor’s spot-on script, which manages to convey the big issues, infuse the numbers with drama and the money managers with humanity, and never talk down to the audience. (1:45) Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

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) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Mighty Macs I can’t be the first reviewer to dub The Mighty Macs “Sister Act 2 meets Hoosiers,” but it can’t be avoided — that’s exactly what this movie is. It’s 1971 at Immaculata College, a tiny school in financial trouble staffed by nuns and populated by female students who made it through the 1960s seemingly untouched by any rebellious spirit. Into this uptight milieu strides Sister Mary Clarence, er, Cathy Rush (Carla Gugino), an ambitious young basketball coach determined to make winners out of a team so undervalued they practice in a basement and play games wearing outdated, skirted uniforms. Based on a pretty incredible true story, The Mighty Macs is a completely clichéd sports movie, with locker-room pep talks, a disapproving authority figure (a be-wimpled Ellen Burstyn), last-minute free throws deciding crucial games, etc. But it also offers a gentle lesson about the early days of feminism, not to mention a scene featuring an elderly nun yelling “Watch out for the pick and roll!” from the sidelines. (1:38) Metreon. (Eddy)

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Mozart’s Sister Pity the talented sister of a world-shaking prodigy. Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart, who may have had just as much promise as a composer as her younger brother, according to Rene Féret’s Mozart’s Sister. A scant five years older, enlisted in the traveling family band led by father-teacher Leopold (Marc Barbe), yet forced to hide her music, being female and forbidden to play violin and compose, Nannerl (Marie Féret, the filmmaker’s daughter) tours the courts of Europe and is acclaimed as a keyboardist and vocalist but is expected to share little of her brother’s brilliant future. Following a chance carriage breakdown near a French monastery, Nannerl befriends one of its precious inhabitants, a daughter of Louis XV (Lisa Féret, another offspring), which leads her to Versailles, into a cross-dressing guise of a boy, and puts her into the sights of the Dauphin (Clovis Fouin, who could easily find a spot in the Cullen vampire clan). He’s seduced by her music and likewise charms Nannerl with his power and feline good looks — what’s a humble court minstrel to do? The conceit of casting one’s daughters in a narrative hinging on unjustly neglected female progeny — shades of Sofia Coppola in The Godfather: Part III (1990)! — almost capsizes this otherwise thoughtful re-imagination of Maria Anna’s thwarted life; despite the fact Féret has inserted his children in his films in the past, both girls offer little emotional depth to their roles. Nevertheless, as a feminist rediscovery pic akin to Camille Claudel (1988), Mozart’s Sister instructs on yet another tragically quashed woman artist and might inspire some righteous indignation. (2:00) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*My Afternoons with Margueritte There’s just one moment in this tender French dramedy that touches on star Gerard Depardieu’s real life: his quasi-literate salt-of-the-earth character, Germain, rushes to save his depressed friend from possible suicide only to have his pretentious pal pee on the ground in front of him. Perhaps Depardieu’s recent urinary run-in, on the floor of an airline cabin, was an inspired reference to this moment. In any case, My Afternoons With Margueritte offers a hope of the most humanist sort, for all those bumblers and sad cases that are usually shuttled to the side in the desperate ’00s, as Depardieu demonstrates that he’s fully capable of carrying a film with sheer life force, rotund gut and straw-mop ‘do and all. In fact he’s almost daring you to hate on his aging, bumptious current incarnation: Germain is the 50-something who never quite grew up or left home. The vegetable farmer is treated poorly by his doddering tramp of a mother and is widely considered the village idiot, the butt of all the jokes down at the cafe, though contrary to most assumptions, he manages to score a beautiful, bus-driving girlfriend (Sophie Guillemin). However the true love of his life might be the empathetic, intelligent older woman, Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus), that he meets in the park while counting pigeons. There’s a wee bit of Maude to Germain’s Harold, though Jean Becker’s chaste love story is content to remain within the wholesome confines of small-town life — not a bad thing when it comes to looking for grace in a rough world. (1:22) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity 3 A prequel to a prequel, this third installment in the faux-home-movie horror series is as good as one could reasonably hope for: considerably better than 2010’s part two, even if inevitably it can’t replicate the relatively fresh impact of the 2007 original. After a brief introductory sequence we’re in 1988, with the grown-up sisters of the first two films now children (Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown) living with a recently separated mom (Lauren Bitter) and her nice new boyfriend (Christopher Smith). His wedding-video business provides the excuse for many a surveillance cam to be set up in their home once things start going bump in the night (and sometimes day). Which indeed they do, pretty quickly. Brown’s little Kristi has an invisible friend called Toby she says is “real,” though of course everyone else trusts he’s a normal, harmless imaginary pal. Needless to say, they are wrong. Written by Christopher Landon (Paranormal Activity 2, 2007’s Disturbia) and directed by the guys (Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman) who made interesting nonfiction feature Catfish (2010), this quickly made follow-up does a good job piling on more scares without getting shameless or ludicrous about it, extends the series’ mythology in ways that easily pave way toward future chapters, and maintains the found-footage illusion well enough. (Excellent child performances and creepy camcorder “pans” atop an oscillating fan motor prove a great help; try to forget that video quality just wasn’t this good in ’88.) Not great, but thoroughly decent, and worth seeing in a theater — this remains one chiller concept whose effectiveness can only be diminished to the point of near-uselessness on the small screen. (1:24) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Real Steel Everybody knows what this movie about rocking, socking robots should have been called. Had the producers secured the rights to the name, we’d all be sitting down to Over The Top II: Child Endangerment. Absentee father Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his much-too-young son Max (Dakota Goyo) haul their remote-controlled pugilists in a big old truck from one underground competition to the next. Along the way Charlie learns what it means to be a loving father while still routinely managing to leave cherubic Max alone in scenarios of astonishing peril. Seriously, there are displays of parental neglect in this movie that strain credulity well beyond any of its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em elements. Fortunately the filmmakers had the good sense to make those elements awesome. The robots look great and the ring action can be surprisingly stirring in spite of the paper-thin human story it depends on. And as adept as the script proves to be at skirting the question of robot sentience, we’re no less compelled to root for our scrappy contender. Recommended if you love finely wrought spectacle but hate strong characterization and children. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Jason Shamai)

Sarah’s Key (1:42) Balboa.

