Internet Archives — Page 30 of 54 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Civil Sidewalks, Lewis Lapham, and the struggle for the soul of cities

Sasha Cuttler

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October 8, 2010

Civil Sidewalks, Lewis Lapham, and the struggle for the soul of cities

Cities often get vilified as the cauldrons of all that’s wrong in the world – greed, vice, pollution, and all manner of social ills – but they are also the incubators of ideas that are humankind’s last best shot at solving the social and environmental problems that threaten our long-term stability and prosperity. So ruminating on the indispensable role of cities, as Lapham’s Quarterly does with its fall issue, is more than just an academic exercise or interesting read.

“The Census Bureau counts 232,581,397 Americans, 82.6 percent of the population, living in the nation’s cities, but if our moralists and intelligence services are to be believed, they do so at no small risk to the safety of their persons and the security of their souls,” editor Lewis Lapham, who ran the venerable Harper’s Magazine before stepping down to start LQ, writes in the opening essay of an issue entitled simply “The City.”

Lapham goes on to note the contradiction of how rural areas and suburbs get celebrated as somehow housing the more noble values of the common folk, raising the questions, “If the city is the sewer of vice and a slough of despond, why do so many people choose to live there? On what toxic landfill does the city stand as the embodiment of its ennobling cognate, civilization?”

In an interview with the Bay Guardian, Lapham puts the increasingly important role of cities even more succinctly: “The future is urban.” As the population grows and natural resources become more scarce – and as sea levels rise – the population of cities will swell and the imperative of solving our long neglected problems will grow. And where else but the cities will new ideas find their laboratories?

But in San Francisco and other big cities, many still struggle with what it means to be a city, with all the tolerance for messy urban realities that entails. Witness Prop. L on SF’s fall ballot, which actually seeks to outlaw the simple act of sitting on a sidewalk, or as its proponents call it (in an ironic testament to their desire for order above all things), the Civil Sidewalks Law.

Lapham told me this fear of the great unwashed masses (“The rich are afraid of the poor”), an emotion that has fueled the growth of the suburbs and the massive waste of resources that entailed, has hindered the ability and willingness of city leaders to advocate for common values and define the lead role that cities should be playing in this troubled country.

“We don’t have an idea of the city as a great, good place, and we have to start with that,” Lapham told us. “We have to decide what is a city, what work does it do, what is the value, and how do we promote that value.”

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is a good place to start that debate. As always, the journal includes the writings of great thinkers throughout time, from Thucydides writing about Athens in 430 BC to Frederick Kaufman writing about New York City in 2008. Celebrated urbanist Jane Jacobs does a great job of capturing the allure of cities – that special something that seems to escape the fearful promoters of Civil Sidewalks – in an essay she wrote about NYC in 1961.

“Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda pop on stoops, and having passed a judgment, the gist of which is, ‘This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn’t be on the street!’ This judgment represents a profound misunderstanding of cities. It makes no more sense than to drop in at a testimonial banquet in a hotel and conclude that if these people had wives who could cook, they would give their parties at home,” she writes. “The point of both the testimonial banquet and the social life of city sidewalks is precisely that they are public. They bring people together who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion – and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion. Nobody can keep an open house in a great city. Nobody wants to. And yet if interesting, useful, and significant contacts among people are confined to acquaintances suitable for private life, the city becomes stultified.”

Indeed, that was the observation that journalist H.L Mencken wrote about many East Coast as he penned an essay in 1920 celebrating San Francisco as “an American city that somehow managed to hold itself above pollution by the national philistinism and craze for standardization, the appalling progress of 100 percent Americanism, the sordid and pathetic dream of unimaginative, timorous, and inferior men.”

Mencken says he can’t quite put a finger on what makes San Francisco so special, touching on our international influences and the fortitude developed by braving fog, steep hills, and messy urban realities, which he says have given us a unique appreciation for life. “The San Franciscans have learned how to bear it. They are stupendously alive while they are in motion, but they knock off betimes. The town is rich in loafing places: restaurants, theaters, parks. No one seems to work very hard. The desperate, consuming industry of the East is quite unknown. One could not imagine a sweatshop in the town. Puffs of Oriental air come with the fog. There is nothing European about the way life is lived; the color is all Asiatic.”

A decidedly different portrait of San Francisco comes in the journal’s only other entry on this city, written in 1849 by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who helped establish an important military base in a city that had only recently changed its name from Yerba Buena and which was about the explode with the discovery of gold in the Sierras.

“All the town lay along Montgomery Street, from Sacramento to Jackson, and about the plaza. Gambling was the chief occupation of the people. While they were waiting for the cessation of the rainy season, and the beginning of spring, all sorts of house were being put up, but of the most flimsy kind, and all were stores, restaurants, or gambling saloons,” wrote the military man, who didn’t much care for the city.

Yet for those who appreciate the role of cities as generators of culture and incubators of ideas, there’s no question that our future is urban, although even Lapham has his doubts that the great solutions will come from the cities, preferring to see the Internet and its virtual communities as usurping from cities the role of intellectual hubs.

“The intellectual engine of the Bay Area is centered in the Silicon Valley world rather than on Montgomery Street in San Francisco,” he told us, noting how little the financial firms that dominate downtown San Francisco or Wall Street in his home city of New York have to do with addressing the real problems the world faces.

He’s right, of course, but that’s also why the struggles for the soul of cities are so important and consequential, and why the the Bay Guardian has spilled so much ink fighting downtown over our 44-year history. Because to give in to the bankers and Civil Sidewalks crowd is to give up on the city.

