Healthcare

What small business owners care about

Zelda Bronstein
-
14
What small business owners care about

Since the mayor’s office still insists that any business-tax reform ought to be revenue-neutral, and since he and other continue to talk about the myth that a payroll tax hurts job growth, I found the latest Bank of America survey of local small business owners fascinating.

Here’s what the survey found: Small business owners are concerned about (1) the cost of healthcare (2) access to credit and (3) finding qualified employees. Local taxes aren’t even on the list.

Now, if you ask almost any business operator whether he or she would like to pay lower taxes, most will probably say, sure. And I agree that a gross receipts tax is a better way of spreading the burden around. But the notion that slightly raising business taxes would hinder job growth in any significant way isn’t supported by reality.

In fact, if you used higher taxes to improve the schools (and thus the education of the future workforce) it would do more to keep employers from leaving San Francisco than cutting taxes. If the state of California went to a single-payer health-care system — dramatically reducing the cost to employers — it would do more to attract jobs to this state than all the tax cuts in a Republican’s wet dreams.

And if Bank of America and Wells Fargo would start loaning money to small businesess, you’d see almost immediate job growth.

How’s that for a Small Business Week agenda?

SF needs healthy housing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
19

My greatest frustration as a tenants’ rights and affordable-housing advocate in San Francisco is that, despite all the good efforts by a lot of good people, we never address the root cause of our housing crisis. We routinely enact laws and ballot initiatives, organize endless demonstrations and elect progressive politicians, but in the final analysis, these efforts are just a Band Aid on a bad system that leaves a lot of people without a roof over their heads.

A few years ago, Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance and I pushed “no fast pass to eviction” legislation to stop the eviction of seniors and people with AIDS and other disabilities through the state Ellis Act.

Ellis allows a landlord to override just-cause eviction protections and evict all of the tenants in a building. It’s often used by speculators to flip properties — that is, buy them, evict the tenants, and create a tenancy-in-common (where there’s the same number of owners as there are apartments). The new owners apply for condo conversion so that, instead of sharing a percentage in the building, they actually own their own units.

No Fast Pass says that if someone uses Ellis to evict tenants, then the building can’t convert to condos for ten years. If any of those tenants are seniors or disabled, it can never be converted. The legislation helped. There was a drop in Ellis evictions. Unfortunately, landlords and speculators now employ intimidation, harassment and buy-outs to get rid of tenants, so that they don’t have to Ellis.

It’s time to get beyond Band-Aids. Housing should be a human right, guaranteed for all, as healthcare is in other nations.

When former Supervisor Tom Ammiano realized that 65,000 San Franciscans (15% of the population) were without health coverage, he (not former Mayor Gavin Newsom, who takes credit for it) introduced legislation to create what is now “Healthy San Francisco,” our city’s version of universal healthcare. It’s not perfect, but it tackles the problem the way it should be tackled: by making healthcare a human right and not a luxury.

The same needs to be done for housing.

As long as housing is a commodity, affordable only to those who have the dough, there will always be people left out in the cold — literally. Our city has more than 10,000 homeless people, not to mention scores of others living (through no choice of their own) in deplorable conditions. The city builds more market-rate housing than it needs, while units for those below 50 percent of the city’s median income fall far short of the demand.

A mandate to house everyone in the city has never been tried. I don’t have an exact plan, but a “Housing SF” (like Healthy SF) might be created by pooling together all of our housing resources and aggressively working to pull in more. If the proposed Housing Trust Fund happens, it should be initially used only for those who need it most — the homeless and the poor, remembering that shelters are not housing, even if they’re considered such under Care Not Cash.

Put a moratorium on market-rate housing. Turn all abandoned properties (both city and privately owned) into affordable units. Raise money by letting the big businesses (including the tech companies) cough up some dough. Use land trusts as much as possible to keep the new places affordable into perpetuity.

It’s time to dream big.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, is a longtime affordable housing advocate.

Challenging the duopoly

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
4

By Adam Morris

news@sfbg.com

On May 12, the Green Party held a presidential debate between Massachusetts physician and longtime progressive activist Jill Stein and comedian turned TV star turned macadamia nut farmer Roseanne Barr. The debate was moderated by Rose Aguilar, host of KALW’s Your Call, and took place at San Francisco’s historic Victoria Theater.

Outside the theater before the event, a battalion of senior-citizen canvassers collected signatures to petition Gov. Jerry Brown to take up single-payer health care. Inside, the audience steadily grew to about 100 people, nearly filling the Victoria, but still was a grim turnout for what was once the Valhalla of progressive politics in America.

The audience was primarily gray; notably absent were the 20- and 30-something Occupiers, indebted students, and underemployed ranks of America’s youth, a political class actively courted by the Green Party and its candidates.

Barr read her opening remarks straight from her laptop computer, in a hurried monotone that nevertheless reached a crescendo as she called for “an end to the system of slavery, war, and usury” in America, and pledged to “make getting food to the hungry our final cause.” Ending hunger resurfaced later in the debate, when Barr observed that the military could be used to distribute food. She also claimed that “there would be no global warming” if humans chose to get their protein from nuts rather than eating animals. This would only happen, she charged, by getting Monsanto “off the necks of small farmers.”

Cribbing lines by turn from JFK and Jesus (via Lincoln), Barr continued, “I beseech the debt creators to ask not what this country can do for them, but what they can do for this country,” and asked America to give the 1 percent a chance to be our partners and not our adversaries, “for a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Stein’s opening statement indicted the Obama administration for adopting the policies of the Bush administration and called for a Green New Deal to reform transportation, health care, and environmental standards. Throughout the night, Stein repeatedly invoked the power of grassroots social movements witnessed across the globe, asking the audience to help her and the Greens “go viral” with their message of environmental and social reform.

Both candidates demanded vengeance on Wall Street, with Stein calling for a breakup of the banks and the establishment of public banks. Barr said that current laws allowed for the prosecuting of what she called “the biggest heist in history,” which is how she referred to the “transfer of wealth upward” of the last decade. “Everything filthy and disgusting originates right there on Wall Street,” she said, “and we want our money back.”

On the military, Stein vowed to “bring our dollars home to stop being the exploiter of the world,” and to turn the bomber factories into windmill factories for green jobs. Barr warned against the militarization of the police and the dangers of what she called the “prison-military-industrial complex,” which she said will be “holding a gun on your neighbor while your neighbor does free labor for a corporation.” Barr’s condemnation of the prison complex continued into the debate on legalization of marijuana, which Barr said would thrust the “tip of the spear into the beast” of the incarceration industry.

Stein echoed Barr’s support of legalization, leaning on her authority as a physician to proclaim that “marijuana is dangerous because it is illegal, not illegal because it is dangerous.” As a doctor, Stein also called for a real health care system involving bikeable cities and reform of the FDA to replace the current “sick-care” system favored by the major parties. Barr said that she too would “lift the curse on single payer universal health care.”

The candidates also came out strong in their support of labor reform, slamming NAFTA and suppression of workers’ rights. Stein called for “fair trade” over “free trade,” faulting the Obama administration for its recent free trade deal with a “union-destroying country” like Colombia. Barr choked up when she told the audience that she is able to “represent the people from whom I came,” quickly adding “and I’ll fight hard too—I’ve got balls bigger than anybody.” Women’s rights also drew fiery proclamations from the candidates, with Stein vowing to “resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment,” and Barr stating flatly that “patriarchy needs to go.”

The signature issue of the Green Party—the environment—was a minor if constantly underlying thread to the discussion, emerging as a topic only later in the debate. While Stein repeated Barr’s jabs at Monsanto and pledged to “deny the Keystone Pipeline on Day 1,” Barr grew solemn, acknowledging the possibility that it might be too late to save the environment from impending catastrophes. We would need to learn, she said, to create “a new system that is not money dependent.”

Both candidates broke debate protocol on time limits and turns of speech, but the atmosphere was collegial and supportive, with Barr chiming in “yeahs” to many of Stein’s remarks. Each woman repeatedly said she “agreed completely” with what the other said. “Our greatest weapon,” Barr said, is to “resist the fear they force-feed us,” linking her remarks to Stein’s claim that “the politics of fear has brought us everything we were afraid of.”

Stein railed against a mainstream press that has effectively sequestered discussion of political alternatives. “We do not have a functioning press,” she told the audience, “We have an o-press. We have a re-press.” She repeated her call for Greens to mobilize online to get the word out about alternative party movements. Barr said that she was being very careful not to bring any discredit to the Green Party. Though biting and at times sarcastic, Barr said she her campaign was “dead serious. And the message is dead serious too.”

Tax equity

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
3
Tax equity

steve@sfbg.com, yael@sfbg.com

A broad consensus in San Francisco supports reforming the city’s business-tax structure by replacing the payroll tax with a gross receipts tax through a November ballot measure. But the devil is in the details of how individual tax bills are affected, which has divided the business community and given a coalition of labor and progressives the opportunity to overcome the insistence by Mayor Ed Lee and other pro-business moderates that any change be revenue-neutral.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021, San Francisco’s biggest city employee union, last month launched a campaign demanding that the measure increase city revenue, setting a goal of at least $50 million, which represents the amount the city has lost annually since 2001 when 52 large downtown corporations sued to overturn the last gross receipts tax. The union is threatening to place a rival measure on the fall ballot.

“This call for it to be revenue-neutral didn’t make a lot of sense given all the reductions in city services in recent years,” said Chris Daly, the union’s interim political director. “It’s fair to at least get the money back that we lost in 2001.”

The union and the city recently agreed on a new contract that avoids more of the salary cuts that SEIU members have taken in recent years, but workers could still face layoffs under a new city budget that Lee is scheduled to introduce June 1. Lee, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and business leaders working on the tax-reform proposal have until June 12 to introduce their ballot measure.

But they don’t yet have an agreement on what the measure should look like — largely because the technology sector (led by billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, the biggest fundraiser for Lee’s mayoral campaign last year), the traditional businesses represented by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the small business community are pushing different interests and priorities.

“The technology industry has to realize they have a tax obligation like any member of the business community does,” Jim Lazarus, the Chamber’s vice president for public policy, told us.

Conway is reportedly using his influence on Lee to push for a model that keeps taxes low for tech companies — even if that comes at the expense of other economic sectors, such as commercial real estate and big construction firms, which will likely see their tax obligations increase. Yet some Chamber counter-proposals could end up costing small businesses more money, creating a puzzle that has yet to be worked out.

But one thing is clear: The business leaders don’t want to see overall city revenue increase. “If there’s anything that is unifying in the business community is that it’s revenue neutral,” small business advocate Scott Hauge told us. “We’re not going to increase revenues, that’s just a given, so if we have to do battle then so be it.”

SEIU and other members of progressive revenue coalition that has been strategizing in recent weeks are hoping to exploit the divisions in the business community and arrive at a compromise that increases revenue, and if not then they say they’re willing to go to the ballot with a rival measure.

“We’re working on trying to recover what we lost in the 2001 settlement and then some,” Sup. John Avalos, who has been working with the progressive coalition, told us. “We have to have something going to the ballot that is revenue generating.”

 

 

LABOR’S CAMPAIGN

For labor and progressives, this is an equity issue. Workers have been asked to give back money, year after year, despite the fact that big corporations have been doing well in recent years but haven’t contributed any of that wealth to the cash-strapped city. Labor leaders say that after they supported last year’s pension-reform measure, it’s time for the business community to support city services.

“When we talked about Prop C, we said if our members are doing this with our pensions now, we’ll see next year what businesses do with business tax,” said Larry Bradshaw, vice president of SEIU Local 1021. “Then we read about secret meetings where the labor movement was excluded from those talks.”

Anger over the “secret meetings” of business leaders that Lee assembled to craft the tax reform measure — meetings at which no labor leaders were included — helped inspire the fierce protest campaign that defined the SEIU’s recent contract negotiations.

In the first weeks of negotiations, workers were already up in arms. Protest marches at SF General Hospital and Laguna Honda Hospital brought hundreds of hospital workers to the streets. These hospitals serve some of the city’s poorest populations: Laguna Honda patients are mostly seniors on Medi-Cal and General is the main public hospital serving the city’s poor.

On April 5, city workers got creative with a street theater protest that involved six-story projections on the iconic Hobart Building. Protesters dressed as rich CEOs and handed out thank-you cards to commuters at the Montgomery transit station. SEIU’s “The City We Need, Not Downtown Greed” campaign included a website (www.neednotgreed.org), slick video, and direct mailers portraying CEOs as panhandlers on the street asking city residents, “Can you spare a tax break?”

The most dramatic civil disobedience came on April 18, when more than 1,000 workers rallied outside City Hall — along with several progressive supervisors — and then marched to Van Ness and Market. Protesters blocked the street, resulting in 23 arrests. At that point, increases in health care cuts and pay cuts to city workers were still on the table.

That was followed the next week by hundreds of workers staging noisy demonstrations in City Hall, and then again on May Day when SEIU workers were well represented in actions that took over parts of the Financial District.

In the end, the demands of union representatives were met in the contract agreement. Health care cost increases and pay cuts were eliminated, and a 3 percent pay raise will kick in during the two-year contract’s second year, a deal overwhelmingly approved by union members. Labor leaders hope to use that momentum to force a deal with the Mayor’s Office on the tax reform measure — which some sources say is possible. Otherwise, they say the campaign will continue.

“We may end up on the streets gathering signatures soon,” Daly said. “We need to figure it out in the next few weeks.”

 

 

THOSE DEVILISH DETAILS

The Controller’s Office released a report on May 10 that made the case for switching to a gross receipts tax and summed up the business community’s meetings, and the report was the subject of a joint statement put out by Lee and Chiu. “After months of thorough analysis, economic modeling and inclusive outreach to our City’s diverse business community, the City Controller and City Economist have produced a report that evaluates a gross receipts tax, a promising alternative to our current payroll tax, which punishes companies for growing and creating new jobs in our City'” the statement said. “Unlike our current payroll tax, a gross receipts tax would deliver stable and growing revenue to fund vital city services, while promoting job growth and continued economic recovery for San Francisco.”

Daly and Avalos say progressives agree that a gross receipts tax would probably be better than the payroll tax, and they say the controller’s report lays out a good analysis and framework for the discussions to come. But despite its detailed look at who the winners and losers in the tax reform might be, Daly said, “We haven’t seen an actual proposal yet.”

Lazarus made a similar statement: “Nobody likes the payroll tax, but the devil is in the details.”

But it’s clear some businesses those with high gross receipts but low payrolls — would pay more taxes. For example, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector now pays about 16 percent of the $410 million the city collects in payroll taxes. That would go up to about 21 percent under a gross receipts tax.

“Several industries that could face higher taxes under the proposal, such as commercial real estate, large retailers, and large construction firms, felt the increase was too sharp,” the report said under the heading of “Policy Issues Arising From Meetings with Businesses.”

The report highlighted how the change would broaden the tax base. Only about 7,500 businesses now pay the payroll tax (others are either too small or are exempt from local taxation, such as banks), whereas 33,500 companies would pay the gross receipts tax, which the report identified as another issue to be resolved.

“While some businesses appreciated the base-broadening aspect of the gross receipts proposal, others felt that too many small businesses were being brought into the Gross Receipts tax,” the report said. Hauge also told us that he fears a tax increase on commercial real estate firms could be passed on to small businesses in the form of higher rents. “I don’t want to see the business community split,” Hauge said, although it’s beginning to look like that might be unavoidable. The big question now is whether progressives and labor can find any allies in this messy situation, and whether they’ll be able to agree on a compromise measure that all sides say is preferable to competing measures.

A fair deal for the city’s nurses

Zelda Bronstein
-
12

For San Francisco’s public-sector registered nurses, this year’s Nurse’s Week was a paradox. On May 10, nurses from throughout the city gathered in the cafeteria of San Francisco General Hospital to celebrate Florence Nightingale’s birthday by bestowing gratitude and appreciation on nurses selected by their colleagues. Martha Hawthorne, long-time Castro-Mission Health Center public health nurse, was one of those honored. 

Upon acceptance of the award, Martha said that city nurses would be most appropriately honored by getting a fair contract. The next day a smaller gathering of nurses, including Martha, was back across the bargaining table from city negotiators who have proposed  significant financial and working condition concessions. Decreased compensation threatens the future of nursing in the public sector by impairing recruitment and retention of highly-skilled registered nurses. Working conditions concessions are even more broadly harmful and unacceptable; it is both risky for the nurses and increases the likelihood of adverse outcomes for those we care for.

San Francisco DPH nurses care for the city, quite literally, and with great pride. We are also proud of San Francisco’s historically progressive record on public health. Immigrant pregnant mothers are not interrogated by immigration authorities before giving birth. Public health nurses don’t require insurance company pre-authorized visits before teaching self-care to elderly residents of downtown SROs. The quality of care given by Jail Health nurses is no less than that given to someone living in a nice house by the city’s home health nurses of Health-at-Home. Laguna Honda, one of the last municipal long-term care centers, has a beautiful new campus and San Francisco General Hospital is being noisily rebuilt thanks to voter-approved bond measures. But nice buildings and well-conceived health programs don’t care for the ill and injured, nurses do.

Nurses are professionally pragmatic; we don’t offer false hope. Patient advocacy requires great patience. This is especially true in the public sector, where the population we serve is likely to suffer from intractable extreme poverty and social marginalization. The poor don’t require less health care than wealthy individuals, in fact they require more. It’s not always pretty, but we know that if we are given the human resources to do so we will continue to deliver excellent patient care.

The complexity and intensity of patient care seems to be rising far faster than inflation. Aside from the issues of fairness and quality care, nurses simply don’t have enough hours in the day to do the repair our over-burdened fractured health system requires. Activist nurses are needed to save lives by preserving and expanding health care access. While universal single-payer health-care is elusive nationally, California nurses are optimistic we can do better here. Women’s health is under attack nationally by fanatics who would deny cancer screening and care for rape survivors.

Nurse’s Week is over and we have a lot to do, let’s start with a fair deal for DPH nurses. It’s not to much to ask for and we will all benefit.

Sasha Cuttler, RN, is a San Francisco public health nurse.

SEIU reps pleased with tentative contract

-
46
SEIU reps pleased with tentative contract

After heated negotiations, the city has come to a tentative two-year contract agreement with SEIU Local 1021. 

The union, which represents 12,000 city workers, has staged large protests in recent weeks while negotiators worked on the contract. The union was opposed to pay cuts and increases in health care costs that the city originally proposed.

With the new agreement, city workers will get a three percent pay increase, to kick in next year.

The arbitrator of the negotiations also ruled in favor of the union on the issue of temporary workers, who mostly don’t currently enjoy benefits or job security. Now, temporary city workers who have worked 1500 hours over the past three years will be prioritized for permanent jobs.

The SEIU did compromise on some parts of the deal. The new contract won’t include travel pay previously provided to people who commute outside the city for work. There will also be new restrictions placed on union organizing, as union stewards will need to be “escorted” into what the city deems “confidential areas,” restricting union access to work environments.

Larry Bradshaw, 1021 Vice President, has been at the table since negotiations began in February. “I’m very happy with the results,” said Bradshaw. “Its the first agreement since 2009 where the city is not going to balance the budget on the back of working families.”

In the years since 2009, city workers have had deferred pay wages, wage concessions, and increased health care costs. Bradshaw says the new contract will put base wages back at 2009 levels.

“I think in the first years of the recession our members were willing to sacrifice,” said Bradshaw. “But then year after year, they don’t want to keep doing that when the city is not going after corporations. They’re just sitting on wealth and the city is not taxing that wealth.”

http://vimeo.com/39869973

That sentiment has led to the SEIU’s call for increased taxes on some corporations in the city. That’s the issue they address in the above video, which may become a TV commercial for what may become a ballot measure in November that would restructure the business tax code.

SEIU Local 1021 members are currently in the process of voting to ratify the contract. The vote will be done by Monday evening, just in time for the Board of Supervisors to ratify the agreement at their May 15 meeting.

GUEST OPINION: The politics of retribution

Zelda Bronstein
-
122
GUEST OPINION: The politics of retribution

By Debra Walker and Krissy Keefer

We have been shocked and saddened by the perpetual attack on Ross Mikarimi and his family.

To Ross’s credit, he took responsibility in the criminal case he faced, and accepted a plea bargain to a non-domestic-violence misdemeanor that the district attorney concluded served the interests of justice.

He and his wife, Eliana Lopez, had resolved their dispute before the betrayed disclosure to the police and the media by the trained but unlicensed attorney that began the criminal case. The plea bargain was vetted and all legal ethicists consulted concluded that the plea bargain could not be the basis of any action against Ross for the now infamous term “official misconduct.” Ross was ordered into counseling.

Since the criminal case ended we have watched the mayor, domestic-violence advocates, and the majority of the print media, collectively pass judgment without connection to reality, with devastating consequences to Ross Mirkarimi, his family and the people of San Francisco.

Mayor Ed Lee suspended Ross without a hearing and without pay. In other words, the mayor acted against Ross without due process. City Attorney Dennis Herrera has merely repeated all of the unsubstantiated allegations from a newspaper opinion piece in the form of a pleading — and actually submitted this as fact, further embarrassing our city.