The Skin I Live In I’d like to think that Pedro Almodóvar is too far along in his frequently-celebrated career to be having a midlife crisis, but all the classic signs are on display in his flashy, disjointed new thriller. Still mourning the death of his burn victim wife and removed from his psychologically disturbed daughter, brilliant-but-ethically compromised plastic surgeon Robert (played with smoldering creepiness by former Almodóvar heartthrob Antonio Banderas) throws himself into developing a new injury-resistant form of prosthetic skin, testing it on his mysterious live-in guinea pig, Vera (the gorgeous Elena Anaya, whose every curve is on view thanks to an après-ski-ready body suit). Eventually, all hell breaks loose, as does Vera, whose back story, as we find out, owes equally to 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and perhaps one of the Saw films. And that’s not even the half of it — to fully recount every sharp turn, digression and MacGuffin thrown at us would take the entirety of this review. That’s not news for Almodóvar, though. Much like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar’s métier is melodrama, as refracted through a gay cinephile’s recuperative affections. His strength as a filmmaker is to keep us emotionally tethered to the story he’s telling, amidst all the allusions, sex changes and plot twists torn straight from a telenovela. The real shame of The Skin I Live In is that so much happens that you don’t actually have time to care much about any of it. Although its many surfaces are beautiful to behold (thanks largely to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine), The Skin I Live In ultimately lacks a key muscle: a heart. (1:57) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*Take Shelter Jeff Nichols directed Michael Shannon in 2007’s Shotgun Stories, released right around the time the actor’s decade-plus prior career broke huge with an Oscar nom for 2008’s Revolutionary Road. Their second collaboration, Take Shelter, is a subtle drama that succeeds mostly because of Shannon’s strong star turn, with an assist from Jessica Chastain (suddenly ubiquitous after The Help, The Debt, and Tree of Life). Curtis (Shannon) and Samantha (Chastain) live paycheck to paycheck in a small Midwestern town; the health insurance associated with his construction job is the only reason they’ll be able to afford a cochlear implant for their deaf daughter. When Curtis starts having horrible nightmares, he can’t shake the feeling that his dreams prophesize an actual disaster to come — or are an indicator that Curtis, like his mother before him, is slowly losing touch with reality. Curtis does seek professional help, but he also starts ripping up his backyard, making expensive improvements to the family’s tornado shelter. You know, just in case. Domestic turmoil, troubles at work, and social ostracization inevitably follow. Where will it all lead? Won’t spoil it for you, but Take Shelter‘s conclusion isn’t nearly as gripping as Shannon’s performance, an skillfully balanced mix of confusion, anger, regret, and white-hot terror. (2:00) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Thing John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is my go-to favorite film (that and 1988’s They Live — I’m a little bit Carpenter-obsessed). So this prequel-which-is-actually-more-like-a-remake is already treading on holy cinematic ground with me. My expectations were low. Pleasantly, first-time director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. doesn’t deliver a total suckfest (as most remakes of sacred movies do, like the abominable 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre); his Thing is rated R, is not in 3D, casts a few actual Norwegians to play the inhabitants of Norway’s Antarctic research lab, etc. It also tries to create continuity with Carpenter’s film by ending exactly where the 1982 film begins. However, all that comes before is basically a weak imitation of Carpenter, whose own film was heavily inspired by 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World (all three versions list John W. Campbell Jr.’s story “Who Goes There?” as source material). Van Heihningen Jr. offers nothing new except for CG (the 1982 organic FX were creepier, though). Oh, there’s also a “we need a final girl” plot device that shoehorns Mary Elizabeth Winstead into the mix. Both this version and Carpenter’s film build up dread with paranoia. But Carpenter’s was also heavy with the Antarctic-long-haul side effects of cabin fever and extreme isolation. Not really a factor when your main character has just jetted in from New York. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Three Musketeers 3D (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

The Way (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Weekend In post-World War II Britain, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, and calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores.” Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes. The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Albert Finney kicked against the pricks in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night. The landscape has changed, but is still nondescript; the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) wakes up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend‘s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple. Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. (1:36) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Woman on the Sixth Floor There is a particular strain of populist European comedy in which stuffy northerners are loosened up by liberating exposure to those sensual, passionate, loud, all-embracing simple folk from the sunny south. The line between multicultural inclusion and condescension is a thin one these movies not infrequently cross. Set in 1960, Philippe Le Guay’s film has a bourgeoisie Paris couple hiring a new maid in the person of attractive young Maria (Natalia Verbeke). She joins a large group of Spanish women toiling for snobbish French gentry in the same building. Her presence has a leavening effect on investment counselor employer Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini), to the point where he actually troubles to improve the poorly housed maids’ lot. (Hitherto no one has cared that their shared toilet is broken.) But he also takes an inappropriate and (initially) unwanted romantic interest in this woman, lending a creepy edge to what’s intended as a feel-good romp. (For the record, Verbeke is about a quarter-century younger than Luchini — a difference one can’t imagine the film would ignore so completely if the genders were reversed.) Le Guay’s screenplay trades in easy stereotypes — the Spanish “help” are all big-hearted lovers of life, the Gallic upper-crusters (including Sandrine Kiberlain as J-L’s shallow, insecure wife) emotionally constipated, xenophobic boors — predictable conflicts and pat resolutions. As formulaic crowd-pleasers go, it could be worse. But don’t be fooled — if this were in English, there’d be no fawning mainstream reviews. In fact, it has been in English, more or less. And that ugly moment in cinematic history was called Spanglish (2004). (1:44) Albany, Clay, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Marc Bamuthi Joseph gets the green movement to live, already

Andrew Lam
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Consider, if you will, the prosaic class issues in the green movement. The price of BART vs. driving, the utility of feeding one’s children McDonald’s after one’s shift is order so you can play with them outside the kichen, the inconvinient truth of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Now add race, and stir. 