It’s not a new struggle, as Friedrich Engels wrote about London in 1844: “Everywhere one finds on the one hand the most barbarous indifference and selfish egotism and on the other the most distressing scenes of misery and poverty. Signs of social conflict are to be found everywhere. Everyone turns his house into a fortress to defend himself – under the protection of the law – form the depredations of his neighbors. Class warfare is so open and shameless that is has to be seen to be believed. The observer of such as appalling state of affairs must shudder at the consequences of such feverish activity and can only marvel that so crazy a social and economic structure should survive at all.”

Four years later, Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto” with Karl Marx, diagnosing the problems of capitalism and laying out solutions that came awfully close to taking root around the world before they were defeated by Western military and economic powers. Yet the problems persist to this day, manifested most visibly in cities around the world.

Lapham does admit that cities will be the laboratories and incubators of the ideas that are developed. Given the political dysfunction on the state and federal levels, he also agrees with the contention of Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond that the age of he Nation-State as the preeminent political authority is passing, and that its likely replacement is the City-State.

“To make democracy work, it needs to be relatively small,” Lapham said, agreeing that localism is the model that is being widely discussed as the answer to many of our political, environmental, and economic problems. And that all comes back to the cities, provided we can seize the opportunity to define ourselves, or as Lapham said, “One of the things we’re missing is the idea of a glorious future of some kind.”

Scroll of sound

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC One of the singular ironies among the speedy online dissemination of sounds has to be the rediscovery of so many 1960s- and ’70s-era women singer-songwriters who came, sang, and seemingly disappeared in the wake of Joni, Judy, and Joan. Singular among Judee Sill, Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton, and those other ladies of the canyon is Linda Perhacs, the maker of Parallelograms, an achingly beautiful ode to nature and an all-too-brief testament to one young woman’s life, first released on Kapp in 1970 and most recently re-released in 2008 by Sunbeam.

From the start, psychedelic and folk-rock aficionados have been swept away by Parallelograms‘ opener "Chimacum Rain," as Perhacs’ overdubbed harmonies pour down like a sweet shower in the Olympic Peninsula while she tenderly pieces out, "I’m spacing out, I’m seeing/ Silences between leaves." But the title track is the heart of the album. A child of both Joni Mitchell and Free Design, with its jazzy washes of atonal color, circling Celtic guitar figure, and exploratory electronic effects, "Parallelograms" is a genuinely haunting masterpiece of experimental psychedelia — a future-folk madrigal that has inspired artists as disparate as Daft Punk (which used her "If You Were My Man" demo in 2007’s Electroma) and Devendra Banhart (who sang with Perhacs on "Freely," from 2007’s Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon).

It’s a recording informed by the natural world of Perhacs, born Linda Jean Arnold in Southern California, raised among the the redwoods of Mill Valley, and relocated once more to Topanga Canyon as a young dental hygienist. By day, she’d work on the teeth of the famous and talented in Beverly Hills, and on the weekend, she and her husband, artist Les Perhacs, would venture into the "very raw wilderness" of Big Sur, Mendocino, and Alaska, she tells me today from LA, where she continues to apply her healing powers to celebrated smiles. "I’d walk the beaches in Baja, California, or the Sea of Cortez, Canada or the Pacific Northwest. I’d spend a lot of time alone walking — that’s when I started to write songs. It just seemed to come naturally in the middle of such beauty. I was just describing what I was seeing."

That vision — and its sonic incarnation — was recognized by Oscar-winning film composer Leonard Rosenman, a patient who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg and befriended Perhacs. Once he heard her rough demo and saw her "scroll" — her sketchlike notation for the song "Parallelograms," which she saw as a "moving sound sound-sculpture" — Rosenman decided he had to record her. "He said, ‘I could live a lifetime and only come up with two ideas this good,’" recalls Perhacs. The composer gave Universal Records a demo of two of her more conventional songs, secured funding, and assembled such ace players as guitarist Steve Cohn and percussionists Shelley Mann and Milt Holland to play on the LP, telling Perhacs, "If you see the executives from Universal walking in with suits, switch to another song because they’ll never understand this piece." In Perhacs’ words, "He supported me, but let the creativity of a young person come through."

Perhacs’ rare vision continues to shine through, though she never tried to replicate Parallelograms‘ many-layered vocals and effects live until recently. In fact, her forthcoming San Francisco Art Institute concert of new material — and a few songs from the 1970 classic, she promises — is only her third public performance. Rather, after making her powerful, influential sole disc, life — and spirit — called Perhacs, who passionately holds forth on theosophist Annie Besant’s thought forms (which find a place in Perhacs’ SFIAF concert), Paramahansa Yogananda, and Sister Josefa Mendez’s unabridged The Way of Divine Love.

"I’m a trained nurse," explains the songwriter, who remembers making music at age 5. "I know this stuff isn’t good for people. I know I lost a bunch of close friends in the ’70s. "Paper Mountain Man" — we lost him at 33. He was being a space pilot with his mind, and we lost him. I knew the dangers, and I knew from working on entertainment personalities in Beverly Hills. I didn’t want that world. I knew it would have an effect on an unformed personality. My sense of caution told me, ‘Do not go on the road and try to live that kind of life.’ My sense of inner balance told me, ‘Keep your balance.’"

The lack of label promotion and the first pressing of Parallelograms, badly remixed for AM radio, discouraged Perhacs from pursuing music further, until a 2003 visit by Wild Places’ Michael Piper, who first reissued the album on CD using the original LP. Shortly before his visit, Perhacs had almost died of pneumonia, but she soon discovered that her album had found a second life, too: "I was really weak when this guy got a hold of me and said, ‘The Internet has sent the album all over the world. I just felt guilty that you didn’t know what was going on.’" Perhacs had hung on to her own masters as well as demos she made after Parallelograms, and with Piper’s help, the original mix and never-before-heard songs like "If You Were My Man" were finally released. A vinyl version of Parallelograms as it was meant to be heard is due soon on Mexican Summer.