Barring further intervention by the courts, the Board of Supervisors and the Ethics Commission will now be forced to publicly weigh in on the concluded criminal case that occurred before Ross was in office.

Was the punishment laid out by the courts not enough? Are we going to all sit back and watch as San Francisco engages in a public political assassination of a progressive elected official? At what point does it stop? 

Clearly it hasn’t stopped with Ross. Now the mayor and the city attorney have begun the attack on his campaign manager and well-known City Hall aide Linette Peralta-Hayes. Who is next? It could be any of us, of you.

As close friends of Ross and Eliana, we can attest to the fact that this family has paid dearly for their now very public fight and we all should hope for a healing. It does not bring justice to any women’s issues to have such a public display of retribution and revenge. Blowing this out of proportion like this has been only sets the stage for the continued backlash against women’s real issues.

If there were not a complete attack on women’s rights at this time in our country, this might be easier to stomach. Not one thing about this has advanced the rights of women or the understanding of domestic violence. Instead, the criminal justice system has been manipulated to further a political agenda of removing an elected official from office.

We all make mistakes in life. There have been several recent occasions involving officials actually in office where their behavior was questioned.  One issues involved sexual contact with a subordinate, another involved domestic violence and others involved substance abuse. In not one of these instances has the person been removed office.

To remove Ross from office is political and nothing else.

People are purportedly so outraged on behalf of abused women everywhere. But where is the outrage about the coordinated attack on choice in our country or about the documented inhumanities perpetrated against women throughout the world, even today?  Or equal pay, or adequate healthcare? What about the families losing their homes to greedy banks? Nothing of substance gets done on these issues. Instead, attention is focused away from the important issues to the personal shortcomings of the politicians seeking to address those issues.

From the impeachment efforts against Clinton to the allegations against the Wikileaks activist, there are over-amped attacks aimed to politically destroy the target in the press.  “Due process” and “innocent until proven guilty” are essentially thrown out the pressroom window. 
In the name of domestic violence, the mayor and the city attorney have removed an elected official from office. Domestic violence advocates are being used to further an agenda that is hypocritical and ultimately will undermine and dis-empower us all.

Ross Mikirimi was the only progressive elected in the last election. Ross has always been an ideological feminist. The established power brokers in City Hall did not want Ross to be sheriff. They do not want someone who advocates for diversity. They do not want someone who supports the rights of the people to implement the Compassionate Use Act and maintain cannabis dispensaries. They do not want a sheriff who will stand up to the federal government.  They do not want a sheriff who will stand with the 99 percent.

San Francisco is a great city not because of intolerance but because of tolerance. The strength of the city came about because of respect for diversity and encouragement of diversity. Ross stands for those principles.

Ross made a mistake in his personal relationship. Eliana Lopez, his wife, has clearly forgiven him. Each of us should do the same. To do otherwise is to disrespect Lopez.

Are we going to trust City Hall to be the arbitrators of conduct?  And are we really going to sit by and watch as they systematically throw untrue, unfounded, unsubstantiated accusations at whomever they want? Really?

To use this incident as the basis for this coup is without precedent. City Hall’s actions are without basis in fact and without foundation in law.

We believe that the mayor, among others, is doing what he wants to under the guise of women’s rights. We do not want to be used in that way.

There is something very wrong with what is happening — and sadly if this public political assassination can happen to Ross and his family, it can and will happen to anyone of us. Ask Linette Peralta Hayes.
 
Krissy Keefer is artist director, Dance Mission Theater. Debra Walker, an artist, is political development chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus.

SEIU makes noise in City Hall

-
13

SEIU Local 1021 workers say ‘’our message was heard” after about 300 marched into City Hall April 30. The city workers marched around the rotunda and then visited the offices of Sups Mar, Campos and Kim and Mayor Ed Lee, demanding that health care costs do not increase in ongoing contract negotiations with the city.

The city has already taken pay cuts that the union had been loudly protesting off the table. 

“We’re making progress, but not enough progress,” said Local 1021 field organizer Frank Martin del Campo.

He added that “this is the first time to my knowledge a union has militarized during the arbitration process since the process was established in San Francisco.”

The union had stated that they planned to demonstrate until 7:30pm, and then attempt to stay the night in a “Wisconsin-style takeover.” But by 6:30pm, the workers had exited City Hall.

“Our goal was to come and reclaim City Hall,” said Local 1021 vice president Larry Bradshaw. “If they wouldn’t let us in we’d occupy City Hall. They let us in.”

He added that “our members aren’t afraid to get arrested,” referencing an April 18 protest that resulted in 23 arrests.

He said that SEIU will not be on strike for May Day, but many members will be calling in sick and supporting janitors with SEIU Local 87 in their picket at Westfield Mall, scheduled for 11am.

Bradshaw, however, a paramedic. won’t be calling in sick. “I’ll be in arbitration,” he said.

The two defining votes of 2012

Zelda Bronstein
-
38
The two defining votes of 2012

The Board of Supervisors will be facing two votes in the next couple of months that will define this board, establish the extent of the mayor’s political clout — and potentially play a decisive role in the political futures of several board members.

Oh: They’ll also have a lasting impact on the future of this city.

I’m talking about 8 Washington and CPMC — one of them the most important vote on housing policy to come along in years, the other a profound decision that will change the face of the city and alter the health-care infrastructure for decades to come.

Both projects have cleared the Planning Commission, as expected. Neither can go forward without approval from a majority of the supervisors. And there will be intense downtown lobbying on both of them.

The 8 Washington project would create what developer Simon Snellgrove calls the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. A piece of waterfront property would become a gated community for the very, very rich, many of whom won’t even live here most of the time. If it’s approved, the economy won’t collapse, neighborhoods won’t be destroyed — but it will make a powerful statement about the city’s housing policy. The message: We build housing for the 1 percent. We are a city that caters only to one very tiny group of people. We are willing to let the needs of the few drive our policy over the needs of the many.

Face it: There is no shortage of housing for the people who will buy Snellgrove’s condos. There’s a severe shortage of housing for most of the people who actually work in San Francisco. And the city’s housing policy is so scewed up that it’s making things worse. That’s the message of 8 Washington.

Then there’s CPMC. California Pacific Medical Center wants to put a snazzy state-of-the art new medical center on Van Ness, which is all well and good. But the giant nonprofit Sutter Health, which operates CPMC, has been openly hostile to some of the city’s demands (for housing, transit and other environmental mitigiation) and the proposal that Mayor Ed Lee has signed off on is way out of balance. There’s not anything even close to a reasonable link between jobs and housing — which will impact the entire city. You bring in a lot of new workers and don’t help build enough housing for them and everyone’s rent goes up.

CPMC also wants to radically downsize St. Luke’s Hospital, the only full-service facility on the south side of town except for the overcrowded and overloaded SF General. Health care for a sizable part of the city will suffer.

This is a very big deal, and the Chamber of Commerce is pushing hard for the supes to approve it. A lot of labor and the entire affordable housing community is against it.

So put those two votes in front of a board where the progressive majority has been very shaky of late — and where Lee will be working hard to line up six votes — and you’ve got potential political dynamite. Supervisor John Avalos told me he has serious concerns about both projects. Sup. David Campos told me he feels the same way. Sup Eric Mar is unlikely to vote for 8 Washington and unlikely to oppose the health-care workers and the progressive leaders who want to block the CPMC deal and make Sutter come back with a better offer, but some elements of labor are pushing hard for 8 Washington and Mar is up for re-election in one of the city’s swing districts.

Sup. David Chiu is against 8 Washington. I’ve called Sups. Jane Kim and Christina Olague (who was not a fan of the project when she was on the Planning Commission) but they haven’t gotten back to me. Olague is running for re-election this fall in the city’s most progressive district, one that’s right on the edge of the CPMC project site; Kim’s district is on the other edge.

You can’t really count to six on either of these projects without getting Chiu and/or Kim and/or Olague. Chiu has no progressive opposition, but if he supports the CPMC deal, someone may decide to challenge him. If Olague supports either project, it will give her opponents plenty of fodder for the fall campaign (John Rizzo, who is running against her, told me he opposes both). If Olague opposes the two projects, it’s going to be much harder for anyone to run against her from the left since she will have demonstrated that she can stand up the mayor on tough issues.

I’ll let you know if I hear more.

 

 

 

Guardian endorsements for June 5 election

Andrew Lam
-
34
Guardian endorsements for June 5 election

>>OUR ONE-PAGE “CLEAN SLATE” PRINTOUT GUIDE IS HERE. 

As usual, California is irrelevant to the presidential primaries, except as a cash machine. The Republican Party has long since chosen its nominee; the Democratic outcome was never in doubt. So the state holds a June 5 primary that, on a national level, matters to nobody.

It’s no surprise that pundits expect turnout will be abysmally low. Except in the few Congressional districts where a high-profile primary is underway, there’s almost no news media coverage of the election.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some important races and issues (including the future of San Francisco’s Democratic Party) — and the lower the turnout, the more likely the outcome will lean conservative. The ballot isn’t long; it only takes a few minutes to vote. Don’t stay home June 5.

Our recommendations follow.

PRESIDENT

BARACK OBAMA

Sigh. Remember the hope? Remember the joy? Remember the dancing in the streets of the Mission as a happy city realized that the era of George Bush and The Gang was over? Remember the end of the war, and health-care reform, and fair economic policies?

Yeah, we remember, too. And we remember coming back to our senses when we realized that the first people at the table for the health-policy talks were the insurance industry lobbyists. And when more and more drones killed more and more civilian in Afghanistan, and the wars didn’t end and the country got deeper and deeper into debt.

Oh, and when Obama bailed out Wall Street — and refused to spend enough money to help the rest of us. And when his U.S. attorney decided to crack down on medical marijuana.

We could go on.

There’s no question: The first term of President Barack Obama has been a deep disappointment. And while we wish that his new pledge to tax the millionaires represented a change in outlook, the reality is that it’s most likely an election-year response to the popularity of the Occupy movement.

Last fall, when a few of the most progressive Democrats began talking about the need to challenge Obama in a primary, we had the same quick emotional reaction as many San Franciscans: Time to hold the guy accountable. Some prominent left types have vowed not to give money to the Obama campaign.

But let’s get back to reality. The last time a liberal group challenged an incumbent in a Democratic presidential primary, Senator Ted Kennedy wounded President Jimmy Carter enough to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan — and the begin of the horrible decline in the economy of the United States. We’re mad at Obama, too — but we’re realists enough to know that there is a difference between moderate and terrible, and that’s the choice we’re facing today.

The Republican Party is now entirely the party of the far right, so out of touch with reality that even Reagan would be shunned as too liberal. Mitt Romney, once the relatively centrist governor of Massachusetts, has been driven by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum so deeply into crazyland that he’s never coming back. We appreciate Ron Paul’s attacks on military spending and the war on drugs, but he also opposes Medicare and Social Security and says that people who don’t have private health insurance should be allowed to die for lack of medical care.

No, this one’s easy. Obama has no opposition in the Democratic Primary, but for all our concerns about his policies, we have to start supporting his re-election now.

U.S. SENATE

DIANNE FEINSTEIN

The Republicans in Washington didn’t even bother to field a serious candidate against the immensely well-funded Feinstein, who is seeking a fourth term. She’s a moderate Democrat, at best, was weak-to-terrible on the war, is hawkish on Pentagon spending (particularly Star Wars and the B-1 bomber), has supported more North Coast logging, and attempts to meddle in local politics with ridiculous ideas like promoting unknown Michael Breyer for District Five supervisor. She supported the Obama health-care bill but isn’t a fan of single-payer, referring to supporters of Medicare for all as “the far left.”

But she’s strong on choice and is embarrassing the GOP with her push for reauthorization of an expanded Violence Against Women Act. She’ll win handily against two token Republicans.

U.S. CONGRESS, DISTRICT 2

NORMAN SOLOMON

The Second District is a sprawling region stretching from the Oregon border to the Golden Gate Bridge, from the coast in as far as Trinity County. It’s home to the Marin suburbs, Sonoma and Mendocino wine country, the rough and rural Del Norte and the emerald triangle. There’s little doubt that a Democrat will represent the overwhelmingly liberal area that was for almost three decades the province of Lynn Woolsey, one of the most progressive members in Congress. The top two contenders are Norman Solomon, an author, columnist and media advocate, and Jared Huffman, a moderate member of the state Assembly from Marin.

Solomon’s not just a decent candidate — he represents a new approach to politics. He’s an antiwar crusader, journalist, and outsider who has never held elective office — but knows more about the (often corrupt) workings of Washington and the policy issues facing the nation than many Beltway experts. He’s talking about taxing Wall Street to create jobs on Main Street, about downsizing the Pentagon and promoting universal health care. He’s a worthy successor to Woolsey, and he deserves the support of every independent and progressive voter in the district.

U.S. CONGRESS, DISTRICT 12

NANCY PELOSI

Nancy Pelosi long ago stopped representing San Francisco (see: same-sex marriage) and began representing the national Democratic party and her colleagues in the House. She will never live down the privatization of the Presidio or her early support for the Iraq war, but she’s become a decent ally for Obama and if the Democrats retake the House, she’ll be setting the agenda for his second term. If the GOP stays in control, this may well be her last term.

Green Party member Barry Hermanson is challenging her, and in the old system, he’d be on the November ballot as the Green candidate. With open primaries (which are a bad idea for a lot of reasons) Hermanson needs support to finish second and keep Pelosi on her toes as we head into the fall.

U.S. CONGRESS, DISTRICT 12

BARBARA LEE

This Berkeley and Oakland district is among the most left-leaning in the country, and its representative, Barbara Lee, is well suited to the job. Unlike Pelosi, Lee speaks for the voters of her district; she was the lone voice against the Middle East wars in the early days, and remains a staunch critic of these costly, bloody, open-ended foreign military entanglements. We’re happy to endorse her for another term.

U.S. CONGRESS, DISTRICT 13

JACKIE SPEIER

Speier’s more of a Peninsula moderate than a San Francisco progressive, but she’s been strong on consumer privacy and veterans issues and has taken the lead on tightening federal rules on gas pipelines after Pacific Gas and Electric Company killed eight of her constituents. She has no credible opposition.

STATE SENATE, DISTRICT 11

MARK LENO

Mark Leno started his political career as a moderate member of the Board of Supervisors from 1998 to 2002. His high-profile legislative races — against Harry Britt for the Assembly in 2002 and against Carole Migden for the Senate in 2008 — were some of the most bitterly contested in recent history. And we often disagree with his election time endorsements, which tend toward more downtown-friendly candidates.

But Leno has won us over, time and again, with his bold progressive leadership in Sacramento and with his trailblazing approach to public policy. He is an inspiring leader who has consistently made us proud during his time in the Legislature. Leno was an early leader on the same-sex marriage issue, twice getting the Legislature to legalize same-sex unions (vetoed both times by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger). He has consistently supported a single-payer health care system and laid important groundwork that could eventually break the grip that insurance companies have on our health care system. And he has been a staunch defender of the medical marijuana patients and has repeatedly pushed to overturn the ban on industrial hemp production, work that could lead to an important new industry and further relaxation of this country wasteful war on drugs. We’re happy to endorse him for another term.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 17

TOM AMMIANO

Ammiano is a legendary San Francisco politician with solid progressive values, unmatched courage and integrity, and a history of diligently and diplomatically working through tough issues to create ground-breaking legislation. We not only offer him our most enthusiastic endorsement — we wish that we could clone him and run him for a variety of public offices. Since his early days as an ally of Harvey Milk on gay rights issues to his creation of San Francisco’s universal health care system as a supervisor to his latest efforts to defend the rights of medical marijuana users, prison inmates, and undocumented immigrants, Ammiano has been a tireless advocate for those who lack political and economic power. As chair of Assembly Public Safety Committee, Ammiano has blocked many of the most reactionary tough-on-crime measures that have pushed our prison system to the breaking point, creating a more enlightened approach to criminal justice issues. We’re happy to have Ammiano expressing San Francisco’s values in the Capitol.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 19

PHIL TING

Once it became abundantly clear that Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting wasn’t going to get elected mayor, he started to set his eyes on the state Assembly. It’s an unusual choice in some ways — Ting makes a nice salary in a job that he’s doing well and that’s essentially his for life. Why would he want to make half as much money up in Sacramento in a job that he’ll be forced by term limits to leave after six years?

Ting’s answer: he’s ready for something new. We fear that a vacancy in his office would allow Mayor Ed Lee to appoint someone with less interest in tax equity (prior to Ting, the city suffered mightily under a string of political appointees in the Assessor’s Office), but we’re pleased to endorse him for the District 19 slot.

Ting has gone beyond the traditional bureaucratic, make-no-waves approach of some of his predecessors. He’s aggressively sought to collect property taxes from big institutions that are trying to escape paying (the Catholic Church, for example) and has taken a lead role in fighting foreclosures. He commissioned, on his own initiative, a report showing that a large percentage of the foreclosures in San Francisco involved some degree of fraud or improper paperwork, and while the district attorney is so far sitting on his hands, other city officials are moving to address the issue.

His big issue is tax reform, and he’s been one the very few assessors in the state to talk openly about the need to replace Prop. 13 with a split-role system that prevents the owners of commercial property from paying an ever-declining share of the tax burden. He wants to change the way the Legislature interprets Prop. 13 to close some of the egregious loopholes. It’s one of the most important issues facing the state, and Ting will arrive in Sacramento already an expert.

Ting’s only (mildly) serious opponent is Michael Breyer, son of Supreme Court Justice Breyer and a newcomer to local politics. Breyer’s only visible support is from the Building Owners and Managers Association, which dislikes Ting’s position on Prop. 13. Vote for Ting.

DEMOCRATIC COUNTY CENTRAL COMMITTEE

You can say a lot of things about Aaron Peskin, the former supervisor and retiring chair of the city’s Democratic Party, but the guy was an organizer. Four years ago, he put together a slate of candidates that wrenched control of the local party from the folks who call themselves “moderates” but who, on critical economic issues, are really better defined as conservative. Since then, the County Central Committee, which sets policy for the local party, has given its powerful endorsement mostly to progressive candidates and has taken progressive stands on almost all the ballot issues.

But the conservatives are fighting back — and with Peskin not seeking another term and a strong slate put together by the mayor’s allies seeking revenge, it’s entirely possible that the left will lose the party this year.

But there’s hope — in part because, as his parting gift, Peskin helped change state law to make the committee better reflect the Democratic voting population of the city. This year, 14 candidates will be elected from the East side of town, and 10 from the West.

We’ve chosen to endorse a full slate in each Assembly district. Although there are some candidates on the slate who aren’t as reliable as we might like, 24 will be elected, and we’re picking the 24 best.

DISTRICT 17 (EAST SIDE)

John Avalos

David Campos

David Chiu

Petra DeJesus

Matt Dorsey

Chris Gembinsky

Gabriel Robert Haaland

Leslie Katz

Rafael Mandelman

Carole Migden

Justin Morgan

Leah Pimentel

Alix Rosenthal

Jamie Rafaela Wolfe

 

DISTRICT 19 (WEST SIDE)

Mike Alonso

Wendy Aragon

Kevin Bard

Chuck Chan

Kelly Dwyer

Peter Lauterborn

Hene Kelly

Eric Mar

Trevor McNeil

Arlo Hale Smith

State ballot measures

PROPOSITION 28

YES

LEGISLATIVE TERM LIMITS

Let us begin with a stipulation: We have always opposed legislative term limits, at every level of government. Term limits shift power to the executive branch, and, more insidiously, the lobbyists, who know the issues and the processes better than inexperienced legislators. The current system of term limits is a joke — a member of the state Assembly can serve only six years, which is barely enough time to learn the job, much less to handle the immense complexity of the state budget. Short-termers are more likely to seek quick fixes than structural reform. It’s one reason the state Legislatures is such a mess.

Prop. 28 won’t solve the problem entirely, but it’s a reasonable step. The measure would allow a legislator to serve a total of 12 years in office — in either the Assembly, the Senate, or a combination. So an Assembly member could serve six terms, a state Senator three terms. No more serving a stint in one house and then jumping to the other, since the term limits are cumulative, which is imperfect: A lot of members of the Assembly have gone on to notable Senate careers, and that shouldn’t be cut off.

Still, 12 years in the Assembly is enough time to become a professional at the job — and that’s a good thing. We don’t seek part-time brain surgeons and inexperienced airline pilots. Running California is complicated, and there’s nothing wrong with having people around who aren’t constantly learning on the job. Besides, these legislators still have to face elections; the voters can impose their own term limits, at any time.

Most of the good-government groups are supporting Prop. 28. Vote yes.

PROPOSITION 29

YES

CIGARETTE TAX FOR CANCER RESEARCH

Seriously: Can you walk into the ballot box and oppose higher taxes on cigarettes to fund cancer research? Of course not. All of the leading medical groups, cancer-research groups, cancer-treatment groups and smoking-cessation groups in the state support Prop. 29, which was written by the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association.

We support it, too.