Dancer-community activist-poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph did. The result was the Life is Living festival, which he stages in underserved ‘hoods throughout the country (and took place in West Oakland Oct. 8). The festival’s amazing, but its creation was a journey — which Bamuthi has brilliantly set to stage with dancing and singing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through Sat/22. It’s called red, black & GREEN: a blues“I’ve got this male Liz Gilbert eat-pray-hip-hop kind of thing,” recounts Bamuthi onstage during opening night at YBCA. Around him, bisected sharecropper’s cabins swing open and shut, revealing their innards and front porches by turns. The set was made from repurposed materials and clay by Theaster Gates (new favorite name), who is participating in double-time — Gates is one of three supporting characters in the play, mainly contributing those eponymous blues in a rich voice from a porch.

Bamuthi’s flip remark (it reaps a guffaw from the audience, one of many garnered from the play’s dealings with race and class) evokes the difficulties that he and his “do-gooder” team faced in cobbling together Life is Living. Originally meant as an eco-festival — Bamuthi’s account of meeting with New Age Oakland environmental activists is gold — the group shifted the traveling events focus to “the celebration of living.” 

The cast of red, black & GREEN: the blues. Photo by Bethanie Hines

The play could be read as an explanation of why this transformation took play. In the scene that serves as the performance’s chorus, repeating through the play, Bamuthi talks to a grieving mom about his festival. “I ask a mother about environment/She tells me of guns/Of emotionally disabled boys.”

She’s got bigger fish to fry than hydroponic gardens. As does a sculptor: “He speaks to me of misters/Old men gathered to pastime/Play young/men games/Share news/Insult/Seed comfort/Cultivate friendship.” A freezing crackhead in the New York winter: “I’m calling collect from tomorrow/track riding.”

And you forget you’re being taught (Bamuthi is fond of likening himself to a 10th grade teacher) because it’s all gorgeous, real artists doing their real artist things. Characters recreate sunny day hip-hop cut-ups, but they also morph their bodies to evoke addiction, old age — two miraculous transformations that showcase the talent in their bodies through the way they restrict their own mobility.

Asking about “what sustains life” instead of “what is sustainable” could be an important cognitive shift for the green movement — one that would reactivate the choir and provide an entry point for people just coming to the green movement. Bamuthi was a featured artist for the NAACP’s centennial anniversary celebration during Barack Obama’s inauguration exercises. President Obama… I hear you’re having some PR troubles. Were you listening to this guy? 

 

red, black & GREEN: a blues

Thu/20-Sat/22 7:30 p.m., $10-$25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The case against C and D

Andrew Lam
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By Brenda Barros, Riva Enteen, Joe Jacskon, Renee Saucedo, Dave Welsh, David H. Williams and Claire Zvanski

OPINION The Guardian started out right on Proposition C and D:

“Our initial instinct was to oppose both of these measures… There’s a basic unfairness about all of this that bothers us … city workers are being asked to give up part of their pay — but the wealthiest individuals and big corporations in San Francisco are giving up nothing. It’s part of the national trend — the poor and middle class are shouldering the entire burden of the economic crisis, and the rich aren’t suffering a bit.”

It’s too bad that the Guardian editors didn’t stick to their guns.

We all know why decent pensions and health care cost so much: corporate greed. And the identity of the corporate criminals who are driving the economy into the ground is no secret. It’s the Wall Street banks and financial speculators. It’s Bank of America and Wells Fargo. It’s the corporate CEOs. It’s the insurance companies.

All workers, whether they work for the city or not, have a right to affordable medical care and a decent retirement.

Take Ethel, who retired 10 years ago after working for the city for more than 20 years and collects a pension of only $17,000 a year. Both Prop C and Prop D would take money out of her check. Some city workers qualify for section 8 housing — Prop C and D would take money out of their paychecks too.

None of this is rocket science. But the corporate media pounds away daily at public employees and ignores the shenanigans of their buddies in the corporate boardrooms. And far too many fall for this bait and switch, or are just too confused to stand up and fight back.

Now, with Propositions C and D, the downtown bigwigs and their lapdog politicians are taking advantage of this confusion to sock it to the victims, and make workers pay for the party the rich have been having at our expense.

Unfortunately, there are those among us who think we should concede many of our hard-fought rights in order to appear reasonable and fend off future attacks.

Making these kinds of concessions is like putting a little blood in the water, and hoping that the corporate sharks will be satisfied. But the reality is that when sharks taste blood, they just get hungry for more.

The editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, the mouthpiece for Wall Street and its minions, said pretty much the same thing in a recent editorial:

“San Franciscans should have no illusions,” wrote the Chronicle editors. “Props C and D offer only modest down payments on the reforms [sic] that must be pursued… The very fact that business and labor leaders are supporting Prop C… sets the stage for… further reforms [sic] that will almost certainly be needed…”

Of course the “reforms” that the Chronicle is demanding are just more attacks on workers’ rights. That’s why many political leaders, including former Supervisor Chris Daly and Ted Gullicksen of the Tenants Union — opposed both Propositions C and D.

Enough is enough. Let’s take heart from the Occupy Wall Street movement. After decades of Reaganomics, Bushonomics, and Democratonomics, it is high time to draw the line, stand up to Wall Street, and fight back.

Join former Supervisor Chris Daly and Tenant’s Union leader Ted Gullicksen, and: Vote NO on C! Vote NO on D! Tax the Rich! 

Brenda Barros is vice-chair, Social Economic Committee, SEIU 1021. Riva Enteen is a member of SEIU 1021. Joe Jackson is co-chair of the S.F. African American Employee Association. Renee Saucedo is a member of SEIU 1021. Dave Welsh is a delegate to the S.F. Labor Council. David H. Williams and Claire Zvanski are retiree members of SEIU 1021.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

SAN FRANCISCO DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

The 10th San Francisco DocFest runs Oct 14-27 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF, and the Shattuck Theatre, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. Tickets ($11) and complete schedule available at www.sfindie.com. For commentary, see “A Decade of DocFest.”