And Perhacs is making new music, inspired and supported by such friends and fans as We Are the World’s Aaron Robinson and Robbie Williamson, and Julia Holter, who performed with her not long ago at Red Cat in LA — a new community akin to her long-ago Topanga Canyon creative milieu. "When we had a budget it went really quickly and was very organized," she says sweetly today. "We all have straight gigs, as you call them, so it’s hard to get us all together to rehearse or record." Nevertheless, she adds, "I felt very comfortable with what I stayed with, which was spiritual pursuit. Going on the road did not feel right to me, but at this stage of my life, I don’t feel vulnerable — you could put me in the middle of a million people and I would feel solid with the choices I made."

LINDA PERHACS
With Julia Holter and CLoudS
Sat/9, 7 p.m., $17
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut, SF
www.human-ear.org

Endorsements 2010: State races

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

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GOVERNOR

EDMUND G. BROWN

We have issues with Jerry Brown. The one-time environmental leader who left an admirable progressive legacy his first time in the governor’s office (including the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the California Conservation Corps, and the liberal Rose Bird Supreme Court) and who is willing to stand up and oppose the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant has become a centrist, tough-on-crime, no-new-taxes candidate. And his only solution to the state budget problems is to bring all the players together early and start talking.

But at least since he’s started to debate Republican Meg Whitman face to face, he’s showing some signs of life — and flashes of the old Jerry. He’s strongly denouncing Whitman’s proposal to wipe out capital gains taxes, reminding voters of the huge hole that would blow in the state budget — and the $5 billion windfall it would give to the rich. He’s talking about suing Wall Street financial firms that cheated Californians. He’s promoting green jobs and standing firm in support of the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions limits.

For all his drawbacks (his insistence, for example, that the Legislature shouldn’t raise any taxes without a statewide vote of the people), Brown is at least part of the reality-based community. He understands that further tax cuts for the rich won’t solve California’s problems. He knows that climate change is real. He’s not great on immigration issues, but at least he’s cognizant that 2 million undocumented immigrants live in California — and the state can’t just arrest and deport them all.

Whitman is more than a conservative Republican. She’s scary. The centerpiece of her economic platform calls for laying off 40,000 state employees — thereby greatly increasing the state’s unemployment rate. Her tax plan would increase the state’s deficit by another $5 billion just so that a tiny number of the richest taxpayers (including her) can keep more of their money. She’s part of the nativist movement that wants to close the borders.

She’s also one of the growing number of candidates who think personal wealth and private-sector business success translate to an ability to run a complex state government. That’s a dangerous trend — Whitman has no political experience or background (until recently she didn’t even vote) and will be overcome by the lobbyists in Sacramento.

This is a critically important election for California. Vote for Jerry Brown.

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR

GAVIN NEWSOM

Why is the mayor of San Francisco running for a job he once dismissed as worthless? Simple: he couldn’t get elected governor, and he wants a place to perch for a while until he figures out what higher office he can seek. It’s almost embarrassing in its cold political calculus, but that’s something we’ve come to expect from Newsom.

We endorsed Newsom’s opponent, Janice Hahn, in the Democratic primary. It was hard to make a case for advancing the political career of someone who has taken what amounts to a Republican approach to running the city’s finances — he’s addressed every budget problem entirely with cuts, pushed a “no-new-taxes” line, and given the wealthy everything they wanted. His immigration policies have broken up families and promoted deporting kids. He’s done Pacific Gas and Electric Co. a nice favor by doing nothing to help the community choice aggregation program move forward.

Nevertheless, we’re endorsing Newsom over his Republican opponent, Abel Maldonado, because there really isn’t any choice. Maldonado is a big supporter of the death penalty (which Newsom opposes). He’s pledged never to raise taxes (and Newsom is at least open to discussion on the issue). He used budget blackmail to force the awful open-primaries law onto the ballot. He’s a supporter of big water projects like the peripheral canal. In the Legislature, he earned a 100 percent rating from the California Chamber of Commerce.

Newsom’s a supporter of more funding for higher education (and the lieutenant governor sits on the University of California Board of Regents). He’d be at least a moderate environmentalist on the state Lands Commission. And he, like Brown, is devoting a lot of attention to improving the state’s economy with green jobs.

We could do much worse than Newsom in the lieutenant governor’s office. We could have Maldonado. Vote for Newsom.

SECRETARY OF STATE

DEBRA BOWEN

California has had some problems with the office that runs elections and keeps corporate filings. Kevin Shelley had to resign from the job in 2005 in the face of allegations that a state grant of $125,000 was illegally diverted into his campaign account. But Bowen, by all accounts, has run a clean office. Her Republican opponent, Damon Dunn, a former professional football player and real estate agent, doesn’t even have much support within his own party and is calling for mandatory ID checks at the ballot. This one’s easy; vote for Bowen.

CONTROLLER

JOHN CHIANG

Chiang’s been a perfectly decent controller, and at times has shown some political courage: When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to cut the pay of state employees to minimum-wage level, Chiang refused to go along — and forced the governor to back down. His opponent, state Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Los Angeles), wants to use to office to promote cuts in government spending. Vote for Chiang.