Yes, it’s a regressive tax — most smokers are in the lower-income brackets. Yes, it’s going to create a huge state fund making grants for research, and it will be hard to administer without some issues. But the barrage of ads opposing this are entirely funded by tobacco companies, which are worried about losing customers, particularly kids. A buck a pack may not dissuade adults who really want to smoke, but it’s enough to price a few more teens out of the market — and that’s only good news.

Don’t believe the big-tobacco hype. Vote yes on 29.

San Francisco ballot measures

PROPOSITION A

YES

GARBAGE CONTRACT

A tough one: Recology’s monopoly control over all aspects of San Francisco’s waste disposal system should have been put out to competitive bid a long time ago. That’s the only way for the city to ensure customers are getting the best possible rates and that the company is paying a fair franchise fee to the city. But the solution before us, Proposition A, is badly flawed public policy.

The measure would amend the 1932 ordinance that gave Recology’s predecessor companies — which were bought up and consolidated into a single behemoth corporation — indefinite control over the city’s $220 million waste stream. Residential rates are set by a Rate Board controlled mostly by the mayor, commercial rates are unregulated, and the company doesn’t even have a contract with the city.

Last year, when Recology won the city’s landfill contract — which was put out to bid as the current contract with Waste Management Inc. and its Altamont landfill was expiring — Recology completed its local monopoly. At the time, Budget Analyst Harvey Rose, Sup. David Campos, and other officials and activists called for updating the ordinance and putting the various contracts out to competitive bid.

That effort was stalled and nearly scuttled, at least in part because of the teams of lobbyists Recology hired to put pressure on City Hall, leading activists Tony Kelley and retired Judge Quentin Kopp to write this measure. They deserve credit for taking on the issue when nobody else would and for forcing everyone in the city to wake up and take notice of a scandalous 70-year-old deal.

We freely admit that the measure has some significant flaws that could hurt the city’s trash collection and recycling efforts. It would split waste collection up into five contracts, an inefficient approach that could put more garbage trucks on the roads. No single company could control all five contracts. Each of those contracts would be for just five years, which makes the complicated bidding process far too frequent, costing city resources and hindering the companies’ ability to make long-term infrastructure investments.

It would require Recology to sell its transfer station, potentially moving the waste-sorting facility to Port property along the Bay. Putting the transfer station in public hands makes sense; moving it to the waterfront might not.

On the scale of corrupt monopolies, Recology isn’t Pacific Gas and Electric Co. It’s a worker-owned company and has been willing to work in partnership with the city to create one of the best recycling and waste diversion programs in the country. For better or worse, Recology controls a well-developed waste management infrastructure that this city relies on, functioning almost like a city department.

Still, it’s unacceptable to have a single outfit, however laudatory, control such a massive part of the city’s infrastructure without a competitive bid, a franchise fee, or so much as a contract. In theory, the company could simply stop collecting trash in some parts of the city, and San Francisco could do nothing about it.

As a matter of public policy, Prop. A could have been better written and certainly could, and should, have been discussed with a much-wider group, including labor. As a matter of real politics, it’s a messy proposal that at least raises the critical question: Should Recology have a no-bid, no contract monopoly? The answer to that is no.

Prop. A will almost certainly go down to defeat; Kopp and Kelly are all alone, have no real campaign or committee and just about everyone else in town opposes it. Our endorsement is a matter of principle, a signal that this longtime garbage deal has to end. If Recology will work with the city to come up with a contract and a bid process, then Prop. A will have done its job. If not, something better will be on the ballot in the future.

For now, vote yes on A.

PROPOSITION B

YES

COIT TOWER POLICY

In theory, city department heads ought to be given fair leeway to allocate resources and run their operations. In practice, San Francisco’s Department of Recreation and Parks has been on a privatization spree, looking for ways to sell or rent public open space and facilities as a way to balance an admittedly tight budget. Prop. B seeks to slow that down a bit, by establishing as city policy the premise that Coit Tower shouldn’t be used as a cash cow to host private parties.

The tower is one of the city’s most important landmarks and a link to its radical history — murals painted during the Depression, under the Works Progress Administration, depict local labor struggles. They’re in a bit of disrepair –but that hasn’t stopped Rec-Park from trying to bring in money by renting out the place for high-end events. In fact, the tower has been closed down to the public in the past year to allow wealthy patrons to host private parties. And the city has more of that in mind.

If the mayor and his department heads were acting in good faith to preserve the city’s public spaces — by raising taxes on big business and wealthy individuals to pay for the commons, instead of raising fees on the rest of us to use what our tax dollars have already paid for — this sort of ballot measure wouldn’t be necessary.

As it is, Prop. B is a policy statement, not an ordinance or Charter amendment. It’s written fairly broadly and won’t prevent the occasional private party at Coit Tower or prevent Rec-Park from managing its budget. Vote yes.

 

SEIU rally draws 1,000 to city hall

-
26
SEIU rally draws 1,000 to city hall

More than 1,000 city employees gathered at City Hall April 18 for a protest that ended in 23 arrests.

The protest comes as the SEIU Local 1021 contract negotiations with the city’s employee relations division are underway. According to Larry Bradshaw, Local 1021 vice president, the city’s proposal may result in pay cuts and health care cost increases for city workers.

“Here’s your negotiations update. The city and county wants you to take another 2 ½ percent pay cut this year and next year. The courts want their court-workers to take a five percent pay cut indefinitely,” Bradshaw, who works as a paramedic, told the crowd.

He also claimed that: “If you have Kaiser, under the city’s proposal you’re going to pay six times more than you’re paying currently. If you have Blue Shield, you’re going to pay twice as much. If you’re on the city plan—I’m not making this up—you’re going to pay one hundred times more than what you’re paying right now.”

Workers at the rally ranged from hall janitors to General Hospital nurses to Department of Emergency Management dispatchers donning shirts reading, “we run 911!”

Workers from the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 also attended to show solidarity.

Sups Avalos, Mar, Kim, Chiu, Campos and Olague offered their support at the rally.

Around 6:30, the group left city hall and marched down Polk St. City workers then stretched caution tape across Market at Van Ness, in front of a Bank of America branch, and 23 sat down on the street. After a police warning, they were arrested for obstructing the sidewalk.

“We’re sitting to protest the greed of the city. The man is getting raises. The district attorney and the city attorney are getting raises. And they want us to take more pay cuts and furloughs,” said Arlette Smith, a protective services social worker, ten minutes before she was arrested.

The union wants to take these pay cuts off the table.

SEIU Local 1021 spokesperson Carlos Rivera also noted, “we’re sitting by Bank of America because banks and corporations don’t pay their fair share.”

The union is calling into question a tax settlement from 2001, in which a court ruled in favor of several corporations that sued the city over a hybrid payroll and gross receipts tax structure. The union characterizes the resulting loss of about $25 million per year in tax revenue as a loophole.

“The payroll tax is only paid by ten percent of San Francisco businesses, yet they’re asking city workers and non profit workers to continue to shoulder these massive budget deficits year after year,” said SEIU spokesperson Anna Bakalis.

Bakalis said that the SEIU is focusing on reinstating a gross receipts tax after researching alternative solutions for the city budget, if the pay cut and health care increases do not go though.

“We want to be able offer some solutions,” she told the Guardian. “We want to help them fix the budget.”

The union plans to return to city hall for further demonstration April 30 “if they have not taken those pay cuts and health care cuts off the table,” according to Bradshaw.

For your consideration: Short takes from SFIFF, week one

-
0
For your consideration: Short takes from SFIFF, week one

The gargantuan San Francisco Film Festival opens this week after a particularly fraught year in which the San Francisco Film Society tragically lost two well-respected executive directors. But never fear! SFIFF is still tops, and we’re here to guide you through it, from throught-provoking experimental flicks to unheralded-as-of-yet crowd-friendly fare. We’ve rustled upmore than a dozen previews of appealing flicks after the jump — and check out our complete coverage, including indepth features and interviews, here.

THU/19

Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot, France, 2012) Opening early on the morning of July 14, 1789, Farewell, My Queen depicts four days at the Palace of Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution, as witnessed by a young woman named Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux) who serves as reader to Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger). Sidonie displays a singular and romantic devotion to the queen, while the latter’s loyalties are split between a heedless amour propre and her grand passion for the Duchess de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen). These domestic matters and other regal whims loom large in the tiny galaxy of the queen’s retinue, so that while elsewhere in the palace, in shadowy, candle-lit corridors, courtiers and their servants mingle to exchange news, rumor, panicky theories, and evacuation plans, in the queen’s quarters the task of embroidering a dahlia for a projected gown at times overshadows the storming of the Bastille and the much larger catastrophe on the horizon. Farewell, My Queen screens as part of the SFIFF’s opening night festivities, which are dedicated to the memory of SF Film Society executive director Graham Leggat. Thu/19, 7pm, Castro. (Lynn Rapoport 

 

FRI/20

Palaces of Pity (Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, Portugal, 2011) Just under an hour, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s Portuguese curiosity is hardly fettered by the limits of time, let alone imagination. Its wayward story focuses on two precocious young female cousins whose closeness goes south when their beloved grandmother dies, leaving them rivals for her estate. Before that happens, however, this fabulist curio hits a deadpan peak in an extended medieval dream sequence that pits punitive Catholic Church against happy sodomites — ah, some things never change. Fri/20, 6pm; Sat/21, 7pm; April 26, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2011) Korean auteur (Woman Is the Future of Man, 2004) Hong Sang-soo’s latest exercise in self-consciousness, this black-and-white, fable-like study of a frustrated filmmaker (Yu Jun-sang), returning home to Seoul to visit an old friend after spending time in the countryside teaching, adds up to a kind of formal palimpsest. Surrounded by sycophants, vindictive former leading men, and women who seem to serve a purely semiotic purpose, he participates in an endless loop of drink, smoke, and conversation in a series of dreamlike scenes that play on the theme of coincidence and endless variation. Hong’s layering of alternate scenarios at times feels like a bit of a gimmick, but the way he infuses specific urban spaces with forlorn significance in mostly static shots is affecting — even if the film’s ultimate narrative slightness has the cut-and-paste haphazardness of fridge poetry magnets. Fri/20, 7:15pm; Mon/23, 9:30pm, Kabuki. April 25, 9pm, PFA. (Michelle Devereaux)

Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece/France, 2011) Yorgos Lanthimos is well on his way to a reputation for sick yet oddly charming high-concept spectacles. Here, a group calling themselves Alps offers substitution services for the recently bereaved — that’s right, they’ll play your dead loved one to fill that hole in your life. Pitch-black comic moments abound, and the sensibility that made 2009’s Dogtooth so thrilling is distinctly present here, if not quite as fresh. Beyond the absurd logline, the plot is rather more conventional: things get out of hand when Alps member Anna (Aggeliki Papoulia, the eldest daughter from Dogtooth) gets too invested in one of her assignments, and the power structure of Alps turns on her. If Alps is not exactly a revelation, it’s still a promising entry in a quickly blossoming auteur’s body of work. Fri/20, 9pm, FSC. Sat/21, 2:30pm; Tue/24, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon, U.S., 2012) Biggie Smalls’ track is just a smart starting point for this streetwise, hilarious debut feature by Adam Leon. Young graf artists Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are hustling hard to get paid and fund a valiant effort to tag the Mets’ Home Run Apple to show up rival gang-bangers. The problem lies in raising the exorbitant fee their source demands, either by hook (selling pot to seductive, rich white girls) or crook (offloading cell phone contraband). The absurdity of the pair’s situation isn’t lost on anyone, especially Leon. But their passion to rise above (sorta) and yearning for expression gives the tale an emotional heft. Arriving with much post-SXSW buzz, Gimme the Loot stays with you long after the taggers have moved onto fresh walls. Fri/20, 9:15pm, Kabuki. Sat/21, 9:30pm, FSC. Tue/24, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

 

SAT/21

Choked (Kim Joong-hyun, South Korea, 2011) Baby, it’s cold outside: urban Seoul is the site of this debut feature by Kim Joong-hyun, but those familiar with the dog-eat-dog realities of getting ahead in the modern world, in any country, will recognize this unrelenting indictment of capitalism. In the de-centered middle of a financial mess left behind by his AWOL mom, the striving, good-looking Youn-ho (Um Tae-goo) holds down an unsavory job, evicting tenants for developers, to raise funds to support his materialistic fiancée. He’s under assault from his mother’s creditors, including her desperate divorcee friend who peddles black-market doodads. Moments of grace — and instances of human connection — are few and far between in this scorched emotional landscape of so-called bad mothers, where unselfish tenderness is scarce and money speaks volumes, and Kim’s smart, humanistic perspective won’t let you tear your eyes away. Sat/21, 1:30pm; April 28, 6pm; May 1, 9pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Dreileben — Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold, Germany, 2011) Originally made for German TV, the Dreileben trio is ideally viewed in order, one right after the other (SFIFF offers that option on two different days). It’s worth blocking off time to see all three, for maximum enjoyment of this tense, offbeat crime series; made by different directors, the films — which take place in a small town surrounded by fairy-tale forests containing monsters both real and imagined — link together in unexpected ways. The first entry, Beats Being Dead, focuses on nursing student Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), whose carelessness allows a convicted murderer to escape, and whose recklessness allows him to romance stormy hotel maid Ana (Luna Mijovic), while still pining for his rich, princessy ex (Vijessna Ferkic). Seldom has young love been portrayed so realistically — or set amid such an atmosphere of bucolic foreboding. Sat/21, 1:30pm; Tue/24, 9:45pm; April 29, 2:45, Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)

Bitter Seeds (Micha X. Peled, U.S., 2011) Just what we all needed: more incontrovertible evidence of the bald-faced evil of Monsanto. This documentary on destitute Indian cotton farmers follows an 18-year-old girl named Manjusha, a budding journalist who investigates the vast numbers of farmer suicides since the introduction (and market stranglehold) of “BT” cotton — which uses the corporation’s proprietary GMO technology — in the region of Vidarbha. Before BT took over in 2004, these cotton farmers relied on cheap heritage seed fertilized only by cow dung, but the largely illiterate population fell prey to Monsanto’s marketing blitz and false claims, purchasing biotech seed that resulted in pesticide reliance, failing crops, and spiraling debt. It’s a truly heartbreaking and infuriating story, but much of the action feels stagey and false. Should Indian formality be blamed? Considering the same fate befell Peled’s 2005 documentary China Blue, probably not. Still, eff Monsanto. Sat/21, 3:45pm, FSC. Tues/24, 8:50pm, PFA. April 26, 6:15pm, Kabuki. (Devereaux)

The Waiting Room (Peter Nicks, U.S., 2011) Twenty-four hours in the uneasy limbo of an ER waiting room sounds like a grueling, maddening experience, and that’s certainly a theme in this day-in-the-life film. But local documentarian Peter Nicks has crafted an absorbing portrait of emergency public health care, as experienced by patients and their families at Oakland’s Highland Hospital and as practiced by the staff there. Other themes: no insurance, no primary care physician, and an emergency room being used as a medical facility of first, last, and only resort. Nicks has found a rich array of subjects to tell this complicated story: An anxious, unemployed father sits at his little girl’s bedside. Staffers stare at a computer screen, tracking a flood of admissions and the scarce commodity of available beds. A doctor contemplates the ethics of discharging a homeless addict for the sake of freeing up one of them. And a humorous, ultra-competent triage nurse fields an endless queue of arrivals with humanity and steady nerves. Sat/21, 3:50pm, PFA. April 30, 1pm; May 1, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Dreileben — Don’t Follow Me Around (Dominik Graf, Germany, 2011) The second Dreileben film offers a shift in tone and style; it’s more of a procedural (but only sorta), and is the only trilogy entry shot on 16mm. Police psychologist Jo (Jeanette Hain) — her full name, Johanna, mirrors that of the first film’s Johannes — is summoned to Dreileben, ostensibly to help local cops track the murderous escapee (and, it would seem, taste the local cuisine, what with the endless dining scenes). But just when you start anticipating Jo slamming the cuffs on the murderer, you realize this story’s really about Jo’s relationship with estranged BFF Vera (Susanne Wolff), who invites Jo to stay at her crumbling country house while working on the case. When the women realize they unwittingly dated the same man years ago, old resentments bubble quickly to the surface. Plus: the pursuit of the killer, with the help of a chainsaw artist. Sat/21, 4pm; April 25, 6:15pm; April 29, 5pm, Kabuki. (Eddy)

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (Matthew Akers, U.S., 2011) Matthew Akers’ sleek and telling doc explores the career and motivations of the legendary Serbian-born, New York-based performance artist on the occasion of 2010’s major retrospective and new work at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Abramović, self-styled the “grandmother of performance art” at an eye-catching 63, steels herself with rare energy — and a determination to gain equal status for performance in the world of fine art — for an incredibly demanding new piece, The Artist Is Present, a quasi-mystical encounter between herself and individual museum patrons that takes the form of a three-month marathon of silent one-on-one gazing. Meanwhile, 30 young artists re-perform pieces from her influential career. Akers gains intimate access throughout, including Abramović’s touching reunion with longtime love and artistic collaborator Ulay, while providing a steady pulse of suspense as the half-grueling, half-ecstatic performance gets underway. A natural charmer, Abramović’s charismatic presence at MoMA is no act but rather a focused state in which audiences are drawn into — and in turn shape — powerful rhythms of consciousness and desire. Sat/21, 4:15pm; April 28, 3:30pm, Kabuki. April 29, 5:40pm, PFA. (Robert Avila)

Dreileben — One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhäusler, Germany, 2011) In part three, Molesch (Stefan Kurt), the muddy man we’ve seen skulking around the edges of the first two films, finally comes into focus. Early on, we learn his murder conviction was based on circumstantial evidence — a surveillance camera marred by “one minute of darkness” at a crucial moment. As veteran detective Kirchberg (Marcus Kreil), the Tommy Lee Jones to Molesch’s Harrison Ford, pursues his prey (while reconsidering the man’s guilt), the fugitive hides out in the woods, playing childlike alphabet games and absconding with lunches packed by passing hikers. But we’ve been waiting for the dark twist since part one’s cliffhanger — resolved here, though the events do not neatly align with what’s come before. The only conclusion: in Dreileben, truth is in the eye of the beholder. Sat/21, 6:30pm; April 26, 9:45pm; April 29, 7:15pm, Kabuki. (Eddy) 

Bernie (Richard Linklater, U.S., 2011) Jack Black plays the titular new assistant funeral director liked by everybody in small-town Carthage, Tex. He works especially hard to ingratiate himself with shrewish local widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), but there are benefits — estranged from her own family, she not only accepts him as a friend (then companion, then servant, then as virtual “property”), but makes him her sole heir. Richard Linklater’s latest is based on a true-crime story, although in execution it’s as much a cheerful social satire as I Love You Philip Morris and The Informant! (both 2009), two other recent fact-based movies about likable felons. Black gets to sing (his character being a musical theater queen, among other things), while Linklater gets to affectionately mock a very different stratum of Lone Star State culture from the one he started out with in 1991’s Slacker. There’s a rich gallery of supporting characters, most played by little-known local actors or actual townspeople, with Matthew McConaughey’s vainglorious county prosecutor one delectable exception. Bernie is its director’s best in some time, not to mention a whole lot of fun. Sat/21, 9:30pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

SUN/22

Will (Ellen Perry, England/France/Turkey, 2011) A far cry from director Ellen Perry’s 2005 political doc The Fall of Fujimori, this sweet-twee tale follows the adventures of a newly orphaned 11-year-old (Perry Eggleton) who slips away from his nun-run boarding school to attend a Very Important Soccer Game. Improbably kind strangers — including a taciturn Serb (Kristian Kiehling) with a troubled past — help guide Will on his journey. Tears are shed, life lessons are learned, etc. The one thing saving Will from drowning in its own sap is its enthusiastic, endearing embrace of European football culture; the game that Will (a diehard Liverpool supporter) is hellbent on attending is the 2005 Champions League Final. For LFC fans smarting over the current season, Will is a must-see: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” soars, and Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, and “King Kenny” Dalglish make cameos. Sun/22, 11:30am; May 1, 6pm, Kabuki. (Eddy)

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, U.S., 2011) Terence Nance’s first feature might remind you of Barry Jenkins’ 2008 Medicine for Melancholy, in that it’s an ambivalent love story between two young African Americans that owes more the restive, intellectually curious, meta-cinema feel of the Nouvelle Vague than more contemporary U.S. cinema. The big differences are that Nance’s vision is both explicitly autobiographical and largely animated. He charts and muses upon an on-off relationship in stream-of-consciousness terms that encompass everything from the summary of a Louise Erdrich novel to an earlier-film-within-the-film (and a Q&A session that occurred after its screening). This kind of structureless navel-gazing can get tired, and indeed Beauty might ideally be experienced in sections rather than over one long haul. But still, just about any chosen few minutes are as clever and inventive as could be. Sun/22, 8:30pm, PFA. April 30, 9pm; May 1, 12:15pm; May 2, 4pm, Kabuki. (Harvey) 

 

MON/23

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan, U.S., 2012) When the carelessness of self-absorbed surgeon Joseph (Kevin Kline) results in the stray dog adopted by Beth (Diane Keaton) going missing during a forest walk, that event somehow brings all the fissures in their long marriage to a crisis point. Big Chill (1983) director Lawrence Kasdan’s first feature in a decade hews back to the more intimate, character-based focus of his best films. But this dramedy is too often shrilly pitched and overly glossy (it seems to take place in a Utah vacation-themed L.L. Bean catalog), with numerous talented actors — including Richard Jenkins, Dianne Wiest, Mark Duplass, Elisabeth Moss, and Sam Shepard — playing superficially etched characters that merely add to the clutter. Most cringe-inducing among them is Ayelet Zurer’s Carmen, a woman of Roma extraction who apparently has a crystal ball in her psychic head and actually speaks lines like “My people have a saying….” Mon/23, 6:45pm; Tue/24, noon, Kabuki. (Harvey)

TUE/24

Target (Alexander Zeldovich, Russia/German, 2011) The year is 2020, and a group of disaffected upper-class Russians make a pilgrimage to an energy accumulator known as the Target, which halts aging, among other effects. The setting is an unsettlingly believable near-future culture based on standardized “ratings” for each member of society and an escalated fixation on age and appearance. What follows the transmutation of these five characters is an operatic mess of love, adultery, debauchery, and violence. It’s a weird admixture of philosophical science fiction, social satire, and intense character drama. In some ways, its closest relative is the bloated Wim Wenders dystopia Until the End of the World (1991), but its absurdities are more calculated and its acting more grounded. Complete with nods to Anna Karenina and Top Chef, it’s a consuming entertainment with consistently surprising creative choices. Tue/24, 2:30pm; April 27, 10pm, Kabuki. (Stander)

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 19-May 3; most shows $13. Venues: Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; and Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post, SF. More info at www.sffs.org.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
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.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 19-May 3; most shows $13. Venues: Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; and Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post, SF. For additional info, visit www.sffs.org.