OPENING

The Big Year Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson star as bird-watching frenemies in this road-trip comedy. (1:30)

*Blackthorn This low-key neo-Western imagines what would’ve happened if Butch Cassidy had survived that shootout in 1908 Bolivia and retreated into anonymity as a rural rancher. Sam Shepard stars as the outlaw turned grizzled gringo (in flashbacks to the Sundance Kid days, he’s played by Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Butch, now known as James Blackthorn, longs to return to America, so he empties his bank account and sells off his horses. His plan runs afoul when he loses his cash stash, thanks to a series of unfortunate events set into motion by gentleman bandit Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), who’s just ripped off a nearby mine but is ill-suited for survival in the harsh backcountry. Determined to recoup his losses, Butch reluctantly teams up with Eduardo; there are shoot-outs and escapes on horseback and a nice series of scenes with Stephen Rea as an aging, frequently soused Pinkerton detective. Director Mateo Gil (writer of 1997’s Open Your Eyes, which starred Noriega) delivers an unpretentious spin on a legend highlighted by gorgeous landscapes and, of course, Shepard’s true-gritty performance. (1:38) Albany, Bridge. (Eddy)

Finding Joe Think of Finding Joe as a noob’s every-hero introduction to mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Director Patrick Takaya Solomon assembles a diverse group of Campbell experts and acolytes such as Joseph Campbell Foundation president Robert Walter, author Deepak Chopra, tai chi master Chungliang Al Huang, A Beautiful Mind (2001) screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and skater Tony Hawk, who expound on every aspect of the hero’s journey, from experiencing spiritual death to finding bliss to summoning the courage to slay dragons. Somewhat predictable clips from Star Wars (1977) and other cinematic sources bring home the ways that pop culture has incorporated and been read through the filter of Campbell’s ideas. All of which makes for an accessible survey of our bro Joe’s work — though despite the inclusion of a few token female talking heads like actress Rashida Jones and Twilight (2008) director Catherine Hardwicke, Solomon’s past shooting action sports and commercials gives the doc a distinctly macho cast. (1:23) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Chun)

Fireflies in the Garden Don’t let the A-list cast (Willem Dafoe, Ryan Reynolds, Emily Watson, Julie Roberts) fool you: this is a minor-key melodrama that would be just as unmemorable with a cast of unknowns. Writer-director Dennis Lee tosses a co-writing credit to Robert Frost, whose poem lends the film its title and plays a part in a pivotal scene. Scarred by a childhood made miserable by his cruel father (Dafoe) — who, as onscreen dads go, really isn’t that terrible (see The Woman, below) — a successful writer (Reynolds) returns home for a family celebration that turns (wait for it) tragic. This is the kind of movie that attempts to hit big emotional notes without actually earning them; if the lure of Reynolds as a hunky sad sack is too great to resist, prepare to feel either completely unmoved or totally manipulated. Not sure which is worse. (1:39) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Footloose Another unnecessary remake joins the queue at the box office, aiming for the pockets of ’80s-era nostalgics and fans of dance movies and naked opportunism. A recap for those (if there are those) who never saw the 1984 original: city boy Ren McCormack moves to a Middle American speck-on-the-map called Bomont and riles the town’s inhabitants with his rock ‘n’ roll ways — rock ‘n’ roll, and the lewd acts of physicality it inspires, i.e., dancing, having been criminalized by the town council to preserve the souls and bodies of Bomont’s young people. Ren falls for wayward preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore — whose father has sponsored this oversolicitous piece of legislation — and vows to fight city hall on the civil rights issue of a senior prom. Ren McCormack 2.0 is one Kenny Wormald (prepped for the gig by his tenure in the straight-to-cable dance-movie sequel Center Stage: Turn It Up), who forgoes the ass-grabbing blue jeans that Kevin Bacon once angry-danced through a flour mill in. Otherwise, the 2011 version, directed and cowritten by Craig Brewer (2005’s Hustle & Flow), regurgitates much of the original, hoping to leverage classic lines, familiar scenes, and that Dance Your Ass Off T-shirt of Ariel’s. It doesn’t work. Ren and Ariel (Dancing with the Stars‘ Julianne Hough) are blandly unsympathetic and have the chemistry of two wet paper towels, the adult supporting cast should have known better, and the entire film comes off as a tired, tuneless echo. (1:53) Balboa. (Rapoport)

*Happy, Happy Sigve (Henrik Rafaelsen) and Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens) seem like very exciting new neighbors to Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen) — she’s almost hysterical with welcoming enthusiasm, perhaps overcompensating for the frigidity of her union to dour Eirik (Joachim Rafaelsen). But it soon emerges that the urban, urbane newcomers to this snowy country community also have more than their share of domestic woes. When those unpleasant facts tumble out over a rather disastrous dinner party, the revelation somehow throws Kaja and Sigve together as not just the injured parties in their respective marriages, but potential soulmates. This first feature for both director Anne Sewitzky and scenarist Ragnhild Tronvoll nearly passed unnoticed at Sundance this January — being so good-natured and, well, Norwegian — but dang if it wasn’t just too much of a genuine (as opposed to contrived) crowdpleaser to go ignored. The characters behave badly (as well as irresponsibly, since there are children involved), yet their fates develop real rooting interest through a number of clever, complex, sometimes hilarious narrative developments. It would be a delight even without the slam-dunk inspiration of an unlikely Greek chorus: four vanilla gents singing African-American spirituals a cappella as incongruous yet strangely perfect external commentary on our protagonists’ hapless entanglements. (1:28) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Sleeping Beauty Fairytales are endemically Freudian; perhaps it has something to with their use of subconscious fantasy to mourn — and breathlessly anticipate — the looming loss of childhood. French provocateuse Catherine Breillat’s feminist re-imagining of The Sleeping Beauty carries her hyper-sexualized signature, but now she also has free reign to throw in bizarre and beastly metaphors for feminine and masculine desire in the form of boil-covered, dungeon-dwelling ogres, albino teenage princes, and icy-beautiful snow queens. The story follows Anastasia, a poor little aristocrat, who longs to be a boy (she calls herself “Sir Vladimir”). When her hand is pricked with a yew spindle (more of a phallic impalement, really), Anastasia falls into a 100-year adventurous slumber, eventually awakening as a sexually ripe 16-year-old. It all plays like an anchorless, Brothers Grimm version of Sally Potter’s 1992 Orlando. And while it’s definitely not for the kiddies, it’s hard to believe that many adults would find its overt symbolism and plodding narrative any more than a sporadically entertaining exercise in preciousness. Your own dreams will undoubtedly be more interesting — perhaps you can catch a few zzz’s in a theater screening this movie. (1:42) SFFS New People Cinema. (Michelle Devereaux)

The Thing A remake of a remake? Or a prequel to a remake? Whatever. Kurt Russell forever! (1:43) Shattuck.