TREASURER

BILL LOCKYER

Lockyer’s almost certain to win reelection as treasurer against a weak Republican, Mimi Walters. He’s done an adequate job and pushed a few progressive things like using state bonds to promote alternative energy. Mostly, though, he seems to be waiting for his chance to run for governor — and if Jerry Brown loses, or wins and decides not to seek a second term, look for Lockyer to step up.

ATTORNEY GENERAL

KAMALA HARRIS

This is going to be close, and it’s another clear choice. We’ve had our differences with Harris — she’s trying too hard to be a tough-on-crime type, pushing some really dumb bills in Sacramento (like a measure that would bar sex offenders from ever using social networking sites on the Internet). And while she shouldn’t take all the blame for the problems in the San Francisco crime lab, she should have known about the situation earlier and made more of a fuss. She’s also been slow to respond to serious problem of prosecutors and the cops hiding information about police misconduct from defense lawyers that could be relevant to a case.

But her opponent, Los Angeles D.A. Steve Cooley, is bad news. He’s a big proponent of the death penalty, and the ACLU last year described L.A. as the leading “killer county in the country.” Cooley has proudly sent 50 people to death row since he became district attorney in 2001, and he vows to make it easier and more efficient for the state to kill people.

He’s also a friend of big business who has vowed, even as attorney general, to make the state more friendly to employers — presumably by slowing prosecutions of corporate wrongdoing.

Harris, to her credit, has refused to seek the death penalty in San Francisco, and would bring the perspective of a woman of color to the AG’s office. For all her flaws, she would be far better in the AG’s office than Cooley. Vote for Harris.

INSURANCE COMMISSIONER

DAVE JONES

Jones, currently a state Assemblymember from Sacramento, won a contested primary against his Los Angeles colleague Hector de la Torre and is now fighting Republican Mike Villines of Fresno, also a member of the Assembly. Jones is widely known as a consumer advocate and was a foe of Prop. 17, the insurance industry scam on the June ballot. A former Legal Aid lawyer, he has extensive experience in health-care reform, supports single-payer health coverage, and would make an excellent insurance commissioner.

Villines pretty much follows right-wing orthodoxy down the line. He wants to replace employer-based insurance with health savings accounts. He argues that the solution to the cost of health insurance is to limit malpractice lawsuits. He wants to limit workers compensation claims. And he supports “alternatives to litigation,” which means eliminating the rights of consumers to sue insurance companies.

Not much question here. Vote for Jones.

BOARD OF EQUALIZATION, DISTRICT 1

BETTY YEE

The Board of Equalization isn’t well known, but it plays a sizable role in setting and enforcing California tax policy. Yee’s a strong progressive who has done well in the office, supporting progressive financial measures. She’s spoken out — as a top tax official — in favor of legalizing and taxing marijuana. We’re happy to endorse her for another term.

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

TOM TORLAKSON

We fully expected a November runoff between Torlakson and state Sen. Gloria Romero. Both Democrats had strong fundraising and political bases — and very different philosophies. Romero’s a big charter school and privatization fan; Torlakson has the support of the teachers unions. But to the surprise of nearly everyone, a wild-card candidate, retired Los Angeles educator Larry Aceves, came in first, with Torlakson second and Romero third. Now Aceves and Torlakson are in the runoff for this nonpartisan post.

Aceves is an interesting candidate, a former principal and school superintendent who has the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Green Party. But he’s too quick to take the easy line that the teachers’ unions are the biggest problem in public education, and he wants the unilateral right to suspend labor contracts.

Torlakson wants more charter-school accountability and more funding for primary education. He’s the far better candidate.

STATE SENATE

DISTRICT 8

Leland Yee

Yee’s got no opposition to speak of, and will easily be re-elected. So why is he spending money on a series of slick television ads that have been airing all over San Francisco, talking about education and sending people to his website? It’s pretty obvious: The Yee for state Senate campaign is the opening act of the Yee for San Francisco mayor campaign, which should kick into high gear sometime next spring. In other words, if Yee has his way, he’ll serve only a year of his next four-year term.

Yee infuriates his colleagues at times, particularly when he refuses to vote for a budget that nobody likes but everyone knows is necessary to keep the state afloat. He’s done some ridiculous things, like pushing to sell the Cow Palace as surplus state property and turn the land over to private real estate developers. But he’s always good on open-government issues, is pushing for greater accountability for companies that take tax breaks and then send jobs out of state, has pushed for accountability at the University of California, and made great progress in opening the records at semiprivate university foundations when he busted Stanislaus State University for its secret speaking-fees deal with Sarah Palin.

With a few strong reservations, we’ll endorse Yee for another term.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 12

FIONA MA

A clear hold-your-nose endorsement. Ma has done some truly bad things in Sacramento, like pushing a bill that would force the San Francisco Unified School District to allow military recruiters in the high schools and fronting for landlords on a bill to limit rent control in trailer parks. But she’s good on public power and highly critical of PG&E, and she has no opposition to speak of.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 13

TOM AMMIANO

Ammiano’s a part of San Francisco history, and without his leadership as a supervisor, we might not have a progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors. Ammiano was one of the architects of the return to district elections, and his 1999 mayoral campaign (against Willie Brown) marked a turning point in the organization, sophistication, and ultimate success of the city’s left. He was the author of the rainy day fund (which has kept the public schools from massive layoffs over the past couple of years) and the Healthy San Francisco plan.