OPENING

*Attenberg Isolated in a seaside Greek hamlet, naive about the ways of the world, and committed to watching her brilliant, terminally ill father slowly ebb away, Marina (Ariane Labed) might be living in a kind of hell from the viewpoint of many of her 20-something peers. But as imagined by writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari, Marina’s circumscribed life instead teems with small, fascinating moments and weird, awkward instances of intimacy — the kind that add up to a compelling portrait of a coming of age and a kind of arrival of wisdom. About to face a lonely future with the imminent passing of architect dad Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), Marina works as a driver, tooling around town to the chilled anguish of Suicide, attempting to learn about the facts of life from sexually experienced chum Bella (Evangelia Randou, a ringer for musician Eleanor Friedberger), and sparring playfully with her father. “We built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens and thought we were making a revolution,” he says in one scene, looking out at the water. “I like it. It’s soothing, all this uniformity,” Marina replies. “That’s because deep down you’re an optimistic bourgeois modernist.” “Bonjour, bourgeois.” A ripple is sent through Marina’s insular existence with the arrival of an engineer (Yorgos Lanthimos) — a real candidate for an intimate social experiment. Aligning herself firmly with her protagonist, Tsangari is gifted with a unique voice and has a remarkable eye for a resonant, poetic image. She channels both into a quiet film reminiscent of indies an age away à la Stranger Than Paradise (1984), finding a vein of humanistic hope during end times. (1:35) Presidio. (Chun)

Chimpanzee Just in time for Earth Day, Tim Allen narrates this kid-friendly, Jane Goodall-approved nature doc. (2:00) Shattuck.

4:44 Last Day on Earth Abel Ferrara’s latest imagines what the end of the world might be like for a volatile Lower East Side couple — he’s an ex-junkie (Ferrara favorite Willem Dafoe), she’s a young painter (Shanyn Leigh, Ferrara’s real-life companion). The film’s title refers to the predicted instant that an environmental catastrophe will completely dissolve the ozone layer, but 4:44 is mostly set indoors, specifically within the headspace of Dafoe’s character. It’s a gritty film that veers between self-indulgence and stuff that honestly seems pretty practical (sure, there’s a lot of Skyping, but if the world were ending, wouldn’t you?); as far as inward-looking disaster movies go, anyone planning an apocalypse film festival could double-bill 4:44 nicely with 2011’s Melancholia. (1:25) Balboa. (Eddy)

Letters From the Big Man Don’t fear the yeti. Filmmaker Christopher Munch (1991’s The Hours and Times) gets back to nature — and a more benevolent look at the sasquatch — with the engrossing Letters From the Big Man. Sarah (Lily Rabe, Jill Clayburgh’s daughter, perhaps best known for her ghostly American Horror Story flapper) is a naturalist and artist determined to get off trail, immerse herself in her postfire wilderness studies in southwestern Oregon, and leave the hassles and heartbreak of the human world behind. She’s far from alone, however, as she senses she’s being tailed — even after she confronts another solo hiker, Sean (Jason Butler Harner), who seems to share her deep love and knowledge of the wild. What emerges — as Sarah lives off the grid, sketches soulful-eyed Bigfoots, and powers her laptop with her bike — is a love story that might bear a remote resemblance to Beauty and the Beast if Munch weren’t so completely straight-faced in his belief in the big guys. The question, the mystery, isn’t whether or not sasquatch exist, according to the filmmaker, who paces his tale as if it were as big and encompassing as an ancient forest — rather, whether we can hold onto a belief in nature and its unknowables and coexist. (1:44) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

The Lucky One Iraq War veteran Logan (Zac Efron) beats PTSD by walking with his German shepherd from Colorado to the Louisiana bayou, in search of a golden-haired angel in cutoff blue jean short shorts (Taylor Schilling). His stated (in soporific voice-over) aim is to meet and thank the angel, who he believes repeatedly saved his life in the combat zone after he plucked her photograph from the rubble of a bombed-out building. The snapshot offers little in the way of biographical information, but luckily, there are only 300 million people in the United States, and he manages to find her after walking around for a bit. The angel, or Beth, as her friends call her, runs a dog kennel with her grandmother (Blythe Danner) while raising her noxiously Hollywood-precocious eight-year-old son (Riley Thomas Stewart) and fending off the regressive advances of her semi-villainous ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson). Logan’s task seems simple enough, and he’s certainly walked a fair distance to complete it, but rather than expressing his gratitude, he becomes tongue-tied in the face of Beth’s backlit blondness and instead fills out a job application and proceeds to soulfully but manfully burrow his way into her affections and short shorts. Being an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, The Lucky One requires some forceful yanking on the heartstrings, but director Scott Hicks (1999’s Snow Falling on Cedars, 1996’s Shine) is hobbled in this task by, among other things, Efron’s wooden, uninvolved delivery of queasy speeches about traveling through darkness to find the light and how many times a day a given woman should be kissed. (1:41) Marina, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Marley Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald (1999’s One Day in September; he also directed Best Actor Forest Whitaker in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland) takes on the iconic Bob Marley, using extensive interviews — both contemporary (with Marley friends and family) and archival (with the musician himself) — and performance and off-the-cuff footage. The end result is a compelling (even if you’re not a fan) portrait of a man who became a global sensation despite being born into extreme poverty, and making music in a style that most people had never heard outside of Jamaica. The film dips into Marley’s Rastafari beliefs (no shocker this movie is being released on 4/20), his personal life (11 children from seven different mothers), his impact on Jamaica’s volatile politics, his struggles with racism, and, most importantly, his remarkable career — achieved via a combination of talent and boldness, and cut short by his untimely death at age 36. (2:25) California, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

*My Way South Korean director Kang Je-gyu (2004 Korean War epic Taegukgi) returns to the battlefield for another bombastic action flick with a very complicated bro-down at its center. This time, it’s World War II, and the head-butting protagonists are not actually brothers, but lifelong frenemies: Japanese Tatsuo (mega-idol Joe Odagiri) and South Korean Joon-sik (Taegukgi star Jang Dong-gun). They meet in occupied South Korea, where class and country lines amp up their frequent confrontations as competitive long-distance runners. When WW2 breaks out, Joon-sik is forced to join the Japanese army, with guess who ordering him around; during My Way‘s meaty war-is-hell section, the men’s relationship endures a Soviet labor camp, knife (and fist) fights, blizzards, gunshot wounds, deafness, countless explosions (including lots of exploding bodies), sprints on the beach, bellowing arguments, runaway tanks, grenades, Nazis, D-Day, and moments of heroism, cowardice, insanity, weepy emotion, and dumb luck. Somehow, Kang keeps the pace between “frenetic” and “superfly TNT” for a solid two hours — the man may not care much for subtlety, but My Way is nothing if not insanely entertaining. (1:59) SF Center. (Eddy)

*Surviving Progress The very definition of a movie that most needs to be seen by the people least likely to see it — i.e. most folk the right of the political dial — this excellent documentary manages to interweave virtually all the leading planet threatening woes of our era in a succinct and entertaining fashion. Its thesis is author Ronald Wright’s notion that “We’re at the end of a failed experiment.” It’s been around a while, so you’ve doubtless heard of it: the Industrial Revolution. That shift from small-scale, self-sustaining agrarian communities to much larger ones dependent on mass production and import-export created pockets of enormous First World wealth and comfort. But the populations that benefitted used up resources wildly out of proportion to their number; now countries like China and India want their share of the industrialized pie, just as we’ve realized those resources might actually run out. Cue summaries of the harm global warming, overpopulation, consumption, soil depletion, “market fundamentalism,” etc. have done and will do, as duly noted here by a roster of A-list experts including Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall. (The latter vividly contextualizes just how out of whack humanity has gone by opining that ours is the only species capable of terminating its future by destroying its own habitat.) While this may sound like a bitter pill to swallow, not to mention one you’ve swallowed many times before, Surviving Progress colorfully weaves together a vast assortment of audiovisual materials as well as information, to highly watchable results. Do the earth a favor: see this movie, and drag a skeptic you know along. (1:26) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Think Like a Man Based on Steve Harvey’s best-seller Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, this ensemble rom-com stars Romany Malco, Gabrielle Union, Kevin Hart, and Wendy Williams. (2:02) Shattuck.

ONGOING

American Reunion Care for yet another helping of all-American horn dogs? The original American Pie (1999) was a sweet-tempered, albeit ante-upping tribute to ’80s teen sex comedies, so the latest in the franchise, the older, somewhat wiser American Reunion, is obliged to squeeze a dab more of the ole life force outta the class of ’99, in honor of their, em, 13th high school reunion. These days Jim (Jason Biggs) is attempting to fluff up a flagging postbaby sex life with wife Michelle (Alyson Hannigan). Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) yearns to get in touch with his buried bad boy. Oz (Chris Klein) has become a sportscaster-reality competition star and is seemingly lost without old girlfriend Heather (Mena Suvari). Stifler (Seann William Scott) is as piggishly incorrigible as ever—even as a low-hanging investment flunky, while scarred, adventuring biker Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) seems to have become “the most interesting man in the world.” How much trouble can the gang get into? About as much of a mess as the Hangover guys, which one can’t stop thinking about when Jim wakes up on the kitchen floor with tile burns and zero pants. Half the cast—which includes Tara Reid, John “MILF!” Cho, Natasha Lyonne, and Shannon Elizabeth — seems to have stirred themselves from their own personal career hangovers, interludes of insanity, and plastic surgery disasters (with a few, like Cho and Thomas, firmly moving on), and others such as parental figures Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge continuing to show the kids how it’s done. Still, the farcical American franchise’s essentially benign, healthy attitude toward good, dirty fun reads as slightly refreshing after chaste teen fare like the Twilight and High School Musical flicks. Even with the obligatory moment of full-frontal penis smooshing. (1:53) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Bad Fever Dustin Guy Defa’s tiny, odd character study centers on one Eddie Cooperschmidt (Kentucker Audley, a director himself), who looks like Mr. February 1992 on a calendar of sensitive grunge band hunks, but acts more like Homer Simpson — the Nathanael West version, not Matt Groening’s. He still lives with mom (unsympathetically played by Annette Wright), doesn’t or can’t hold a job, has no friends, fumbles through an oddly formal vocabulary, and carries himself like a 13-year-old who’s just had all his growth spurts in one go. In other words, he’s the sort of character whose precise status — just socially inept, or developmentally disabled, or both? — is a mystery the film doesn’t bother clarifying. Nor do we find out what the story is behind Irene (Eleonore Hendricks), his hard-bitten antithesis, who seems to be staying in an empty school classroom as some sort of weird art experiment rather than because she’s “homeless,” and who manipulates the hapless Eddie into videotaped situations that are perverse but stop short of pornography. (Or rather he — almost certainly a virgin — stops short there.) As if more goofy pathos were needed here, Eddie’s dream is to be a stand-up comedian, a career he is about as well equipped for as brain surgeon. When Eddie plays his big first (and probably last) comedy gig, the onscreen audience appears to be wondering the same thing you might: is this just sad, or some kind of Andy Kaufman-type performance piece? Painstakingly low-key and realistic in execution, Bad Fever‘s success will depend on whether you can swallow it conceptually — these characters are surrounded by a real world, but they can seem unreal themselves. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. (1:12) Roxie. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Blue Like Jazz Tap or bottled water, rainy Portland, Ore. or dry Texas — how does a sincere, young Bible-thumping Baptist reconcile the two — a fish out of water nonetheless determined to swim upstream and make his way to adulthood. Based on the Donald Miller memoir-of-sorts, Blue Like Jazz may look like a Nicholas Sparks romantic opus from afar, but in the care of director-cowriter Steve Taylor, this tale of a young man coming to terms with the wider, wilder world apart from the strict confines of lock-in abstinence groups snatches a bit of the grace John Coltrane tapped in A Love Supreme. The earnest Donald (True Blood‘s Marshall Allman) is all set to go to his nearby Bible Belt Christian university until his bohemian jazz-loving dad pulls favors and enrolls him at free-form Reed College. Donald will have to closet his holy-roller background if, as his new lesbian pal (Tania Raymonde) cautions, he “plans on ever making friends or sharing a bowl or seeing human vagina without a credit card.” Donald finds his way back to meaning and spirit — and the fun is getting there, as he joins a civil-disobedience-club-for-credit (Malaysian cocktail tennis was canceled) and falls for passionate activist Penny (Claire Holt). Allman, who also co-executive produced, emerges as a thoughtful actor who can carry a potentially maudlin and ultimately lovable collegiate coming-of-age story on his own. (1:47) 1000 Van Ness, Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Bully Anyone who’s ever been a kid on the wrong side of a bully — or was sensitive and observant enough not to avert his or her eyes — will be puzzling over the MPAA’s R rating of this doc, for profanity. It’s absurd when the gory violence on network and basic cable TV stops just short of cutting characters’ faces off, as one blurred-out bus bully threatens to do to the sweet, hapless Alex, dubbed “Fish Face” by the kids who ostracize him and make his life hell on the bus. It’s a jungle out there, as we all know — but it’s that real, visceral footage of the verbal (and physical) abuse bullied children deal with daily that brings it all home. Filmmaker Lee Hirsch goes above and beyond in trying to capture all dimensions of his subject: the terrorized bullied, the ineffectual school administrators, the desperate parents. There’s Kelby, the gay girl who was forced off her beloved basketball team after she came out, and Ja’Maya, who took drastic measures to fend off her tormenters — as well as the specters of those who turned to suicide as a way out. Hirsch is clearly more of an activist than a fly on the wall: he steps in at one point to help and obviously makes an uplifting effort to focus on what we can do to battle bullying. Nevertheless, at the risk of coming off like the Iowa assistant principal who’s catching criticism for telling one victim that he was just as bad as the bully that he refused to shake hands with, one feels compelled to note one prominent component that’s missing here: the bullies themselves, their stories, and the reasons why they’re so cruel — admittedly a daunting, possibly libelous task. (1:35) Metreon, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Cabin in the Woods If the name “Joss Whedon” doesn’t provide all the reason you need to bum-rush The Cabin in the Woods (Whedon produced and co-wrote, with director and frequent collaborator Drew Goddard), well, there’s not much more that can be revealed without ruining the entire movie. In a very, very small nutshell, it’s about a group of college kids (including Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) whose weekend jaunt to a rural cabin goes horribly awry, as such weekend jaunts tend to do in horror movies (the Texas Chainsaw and Evil Dead movies are heavily referenced). But this is no ordinary nightmare — its peculiarities are cleverly, carefully revealed, and the movie’s inside-out takedown of scary movies produces some very unexpected (and delightfully blood-gushing) twists and turns. Plus: the always-awesome Richard Jenkins, and in-jokes galore for genre fans. (1:35) California, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Eddy)

*Casa de mi Padre Will Ferrell’s latest challenge in a long line of actorly exercises and comic gestures — from his long list of comedies probing the last gasps of American masculinity to serious forays like Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Everything Must Go (2010) — is almost entirely Spanish-language telenovela-burrito Western spoof Casa de mi Padre. Here Ferrell tackles an almost entirely Spanish script (with only meager, long-ago high school and college language courses under his belt) alongside Mexican natives Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and telenovela veteran Genesis Rodriguez. This clever, intriguing, occasionally very funny, yet not altogether successful endeavor, directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, sprang from Ferrell’s noggin. Ferrell is nice guy Armando, content to stay at home at the ranch, hang with his buddies, and be dismissed by his father (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) as a dolt. The arrival of his sleazy bro Raul (Luna) and Raul’s fiancée Sonia (Rodriguez) change everything, bringing killer narco Onza (Bernal) into the family’s life and sparking some hilariously klutzy entanglements between Armando and Sonia. All of this leads to almost zero improvisation on Ferrell’s part and plenty of meta, Machete-like spoofs on low-budget fare, from Sergio Leone to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Casa punctures padre-informed transmissions of Latin machismo, but it equally ridicules the idea of a gringo actor riding in and superimposing himself, badly or otherwise, over another country’s culture. (1:25) Four Star. (Chun)

*Damsels in Distress Whit Stillman lives! The eternally preppy writer-director (1990’s Metropolitan; 1994’s Barcelona; 1998’s The Last Days of Disco), whose dialogue-laden scripts have earned him the not-inaccurate descriptor of “the WASP Woody Allen,” emerges with this popped-collar take on girl-clique movies like Mean Girls (2004), Clueless (1995), and even Heathers (1988). At East Coast liberal-arts college Seven Oaks (“the last of the Select Seven to go co-ed”), frat guys are so dumb they don’t know the names of all the colors; the school newspaper is called the Daily Complainer; and a group of girls, lead by know-it-all Violet (Greta Gerwig), are determined to lift student morale using unconventional methods (tap dancing is one of them). After she’s scooped into this strange orbit, transfer student (Analeigh Tipton) can’t quite believe Violet and her friends are for real. They’re not, of course — they’re carefully crafted Stillman creations, which renders this very funny take on college life a completely unique experience. Did I mention the musical numbers? (1:38) SF Center. (Eddy)

*The Deep Blue Sea Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, filmmaker Terence Davies, much like his heroine, chooses a mutable, fluid sensuality, turning his source material, Terence Rattigan’s acclaimed mid-century play, into a melodrama that catches you in its tide and refuses to let go. At the opening of this sumptuous portrait of a privileged English woman who gives up everything for love, Hester (Rachel Weisz) goes through the methodical motions of ending it all: she writes a suicide note, carefully stuffs towels beneath the door, takes a dozen pills, turns on the gas, and lies down to wait for death to overtake her. Via memories drifting through her fading consciousness, Davies lets us in on scattered, salient details in her back story: her severely damped-down, staid marriage to a high court judge, Sir William (Simon Russel Beale), her attraction and erotic awakening in the hands of charming former RF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), her separation, and her ultimate discovery that her love can never be matched, as she hazards class inequities and ironclad gender roles. “This is a tragedy,” Sir William says, at one point. But, as Hester, a model of integrity, corrects him, “Tragedy is too big a word. Sad, perhaps.” Similarly, Sea is a beautiful downer, but Davies never loses sight of a larger post-war picture, even while he pauses for his archetypal interludes of song, near-still images, and luxuriously slow tracking shots. With cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, he does a remarkable job of washing post-war London with spots of golden light and creating claustrophobic interiors — creating an emotionally resonant space reminiscent of the work of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle. At the center, providing the necessary gravitas (much like Julianne Moore in 2002’s Far From Heaven), is Weisz, giving the viewer a reason to believe in this small but reverberant story, and offering yet another reason for attention during the next awards season. (1:38) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Detention The latest from A-list music video director turned B-movie helmer Joseph Kahn (2004’s Torque) realllllly wants to be a cult classic. Not sure that’s a certainty, but midnight would definitely be the appropriate hour to view this teen-slasher parody that also enfolds body-swapping, time travel, out-of-control parties, stuffed bears, accidental YouTube porn, unrequited love, the dreaded Dane Cook, and cinema’s most sledgehammer-heavy 1990s nostalgia to date — despite the fact that Detention‘s central homage is to The Breakfast Club, which came out in 1985. Nominally grounding the film’s garish look, broad humor, and breakneck pace are the charms of young leads Shanley Caswell (as klutzy tomboy Riley) and Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson (as a Road House-worshiping skater), who displays questionable if admirable show biz aspirations by serving as one of Detention‘s executive producers. He was, after all, born in 1992, which in Detention‘s estimation was “like, the coolest year ever!” (1:30) Metreon. (Eddy)

Footnote (1:45) Albany, Clay.