Toast Oh, what a tasty dish Helena Bonham Carter has become, not afraid to look bad, mumsy, frazzled, or even like a fashion icon (as in recent Marc Jacobs ads). Watching her clean, cook, and spar with the young, preternaturally snobbish food writer Nigel Slater (played as a child by Oscar Kennedy, then as a teenager by Freddie Highmore) is the central, entirely edible joy of this changeable, not-quite-cozy journey back to a damp, dour ’60s-era Britain. Swinging London is more than simply a few miles away from Nigel’s sad childhood in this film based on Slater’s memoir: he fantasizes about lavish spreads of food while his aggro dad (Ken Stott) blusters hopelessly and his sickly mum (Victoria Hamilton) cringes at even spaghetti Bolognese and relies on the culinary fallback of toast. The arrival of the blowsy, earthy and, in Nigel’s eyes, unendingly tacky housekeeper, Mrs. Potter (Carter), brings genuinely good food — and welcome comedy — into Nigel’s life while stirring a sense of indignant competition. The way to a dad’s, or rather, a man’s, heart is obviously through a lofty, majestic lemon meringue pie. Too bad young Nigel is such an elitist bitch, making for a repugnant protagonist that’s hard to sympathize with. Likewise Highmore and Kennedy are outclassed when it comes to Bonham Carter, who snatches the entire film away with her undeniable sass, manic scrubbing, and sorrowful looks. (1:36) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Chun)

Trespass It’s a shame that director Joel Schumacher has to take the blowtorch of bad taste to this promising if melodramatic and theatrically static home-invasion thriller, especially considering the competence and likeability of the cast; the blood, sweat, and tears they shed; the pots boiled; and the scenery chomped, stomped, and summarily destroyed. Assembled in their set piece of a McMansion like sleek figurines all set to be knocked down, the affluent Miller family already appears to be a fairly dysfunctional lot: dad Kyle (Nicolas Cage) is more interested in cutting deals for his diamonds than paying any attention to his neglected, ineffectual wife, Sarah (Nicole Kidman), and his rebellious daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato). As Avery slips out for a clandestine teen party, in slithers a whole ‘nother screwed-up clan, led by Elias (Ben Mendelsohn) and Jonah (Cam Gigandet). This all-American fortress has been breached, but with little of the gut-level, primal genius of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971). Broken glass, shattered bones, multiple death threats, and far too many cheesy, curtain-fluttering flashbacks ensue — the type that set you at the edge of your seat, simultaneously wondering what plot twist will materialize next and when the agony will be over, namely the Millers’, who Cage and Kidman invest with admirable bushels of conviction, and your own. (1:31) (Chun)

The Woman Writer-director Lucky McKee scored a cult hit with 2002’s May; his latest, The Woman (co-written with novelist Jack Ketchum), arrived in my mailbox packaged in a barf bag, “just in case.” This bit of Herschell Gordon Lewis-style gimmickry had me expecting great things, and indeed, McKee’s love of gore goes to 11, with gnawed-off digits, ripped-out entrails, and other squishy moments aimed squarely at shock-horror enthusiasts. All is not well in the household headed up by cheerful misogynist-sadist Chris (Sean Bridgers of Deadwood): his wife (May‘s Angela Bettis) is a quivering wreck; his older daughter (Lauren Ashley Carter) is concealing a growing secret; and his son (Zach Rand) is a middle-school sociopath. When Chris captures a Nell-by-way-of-Leatherface feral woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) in the woods near his home, he chains her up in a storm shelter and sets about “civilizing” her — which basically means keeping her as his own personal torture puppet. McKee, who never met a slo-mo shot he didn’t like, seems to be aiming for black comedy at least part of the time, but The Woman is so mean-spirited that by the time its inevitable tidal wave of revenge crashes down, it’s hard to feel any kind of satisfaction or release. Revulsion, however: yes. (1:45) (Eddy)

ONGOING

*American Teacher Public school teachers have one of the most important jobs in America — and most of them are paid very little in proportion to the long, difficult hours they put in (truth, no matter what Tea Partiers say). Vanessa Roth’s American Teacher — narrated by Matt Damon, co-produced by Dave Eggers, and spurred by the nonprofit Teacher Salary Project — examines the current state of the teaching profession, from its many drawbacks (like those mentioned above) to its chief rewards, namely, the feelings of joy that come from helping to expand young minds. As education experts lament the fact that top college grads gravitate toward big-bucks careers in law and medicine instead of teaching, the film profiles four teachers who’re struggling to stay in the career they love (one of them reluctantly quits his job at San Francisco’s Leadership High School in favor of a higher-paying gig with his family’s real-estate business). There’s also the Harvard grad tempted by a magnet school that pays its teachers over $100,000 a year; the pregnant first-grade teacher worried about the intricacies of maternity leave; and the most devastating tale, of a small-town Texas teacher and coach forced to take on a second job to support his family, at the eventual expense of his marriage. It’s likely that American Teacher will play mostly for audiences already sympathetic to its message, but there’s always hope a film like this will inspire an angry Fox News-er to have a change of heart. (1:21) Roxie. (Eddy)