In Sacramento, he’s been a leader in the effort to legalize (and tax) marijuana and to demand accountability for the BART Police. He’s taken on the unpleasant but critical task of chairing the Public Safety Committee and killing the worst of the right-wing crime bills before they get to the floor. He has four more years in Sacramento, and we expect to see a lot more solid progressive legislation coming out of his office. We enthusiastically endorse him for reelection.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 14

NANCY SKINNER

Skinner’s a good progressive, a good ally for Ammiano on the Public Safety Committee, and a friend of small business and fair taxation. Her efforts to make out-of-state companies that sell products in California pay state sales tax would not only bring millions into the state coffers but protect local merchants from the likes of Amazon. We don’t get why she’s joined with Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to try to get rid of Kriss Worthington, the most progressive member of the Berkeley City Council, but we’ll endorse her for re-election.

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 16

SANDRE SWANSON

Swanson’s a good vote most of the time in Sacramento, but he’s not yet the leader he could be — particularly on police accountability. The BART Police murdered Oscar Grant in Swanson’s district, yet it fell to a San Franciscan, Tom Ammiano, to introduce strong state legislation to force BART to have civilian oversight of the transit cops. Still, he’s done some positive things (like protecting state workers who blow the whistle on fraud) and deserves another term.

>>BACK TO ENDORSEMENTS 2010

Film listings

David Talbot

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October 5, 2010

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. The film intern is Ryan Prendiville. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

The 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival runs Oct 7-17 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; Century Cinema, 41 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera; Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; and CinéArts@Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. For tickets (most shows $12.50), call 1-877-874-6833 or visit www.mvff.com. "5@5" events are short-film programs. All times p.m. unless otherwise indicated.

THURS/7

Rafael The King’s Speech 7.

Sequoia Conviction 7, 7:15. Nowhere Boy 9:45.

FRI/8

Rafael Cut Poison Burn 6. Katalin Varga 6:30. "Spotlight on Alejandro González Iñárritu:" Biutiful 7. Tehran Tehran 8:30. Estigmas 8:45.

Sequoia "5@5: Gimme Some Truth" 5. Made in Dagenham 6:30. Queen of Hearts 7:15. Desert Flower 9. Dumas 9:30.

Throck "John Lennon at 70: A Live Concert" 8.

SAT/9

Rafael Eep! 10:30am. "New Movies Lab: The Future of Distribution" noon. TBA 12:15. Space, Land and Time 1. Tehran Tehran 2:15. Patagonia 3:15. Opal 3:30. Adrift 4:45. From a Whisper 6. "Tribute to Edward Norton:" Stone 7. Sand 7:15. About Her Brother 8:15. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone 9:30.

Sequoia The Indian 11am. Food Stamped 1. The Reverse 2:45. Child of Giants 3:30. Kawasaki’s Rose 5:15. Puzzle 6:15. Love Crimes 7:30. The River Why 8:15. "Hi De Ho Show" 10.

Throck "Children’s Film Fest Opening Party Extravaganza" 12:30. "The Jay Clay Trilogy" 4. Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World 7:30.

SUN/10

Rafael Estigmas 12:30. Cosmonauts 12:45. Most Valuable Players 1. Becloud 2:45. The Tempest 3. Lesson Plan: Story of the Third Wave 3:30. About Her Brother 5:30. "Centerpiece:" Miral 5:45. Atomic Mom 6. Cut Poison Burn 6:15. Mr. Bjarnfredarson 8:30. Desert Flower 9.

Sequoia Twigson 11am. Sebbe noon. Precious Life 2. Moloch Tropical 2:15. From a Whisper 4:45. Cruz Reynoso 5. Leave Them Laughing 7. TBA 7:15. Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World 9:30.

Throck The Crocodiles 1:30. Truth Be Told 4:15. "Cinemasports" 8.

MON/11

Rafael "5@5: Just Like Starting Over" 5. The Two Horses of Genghis Khan 6. Precious Life 6:15. Cruz Reynoso 6:45. Child of Giants 8:30. Of Love and Other Demons 8:45. Kawasaki’s Rose 9:15.

Sequoia Dumas 4:45. "5@5: Watching the Wheels" 5. To Educate a Girl 7. Made in Dagenham 7:15. TBA 9:30.

Throck Space, Land and Time 7.

TUES/12

Cinema Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back 6:30.

Rafael "5@5: Gimme Some Truth" 5. Food Stamped 6. Blue Valentine 6:15. Opal 7. Leave Them Laughing 8:30. Black Field 9. Sand 9:15.

Sequoia "5@5: Working Class Hero" 5. Queen of the Sun 6. Cast Me If You Can 7. Kung Fu Chefs 8:30. Sebbe 9:30.

OPENING

Enter the Void See "Noé Thanks." (2:17) Bridge, Shattuck.

*Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods The common stereotypes of a comic book writer’s life usually don’t include tales of swinging sex clubs, playing in rock bands, dressing in drag, and diving headfirst into the world of psychedelic drugs. Scottish-born artist Grant Morrison, on the other hand, has built a reputation for himself as a sort of comic world bad-boy, while putting his psychologically dark, surreal stamp on comics such as The Invisibles, Doom Patrol and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Talking with Gods is pretty traditional in its talking-head retelling of Morrison’s career, and at times goes a little overboard with peers and coworkers trying hard to sell his shaman-like persona. But comic fans will eat this stuff up, and newbies can get a sense of how far this medium has come from just being for the kids. (1:30) Roxie. (Landon Moblad)