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) SF Center. (Rapoport)

*House of Pleasures Set in a fin de siècle French brothel, Bertrand Bonello’s lushly rendered drama is challenging and frequently unpleasant. Bonello sees the beauty and allure of his subjects, the many miserable women of this maison close, but rarely sinks to sympathy for their selfish and sometimes sadistic clients. Bound as they are by their debts to their Madame, the prostitutes are essentially slaves, held to strict and humiliating standards. All they have is each other, and the movie’s few emotional bright spots come from this connection. The filmmaking is wily and nouvelle vague-ish, featuring anachronistic music and inventive split-screen sequences. Additionally, there is a spidery complexity to the film’s chronology, wherein certain scenes repeat to reveal new contexts. This unstuck sense of newness is perhaps didactic — this could and does happen now as well as then — but it also serves to make an already compelling ensemble piece even richer and more engaging. (2:02) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sam Stander)

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the annual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Hunter Shot and set during Iran’s contentious 2009 Presidential campaign, The Hunter starts as a Kafka-esque portrait of quiet desperation in a cold, empty Tehran, then turns into a sort of existential thriller. The precise message may be ambiguous, but it’s no surprise this two-year-old feature has so far played nearly everywhere but Iran itself. Ali (filmmaker Rafi Pitts) is released from prison after some years, his precise crime never revealed. Told that with his record he can’t expect to get a day shift on his job as security guard at an automotive plant, he keeps hours at odds with his working wife Sara (Mitra Haijar) and six-year-old daughter Saba (Saba Yaghoobi). Still, they try to spend as much time together as possible, until one day Ali returns to find them uncharacteristically gone all day. After getting the bureaucratic runaround he’s finally informed by police that something tragic has occurred; one loved one is dead, the other missing. When his thin remaining hope is dashed, with police notably useless in preventing that grim additional news, Ali snaps — think Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets. He’s soon in custody, albeit in that of two bickering officers who get them all lost in the countryside. Pitts, a long-ago child performer cast here only when the actor originally hired had to be replaced, makes Ali seem pinched from the inside out, as if in permanent recoil from past and anticipated abuse. This thin, hunched frame, vulnerable big ears, and hooded eyes — the goofily oversized cap he wears at work seems a deliberate affront — seems so fixed an expression of unhappiness that when he flashes a great smile, for a moment you might think it must be someone else. He’s an everyman who only grows more shrunken once the film physically opens up into a natural world no less hostile for being beautiful. (1:32) Roxie. (Harvey)

*The Island President The titular figure is Mohamed Nasheed, recently ousted (by allies of the decades long dictator he’d replaced) chief executive of the Republic of Maldives — a nation of 26 small islands in the Indian Ocean. Jon Shenk’s engaging documentary chronicles his efforts up to and through the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit to gather greater international commitment to curbing greenhouse gas emissions. This is hardly do-gooderism, a bid for eco-tourism, or politics as usual: scarcely above sea level, with nary a hill, the Maldives will simply cease to exist soon if waters continue to rise at global warming’s current pace. (“It won’t be any good to have a democracy if we don’t have a country,” he half-jokes at one point.) Nasheed is tireless, unjaded, delightful, and willing to do anything, at one point hosting “the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting” (with oxygen tanks, natch) as a publicity stunt. A cash-strapped nation despite its surfeit of wealthy vacationers, it’s spending money that could go to education and health services on the pathetic stalling device of sandwalls instead. But do bigger powers — notably China, India and the U.S. — care enough about this bit-part player on the world stage to change their energy-use and economic habits accordingly? (A hint: If you’ve been mulling a Maldivian holiday, take it now.) Somewhat incongruous, but an additional sales point nonetheless: practically all the film’s incidental music consists of pre-existing tracks by Radiohead. (1:51) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Jeff, Who Lives at Home The failure-to-launch concept will always thrive whenever and wherever economies flail, kids crumble beneath family trauma, and the seduction of moving back home to live for free with the parental units overcomes the draw of adulthood and individuation. Nevertheless brotherly writing and directing team Jay and Mark Duplass infuse a fresh, generous-minded sweetness in this familiar narrative arc, mainly by empathetically following those surrounding, and maybe enabling, the stay-at-home. Spurred by a deep appreciation of Signs (2002) and plentiful bong hits, Jeff (Jason Segel) decides to go with the signals that the universe throws at him: a mysterious phone call for a Kevin leads him to stalk a kid wearing a jersey with that name and jump a candy delivery truck. This despite the frantic urging of his mother (Susan Sarandon), who has set the bar low and simply wants Jeff to repair a shutter for her birthday, and the bad influence of brother Pat (Ed Helms), a striving jerk who compensates for his insecurities by buying a Porsche and taking business meetings at Hooters. We never quite find out what triggered Jeff’s dormancy and Pat’s prickishness — two opposing responses to some unspecified psychic wound — yet by Jeff, Who Lives at Home‘s close, it doesn’t really matter. The Duplass brothers convince you to go along for the ride, much like Jeff’s blessed fool, and accept the ultimately feel-good, humanist message of this kind-hearted take on human failings. (1:22) SF Center. (Chun)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

*The Kid with a Bike Slippery as an eel, Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the bane of authorities as he tries to run away at any opportunity from school and a youth home — being convinced that the whole adult world is conspiring to keep his father away from him. During one such chase he literally runs into hair-salon proprietor Samantha (Cécile De France), who proves willing to host him on weekends away from his public facility, and is a patient, steadying influence despite his still somewhat exasperating behavior. It’s she who orchestrates a meeting with his dad (Jerémié Renier, who played the child in the Dardennes’ 1996 breakthrough La Promesse), so Cyril can confront the hard fact that his pa not only can’t take care of him, he doesn’t much want to. Still looking for some kind of older male approval, Cyril falls too easily under the sway of Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a teenage thug whom everyone in Samantha’s neighborhood knows is bad news. This latest neorealist-style drama from Belgium’s Dardenne Brothers treads on very familiar ground for them, both in themes and terse execution. It’s well-acted, potent stuff, if less resonant in sum impact than their best work. (1:27) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*The Lady Luc Besson directs Michelle Yeoh — but The Lady is about as far from flashy action heroics as humanly possible. Instead, it’s a reverent, emotion-packed biopic of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a national hero in Burma (Myanmar) for her work against the country’s oppressive military regime. But don’t expect a year-by-year exploration of Suu’s every accomplishment; instead, the film focuses on the relationship between Suu and her British husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis). When Michael discovers he’s dying of cancer, he’s repeatedly denied visas to visit his wife — a cruel knife-twist by a government that assures Suu that if she leaves Burma to visit him, they’ll never allow her to return. Heartbreaking stuff, elegantly channeled by Thewlis and especially Yeoh, who conveys Suu’s incredible strength despite her alarmingly frail appearance. The real Iron Lady, right here. (2:07) Bridge, Shattuck. (Eddy)

L!fe Happens Ah, another movie in the Juno-Knocked Up continuum of “Unplanned and totally ill-advised pregnancy? Welp, guess I’m having a baby!” We never know if a “shmishmortion” occurs to Kim (Krysten Ritter), because she has unprotected sex in the first scene and the next scene is “one year later,” with infant in tow. The wee babe’s dad, a surfer with neck tattoos, is out of the picture; Kim makes do with her job as a dog walker (Kristen Johnston plays her kid-hating, cheesy-diva boss) and the good graces of her roommates, sardonic budding self-help guru Deena (Kate Bosworth) and cheerful Laura (Rachel Bilson), whose only defining characteristic is that she’s a virgin (omg, the irony). As directed by Kat Coira (who co-wrote with Ritter), L!fe Happens lurches toward Hollywood conventionality by pairing Kim with a hunky guy (Geoff Stults) who doesn’t realize she’s a MILF. Fortunately, that storyline is frequently overshadowed — seriously, they might as well have named the baby “Plot Device” or “Conflict Generator” — by the remarkably realistic I-love-you-but-sometimes-I-want-to-kill-you relationship between BFFs Kim and Deena, which forms the film’s true emotional core. +100 for casting Weeds‘ Justin Kirk as an ascot-wearing weirdo who woos the icy Deena, with (not-so) surprising results. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Lockout Just when you thought Luc Besson was turning over a new, serious-minded leaf with Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady, Lockout arrives to remind you that this is the dude whose earliest efforts (1990’s La Femme Nikita, 1997’s The Fifth Element) have since been subsumed beneath piles of dispose-o-flicks that resemble outtakes from the Transporter movies (which he produced, natch). That’s not to say there aren’t certain pleasures to be found in tossed-off action flicks; Lockout, which inexplicably needed two directors (James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, who co-wrote with Besson), is enjoyable enough in the moment, in addition to being completely, consistently ludicrous throughout. Guy Pearce plays the wisecracking Snow, a wrongfully-convicted government agent who’s about to suffer the Punishment of the Future: being sedated and then blasted to space prison for 30 years. That is, until the First Daughter (Maggie Grace) finds herself trapped aboard the facility when a riot breaks out. Naturally, reluctant rescuer Snow is chosen for prison-break-in-reverse duties. The rest goes like this: Boom! Quip! Boom! Quip! Lockout purports to be from an “original idea” by exec producer Besson, a bold claim considering the movie is more or less Con Air (1997) pasted over the Die Hard series and John Carpenter’s Escape movies. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Mirror Mirror In this glittery, moderately girl-powery adaptation of the Snow White tale (a comic foil of sorts to this summer’s gloomier-looking Snow White and the Huntsman), Julia Roberts takes her turn as stepmom, to an earnest little ingenue (Lily Collins) whose kingly father (Sean Bean) is presumed dead and whose rather-teeny-looking kingdom is collapsing under the weight of fiscal ruin and a thick stratum of snow. Into this sorry realm rides a chiseled beefcake named Prince Alcott (Arnie Hammer), who hails from prosperous Valencia, falls for Snow White, and draws the attentions of the Queen (Roberts) from both a strategic and a libidinal standpoint. Soon enough, Snow White (Snow to her friends) is narrowly avoiding execution at the hands of the Queen’s sycophantic courtier-henchman (Nathan Lane), rustling up breakfast for a thieving band of stilt-walking dwarves, and engaging in sylvan hijinks preparatory to deposing her stepmother and bringing light and warmth and birdsong and perennials back into fashion. Director Tarsem Singh (2000’s The Cell, 2011’s Immortals) stages the film’s royal pageantry with a bright artistry, and Roberts holds court with vicious, amoral relish as she senses her powers of persuasion slipping relentlessly from her grasp. Carefully catering to tween-and-under tastes as well as those of their chaperones, the comedy comes in various breadths, and there’s meta-humor in the sight of Roberts passing the pretty woman torch, though Collins seems blandly unprepared to wield her power wisely or interestingly. Consider vacating your seats before the extraneous Bollywood-style song-and-dance number that accompanies the closing credits. (1:46) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Monsieur Lazhar When their beloved but troubled teacher hangs herself in the classroom — not a thoughtful choice of location, but then we never really discover her motives — traumatized Montreal sixth-graders get Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), a middle-aged Algerian émigré whose contrastingly rather strict, old-fashioned methods prove surprisingly useful at helping them past their trauma. He quickly becomes the crush object of studious Alice (Sophie Nelisse), whose single mother is a pilot too often away, while troublemaker Simon (Emilien Neron) acts out his own domestic and other issues at school. Lazhar has his own secrets as well — for one thing, we see that he’s still petitioning for permanent asylum in Canada, contradicting what he told the principal upon being hired — and while his emotions are more tightly wrapped, circumstances will eventually force all truths out. This very likable drama about adults and children from Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau doesn’t quite have the heft and resonance to rate among the truly great narrative films about education (like Laurent Cantet’s recent French The Class). But it comes close enough, gracefully touching on numerous other issues while effectively keeping focus on how a good teacher can shape young lives in ways as incalculable as they are important. (1:34) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

People v. The State of Illusion Writer-producer-star Austin Vickers’ slice of self-help cinema is a motivational lecture illustrated by a lot of infomercial-type imagery, plus a narrative strand: when a stressed-out yuppie single dad’s carelessness results in a traffic death, he’s sent to prison. Naturally Aaron (played by J.B. Tuttle) hate, hate, hates it there, until the world’s most philosophically advanced janitor (Michael McCormick) gradually gets him to understand that the real “prison” is his mind — freedom requires only an “awareness shift.” The larger film, with Vickers addressing us directly and various experts chipping in, furthers that notion to suggest even cellular science supports the notion that reality is a matter of perception — and thus the roadblocks and limitations that gum us up on life’s paths (relationships, income, self-doubt, et al.) can be overcome if one believes so and acts accordingly. This elaborate pep talk isn’t really the sort of thing you can evaluate in art or entertainment terms, save to say it’s well-crafted for its type. As for value in other terms, well, odds are you’ve heard all this in one form or another before. But if you happen to be stuck in any kind of personal prison, who knows, People might be just the prod that gets you moving. (1:26) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*The Raid: Redemption As rip-roaring as they come, Indonesian import The Raid: Redemption (from, oddly, a Welsh writer-director, Gareth Huw Evans) arrives to reassure genre fans that action films are still being made without CG-embellished stunts, choppy editing, and gratuitous 3D. Fists, feet, and gnarly weapons do the heavy lifting in this otherwise simple tale of a taciturn special-forces cop (Iko Uwais) who’s part of a raid on a run-down, high-rise apartment building where all the tenants are crooks and the landlord is a penthouse-dwelling crime boss (Ray Sahetapy). Naturally, things go awry almost immediately, and floor-to-floor brawls (choreographed by Uwais and co-star Yayan Ruhian, whose character is aptly named “Mad Dog”) comprise nearly the entirety of the film; of particular interest is The Raid‘s focus on pencak silat, an indigenous Indonesian fighting style — though there are also plenty of thrilling gun battles, machete-thwackings, and other dangerous delights. Even better: Redemption is the first in a planned trilogy of films starring Uwais’ badass (yet morally rock-solid) character. Bring it! (1:40) Metreon. (Eddy)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) California, Four Star, Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Rapoport)

*The Salt of Life Gianni Di Gregorio is both a triumph over and cautionary illustration of the aging uomo, racking up decades of experience yet still infantilized by that most binding tie. He’s a late bloomer who’s long worked in theater and film in various capacities, notably as a scenarist for 2008’s organized crime drama Gomorrah. That same year he wrote and directed a first feature basically shot in his own Rome apartment. Mid-August Lunch was a surprise global success casting the director himself as a putz, also named Gianni, very like himself (by his own admission), peevishly trying to have some independence while catering to the whims of the ancient but demanding mother (Valeria De Franciscis) he still lives with. Lunch was charming in a sly, self-deprecating way, and The Salt of Life is more of the same minus the usual diminishing returns: the creator’s barely-alter ego Gianni is still busy doing nothing much, dissatisfied not by his indolence but by its quality. But his pint-sized, wig-rocking, nearly century-old matriarch has now moved to a plush separate address with full-time care — and Salt‘s main preoccupation is Gianni’s discovery that while he’s as available and interested in women as ever, at age 63 he is no longer visible to them. While Fellini confronted desirable, daunting womanhood with a permanent adolescent’s masturbatory fantasizing, Di Gregorio’s humbler self-knowledge finds comedy in the hangdog haplessness of an old dog who can’t learn new tricks and has forgotten the old ones. (1:30) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Simple Life When elderly Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the housekeeper who’s served his family for decades, has a stroke, producer Roger (Andy Lau) pays for her to enter a nursing home. No longer tasked with caring for Roger, Ah Tao faces life in the cramped, often depressing facility with resigned calm, making friends with other residents (some of whom are played by nonprofessional actors) and enjoying Roger’s frequent visits. Based on Roger Lee’s story (inspired by his own life), Ann Hui’s film is well-served by its performances; Ip picked up multiple Best Actress awards for her role, Lau is reliably solid, and Anthony Wong pops up as the nursing home’s eye patch-wearing owner. Wong’s over-the-top cameo doesn’t quite fit in with the movie’s otherwise low-key vibe, but he’s a welcome distraction in a film that can be too quiet at times — a situation not helped by its washed-out palette of gray, beige, and more gray. (1:58) Metreon. (Eddy)

*They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain Recent elections signal that Myanmar’s status as “the second-most isolated country on the planet,” per Robert H. Lieberman’s doc, may soon be changing. With that hopeful context, this insightful study of Myanmar (or Burma, depending on who’s referring to it) is particularly well-timed. Shot using clandestine methods, and without identifying many of its fearful interviewees — with the exception of recently-released-from-house-arrest politician Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner — They Call it Myanmar offers a revealing look at a country largely untouched by corporate influences and pop culture. Myanmar’s military dictatorship is the opposite of a cult of personality; it’s scarier, one subject reflects, because “it’s a system, not an individual,” with faceless leaders who can be quietly be replaced. The country struggles with a huge disconnect between the very rich and the very poor; it has a dismal health care system overrun by “quacks,” and an equally dismal educational system that benefits very few children. Hunger, disease, child labor — all prevalent. Surprisingly, though the conditions that surround them are grim, Myanmar’s people are shown to be generally happy and deeply spiritual as they go about their daily lives. A highlight: Lieberman’s interactions with excited Buddhist pilgrims en route to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, with an up-close look at the miraculously teetering “Golden Rock.” (1:23) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The Three Stooges: The Movie (1:32) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Titanic 3D (3:14) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

*The Turin Horse Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s final cinematic statement is extrapolated from a climactic episode in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, wherein the philosopher tearfully intervened in the beating of a horse on the streets of Turin. Tarr, working with frequent collaborators Ágnes Hranitzky and László Krasznahorkai, conjures the lives of a horseman and his daughter as they barely subsist amid a windswept wasteland. This glacial Beckettian dirge of a film, shot in black and white and composed of Tarr’s trademark long takes, doesn’t so much develop these two characters as wear them down. Their stultifying daily routines — cleaning the stable, fetching water from the well, changing and cleaning their numerous layers of clothing — occupy much of the film, so it is all the more unsettling when this wretched lifestyle is torn asunder by the whims of nature. (2:26) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sam Stander)

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

We Have a Pope What if a new pope was chosen … but he didn’t want to serve? In this gentle comedy-drama from Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti (2001’s The Son’s Room), Cardinal Melville (veteran French actor Michel Piccoli) is tapped to be the next Holy Father — and promptly flips out. The Vatican goes into crisis mode, first calling in a shrink, Professor Brezzi (Moretti), to talk to the troubled man, then orchestrating a ruse that the Pope-elect is merely hiding out in his apartments as the crowds of faithful rumble impatiently outside. Meanwhile, Melville sneaks off on an unauthorized, anonymous field trip that turns into a soul-searching, existential journey; along the way he hooks up with a group of actors that remind him of his youthful dreams of the stage — and help him realize that being the next Pope will require a performance he’s not sure he can deliver. Back at the Vatican, all assembled are essentially trapped until the new Pope is publicly revealed; the bored Cardinals kill time by playing cards and, most amusingly, participating in a volleyball tournament organized by Brezzi. Irreverent enough, though I’m not sure what kind of audience this will draw. Papal humorists? (1:44) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Wrath of the Titans Playing fast and loose with Greek myths but not agile enough to kick out a black metal jam during a flaming underworld power-grab, Wrath of Titans is, as expected, a bit of a CGI-crammed mess. Still, the sword-and-sandals franchise has attracted scads of international actorly talent — the cast is enriched this time by Édgar Ramírez (2010’s Carlos), Bill Nighy, and Rosamund Pike — and you do get at least one cool monster and paltry explication (Cerberus, which bolts from earth for no discernible reason except that maybe all hell is breaking loose). Just because action flicks like Cloverfield (2008) have long dispensed with narrative handlebars doesn’t mean that age-old stories like the Greek myths should get completely random with their titanic tale-spinning. Wrath opens on the twilight of the gods: Zeus (Liam Neeson) is practically groveling before Perseus (Sam Worthington) — now determined to go small, raise his son, and work on his fishing skills — and trying to persuade him to step up and help the Olympians hold onto power. Fellow Zeus spawn Ares (Ramírez) is along for the ride, so demigod up, Perseus. In some weird, last-ditch attempt to ream his bro Zeus, the oily, mulleted Hades (Ralph Fiennes) has struck a deal with their entrapped, chaotic, castrating fireball of a dad Cronus to let them keep their immortality, on the condition that Zeus is sapped of his power. Picking up Queen Andromeda (Pike) along the way, Perseus gets the scoop on how to get to Hell from Hephaestus (Nighy playing the demented Vulcan like a ’60s acid casualty, given to chatting with mechanical owl Bubo, a wink to 1981 precursor Clash of the Titans, which set the bar low for the remake). Though there are some distracting action scenes (full of speedy, choppy edits that confuse disorientation for excitement) and a few intriguing monsters (just how did the Minotaur make it to this labyrinth?), there’s no money line like “Release the Kraken!” this time around, and there’s way too much nattering on about fatherly responsibility and forgiveness —making these feel-good divinities sound oddly, mawkishly Christian and softheaded rather than mythically pagan and brattily otherworldly. Wasn’t the appeal of the gods linked to the fact that they always acted more like outta-hand adolescents than holier-than-thou deities? I guess that’s why no one’s praying to them anymore. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Items

-
0
Items

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO So many things I want to write about this week, if only my delicate, exquisite hands could stop doing these fluttery bird-like motions in front of my gorgeous face. Girls, I’ve got a serious case of the Vogues, which along with Perma-Nod, Fist Pump, “Woo!”-itis, Twirlfoot, Strobe-eye, and Record Bag Shoulder will soon flood hospital wards and special care facilities nationwide with my rapidly aging (mid-20s) club generation.