*The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Cinematic crate-diggers have plenty to celebrate, checking the results of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson had heard whispers for years that Swedish television archives possessed more archival footage of the Black Panthers than anyone in the states — while poring through film for a doc on Philly soul, he discovered the rumors were dead-on. With this lyrical film, coproduced by the Bay Area’s Danny Glover, Olsson has assembled an elegant snapshot of black activists and urban life in America, relying on the vivid, startlingly crisp images of figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton at their peak, while staying true to the wide-open, refreshingly nonjudgmental lens of the Swedish camera crews. Questlove of the Roots and Om’Mas Keith provide the haunting score for the film, beautifully historicized with shots of Oakland in the 1960s and Harlem in the ’70s. It’s made indelible thanks to footage of proto-Panther school kids singing songs about grabbing their guns, and an unforgettable interview with a fiery Angela Davis talking about the uses of violence, from behind bars and from the place of personally knowing the girls who died in the infamous Birmingham, Ala., church bombing of 1963. (1:36) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Contagion Tasked with such panic-inducing material, one has to appreciate director Steven Soderbergh’s cool head and hand with Contagion. Some might even dub this epic thriller (of sorts) cold, clinical, and completely lacking in bedside manner. Still, for those who’d rather be in the hands of a doctor who refuses to talk down to the patient, Contagion comes on like a refreshingly smart, somewhat melodrama-free clean room, a clear-eyed response to a messy, terrifying subject. A deadly virus is spreading swiftly — sans cure, vaccine, or sense — starting with a few unlikely suspects: globe-trotting corporate exec Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), a waiter, a European tourist, and a Japanese businessman. The chase is on to track the disease’s genesis and find a way to combat it, from the halls of the San Francisco Chronicle and blog posts of citizen activist-journalist Alan (Jude Law), to the emergency hospital in the Midwest set up by intrepid Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), to a tiny village in China with a World Health investigator (Marion Cotillard). Soderbergh’s brisk, businesslike storytelling approach nicely counterpoints the hysteria going off on the ground, as looting and anarchy breaks out around Beth’s immune widower Mitch (Matt Damon), and draws you in — though the tact of making this disease’s Typhoid Mary a sexually profligate woman is unsettling and borderline offensive, as is the predictable blame-it-on-the-Chinese origin coda. (1:42) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*The Dead Most zombie movies tell the same basic story, some variation of “survivors on the run.” Sometimes, the repetition is forgivable, as when the special effects are particularly juicy, or there’s totally unique plot twist (2009’s Zombieland set a new gold standard for that one), or there’s some other special thing that makes the film stand out from the brains-gobbling pack. For British directing brothers Howard J. and Jon Ford, that thing is the setting, which is neither backwoods America nor empty London, but West Africa. When The Dead begins, the outbreak (never explained) has already commenced; in an abandoned village, a grizzled American soldier (Rob Freeman) encounters a grim African soldier (Prince David Osei). Since they’re the only two living humans for miles, logic dictates they should team up; much of the film follows the pair on a surreal road trip through a rural landscape populated only by slow-moving, staring, ever-hungry undead. Despite some flaws (uneven acting, plus a few culturally iffy points — isn’t “witch doctor” kind of an outdated turn of phrase?), The Dead delivers where it matters, with moments of genuine suspense and some satisfyingly gross-outs. A+ in the ripped-off limbs department, Ford brothers. (1:45) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Debt On paper, The Debt has a lot going for it: captivating history-based plot, “it” actor Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren vs. Nazis. And while the latest from John Madden (1998’s Shakespeare in Love) is fairly entertaining, the film is ultimately forgettable. Chastain plays Rachel, a member of an Israeli team tasked with capturing a Nazi war criminal and bringing him to justice. Mirren is the older Rachel, who is haunted by the long-withheld true story of the mission. Although The Debt traffics in spy secrets, it’s actually rather predictable: the big reveal is shrug-worthy, and the shocking conclusion is expected. So while the entire cast — which also includes Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington, and Ciaran Hinds — turn in admirable performances, the script is lacking what it needs to make The Debt an effective drama or thriller. Like 2008’s overrated The Reader, the film tries to hide its inadequacies under heavy themes and the dread with which we remember the Holocaust. (1:54) Piedmont. (Louis Peitzman)

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2:02) Lumiere.

Dirty Girl The teenage heroine and hero of Dirty Girl, a self-possessed, unabashed slut and a chubby, diva-loving gay boy, were clearly meant for better things than life in the small-minded town of Norman, Okla., where they seem destined for a succession of beat-downs and shunnings. But as writer-director Abe Sylvia’s sweet-tart 1987-set story opens, Danielle (Juno Temple) and Clarke (Jeremy Dozier) have been wedged by a high school administration ill-equipped to handle square pegs into a remedial-track classroom that resembles the Island of Misfit Toys. There they are paired up for a “life skills” project as unenthusiastic new parents to a five-pound sack of flour (christened Joan after the pair’s respective idols, Jett and Crawford). Parenting missteps loom uncomfortably large in their lives: on Danielle’s home front, an ineffectual mother (Milla Jovovich), feebly deflecting her daughter’s rancor and clinging to her cheery Mormon boyfriend (William H. Macy); on Clarke’s, a homophobic father (Dwight Yoakam) and a recessive mother (Mary Steenburgen) passively witnessing his abuses. With none of the adults seeming up to the task of competently raising these misfit teenagers, it’s something of a relief when they acquire some wheels and Dirty Girl turns into a road movie — destination: Danielle’s mystery birth father, now living in California. With Danielle narrating — and penning diary entries in baby Joan’s name — Sylvia’s skillfully made first feature maps the high and low points of the journey with a comic eye and compassion, depicting a girl and her (flour)baby daddy’s deepening relationship and the complications attending any attempt to draw a family tree from scratch. (1:45) Lumiere, Metreon, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Dolphin Tale (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Dream House (1:33) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

50/50 This is nothing but a mainstream rom-com-dramedy wrapped in indie sheep’s clothes. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) learns he has cancer, he undergoes the requisite denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance like a formality. Aided by his bird-brained but lovable best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan), lovable klutz of a counselor Katherine (Anna Kendrick), and panicky mother (Anjelica Huston), Adam gets a new lease on life. This comes in the form of one-night-stands, furious revelations in parked cars, and a prescribed dose of wacky tobaccy. If 50/50 all sounds like the setup for a pseudo-insightful, kooky feel-goodery, it is. The film doesn’t have the brains or spleen to get down to the bone of cancer. Instead, director Jonathan Levine (2008’s The Wackness) and screenwriter Will Reiser favor highfalutin’ monologues, wooden characters, and a Hollywood ending (with just the right amount of ambiguity). Still, Gordon-Levitt is the most gorgeous cancer patient you will ever see, bald head and all. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (1:28) Bridge, Shattuck.