I Spit on Your Grave Riding on the still-shocking premise of Meir Zarchi’s 1978 exploitation flick and given a cranked-up revamp — post-9/11 video beheadings, torture horror offerings a la Hostel (2005) and the Saw series — this unrated remake arrives with its initial writer-director’s blessing (Zarchi co-executive produced), while foregrounding the hillbilly dread of the original and amplifying its qualities as a not-quite-literary female Deliverance (1972) with an emphasis on no-holds-barred, gorily poetic revenge. The spare framework of the original remains the same: Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) is a writer working on a novel and in search of peace and quiet. She finds some unsettling quiet in an isolated rural cabin, but little peace as director Steven R. Monroe aims the hand-held on the farm implements that will come in all-too-handy in the second half of the film. Jennifer’s run-ins with lascivious, sadistic locals (Daniel Frenzies, Jeff Branson, Rodney Eastman, and Andrew Howard) escalate into scary, bullying cat-and-mouse games and continue ratcheting up until Jennifer has been brutally gang-raped, all of which is documented on video and is sickeningly extended for the audience in turn. The rest of the film turns the tables, gruesomely, on the torturers as they run scared through the always dark, beautiful, impervious woods, and Jennifer becomes a kind of vengeful ghost, a sister spirit of The Ring goblin-girl, sans psychology, contrition, and on-camera consequences. In place of the sad-Buster-faced Camille Keaton in the original is the wraith-thin Butler, who turns in a necessarily brave performance, though, through little fault of her own, her character remains startlingly opaque — the unlikely object of men’s most offensive sexual fantasies turned into the savage instrument, hedge clippers sharpened, of women’s ruthless revenge fantasies. (1:47) Metreon. (Chun)

It’s Kind of a Funny Story Largely self-inflicted scholastic pressures having manifested themselves in an array of symptoms from "stress vomiting" to suicidal ideations, depressive Brooklyn teen Craig (Keir Gilchrist) rides his bicycle to a local hospital and announces he needs help. Expecting to be fussed over a bit and given some nice tranquilizing pill, he’s dismayed instead when the no-nonsense intake psychiatrist (Viola Davis) tells him it’s her obligation to commit him for a minimum five days’ observation. Worse, the facility’s youth psych ward is being renovated, so he’s tossed in with the crazy adults. Other residents are led by comely but self-cutting fellow teen Noelle (Emma Roberts) and mentoring yet self-sabotaging Bobby (Zach Galifianakis). Based on Ned Vizzini’s semi-autobiographical novel, Funny Story is well acted (even or especially by the atypically subdued Galifianakis), its mixed humor and poignancy nicely negotiated by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck in their third feature. But compared to the duo’s prior Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008), this seems conventional and a little soft — hewing dangerously close to that sentimentally twee notion (popularized in 1966’s King of Hearts, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al.) that we’re all "crazy" and lunatics are really the wisest fools of all. Heartwarming life lessons get learned, needless to say. The cuteness climaxes with an "Under Pressure" music video fantasy that belongs in an episode of Glee — not, perhaps, in a movie that begins with a 15-year-old seriously considering jumping from a bridge. (1:51) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Harvey)

Life as We Know It "You have poo on your face." (1:52) Presidio.

My Soul to Take Wes Craven sure loves serial killers. (1:46)

*Secretariat In this biopic of one of the most-celebrated horses in U.S. history, Denver housewife and mother of four Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) returns to the Kentucky horse-breeding farm where she grew up, drawn to the project of reviving the ailing business. She pins her hopes on an unborn foal of questionable marketability, who she comes to believe is destined for greatness. Secretariat — or Big Red, as he’s known to his friends — is raised in the light of this belief by a small, reverent circle including his trainer (John Malkovich), his jockey (professional rider Otto Thorwarth), his groom (True Blood‘s Nelsan Ellis), and the farm’s longtime secretary (Margo Martindale), and he goes on to attain the status of a national folk hero. Director Randall Wallace has crafted an appropriately epic tale — and heavily salted the film with messages about unswerving faith and determination and hope and glory, mostly delivered in ringing, overwrought tones by Lane (which undercuts the pleasure of seeing her character quietly pursue a larger setting than the domestic scene she inhabits at Secretariat‘s outset). But somehow it’s harder to poke fun when the hero of the story is a horse, especially one of such majestic stature and jaw-dropping prowess. Each time Secretariat goes surging around the oval, in one of the film’s white-knuckle race sequences, the clichés fly and then fall away like dirt on the track. (1:56) Presidio, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

ONGOING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane." You can see why director Vikram Jayanti scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." (1:42) Roxie. (Chun)

*Buried Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ first English-language feature has one of the most deeply unsettling openings in recent memory: a pitch-black screen gradually soundtracked by the waking, disorientation, and frantic scratching made by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) as he realizes he’s been buried alive. A U.S. civilian contractor (the good, reconstructionist kind, not the gun-crazy, mercenary "security" type) in Iraq, he struggles to calm down as he uses a pocket lighter to view the coffin he’s trapped in. Finding a flashlight and cell phone, he soon receives a call from his kidnappers informing he has just 90 minutes of oxygen (and probably less time on the phone’s running-down battery) to raise a considerable ransom. Chris Sparling’s clever screenplay and Cortés’ surprisingly cinematic treatment (given the single location’s extreme claustrophobia) keep this potentially one-note real-world horror movie nail-bitingly tense throughout, while Reynolds runs a grueling emotive gamut with aplomb. (1:34) SF Center. (Harvey)

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Case 39 (1:49) 1000 Van Ness.