That’s why universal healthcare is so very important! Have we learned nothing from disco’s untreated polyester scars, the shaken sacroiliacs of funk, Rave Damage, Swing Elbow, Goth Pout, the horrible social stigma of Breakdancer’s Breath? Shit staaank. Don’t laugh, teenage Post-Millennials, it’s coming for you. One day you’ll be holding your phone up to record that underground light show, when you’ll realized with horror that no one uses phones as cameras anymore, not even you. You’ll only be holding your phone up in your mind. And then you’ll catch Skrillexatosis.

What am I even talking about? The things I most want to tell you are these. 1) Mimosas and house dancing on Sunday mornings 6am-2pm at Monroe in North Beach are rad, especially the second and third Sundays of each month, hosted by the Pressure! and Forward crews respectively. 2) The Entertainment Commission is actually considering the use of mimes to help control rowdy nighttime crowds, for realz. (Read more on SFBG.com’s Noise blog.) 3) Flaunting its global fan base, amazing weekly Honey Soundsystem is now simulcasting its Sunday night parties at www.mixlr.com /hnysndsystm — so you can kiki out while doing your dishes at home. 4) I just about died when rap prodigy Azaelia Banks broke into the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” at Coachella, did you see it? More please.

 

THE TUBESTEAK CONNECTION 8-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Have you noticed we may be going through another heavy period of gentrification? DJ Bus Station John started his weekly Thursday night club in reaction to the last tech boom’s more blanding effects, drawing upon underground queer ’70s culture to keep the gay ’00s freaky, slutty, and disco-lickingly funky (also cell-phone free: don’t Tweet in this room, love, keep it between us.) “A reliable source of good music and fresh meat delivered w/love (& refreshingly w/o irony) by a 50-something bear qween,” is how BSJ himself describes it. “You won’t believe what you just 8!” is how I do.

Thu/19 and every Thursday, 10pm, $5-7. Aunt Charlie’s, 133 Turk, SF.

 

ROCK IT SCIENCE LABORATORIES DOUBLE ANNIVERSARY

Seven years of parties, two years as a record label, and always keepin’ it ravey-styley — local player Eric Sharp started off throwing Afterglow undergrounds at the storied Infinite Kaos venue and has become a bedrock of the Bay Area dance music (and an early handlebar mustache pioneer), now celebrating with DJ Fame, Eric Reilly, and his RISL (www.rislabs.com) family, which is us, of course. Expect craziness.

Fri/20, 10pm-late, $5 before 11pm. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

JEFF MILLS

As “The Wizard” on Detroit’s WJLB FM in the ’80s, the genius Mills cut ‘n scratched electro, hip-hop, house, and techno into breathtaking, highly influential conflagrations of party-starting awe. Now he not only beams genius slices of intelligent techno down from the Mothership — he basically is the Mothership, often on multiple turntables, and will deliciously demolish Public Works, along with beloved Detroit house legend Terrance Parker, LA heavy technoist Drumcell, our own Icee Hot DJs, Mossmoss, and more. Sat/21, $15–25. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

Truth or consequences

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Truth or consequences

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF It’s possible to have an almost perfect Sundance Film Festival viewing experience if you hew to one simple rule: only go to the documentaries. Sure, see some of the dramatic entries too, after the 40th person has told you such-and-such title is great. But you can rarely go far wrong with the documentaries. Sundance has its pick of the annual crème de la crème in that genre (among U.S. if not necessarily international films).

As pretty much a “best of other festivals” festival taking place in late spring — thus perfectly situated to grab the best docs not just from Sundance, but also Berlin, Rotterdam, South by Southwest and elsewhere — the San Francisco International Film Festival can potentially offer the crème de la crème de la crème. Thank god documentaries, unlike that imaginary dairy substance, are not high in saturated fat or cholesterol. You can consume them for SFIFF’s entire span and remain your slim, lovely self, mentally refreshed by enormous quantities of new information ingested the fun and easy way.

Actually, a portrait of conspicuous consumption in its most corpulent form was among Sundance’s opening night films this January, and will duly boggle your mind at SFIFF. Lauren Greenfield’s obscenely entertaining The Queen of Versailles takes a long, turbulent look at the lifestyles lived by David and Jackie Siegel. He is the 70-something undisputed king of timeshares; she is his 40-something (third) wife, a former beauty queen with the requisite blonde locks and major rack, both probably not entirely Mother Nature-made. He’s so compulsive that he’s never saved, instead plowing every buck back into the business.

When the recession hits, that means this billionaire is — in ready-cash as opposed to paper terms — suddenly sorta kinda broke, just as an enormous Las Vegas project is opening and the family’s stupefyingly large new “home” (yep, modeled after Versailles) is mid-construction. Plugs must be pulled, corners cut. Never having had to, the Siegels discover (once most of the servants have been let go) they have no idea how to run a household. Worse, they discover that in adversity they have a very hard time pulling together — in particular, David is revealed as a remote, cold, obsessively all-business person who has no use for getting or giving “emotional support;” not even for being a husband or father, much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM43Wyulc7w

What ultimately makes Queen poignantly more than a reality-TV style peek at the garishly wealthy is that Jackie, despite her incredibly vulgar veneer (she’s like a Jennifer Coolidge character, forever squeezed into loud animal prints), is at heart just a nice girl from hicksville who really, really wants to make this family work.

Other docs pipelined from Sundance to SF include acclaimed ones about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), Ethel (as in Kennedy), pervasive rape in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), and the Israeli military legal system that governs civilian Palestinians under occupation (The Law in These Parts). Of particular local interest is David France’s excellent How to Survive a Plague, about how ACT UP virtually forced the medical and pharmacological establishments into speeded-up drug trials and development that drastically reduced the AIDS epidemic’s U.S. fatalities within a decade. Don’t expect much about SF activism, though — like so many gay docs on national issues, this one barely sets foot outside Manhattan.

Of actual local origin are several SFIFF nonfiction highlights, not least festival closing nighter Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey, Ramona Diaz’s film about the incredible journey of Filipino superfan Arnel Pineda, from fronting a Journey cover band to fronting the actual Bay Area outfit itself as its latest lead vocalist. There’s also Micha X. Peled’s last globalization trilogy entry Bitter Seeds, focusing on hitherto self-sufficient farmers in India increasingly driven toward bankrupting debt (and widespread suicides) by costly biotech “advances;” Peter Nicks’ The Waiting Room, which sits us right there at Highland Hospital in Oakland, illustrating the heroically coping status quo and desperate need for improvement in a microcosm of U.S. healthcare; and Jamie Meltzer’s world premiere Informant. The latter’s subject is activist-turned-FBI snitch Brandon Darby, whose testimony got two anarchists imprisoned — and who fully participated in this portrait, even its re-enactments of his protest-group infiltration. Darby is expected to attend the festival; given this town’s political leanings, he might want to wear a raincoat.

Speaking of audiences hurling things — abuse, at the least — Caveh Zahedi (plus his lawyer) was evidently met with a shitstorm after the SXSW premiere of The Sheik and I. You, too, may feel the spasmodic urge to throttle him during this latest naughty-boy’s own adventure, in which he accepts a commission to make work for a biennial perversely themed around “art as subversive act” in the far-from-liberal United Arab Emirates. Professed fans, the curators had duly seen his prior work; surely they knew they were inviting trouble in these circumstances?

Nonetheless, they play perfectly into his hands, expressing dismay and barely masked fear as Zahedi faux-naively proceeds to do everything he shouldn’t. That includes ridiculing Islam and the host sheik, stereotyping Arabs in general, putting everyone (including himself and his two-year-old son) in potential danger, all the while claiming his aim is “a critique of imperialism.” Is he really the very model of the privileged Western artist, railing about artistic freedom while ignorant that sometimes, some places, some things (like blasphemy, and prison) must take precedent? Or is the whole act just a deliberate provocation (hardly his first), albeit one with disturbingly dire potential consequences? Alternately very funny and completely infuriating, The Sheik and I is one movie you might want to attend just for the Q&A afterward. Odds are, it’s gonna get ugly. 

www.sffs.org

 

In city workers’ shoes

Andrew Lam
-
6

We both work under City Hall’s iconic dome as civil servants. While I often work late into the evening hours as a supervisor, Robert’s back-breaking work as a janitor is often done past the midnight hour, five nights a week.

I had the opportunity to meet Robert last week, as part of the “Walk A Day In Our Shoes” program of Service Employees International Union, Local 1021.

Robert is 52 years old. He’s worked for the city since 1999. Before that, he worked for San Francisco Unified School District. He sweeps and mops the floors and stairs of the famous rotunda and cleans 150 cubicles.

Last week, Robert had me take off my jacket and tie, roll up my sleeves and do his job for a while. I swept the marble floors, which are truly unending. I mopped the grand marble staircase behind happy couples exchanging wedding vows. He let me attempt to push a gigantic whirring machine that felt more like a Zamboni than a vacuum.

When I was younger, I had a summer job as a janitor at a public high school, so I know how truly strenuous Robert’s job is.

Robert injured his spine as a result of pushing that heavy vacuum for years. When he was in the hospital treating his spinal injury, the doctors discovered cancer. While in chemotherapy, he didn’t miss a day of work. He lives cancer-free today.

Robert is also a green pioneer at City Hall — he started a recycling program here before it was popular to do so. After that, the rest of the city caught on. He has photos of himself and the past four mayors in his home. He offers directions to visitors. He has a son, and they both live in his sister’s home. He speaks lovingly of his wife, who he lost to diabetes several years ago.

As our economy evolves, we can’t leave people like Robert — those who support our world-class city —behind. While we court businesses who create new jobs in our city, we also need to reinvest in the people who do the important work that often goes unnoticed.

Hospital workers are up at 4am, preparing meals for patients. Library technicians provide bilingual translation for our children. Others, like Robert, are up until 1am, making sure we have a clean and safe environment to work every day.

After years of concessions to balance deep budget deficits, city workers experienced ongoing cuts to their wages and benefits. In current contract negotiations, they are being asked to give hundreds more each month in healthcare costs to insure their children.

We appreciate all they have done to help our city in times of need. As our city recovers economically, it’s time to thank them, to ask others to help shoulder the costs for affordable housing, parks and recreation facilities and schools, and to reform our local business tax — which is paid by only 10% of our city’s companies.

Last week, I got to know a fellow civil servant whose work we need to remember to value. Which is why I will stand alongside Robert, labor unions, nonprofits, community members and neighbors on Wednesday, April 18, in front of City Hall from 4pm to 7pm. Please join us in supporting the workforce that supports us all, 24 hours a day. 

David Chiu is president of the Board of Supervisors.Thousands of community allies, elected officials, and SEIU 1021 members will rally on Wednesday, April 18 to close tax loopholes on mega banks and corporations from 4pm to 7pm at City Hall.

Meister: The obvious solution to our social security problem

-
3

By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Guaranteeing America’s working people a decent retirement has become increasingly difficult with the decline of traditional pension plans and the glaring inadequacy of the 401 (k) savings accounts that have replaced them.

So what to do? The answer is obvious to the AFL-CIO, and should be to everyone else: Increase Social Security benefits.

As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka notes, “Social Security is a phenomenally successful program that represents the very best in American values and has virtually no waste, no corruption and almost no overhead.”

The program does have one serious problem, however – “its benefits are too low.”

Trumka certainly has that right. The average Social Security payout for men is only about $16,000 a year, barely above the minimum wage. Payouts for women average only about $12,000 a year, barely above the poverty line.

Most of those drawing benefits earned much more during their working days. The retirement programs in most other industrialized countries pay retirees benefits in amounts far closer to what they made while working.

It’s for very good reason that the AFL-CIO has taken an official position calling for “an across the board increase in Social Security benefits,” including adjustments to account for retirees’ steadily escalating health care costs and, among other economic setbacks, “the loss of home equity experienced by millions of Americans in the Great Recession.”

Remedial action is clearly needed. As the AFL-CIO says, “Our retirement system is falling apart at the seams. Millions of Americans are afraid to retire because they know they can’t maintain their standard of living in retirement, and more and more seniors have to keep working well past the age when they should be retiring.”

Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who calls Social Security “the most successful program in history,” has introduced a bill – the Rebuild America Act – that includes changes in the program such as the AFL-CIO is advocating.

Harkin’s bill would increase benefits by about $60-$70 a month and guarantee that the trust fund from which benefits are drawn would remain solvent and able to pay out full benefits for at least another 40 years, in large part by removing the $110,100 cap on income subject to Social Security deductions.

Quite a contrast to what’s been discussed in Washington, where most of the talk about Social Security has been about Republican proposals to cut benefits. That has especially included increasing the retirement age and cutting back cost-of-living adjustments.

Harkin’s measure would not only revitalize the Social Security system. It also calls for modernizing transportation and energy infrastructures and education systems, increasing access to quality child care, expanding time-and-a-half overtime pay, raising the minimum wage, increasing the availability of paid sick leave, expanding union rights and increasing opportunities for disabled workers. The bill also would end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

Increasing Social Security benefits remains a top priority with Harkin and other Democrats. As the AFL-CIO sees it, “the overwhelming majority of working Americans of every political persuasion in every part of the country ‘get’ the absolutely critical importance of adequate Social Security benefits, but our elites don’t seem to get it. Social security is the solution, not the problem.”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
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

*Applause See “Diva in the Headlights.” (1:27) Lumiere, Shattuck.

Bad Fever Dustin Guy Defa’s tiny, odd character study centers on one Eddie Cooperschmidt (Kentucker Audley, a director himself), who looks like Mr. February 1992 on a calendar of sensitive grunge band hunks, but acts more like Homer Simpson — the Nathanael West version, not Matt Groening’s. He still lives with mom (unsympathetically played by Annette Wright), doesn’t or can’t hold a job, has no friends, fumbles through an oddly formal vocabulary, and carries himself like a 13-year-old who’s just had all his growth spurts in one go. In other words, he’s the sort of character whose precise status — just socially inept, or developmentally disabled, or both? — is a mystery the film doesn’t bother clarifying. Nor do we find out what the story is behind Irene (Eleonore Hendricks), his hard-bitten antithesis, who seems to be staying in an empty school classroom as some sort of weird art experiment rather than because she’s “homeless,” and who manipulates the hapless Eddie into videotaped situations that are perverse but stop short of pornography. (Or rather he — almost certainly a virgin — stops short there.) As if more goofy pathos were needed here, Eddie’s dream is to be a stand-up comedian, a career he is about as well equipped for as brain surgeon. When Eddie plays his big first (and probably last) comedy gig, the onscreen audience appears to be wondering the same thing you might: is this just sad, or some kind of Andy Kaufman-type performance piece? Painstakingly low-key and realistic in execution, Bad Fever‘s success will depend on whether you can swallow it conceptually — these characters are surrounded by a real world, but they can seem unreal themselves. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

Blue Like Jazz Tap or bottled water, rainy Portland, Ore. or dry Texas — how does a sincere, young Bible-thumping Baptist reconcile the two — a fish out of water nonetheless determined to swim upstream and make his way to adulthood. Based on the Donald Miller memoir-of-sorts, Blue Like Jazz may look like a Nicholas Sparks romantic opus from afar, but in the care of director-cowriter Steve Taylor, this tale of a young man coming to terms with the wider, wilder world apart from the strict confines of lock-in abstinence groups snatches a bit of the grace John Coltrane tapped in A Love Supreme. The earnest Donald (True Blood’s Marshall Allman) is all set to go to his nearby Bible Belt Christian university until his bohemian jazz-loving dad pulls favors and enrolls him at free-form Reed College. Donald will have to closet his holy-roller background if, as his new lesbian pal (Tania Raymonde) cautions, he “plans on ever making friends or sharing a bowl or seeing human vagina without a credit card.” Donald finds his way back to meaning and spirit — and the fun is getting there, as he joins a civil-disobedience-club-for-credit (Malaysian cocktail tennis was canceled) and falls for passionate activist Penny (Claire Holt). Allman, who also co-executive produced, emerges as a thoughtful actor who can carry a potentially maudlin and ultimately lovable collegiate coming-of-age story on his own. (1:47) (Chun)

*Bully Anyone who’s ever been a kid on the wrong side of a bully — or was sensitive and observant enough not to avert his or her eyes — will be puzzling over the MPAA’s R rating of this doc, for profanity. It’s absurd when the gory violence on network and basic cable TV stops just short of cutting characters’ faces off, as one blurred-out bus bully threatens to do to the sweet, hapless Alex, dubbed “Fish Face” by the kids who ostracize him and make his life hell on the bus. It’s a jungle out there, as we all know — but it’s that real, visceral footage of the verbal (and physical) abuse bullied children deal with daily that brings it all home. Filmmaker Lee Hirsch goes above and beyond in trying to capture all dimensions of his subject: the terrorized bullied, the ineffectual school administrators, the desperate parents. There’s Kelby, the gay girl who was forced off her beloved basketball team after she came out, and Ja’Maya, who took drastic measures to fend off her tormenters — as well as the specters of those who turned to suicide as a way out. Hirsch is clearly more of an activist than a fly on the wall: he steps in at one point to help and obviously makes an uplifting effort to focus on what we can do to battle bullying. Nevertheless, at the risk of coming off like the Iowa assistant principal who’s catching criticism for telling one victim that he was just as bad as the bully that he refused to shake hands with, one feels compelled to note one prominent component that’s missing here: the bullies themselves, their stories, and the reasons why they’re so cruel — admittedly a daunting, possibly libelous task. (1:35) Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

*The Cabin in the Woods If the name “Joss Whedon” doesn’t provide all the reason you need to bum-rush The Cabin in the Woods (Whedon produced and co-wrote,  with director and frequent collaborator Drew Goddard), well, there’s not much more that can be revealed without ruining the entire movie. In a very, very small nutshell, it’s about a group of college kids (including Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) whose weekend jaunt to a rural cabin goes horribly awry, as such weekend jaunts tend to do in horror movies (the Texas Chainsaw and Evil Dead movies are heavily referenced). But this is no ordinary nightmare — its peculiarities are cleverly, carefully revealed, and the movie’s inside-out takedown of scary movies produces some very unexpected (and delightfully blood-gushing) twists and turns. Plus: the always-awesome Richard Jenkins, and in-jokes galore for genre fans. (1:35) California, Presidio. (Eddy)

*Damsels in Distress Whit Stillman lives! The eternally preppy writer-director (1990’s Metropolitan; 1994’s Barcelona; 1998’s The Last Days of Disco), whose dialogue-laden scripts have earned him the not-inaccurate descriptor of “the WASP Woody Allen,” emerges with this popped-collar take on girl-clique movies like Mean Girls (2004), Clueless (1995), and even Heathers (1988). At East Coast liberal-arts college Seven Oaks (“the last of the Select Seven to go co-ed”), frat guys are so dumb they don’t know the names of all the colors; the school newspaper is called the Daily Complainer; and a group of girls, lead by know-it-all Violet (Greta Gerwig), are determined to lift student morale using unconventional methods (tap dancing is one of them). After she’s scooped into this strange orbit, transfer student (Analeigh Tipton) can’t quite believe Violet and her friends are for real. They’re not, of course — they’re carefully crafted Stillman creations, which renders this very funny take on college life a completely unique experience. Did I mention the musical numbers? (1:38) (Eddy)

Detention The latest from A-list music video director turned B-movie helmer Joseph Kahn (2004’s Torque) realllllly wants to be a cult classic. Not sure that’s a certainty, but midnight would definitely be the appropriate hour to view this teen-slasher parody that also enfolds body-swapping, time travel, out-of-control parties, stuffed bears, accidental YouTube porn, unrequited love, the dreaded Dane Cook, and cinema’s most sledgehammer-heavy 1990s nostalgia to date — despite the fact that Detention‘s central homage is to The Breakfast Club, which came out in 1985. Nominally grounding the film’s garish look, broad humor, and breakneck pace are the charms of young leads Shanley Caswell (as klutzy tomboy Riley) and Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson (as a Road House-worshiping skater), who displays questionable if admirable show biz aspirations by serving as one of Detention‘s executive producers. He was, after all, born in 1992, which in Detention‘s estimation was “like, the coolest year ever!” (1:30) (Eddy)

*The Lady Luc Besson directs Michelle Yeoh — but The Lady is about as far from flashy action heroics as humanly possible. Instead, it’s a reverent, emotion-packed biopic of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a national hero in Burma (Myanmar) for her work against the country’s oppressive military regime. But don’t expect a year-by-year exploration of Suu’s every accomplishment; instead, the film focuses on the relationship between Suu and her British husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis). When Michael discovers he’s dying of cancer, he’s repeatedly denied visas to visit his wife — a cruel knife-twist by a government that assures Suu that if she leaves Burma to visit him, they’ll never allow her to return. Heartbreaking stuff, elegantly channeled by Thewlis and especially Yeoh, who conveys Suu’s incredible strength despite her alarmingly frail appearance. The real Iron Lady, right here. (2:07) Bridge, Shattuck. (Eddy)

L!fe Happens Ah, another movie in the Juno-Knocked Up continuum of “Unplanned and totally ill-advised pregnancy? Welp, guess I’m having a baby!” We never know if a “shmishmortion” occurs to Kim (Krysten Ritter), because she has unprotected sex in the first scene and the next scene is “one year later,” with infant in tow. The wee babe’s dad, a surfer with neck tattoos, is out of the picture; Kim makes do with her job as a dog walker (Kristen Johnston plays her kid-hating, cheesy-diva boss) and the good graces of her roommates, sardonic budding self-help guru Deena (Kate Bosworth) and cheerful Laura (Rachel Bilson), whose only defining characteristic is that she’s a virgin (omg, the irony). As directed by Kat Coira (who co-wrote with Ritter), L!fe Happens lurches toward Hollywood conventionality by pairing Kim with a hunky guy (Geoff Stults) who doesn’t realize she’s a MILF. Fortunately, that storyline is frequently overshadowed — seriously, they might as well have named the baby “Plot Device” or “Conflict Generator” — by the remarkably realistic I-love-you-but-sometimes-I-want-to-kill-you relationship between BFFs Kim and Deena, which forms the film’s true emotional core. +100 for casting Weeds‘ Justin Kirk as an ascot-wearing weirdo who woos the icy Deena, with (not-so) surprising results. (1:40) (Eddy)

Lockout When the president’s daughter is trapped amid a prison uprising in outer space, the government has no choice but to call in Snake Plissken — er, Guy Pearce — to save the day. (1:35) Shattuck, Vogue.