The Ides of March Battling it out in the Ohio primaries are two leading Democratic presidential candidates. Filling the role of idealistic upstart new to the national stage — even his poster looks like you-know-who’s Hope one — is Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), who’s running neck-and-neck in the polls with his rival thanks to veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and ambitious young press secretary Steven (Ryan Gosling). The latter is so tipped for success that he’s wooed to switch teams by a rival politico’s campaign chief (Paul Giamatti). While he declines, even meeting with a representative from the opposing camp is a dangerous move for Steven, who’s already juggling complex loyalties to various folk including New York Times reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei) and campaign intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who happens to be the daughter of the Democratic National Party chairman. Adapted from Beau Willimon’s acclaimed play Farragut North, Clooney’s fourth directorial feature is assured, expertly played, and full of sharp insider dialogue. (Willimon worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 run for the White House.) It’s all thoroughly engaging — yet what evolves into a thriller of sorts involving blackmail and revenge ultimately seems rather beside the point, as it turns upon an old-school personal morals quandary rather than diving seriously into the corporate, religious, and other special interests that really determine (or at least spin) the issues in today’s political landscape. Though stuffed with up-to-the-moment references, Ides already feels curiously dated. (1:51) Balboa, California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Killer Elite Jason Statham has a lot going on, in addition to devastatingly attractive male-pattern balding: along with fellow Brit Daniel Craig, he’s one of the most believable action heroes in the cineplex today. This continent-hopping, Bourne-ish exercise, kitted out with piercingly loud sound design, comes chock-full of promise in the form of Statham, Robert De Niro, and Clive Owen, wielding endless firearms and finding new deadly uses for bathroom tile — you don’t want to be caught solo in anger management class with these specialists in cinematic rageaholism. Mercenary assassin Danny (Statham) wants out of the game after a traumatic killing involving way too much eye contact with a small child. Killer coworker Hunter (De Niro) pulled him out of that tight spot, so when the aging gunman is held hostage, Danny must emerge from hiding in rural Australia and take on a seemingly impossible case: avenge the deaths of a dying sheik’s sons, who were gunned down by assorted highly trained British military hotshots, get them to confess, and make it all look like an accident. Oh, yes, and try to make sure his own loved ones aren’t killed in the process. Dancing backwards as fast as he can is those retired Brits’ guardian angel-of-sorts, Spike (Owen), another intense, dangerous fellow with too much time on his hands. Throw in my favorite Oz evil-doer Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Danny and Hunter’s boss, some welcome been-there twinkle from De Niro, as well as a host of riveting fight scenes (and that ’00s cliché: sudden death by bus/truck/semi), and you have diverting popcorn killer. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The Lion King 3D (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki.

*Love Crime Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime. The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance about what sleazy things could potentially be done to this neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller. No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures. Ludivine Sagnier plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. Though it’s no masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his Corneau’s career Corneau (he died at age 67 last August) not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. (1:46) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

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, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Mill and the Cross One of the clichés often told about art is that it is supposed to speak to us. Polish director Lech Majewski’s gorgeous experiment in bringing Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Bruegel’s sprawling 1564 canvas The Procession to Calvary to life attempts to do just that. Majeswki both re-stages Bruegel’s painting –which draws parallels between its depiction of Christ en route to his crucifixion and the persecution of Flemish citizens by the Spanish inquisition’s militia — in stunning tableaux vivant that combine bluescreen technology and stage backdrops, and gives back stories to a dozen or so of its 500 figures. Periodically, Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) addresses the camera mid-sketch to dolefully explain the allegorical nature of his work, but these pedantic asides speak less forcefully than Majeswki’s beautifully lit vignettes of the small joys and many hardships that comprised everyday life in the 16th century. Beguiling yet wholly absorbing. (1:37) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

Moneyball As fun as it is to watch Brad Pitt listen to the radio, work out, hang out with his cute kid, and drive down I-80 over and over again, it doesn’t quite translate into compelling cinema for the casual baseball fan. A wholesale buy-in to the cult of personality — be it A’s manager Billy Beane or the actor who plays him — is at the center of Moneyball‘s issues. Beane (Pitt) is facing the sad, inevitable fate of having to replace his star players, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, once they command the cash from the more-moneyed teams. He’s gotta think outside of the corporate box, and he finds a few key answers in Peter Brand (a.k.a. Paul DePodesta, played by Jonah Hill), who’s working with the sabermetric ideas of Bill James: scout the undervalued players that get on base to work against better-funded big-hitters. Similarly, against popular thought, Moneyball works best when director Bennett Miller (2005’s Capote) strays from the slightly flattening sunniness of its lead actor and plunges into the number crunching — attempting to visualize the abstract and tapping into the David Fincher network, as it were (in a related note, Aaron Sorkin co-wrote Moneyball‘s screenplay) — though the funny anti-chemistry between Pitt and Hill is at times capable of pulling Moneyball out of its slump. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Mozart’s Sister Pity the talented sister of a world-shaking prodigy. Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart, who may have had just as much promise as a composer as her younger brother, according to Rene Féret’s Mozart’s Sister. A scant five years older, enlisted in the traveling family band led by father-teacher Leopold (Marc Barbe), yet forced to hide her music, being female and forbidden to play violin and compose, Nannerl (Marie Féret, the filmmaker’s daughter) tours the courts of Europe and is acclaimed as a keyboardist and vocalist but is expected to share little of her brother’s brilliant future. Following a chance carriage breakdown near a French monastery, Nannerl befriends one of its precious inhabitants, a daughter of Louis XV (Lisa Féret, another offspring), which leads her to Versailles, into a cross-dressing guise of a boy, and puts her into the sights of the Dauphin (Clovis Fouin, who could easily find a spot in the Cullen vampire clan). He’s seduced by her music and likewise charms Nannerl with his power and feline good looks — what’s a humble court minstrel to do? The conceit of casting one’s daughters in a narrative hinging on unjustly neglected female progeny — shades of Sofia Coppola in The Godfather: Part III (1990)! — almost capsizes this otherwise thoughtful re-imagination of Maria Anna’s thwarted life; despite the fact Féret has inserted his children in his films in the past, both girls offer little emotional depth to their roles. Nevertheless, as a feminist rediscovery pic akin to Camille Claudel (1988), Mozart’s Sister instructs on yet another tragically quashed woman artist and might inspire some righteous indignation. (2:00) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*My Afternoons with Margueritte There’s just one moment in this tender French dramedy that touches on star Gerard Depardieu’s real life: his quasi-literate salt-of-the-earth character, Germain, rushes to save his depressed friend from possible suicide only to have his pretentious pal pee on the ground in front of him. Perhaps Depardieu’s recent urinary run-in, on the floor of an airline cabin, was an inspired reference to this moment. In any case, My Afternoons With Margueritte offers a hope of the most humanist sort, for all those bumblers and sad cases that are usually shuttled to the side in the desperate ’00s, as Depardieu demonstrates that he’s fully capable of carrying a film with sheer life force, rotund gut and straw-mop ‘do and all. In fact he’s almost daring you to hate on his aging, bumptious current incarnation: Germain is the 50-something who never quite grew up or left home. The vegetable farmer is treated poorly by his doddering tramp of a mother and is widely considered the village idiot, the butt of all the jokes down at the cafe, though contrary to most assumptions, he manages to score a beautiful, bus-driving girlfriend (Sophie Guillemin). However the true love of his life might be the empathetic, intelligent older woman, Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus), that he meets in the park while counting pigeons. There’s a wee bit of Maude to Germain’s Harold, though Jean Becker’s chaste love story is content to remain within the wholesome confines of small-town life — not a bad thing when it comes to looking for grace in a rough world. (1:22) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Real Steel Everybody knows what this movie about rocking, socking robots should have been called. Had the producers secured the rights to the name, we’d all be sitting down to Over The Top II: Child Endangerment. Absentee father Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his much-too-young son Max (Dakota Goyo) haul their remote-controlled pugilists in a big old truck from one underground competition to the next. Along the way Charlie learns what it means to be a loving father while still routinely managing to leave cherubic Max alone in scenarios of astonishing peril. Seriously, there are displays of parental neglect in this movie that strain credulity well beyond any of its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em elements. Fortunately the filmmakers had the good sense to make those elements awesome. The robots look great and the ring action can be surprisingly stirring in spite of the paper-thin human story it depends on. And as adept as the script proves to be at skirting the question of robot sentience, we’re no less compelled to root for our scrappy contender. Recommended if you love finely wrought spectacle but hate strong characterization and children. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness. (Jason Shamai)