Catfish Please do not reveal the secret to Catfish — relax, I’m not going to. What I will say is this: Catfish’s uber-secretive, Paranormal Activity-esque ad campaign is effective, but the film ultimately stands on its own merits. This is an intriguing, relatable documentary, and if the studio feels that they’ll sell more tickets by promoting it in a certain way, so be it. Without giving away too much, Catfish is the spontaneous documentary that arose when filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost began filming Rel’s brother, Nev. Like so many of us, Nev finds himself drawn to a person he’s never met — embarking on a relationship through Facebook photos and wall posts. Of course, as is so often the case with the internet, nothing is quite what it seems. Catfish has already found its critics, particularly those who insist the documentary is a fake. I believe it, but either way it’s an impressive achievement: the best film yet about social networking. (1:26) Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*The Desert of Forbidden Art Uzbekistan probably hasn’t been at the top of your vacation wish list, but it might be after seeing this documentary by Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope — at least if you’re a modern art lover. It centers on the Nukus Museum, an extraordinary institution founded by the late Igor Savitsky, a frustrated painter who came here first from Moscow as an archaeologist, then became fascinated with the remote region’s ethnic folk artifacts. By 1966 official policy had turned from wiping out regional traditions and identities to embracing them, so he was given public funds to showcase his collection here. But unbeknownst to the bureaucrats back home (until it was too late), he’d already found a new passion, and was busy funneling his budget toward it: Finding and archiving a wealth of virtually unknown Soviet modern art that had been created without notice (often in hiding) since Stalin’s cultural watchdogs condemned the once-favored avant-garde movement of the 1920s in favor of sentimental, propagandic "Soviet realism." This stuff is the bomb — almost literally, since workaholic Savitsky finally died in 1984 of excess exposure to toxic restoration chemicals. There are poignant and colorful human stories here, but The Desert of Forbidden Art‘s exhilarating primary appeal lies in the fact that it features probably more eye-poppingly great visual art that you’ve never seen or known about before than quite possibly any documentary before it. You may well walk out with a question: so, are there cheap flights to Uzbekistan? (1:20) Four Star. (Harvey)

*Easy A Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked ’00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. The brainy grandchild of 1930s screwball comedies and the knowing offspring of more recent spoofs of the Clearasil years like Clueless (1995) — with blood ties to the on-point pop of pater familias John Hughes — Easy A doesn’t quite aspire to the grainy, your-so-called-reality of YouTube auteurs, à la The Virginity Hit, though Bert V. Royal’s script is just as steeped in the culture of viral gossip and TMZ-writ-small, as well as the high-low literary and cinematic referents, that ’80s babies-and-up were succored on. Welcome to the postmodern mixed-up world of the girl who gets straight As, a marked contrast to all the bromancin’ going down in other parts of the cineplex: Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is curious enough to venture fully down the rabbit hole of bad-girl schoolyard celebrity after fabricating a story about losing her virginity. Despite the swelling disapproval of Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her virginal Christian fundamentalist crew, Olive’s soon giving pity faux-fucks to all the misfits on campus in exchange for gift cards to big-box stores. Her hilariously staged tryst with classmate Brandon (Dan Byrd), who’s sick of getting beaten up every day because he’s gay, is up there with anything in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). And though Easy A often seems pitched more to adults, like Olive’s wise-cracking parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci), its entertainingly self-aware fiction is still likely to bridge generational divides as much as anything on Facebook. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck. (Chun)

*A Film Unfinished Documentaries that "tell" the Holocaust tend to employ archival footage generically as a kind of historical flavoring. It’s rare that we are asked to contemplate either the provenance of the images or the individual lives depicted. Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished simultaneously confronts both of these gaps with a taut historiography of several reels of Nazi propaganda footage. Even in the German film’s inchoate form, we easily apprehend the propagandistic moves to further manipulate an already constructed reality (the Warsaw Ghetto) for objective "proof" of the necessity of Hitler’s Final Solution. Yet here before us, flowing at the speed of life, are the faces and places that would be destroyed within months of the filming. Hersonski attempts to extricate the documentary value of this footage using frame-speed manipulations and edits that call attention to telling movements. She also films elderly survivors watching the footage alone in a darkened theater. In their capacity for recognition and incredulousness, they unravel the German point of view. By weaving these live responses with diary entries of those consigned to the ghetto along with the deposition of a German cameraman, Hersonski draws a fragmentary, highly specific account of the Holocaust’s crisis of representation. (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

Fresh Fresh may be a surprisingly hard sell in the Bay Area. Even though self-styled gourmands are as abundant here as subsidized corn in Iowa, they may have already seen 2008’s Food, Inc. And although Fresh bills itself as a next step in a dialogue on sustainable agriculture, it’s a bit of retread. Author and reluctant leader of the movement Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and small farm messiah Joel Salatin make obligatory appearances, if only in less depth than Food, Inc. While no more talky than Food Inc., Fresh‘s production frequently relies on stock footage against stagy interviews. The effect is more folksy than insightful. When it works, particularly in sections featuring urban farmer Will Allen, Fresh comes off as hopeful. But if you’re looking for a tool to educate someone about why they shouldn’t buy groceries at Target, you might want to shop around. (1:12) Red Vic, Smith Rafael. (Prendiville)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*Howl Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of "Howl," the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudo-spiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. (1:30) Four Star, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Marke B.)