*Monsieur Lazhar When their beloved but troubled teacher hangs herself in the classroom — not a thoughtful choice of location, but then we never really discover her motives — traumatized Montreal sixth-graders get Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), a middle-aged Algerian émigré whose contrastingly rather strict, old-fashioned methods prove surprisingly useful at helping them past their trauma. He quickly becomes the crush object of studious Alice (Sophie Nelisse), whose single mother is a pilot too often away, while troublemaker Simon (Emilien Neron) acts out his own domestic and other issues at school. Lazhar has his own secrets as well — for one thing, we see that he’s still petitioning for permanent asylum in Canada, contradicting what he told the principal upon being hired — and while his emotions are more tightly wrapped, circumstances will eventually force all truths out. This very likable drama about adults and children from Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau doesn’t quite have the heft and resonance to rate among the truly great narrative films about education (like Laurent Cantet’s recent French The Class). But it comes close enough, gracefully touching on numerous other issues while effectively keeping focus on how a good teacher can shape young lives in ways as incalculable as they are important. (1:34) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

People v. The State of Illusion Writer-producer-star Austin Vickers’ slice of self-help cinema is a motivational lecture illustrated by a lot of infomercial-type imagery, plus a narrative strand: when a stressed-out yuppie single dad’s carelessness results in a traffic death, he’s sent to prison. Naturally Aaron (played by J.B. Tuttle) hate, hate, hates it there, until the world’s most philosophically advanced janitor (Michael McCormick) gradually gets him to understand that the real “prison” is his mind — freedom requires only an “awareness shift.” The larger film, with Vickers addressing us directly and various experts chipping in, furthers that notion to suggest even cellular science supports the notion that reality is a matter of perception — and thus the roadblocks and limitations that gum us up on life’s paths (relationships, income, self-doubt, et al.) can be overcome if one believes so and acts accordingly. This elaborate pep talk isn’t really the sort of thing you can evaluate in art or entertainment terms, save to say it’s well-crafted for its type. As for value in other terms, well, odds are you’ve heard all this in one form or another before. But if you happen to be stuck in any kind of personal prison, who knows, People might be just the prod that gets you moving. (1:26) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

A Simple Life When elderly Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the housekeeper who’s served his family for decades, has a stroke, producer Roger (Andy Lau) pays for her to enter a nursing home. No longer tasked with caring for Roger, Ah Tao faces life in the cramped, often depressing facility with resigned calm, making friends with other residents (some of whom are played by nonprofessional actors) and enjoying Roger’s frequent visits. Based on Roger Lee’s story (inspired by his own life), Ann Hui’s film is well-served by its performances; Ip picked up multiple Best Actress awards for her role, Lau is reliably solid, and Anthony Wong pops up as the nursing home’s eye patch-wearing owner. Wong’s over-the-top cameo doesn’t quite fit in with the movie’s otherwise low-key vibe, but he’s a welcome distraction in a film that can be too quiet at times — a situation not helped by its washed-out palette of gray, beige, and more gray. (1:58) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Three Stooges: The Movie Why? (1:32) Presidio.

*The Turin Horse Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s final cinematic statement is extrapolated from a climactic episode in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, wherein the philosopher tearfully intervened in the beating of a horse on the streets of Turin. Tarr, working with frequent collaborators Ágnes Hranitzky and László Krasznahorkai, conjures the lives of a horseman and his daughter as they barely subsist amid a windswept wasteland. This glacial Beckettian dirge of a film, shot in black and white and composed of Tarr’s trademark long takes, doesn’t so much develop these two characters as wear them down. Their stultifying daily routines — cleaning the stable, fetching water from the well, changing and cleaning their numerous layers of clothing — occupy much of the film, so it is all the more unsettling when this wretched lifestyle is torn asunder by the whims of nature. (2:26) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sam Stander)

We Have a Pope What if a new pope was chosen … but he didn’t want to serve? In this gentle comedy-drama from Italian writer-director Nanni Moretti (2001’s The Son’s Room), Cardinal Melville (veteran French actor Michel Piccoli) is tapped to be the next Holy Father — and promptly flips out. The Vatican goes into crisis mode, first calling in a shrink, Professor Brezzi (Moretti), to talk to the troubled man, then orchestrating a ruse that the Pope-elect is merely hiding out in his apartments as the crowds of faithful rumble impatiently outside. Meanwhile, Melville sneaks off on an unauthorized, anonymous field trip that turns into a soul-searching, existential journey; along the way he hooks up with a group of actors that remind him of his youthful dreams of the stage — and help him realize that being the next Pope will require a performance he’s not sure he can deliver. Back at the Vatican, all assembled are essentially trapped until the new Pope is publicly revealed; the bored Cardinals kill time by playing cards and, most amusingly, participating in a volleyball tournament organized by Brezzi. Irreverent enough, though I’m not sure what kind of audience this will draw. Papal humorists? (1:44) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

ONGOING

American Reunion Care for yet another helping of all-American horn dogs? The original American Pie (1999) was a sweet-tempered, albeit ante-upping tribute to ‘80s teen sex comedies, so the latest in the franchise, the older, somewhat wiser American Reunion, is obliged to squeeze a dab more of the ole life force outta the class of ‘99, in honor of their, em, 13th high school reunion. These days Jim (Jason Biggs) is attempting to fluff up a flagging postbaby sex life with wife Michelle (Alyson Hannigan). Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) yearns to get in touch with his buried bad boy. Oz (Chris Klein) has become a sportscaster-reality competition star and is seemingly lost without old girlfriend Heather (Mena Suvari). Stifler (Seann William Scott) is as piggishly incorrigible as ever—even as a low-hanging investment flunky, while scarred, adventuring biker Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) seems to have become “the most interesting man in the world.” How much trouble can the gang get into? About as much of a mess as the Hangover guys, which one can’t stop thinking about when Jim wakes up on the kitchen floor with tile burns and zero pants. Half the cast—which includes Tara Reid, John “MILF!” Cho, Natasha Lyonne, and Shannon Elizabeth — seems to have stirred themselves from their own personal career hangovers, interludes of insanity, and plastic surgery disasters (with a few, like Cho and Thomas, firmly moving on), and others such as parental figures Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge continuing to show the kids how it’s done. Still, the farcical American franchise’s essentially benign, healthy attitude toward good, dirty fun reads as slightly refreshing after chaste teen fare like the Twilight and High School Musical flicks. Even with the obligatory moment of full-frontal penis smooshing. (1:53) California, Four Star, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. (1:12) Roxie. (Nicole Gluckstern)

*Casa de mi Padre Will Ferrell’s latest challenge in a long line of actorly exercises and comic gestures — from his long list of comedies probing the last gasps of American masculinity to serious forays like Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Everything Must Go (2010) — is almost entirely Spanish-language telenovela-burrito Western spoof Casa de mi Padre. Here Ferrell tackles an almost entirely Spanish script (with only meager, long-ago high school and college language courses under his belt) alongside Mexican natives Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and telenovela veteran Genesis Rodriguez. This clever, intriguing, occasionally very funny, yet not altogether successful endeavor, directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, sprang from Ferrell’s noggin. Ferrell is nice guy Armando, content to stay at home at the ranch, hang with his buddies, and be dismissed by his father (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) as a dolt. The arrival of his sleazy bro Raul (Luna) and Raul’s fiancée Sonia (Rodriguez) change everything, bringing killer narco Onza (Bernal) into the family’s life and sparking some hilariously klutzy entanglements between Armando and Sonia. All of this leads to almost zero improvisation on Ferrell’s part and plenty of meta, Machete-like spoofs on low-budget fare, from Sergio Leone to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Casa punctures padre-informed transmissions of Latin machismo, but it equally ridicules the idea of a gringo actor riding in and superimposing himself, badly or otherwise, over another country’s culture. (1:25) Four Star, Metreon, Shattuck. (Chun)

*The Deep Blue Sea Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, filmmaker Terence Davies, much like his heroine, chooses a mutable, fluid sensuality, turning his source material, Terence Rattigan’s acclaimed mid-century play, into a melodrama that catches you in its tide and refuses to let go. At the opening of this sumptuous portrait of a privileged English woman who gives up everything for love, Hester (Rachel Weisz) goes through the methodical motions of ending it all: she writes a suicide note, carefully stuffs towels beneath the door, takes a dozen pills, turns on the gas, and lies down to wait for death to overtake her. Via memories drifting through her fading consciousness, Davies lets us in on scattered, salient details in her back story: her severely damped-down, staid marriage to a high court judge, Sir William (Simon Russel Beale), her attraction and erotic awakening in the hands of charming former RF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), her separation, and her ultimate discovery that her love can never be matched, as she hazards class inequities and ironclad gender roles. “This is a tragedy,” Sir William says, at one point. But, as Hester, a model of integrity, corrects him, “Tragedy is too big a word. Sad, perhaps.” Similarly, Sea is a beautiful downer, but Davies never loses sight of a larger post-war picture, even while he pauses for his archetypal interludes of song, near-still images, and luxuriously slow tracking shots. With cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, he does a remarkable job of washing post-war London with spots of golden light and creating claustrophobic interiors — creating an emotionally resonant space reminiscent of the work of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle. At the center, providing the necessary gravitas (much like Julianne Moore in 2002’s Far From Heaven), is Weisz, giving the viewer a reason to believe in this small but reverberant story, and offering yet another reason for attention during the next awards season. (1:38) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Footnote (1:45) Albany, Clay.

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*House of Pleasures Set in a fin de siècle French brothel, Bertrand Bonello’s lushly rendered drama is challenging and frequently unpleasant. Bonello sees the beauty and allure of his subjects, the many miserable women of this maison close, but rarely sinks to sympathy for their selfish and sometimes sadistic clients. Bound as they are by their debts to their Madame, the prostitutes are essentially slaves, held to strict and humiliating standards. All they have is each other, and the movie’s few emotional bright spots come from this connection. The filmmaking is wily and nouvelle vague-ish, featuring anachronistic music and inventive split-screen sequences. Additionally, there is a spidery complexity to the film’s chronology, wherein certain scenes repeat to reveal new contexts. This unstuck sense of newness is perhaps didactic — this could and does happen now as well as then — but it also serves to make an already compelling ensemble piece even richer and more engaging. (2:02) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sam Stander)

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the ann­ual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Hunter Shot and set during Iran’s contentious 2009 Presidential campaign, The Hunter starts as a Kafka-esque portrait of quiet desperation in a cold, empty Tehran, then turns into a sort of existential thriller. The precise message may be ambiguous, but it’s no surprise this two-year-old feature has so far played nearly everywhere but Iran itself. Ali (filmmaker Rafi Pitts) is released from prison after some years, his precise crime never revealed. Told that with his record he can’t expect to get a day shift on his job as security guard at an automotive plant, he keeps hours at odds with his working wife Sara (Mitra Haijar) and six-year-old daughter Saba (Saba Yaghoobi). Still, they try to spend as much time together as possible, until one day Ali returns to find them uncharacteristically gone all day. After getting the bureaucratic runaround he’s finally informed by police that something tragic has occurred; one loved one is dead, the other missing. When his thin remaining hope is dashed, with police notably useless in preventing that grim additional news, Ali snaps — think Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets. He’s soon in custody, albeit in that of two bickering officers who get them all lost in the countryside. Pitts, a long-ago child performer cast here only when the actor originally hired had to be replaced, makes Ali seem pinched from the inside out, as if in permanent recoil from past and anticipated abuse. This thin, hunched frame, vulnerable big ears, and hooded eyes — the goofily oversized cap he wears at work seems a deliberate affront — seems so fixed an expression of unhappiness that when he flashes a great smile, for a moment you might think it must be someone else. He’s an everyman who only grows more shrunken once the film physically opens up into a natural world no less hostile for being beautiful. (1:32) Roxie. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*The Island President The titular figure is Mohamed Nasheed, recently ousted (by allies of the decades long dictator he’d replaced) chief executive of the Republic of Maldives — a nation of 26 small islands in the Indian Ocean. Jon Shenk’s engaging documentary chronicles his efforts up to and through the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit to gather greater international commitment to curbing greenhouse gas emissions. This is hardly do-gooderism, a bid for eco-tourism, or politics as usual: scarcely above sea level, with nary a hill, the Maldives will simply cease to exist soon if waters continue to rise at global warming’s current pace. (“It won’t be any good to have a democracy if we don’t have a country,” he half-jokes at one point.) Nasheed is tireless, unjaded, delightful, and willing to do anything, at one point hosting “the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting” (with oxygen tanks, natch) as a publicity stunt. A cash-strapped nation despite its surfeit of wealthy vacationers, it’s spending money that could go to education and health services on the pathetic stalling device of sandwalls instead. But do bigger powers — notably China, India and the U.S. — care enough about this bit-part player on the world stage to change their energy-use and economic habits accordingly? (A hint: If you’ve been mulling a Maldivian holiday, take it now.) Somewhat incongruous, but an additional sales point nonetheless: practically all the film’s incidental music consists of pre-existing tracks by Radiohead. (1:51) Lumiere, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Jeff, Who Lives at Home The failure-to-launch concept will always thrive whenever and wherever economies flail, kids crumble beneath family trauma, and the seduction of moving back home to live for free with the parental units overcomes the draw of adulthood and individuation. Nevertheless brotherly writing and directing team Jay and Mark Duplass infuse a fresh, generous-minded sweetness in this familiar narrative arc, mainly by empathetically following those surrounding, and maybe enabling, the stay-at-home. Spurred by a deep appreciation of Signs (2002) and plentiful bong hits, Jeff (Jason Segel) decides to go with the signals that the universe throws at him: a mysterious phone call for a Kevin leads him to stalk a kid wearing a jersey with that name and jump a candy delivery truck. This despite the frantic urging of his mother (Susan Sarandon), who has set the bar low and simply wants Jeff to repair a shutter for her birthday, and the bad influence of brother Pat (Ed Helms), a striving jerk who compensates for his insecurities by buying a Porsche and taking business meetings at Hooters. We never quite find out what triggered Jeff’s dormancy and Pat’s prickishness — two opposing responses to some unspecified psychic wound — yet by Jeff, Who Lives at Home’s close, it doesn’t really matter. The Duplass brothers convince you to go along for the ride, much like Jeff’s blessed fool, and accept the ultimately feel-good, humanist message of this kind-hearted take on human failings. (1:22) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*The Kid with a Bike Slippery as an eel, Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the bane of authorities as he tries to run away at any opportunity from school and a youth home — being convinced that the whole adult world is conspiring to keep his father away from him. During one such chase he literally runs into hair-salon proprietor Samantha (Cécile De France), who proves willing to host him on weekends away from his public facility, and is a patient, steadying influence despite his still somewhat exasperating behavior. It’s she who orchestrates a meeting with his dad (Jerémié Renier, who played the child in the Dardennes’ 1996 breakthrough La Promesse), so Cyril can confront the hard fact that his pa not only can’t take care of him, he doesn’t much want to. Still looking for some kind of older male approval, Cyril falls too easily under the sway of Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a teenage thug whom everyone in Samantha’s neighborhood knows is bad news. This latest neorealist-style drama from Belgium’s Dardenne Brothers treads on very familiar ground for them, both in themes and terse execution. It’s well-acted, potent stuff, if less resonant in sum impact than their best work. (1:27) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Mirror Mirror In this glittery, moderately girl-powery adaptation of the Snow White tale (a comic foil of sorts to this summer’s gloomier-looking Snow White and the Huntsman), Julia Roberts takes her turn as stepmom, to an earnest little ingenue (Lily Collins) whose kingly father (Sean Bean) is presumed dead and whose rather-teeny-looking kingdom is collapsing under the weight of fiscal ruin and a thick stratum of snow. Into this sorry realm rides a chiseled beefcake named Prince Alcott (Arnie Hammer), who hails from prosperous Valencia, falls for Snow White, and draws the attentions of the Queen (Roberts) from both a strategic and a libidinal standpoint. Soon enough, Snow White (Snow to her friends) is narrowly avoiding execution at the hands of the Queen’s sycophantic courtier-henchman (Nathan Lane), rustling up breakfast for a thieving band of stilt-walking dwarves, and engaging in sylvan hijinks preparatory to deposing her stepmother and bringing light and warmth and birdsong and perennials back into fashion. Director Tarsem Singh (2000’s The Cell, 2011’s Immortals) stages the film’s royal pageantry with a bright artistry, and Roberts holds court with vicious, amoral relish as she senses her powers of persuasion slipping relentlessly from her grasp. Carefully catering to tween-and-under tastes as well as those of their chaperones, the comedy comes in various breadths, and there’s meta-humor in the sight of Roberts passing the pretty woman torch, though Collins seems blandly unprepared to wield her power wisely or interestingly. Consider vacating your seats before the extraneous Bollywood-style song-and-dance number that accompanies the closing credits. (1:46) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*The Raid: Redemption As rip-roaring as they come, Indonesian import The Raid: Redemption (from, oddly, a Welsh writer-director, Gareth Huw Evans) arrives to reassure genre fans that action films are still being made without CG-embellished stunts, choppy editing, and gratuitous 3D. Fists, feet, and gnarly weapons do the heavy lifting in this otherwise simple tale of a taciturn special-forces cop (Iko Uwais) who’s part of a raid on a run-down, high-rise apartment building where all the tenants are crooks and the landlord is a penthouse-dwelling crime boss (Ray Sahetapy). Naturally, things go awry almost immediately, and floor-to-floor brawls (choreographed by Uwais and co-star Yayan Ruhian, whose character is aptly named “Mad Dog”) comprise nearly the entirety of the film; of particular interest is The Raid’s focus on pencak silat, an indigenous Indonesian fighting style — though there are also plenty of thrilling gun battles, machete-thwackings, and other dangerous delights. Even better: Redemption is the first in a planned trilogy of films starring Uwais’ badass (yet morally rock-solid) character. Bring it! (1:40) California, Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — ”Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House’s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) SF Center. (Chun)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) Four Star, Opera Plaza, Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Salt of Life Gianni Di Gregorio is both a triumph over and cautionary illustration of the aging uomo, racking up decades of experience yet still infantilized by that most binding tie. He’s a late bloomer who’s long worked in theater and film in various capacities, notably as a scenarist for 2008’s organized crime drama Gomorrah. That same year he wrote and directed a first feature basically shot in his own Rome apartment. Mid-August Lunch was a surprise global success casting the director himself as a putz, also named Gianni, very like himself (by his own admission), peevishly trying to have some independence while catering to the whims of the ancient but demanding mother (Valeria De Franciscis) he still lives with. Lunch was charming in a sly, self-deprecating way, and The Salt of Life is more of the same minus the usual diminishing returns: the creator’s barely-alter ego Gianni is still busy doing nothing much, dissatisfied not by his indolence but by its quality. But his pint-sized, wig-rocking, nearly century-old matriarch has now moved to a plush separate address with full-time care — and Salt’s main preoccupation is Gianni’s discovery that while he’s as available and interested in women as ever, at age 63 he is no longer visible to them. While Fellini confronted desirable, daunting womanhood with a permanent adolescent’s masturbatory fantasizing, Di Gregorio’s humbler self-knowledge finds comedy in the hangdog haplessness of an old dog who can’t learn new tricks and has forgotten the old ones. (1:30) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain Recent elections signal that Myanmar’s status as “the second-most isolated country on the planet,” per Robert H. Lieberman’s doc, may soon be changing. With that hopeful context, this insightful study of Myanmar (or Burma, depending on who’s referring to it) is particularly well-timed. Shot using clandestine methods, and without identifying many of its fearful interviewees — with the exception of recently-released-from-house-arrest politician Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner — They Call it Myanmar offers a revealing look at a country largely untouched by corporate influences and pop culture. Myanmar’s military dictatorship is the opposite of a cult of personality; it’s scarier, one subject reflects, because “it’s a system, not an individual,” with faceless leaders who can be quietly be replaced. The country struggles with a huge disconnect between the very rich and the very poor; it has a dismal health care system overrun by “quacks,” and an equally dismal educational system that benefits very few children. Hunger, disease, child labor — all prevalent. Surprisingly, though the conditions that surround them are grim, Myanmar’s people are shown to be generally happy and deeply spiritual as they go about their daily lives. A highlight: Lieberman’s interactions with excited Buddhist pilgrims en route to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, with an up-close look at the miraculously teetering “Golden Rock.” (1:23) Shattuck. (Eddy)