*Sleep Furiously Gideon Koppel’s poetical feature takes a snapshot of an ebbing agricultural hamlet in middle Wales where his parents now live, one near in flavor and geography to Dylan Thomas’ fictive “Llareggub” in Under Milk Wood. Not that any background information is laid out here — this is the kind of documentary that eschews narrative and informational elements for an impressionist approach, little fragments of artfully arranged life adding up to a flavorsome if incomplete whole picture. Koppel is attracted to the way things haven’t changed — we never see a TV on, let alone somebody using a cell phone — yet we soon glean that things in Trefeurig are changing whether he likes it or not. The local residents we meet don’t: a dwindling populace has already shuttered the post office and other basic lifelines, with the schoolhouse scheduled next. What’s at issue here is the extinction of a community, though despite the attempts we see at sustaining local traditions, that may already be a foregone conclusion. Still, life goes on, from livestock birthings and shearings to the rain-or-shine route of John the mobile librarian, whose monthly visits to isolated pensioners provides Sleep‘s closest thing to a connecting thread. Some may be frustrated by the film’s opacity, and Koppel’s directorial choices can be pointlessly mannered. Yet there’s a lovely, lyrical warmth of observation that makes this perversely named (after a Noam Chomsky quote) nonfiction work a real pleasure to watch. It’s also a pleasure to hear, thanks to one exceptional local choir (featured in a rehearsal segment) and an original ambient soundtrack by Aphex Twin. (1:34) Roxie. (Harvey)

*Take Shelter Jeff Nichols directed Michael Shannon in 2007’s Shotgun Stories, released right around the time the actor’s decade-plus prior career broke huge with an Oscar nom for 2008’s Revolutionary Road. Their second collaboration, Take Shelter, is a subtle drama that succeeds mostly because of Shannon’s strong star turn, with an assist from Jessica Chastain (suddenly ubiquitous after The Help, The Debt, and Tree of Life). Curtis (Shannon) and Samantha (Chastain) live paycheck to paycheck in a small Midwestern town; the health insurance associated with his construction job is the only reason they’ll be able to afford a cochlear implant for their deaf daughter. When Curtis starts having horrible nightmares, he can’t shake the feeling that his dreams prophesize an actual disaster to come — or are an indicator that Curtis, like his mother before him, is slowly losing touch with reality. Curtis does seek professional help, but he also starts ripping up his backyard, making expensive improvements to the family’s tornado shelter. You know, just in case. Domestic turmoil, troubles at work, and social ostracization inevitably follow. Where will it all lead? Won’t spoil it for you, but Take Shelter‘s conclusion isn’t nearly as gripping as Shannon’s performance, an skillfully balanced mix of confusion, anger, regret, and white-hot terror. (2:00) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Weekend In post-World War II Britain, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, and calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores.” Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes. The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Albert Finney kicked against the pricks in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night. The landscape has changed, but is still nondescript; the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) wakes up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend‘s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple. Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. (1:36) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

What’s Your Number? Following some sage relationship advice from Marie Claire about the perils of a lengthy sexual résumé, Ally (Anna Faris) resolves to cut off her partner roster at 20, too late to avoid getting tagged a slut by her friends but not, she hopes, to secure her soul mate — if she can cast back over a storied career of failed relationships and hook the one who might not have been a total douche after all. Aiding her in this sad, misguided quest is her far sluttier across-the-hall neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans), whose main selling point other than P.I. skills and a well-defined set of obliques seems to be that he’s virtually the only person in the movie who doesn’t think Ally is doomed to solitude for having slept with 20 people. Faris is a charmer, and — no mean feat given the modest claims of the material at hand — she injects a comic exuberance into Ally’s reunions with a succession of impossibles, who are either engaged to be married, still not interested, or a gay politico seeking a beard. For jokes not revealed in the trailer, see: the inexorable progression of Ally and Colin’s friendship (they have plenty of time to hang out, cyber-stalk people, and play games of strip H-O-R-S-E since she’s just been laid off and he has no visible source of income), which leaves Ally with a couple of insights into Colin’s character and motivations and the viewer shrugging, only half-convinced of the merits of bachelor number 21. (1:46) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

 

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