*This Is Not a Film Jafar Panahi is no longer allowed to make films in Iran. So, with the help of documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, he made This Is Not a Film. After arrests in 2009 and 2010, Panahi was sentenced to a 20-year ban from filmmaking and a six-year prison term for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” as reported by the Green Voice of Freedom, a human rights website. He is also barred from leaving the country or giving interviews. This Is Not a Film, an “effort” credited to him and Mirtahmasb, seems simple at first: Panahi eats breakfast and gets dressed in long, self-shot takes. Then, after Mirtahmasb arrives to take over the camera, he talks to his lawyer, begins to narrate and reconstruct the last film he was working on, explores memories of filmmaking, and interacts with his neighbors. The editing becomes more complex, more cinematic, and more problematic as the day progresses.There’s a cliché in criticism that certain technically accomplished movies are “pure cinema,” and in a sense, if this is not a film, it’s pure filmmaking. It presents itself as a document, but its authenticity is questionable, and for a man who is banned from filmmaking, so is its legitimacy. But it is a process in action and in dialogue with itself. It is an act of defiance, and the product of an artist’s self-effacing need to express himself. Whether or not this is a film, it is a profound artistic howl. (1:15) SF Film Society Cinema. (Stander)

Titanic 3D (3:14) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-‘80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Marina, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Wrath of the Titans Playing fast and loose with Greek myths but not agile enough to kick out a black metal jam during a flaming underworld power-grab, Wrath of Titans is, as expected, a bit of a CGI-crammed mess. Still, the sword-and-sandals franchise has attracted scads of international actorly talent — the cast is enriched this time by Édgar Ramírez (2010’s Carlos), Bill Nighy, and Rosamund Pike — and you do get at least one cool monster and paltry explication (Cerberus, which bolts from earth for no discernible reason except that maybe all hell is breaking loose). Just because action flicks like Cloverfield (2008) have long dispensed with narrative handlebars doesn’t mean that age-old stories like the Greek myths should get completely random with their titanic tale-spinning. Wrath opens on the twilight of the gods: Zeus (Liam Neeson) is practically groveling before Perseus (Sam Worthington) — now determined to go small, raise his son, and work on his fishing skills — and trying to persuade him to step up and help the Olympians hold onto power. Fellow Zeus spawn Ares (Ramírez) is along for the ride, so demigod up, Perseus. In some weird, last-ditch attempt to ream his bro Zeus, the oily, mulleted Hades (Ralph Fiennes) has struck a deal with their entrapped, chaotic, castrating fireball of a dad Cronus to let them keep their immortality, on the condition that Zeus is sapped of his power. Picking up Queen Andromeda (Pike) along the way, Perseus gets the scoop on how to get to Hell from Hephaestus (Nighy playing the demented Vulcan like a ‘60s acid casualty, given to chatting with mechanical owl Bubo, a wink to 1981 precursor Clash of the Titans, which set the bar low for the remake). Though there are some distracting action scenes (full of speedy, choppy edits that confuse disorientation for excitement) and a few intriguing monsters (just how did the Minotaur make it to this labyrinth?), there’s no money line like “Release the Kraken!” this time around, and there’s way too much nattering on about fatherly responsibility and forgiveness —making these feel-good divinities sound oddly, mawkishly Christian and softheaded rather than mythically pagan and brattily otherworldly. Wasn’t the appeal of the gods linked to the fact that they always acted more like outta-hand adolescents than holier-than-thou deities? I guess that’s why no one’s praying to them anymore. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

 

The problem with Laura’s Law

Andrew Lam
-
9

OPINION Mental health conditions and mental illness are issues that bring passionate people to the table from all sides of the spectrum. Individuals who have lived with the experience of mental-health conditions, clinicians, family members, researchers, and advocates all have a lot to say.

But as a March 11 San Francisco Chronicle piece, “Laura’s Law likely to save lives,” suggests, people can be fueled by pain and emotion, rather than logic and information. It’s in such a hot zone that AB 1421 emerged, after the tragic death of a young woman at the hands of a violent man who also happened to be dealing with mental health conditions.

The so-called Laura’s Law passed the state Legislature in 2002, and counties have a choice whether to implement it locally. If enacted in San Francisco, AB 1421 would mandate outpatient treatment for some people with mental illness — and those out of compliance would get a 72-hour hold under lock and key at the hospital, and would be at risk of being thrown into the revolving door of the criminal justice system.

The public support for AB 1421 and similar involuntary measures outlines the pervasive misunderstanding that comes when emotion rules the fray over common sense and dignity. And more dangerously, it promotes the long-debunked myth that mental illness is related to violence. In fact, individuals with mental illness are one percent less likely to commit violence than other individuals.

Often, the very people whose voices are left out of the decision making process in legislation such as AB 1421, are the ones who are directly affected personally by mental illness and mental-health conditions. That’s due in large part to the lasting impact of stigma, which deprives people of dignity, individual choice, and the empowerment to seek their own goals and paths in life.

What we know is this: voluntary treatment that is accessible in community settings and centered on individual strength is by far the best option for recovery from mental health conditions and the path for a rewarding, enriched life.

San Francisco typically leads the state in the number of involuntary commitments for people in acute psychiatric crisis. That’s proven to be not only a colossal waste of resources but also the wrong approach. Many of those who are involuntarily detained are accessing the mental health system for the first time—in restraints. This leads to further mistrust and trauma for those dealing with mental health challenges.

When it comes to embracing laws such as AB 1421, California voters know better. After the passage of that measure, California voters passed the landmark Mental Health Services Act in 2004. It is the principles of MHSA—voluntary, community-driven treatment, and full inclusion of individuals with mental health conditions as decision-makers—that should guide our efforts in recovery from mental health conditions and eliminating the pervasive stigma and bias that are the true culprits in causing pain and trauma in our society. MHSA provides funding for innovative, alternative approaches to Treatment As Usual.

Michael Gause is deputy director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.

 

CPMC strike linked to new hospital

Zelda Bronstein
-
13
CPMC strike linked to new hospital

I stopped by the picket line outside Davies hospital and chatted with the members of Operating Engineers Local 39, who have been working without a contract since October, 2010 — and I heard a story that ought to be part of the discussion over CPMC’s plans to build a shiny new hospital on Cathedral Hill.

The striking engineers (who operate and maintain machinery and equipment at the hospitals) say the only remaining issue in the dispute is pay scale — and the last, best offer that CPMC, a Sutter Health affiliate, has put on the table is lower than what Sutter pays members of the same union at other Bay Area hospitals. Why? According to Joseph Klein, Local 39 business rep, the CPMC negotiators were pretty specific:

“They told us they need the money to build their new hospital.”

The CPMC negotiators, he said, “don’t even question whether they can afford to pay us comparable salaries. They just say they want to spend the money on that project.”

Wow — that’s the first time I’ve heard anything so detailed and specific about CPMC essentially using lower wages to help fund the Cathedral Hill medical palace. So I called Kathie Graham, spokesperson for CPMC, and asked her about it.

“The primary reason for our offer was that the wage we proposed was comparable to the raises that our other hospital workers got,” she said.

Okay, but was the cost of the new hospital a factor? Actually, yes.

“The primary issue is equity,” she said. “But do we have a billion-dollar rebuild that we have to fund? Yes. Because of the whole way health care is going — and because we need to rebuild — we have to be very careful stewards of our nonprofit dollars.”

Both sides want to go back to the bargaining table, and I know labor talks are always complicated, and I hope it gets resolved quickly. But I think it’s fair to say that all CMPC workers need to take a lesson here: It’s going to be hard bargaining for quite some time to come.

And I hope the supervisors who are reviewing this consider where the construction money is coming from.

 

 

Guardian exclusive: the health-care scam chart

-
17

We’ve always found it a bit annoying when restaurants charge an additional fee to pay for Healthy San Francisco, the law that mandates health care for workers. If the cost of eggs goes up, there’s no “special breakfast cost pass-along surcharge.” So it seems to us more like a political statement in opposition to the law than a business expense.

That said, we’re happy to pay an extra 3 percent for a nice meal — if it means the people who cook and serve it get health insurance.

But it’s more than annoying to find that a lot of restaurants charge a special HSF fee — but it never goes for employee healthcare. Attached is an Excel file, based on data from the San Francisco Department of Labor Standards Enforcement, that shows which restaurants charge extra for health care — and how much of that money actually goes to employees.

We’ve also pulled out a list of the top 10 offenders — the restaurants who put the lowest percentage of their Health Savings Account money into actual employee health care. A caveat: Some of these places may just be lucky — maybe none of their employees got sick all year. But still, they’re collecting a surcharge for employee health care, and that’s not where the money’s going.

>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR EXCLUSIVE CHART OF RESTAURANTS WITH SURCHARGES — AND WHERE THE MONEY GOES (xls)

TOP 10 RESTAURANT OFFENDERS
 
Eagle Café

Surcharge: 3%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 55, 768

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $425.00

 
Tres Agraves

Surcharge: 4%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 103,503.00

Reimbursement Plan (total reimbursed): $1,497

 
Amici’s

Surcharge: 4.85%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 125,763.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $1,995

 
Blue Plate

Surcharge: 4%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 41,859.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $723

 
Park Chow

Surcharge: 2%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 93,072.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $1,680

 
2223 Restaurant

Surcharge: 4%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $79, 817

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $ 1,687

 
Johnny Foleys Irish House

Surcharge: 4%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $73, 133

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $ 1,550

 
MarketBar

Surcharge: 3%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 76,404.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $1,673

 
Andalu

Surcharge: 3%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 122,742.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $3,762

 
Wayfare Tavern

Surcharge: 3.5%

Reimbursement plan (total allocated): $ 60,114.00

Reimbursement plan (total reimbursed): $2,403

Fact: your heart will go on if you skip ‘Titanic 3D’

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Fact: your heart will go on if you skip ‘Titanic 3D’

We already made fun of Titanic 3D last week (spoiler alert: Kate aged better than Leo), and the only other big Hollywood cheese opening this week is American Reunion (spoiler alert: Alyson Hannigan‘s career has aged better than Jason Biggs‘).

Of slightly more urgent, politically relevent, Celine Dion-less note, check out Sam Stander’s review of This Is Not a Film, a movie by embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi that was literally smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake. It opens Fri/13 at the SF Film Society Cinema (a zone soon to be taken over by the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, kicking off April 19).

If you’re an artist yourself, possibly one who looks spiffy in a pair of chaps, the Folsom Street Fair (which has a new date this year!) has put out a call to independent filmmakers interested in working on a planned documentary on “the grandaddy of all leather events.” From the Folsom Street Events press release:

“Demetri Moshoyannis, Executive Director, said, ‘As Folsom Street Fair approaches its 30th anniversary, Folsom Street Events is seeking an independent filmmaker to help document our rich, diverse, and sometimes salacious history. With so much film talent in California, across the U.S., and even abroad, we believe that the development of Folsom Street Fair is a compelling story that must be shared.’ Jacob Richards, Board President, added, ‘The Board of Directors has agreed to provide support for the project in the form of a very modest grant (if requested), fundraising appeals to its donor base, access to historical documents and agency contacts, and more. We are hoping to receive a broad range of proposals from diverse filmmakers.'”

Head to www.folsomstreetevents.org for more info.

And if you’re simply looking for a new movie to see (The Hunger Games has grossed $373,330,642 worldwide … so far. Katniss Everdeen, you’ll never go hungry again!), you can geek out with Morgan Spurlock‘s fun doc Comic-Con IV: A Fan’s Hope; check out Moroccan filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’s latest, Free Men; see a couple of American Reunion cast members moonlight in the hockey flick Goon; and learn more about the recently-in-the-news-for-hopeful-reasons-for-once country of Myanmar in doc They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain. Reviews follow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN41gXXUlLI

Comic-Con IV: A Fan’s Hope When what is now known as the San Diego Comic-Con International launched in 1970, attendance consisted of a couple hundred comic-book fans. Now, it’s a huge event thronging with hundreds of thousands of geek-leaning movie, TV, video game, and — oh, yeah — comic-book fans; it’s also become an essential part of the hype-building machine for every major pop-culture property. Super Size Me (2004) director Morgan Spurlock’s lively doc examines the current state of Comic-Con with input from those who’ve ridden the nerd train to fame and fortune (Joss Whedon, Guillermo Del Toro, Stan Lee) — but the film’s most compelling sequences zero in on a handful of ordinary folks obsessed with the event for a variety of reasons. There’s the proprietor of a Denver comics shop, a 38-year Comic-Con veteran, faced with the chilling prospect of having to sell his most valuable (and most beloved) comic in order to keep his business afloat; the Carrie Brownstein look alike who spends the entire year crafting incredibly detailed costumes for Comic-Con’s annual masquerade contest; the soldier and family man who dreams of drawing comics for a living; and the sweetly dorky young man nervously planning to propose to his girlfriend … during a Kevin Smith panel. To its credit, Comic-Con IV never mocks its subjects, and it manages to infuse its many storylines with surprising emotional depth. Extra points for the clever, comics-inspired transitions, too. Director Spurlock appears in person for post-film Q&As Sun/8 at 5 and 7:30pm shows. (1:26) Vogue. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bXghcORxHo

Free Men Amid moderate hoopla for Casablanca‘s 70th anniversary, it’s a good time for something that was a whole lot more common back then — a wartime drama not about battle or victimization, but espionage intrigue crossing the lines between military, diplomatic, and civilian sectors. Arrested for participating in the black market in the occupied Paris of 1942, North African émigré Younes (Tahar Rahim from 2009’s A Prophet) evades prison or deportation by agreeing to spy on a local mosque suspected by the Nazis of harboring and smuggling out Jews. His clumsy efforts are quickly found out by a visiting imam (Michael Lonsdale), with the result that Younes — whose brother (Farid Larbi) is already a committed fighter in the Resistance underground — winds up playing double-agent, pretending to serve the police and SS while actually working against them. En route he becomes entangled in the disparate agendas of others including Leila (Lubna Azabal), who’s secretly involved in the Algerian liberation movement, and Salim (Mahmud Shalaby), an apolitical, bisexual singer whose career ambitions blind him to the personal dangers he risks. Ismaël Ferroukhi’s handsome, twisty drama won’t have you white-knuckling the armrests, but it’s an intelligent, satisfying throwback to the colorful characters and narrative intricacies of another era’s cinematic melodramas — with the welcome update of making non-white players our protagonists rather than “exotic” support players. (1:39) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytVoTYFT08

Goon An amiable Massachusetts bar bouncer who’s the odd one out within his highly-educated, high-achieving Jewish family (led by Eugene Levy), Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) can punch your lights out as easily — and with as little malice — as he’d flip a light switch. That skill looks useful to a local hockey team in need of an enforcer to disable relevant members of the opposing team when needed, then sit in the penalty box. Soon “Doug the Thug’s” burgeoning reputation brings him to the relative big leagues of Halifax, where his main job for the Highlanders is protecting a star (Marc-André Grondin) who’s been skittish since his serious bruising at the hands of “Ross the Boss” (Liev Schreiber), our hero’s veteran equivalent. Based very loosely on Doug “The Hammer” Smith’s memoir, this latest from director Michael Dowse (2004’s It’s All Gone Pete Tong) and co-scenarist Jay Baruchel (who also plays Doug’s incredibly crass best friend) is a cut above most Canadian hockey comedies — which, trust me, is not saying much. But it is indeed rather endearing eventually as an exercise in rude, pretty funny yet non-loutish humor about oafish behavior. A lot of its appeal has to do with Scott, who is arguably miscast and somewhat wasted as this “Hebrew Dolph Lundgren” — the actor’s forte being manic, impulsive, near-lunatic rather than slow-witted characters — yet who helps Goon maintain a no-foul friendliness in inverse proportion to its face-mashing action on ice. The writing could be sharper, but apparently there is only room for one smart hockey satire in our universe, and that spot was taken by Slap Shot 35 years ago. (1:30) Lumiere. (Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPDbdEN-XcM

They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain Recent elections signal that Myanmar’s status as “the second-most isolated country on the planet,” per Robert H. Lieberman’s doc, may soon be changing. With that hopeful context, this insightful study of Myanmar (or Burma, depending on who’s referring to it) is particularly well-timed. Shot using clandestine methods, and without identifying many of its fearful interviewees — with the exception of recently-released-from-house-arrest politician Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner — They Call it Myanmar offers a revealing look at a country largely untouched by corporate influences and pop culture. Myanmar’s military dictatorship is the opposite of a cult of personality; it’s scarier, one subject reflects, because “it’s a system, not an individual,” with faceless leaders who can be quietly be replaced. The country struggles with a huge disconnect between the very rich and the very poor; it has a dismal health care system overrun by “quacks,” and an equally dismal educational system that benefits very few children. Hunger, disease, child labor — all prevalent. Surprisingly, though the conditions that surround them are grim, Myanmar’s people are shown to be generally happy and deeply spiritual as they go about their daily lives. A highlight: Lieberman’s interactions with excited Buddhist pilgrims en route to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, with an up-close look at the miraculously teetering “Golden Rock.” (1:23) Bridge. (Eddy)

And if none of the above are weird or insane enough for your tastes, the new series at the Vortex Room, “Starship Vortex,” will not, we repeat not, in no way, shape, or form, let you down. Blast off!

End the health-care scam

-
15

OPINION Last year, after receiving data from San Francisco, the Wall Street Journal reported on an investigation into the use of health reimbursement accounts by several local restaurants. It showed a group of employers evading the city’s health care law while charging their customers a “Healthy San Francisco” surcharge that is never actually spent on employees’ health care.

Rather than providing health coverage to their workers, as customers are led to believe, the restaurants are allocating funds for HRAs — and taking back the funds before they can be used.

The numbers speak for themselves: Of the $62 million that was set aside for health care accounts in 2010, more than $50 million was kept by employers.

>>WHO’S GAMING THE SYSTEM? CLICK HERE FOR OUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO RESTAURANTS WITH SURCHARGES — AND WHERE THE MONEY GOES

Workers spoke about never being notified about the accounts; being forced to jump through numerous, often onerous hoops to receive reimbursements or never receiving reimbursements; facing severe restrictions on use of the funds; and fearing retaliation for seeking to access the funds. It was clear that as long as employers can take back unspent funds they have a large incentive to restrict workers’ access.

In response, Supervisor Campos drafted an amendment to the Health Care Security Ordinance (known as Healthy San Francisco) that would have closed this loophole, which was being exploited by a small number of employers. The Chamber of Commerce, accompanied by the San Francisco Chronicle, made hysterical claims about impending job loss and business closures, and after the Board of Supervisors approved the legislation on a 6-5 vote, Mayor Ed Lee vetoed it.

Supervisors Malia Cohen and David Chiu then authored “compromise” legislation that actually didn’t address the problem. Their version merely allowed employers to take back workers’ health care dollars after two years instead of one. This cosmetic change did, however, provide enough window dressing to please the Chamber, so the supervisors approved it and Mayor Lee signed it into law.

Now, just a few months later, an article in the Public Press showed exactly why we opposed the Cohen/Chiu amendment in the first place: It doesn’t really close the loophole. Employers can still take money back from the HRAs. This creates a clear incentive to choose HRAs over insurance — the worst option for workers. Furthermore, the loophole leaves responsible businesses that provide health coverage to employees through insurance or HSF competing against employers that exploit it by paying less into HRAs.

We find it unconscionable that there are businesses charging customers a health-care surcharge and then keeping the money for profit. What is more unconscionable is that City Hall passed an amendment that continues to let it happen.

The Department of Labor Standards Enforcement compliance data for 2011 will be available next month — and if that continues to show abuse of the HRA provision, then it’s time for the Board of Supervisors to end the charade and truly close the loophole once and for all. Healthy San Francisco is about providing health care for workers — not creating additional profit for businesses.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano represents the 13th District. Supervisor David Campos represents District 9.

1...91011...18Page 10 of 18

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org