Jack Goes Boating Not all miserable people are interesting — sometimes they’re just miserable and dull. Case in point: all of the characters in Jack Goes Boating, adapted by Robert Glaudini from his play. The titular Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also directs) is an awkward limo driver with filthy dreads and an anger management problem. He does his best to court equally awkward Connie (Amy Ryan), while his best friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) watch their marriage collapse, spectacularly. Given the talent involved, Jack Goes Boating might be mistaken for a better film than it is. There are moments, in fact, when it’s almost good. But the movie is unpleasant on every level — and not in an engaging way, like far better Noah Baumbach films about dysfunction. The romance is strained and unrelatable: you want Jack and Connie to make it work, if only so that the movie can end. (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

Last Train Home In disaster movies, there’s a familiar scene: panicked throngs press against barriers, crushing one another, pleading "I have to get through!" to impassive guards. Watching the documentary Last Train Home, you realize an over-dramatic Hollywood cliché is a depressing reality in other parts of the world, as workers in China annually endure massive crowds to get home for New Year’s. Filmmaker Lixin Fan focuses on one couple among the 130 million taking part in the world’s largest migration. Their sacrifice (being away from their children for work) is called into question when their daughter runs away to the city to sew jeans and party. By the producers of 2007’s equally cinematic Up the Yangtze, this doc unfolds like a scripted film, until the family’s conflict shatters the fourth wall, and you’re reminded that people actually have to endure intense hardships so that we can have cheap pants with 40-inch waists. (1:27) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Prendiville)

*Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole Owl fever is everywhere — from the megahit Webcam trained on Molly the Barn Owl in San Marcos to the omnipresent ’70s-flavored owl necklaces designed by Real Housewife kook Kelly Bensimon. Animated fantasy Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is yet another sign that the fascination hasn’t faded yet. Less sophisticated than Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and more straight-faced than this year’s Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, this animated talking-animal epic displays director Zach Snyder in family-friendly fantasy mode. While venturing out of the safety of their nest and attempting to test their wings, youthful barn owlet Soren (Jim Sturgess) and competitive brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) are captured by the hench-owls of Nyra (Helen Mirren) and Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton), two Aryan Nation-esque critters who style themselves as the Pure Ones. They’re bent on imposing a strict heirarchy on the owl kingdom, subjugating the "lesser" birds, and destroying a mythical crew of warrior owls called the Guardians. And thanks to Legend of the Guardians‘ cunning detail and solid 3-D effects, that world of good vs. evil takes on a breadth and depth that both children and adults can probably fly with. Though the owls’ eyes can seem a bit too cartoonishly, and wildly unrealistically, expressive, the director who made 300 (2006) and Watchman (2009) and creative team Animal Logic still can’t resist giving the kids a little gritty kick with bloodless yet visceral bird battle scenes, and those nuggets of mouse parts that the cute li’l owlets puke up. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Let Me In In 2008, chilly Swedish import Let the Right One In offered an alternative, and an antidote, to the first Twilight movie’s sparkly vampire fantasy. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own book for director Tomas Alfredson, and the tale — about a bullied, neglected 12-year-old boy who befriends the seemingly same-aged, mysterious new girl in his apartment complex, only to discover her monstrous secret — became a favorite among critics and genre fans unafraid of foreign flicks. Just two years later, writer-director Matt Reeves (whose Cloverfield was also a 2008 release) offers his own take on Lindqvist’s story, with Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year’s The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) taking the leads, and Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas, and current Mad Men scene-stealer Cara Buono playing the peripheral adults. Reeves’ version is just fine — he shifts the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains, and Americanizes the original’s 80s setting (Reagan clips, new wave radio hits) — but doesn’t bring enough new to the table to justify remaking what was already a pretty fantastic film. Still, horror fans who haven’t seen the original, or who can’t be bothered to read subtitles, will no doubt appreciate this atmospheric spin on the age-old shared belief that growing up really sucks. For my interview with Reeves, including his explanation of why he chose to do a remake of a film he greatly admired, check out www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line "You just fucked with the wrong Mexican." Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to "the nice parts.") Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life
isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Never Let Me Go The time is not so long ago, and the atmosphere is of a rural England that resists change. So it takes a while for us to realize that this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed book (by fellow novelist Alex Garland) takes place in an alternative recent past in which society has indeed changed in ways that are few, yet enormous. Raised at what appears to be a familiar if slightly peculiar English boarding school, the students of Hailsham are given limited but highly specific education preparing them for an adulthood of service. A short adulthood, that is, for they are clones grown from "originals," considered not quite human, their purpose being eventual willing harvest for organs by a populace whom medical science breakthroughs can now allow extraordinarily long lifespans. Placidly preparing for that future sacrifice are best friends Ruth (Keira Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the latter such a born accommodator that she doesn’t utter a peep of protest when Ruth grabs Tommy as her boyfriend — destroying all Kathy’s hopes and probably dimming Tommy’s somewhat as well. Directed by Mark Romanek (2002’s One Hour Photo), Never Let Me Go spans a couple of decades, but its aura of mournful melancholy never wavers. The results are well cast, handsomely outfitted (Rachel Portman contributes a plaintive string score), tasteful, and just a little bit more monotonous and less touching than you might hope. Not particularly plot-driven, this is a good film that’s also another illustration (like such recent examples as 2009’s The Road and 2008’s Revolutionary Road) of how sometimes no amount of intelligent effort can make a movie achieve everything that some literature can. (1:43) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) Shattuck. (Sam Stander)

*The Social Network David Fincher’s The Social Network is a gripping and entertaining account of how Facebook came to take over the known social-networking universe. In this version of events — scripted by Aaron Sorkin and based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, in turn based substantially on interviews with FB cofounder Eduardo Saverin, with input from Mark Zuckerberg icily absent — a girlfriend’s dumping of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a crisp evening in 2003 is the impetus in his headlong quest for a "big idea." The film is structured around the conference-room depositions for two separate lawsuits, brought against Zuckerberg by Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and by fellow Harvard entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) for crimes involving intellectual property and vast scads of retributive money. Unless Zuckerberg decides to post it on Facebook (which he probably shouldn’t, given the nondisclosure vows that capped off the first round of lawsuits), we’ll never know what truly motivated him and how badly he screwed over his friends and fellow students. But Fincher and Sorkin have crafted a compelling, absorbing, and occasionally poignant tale of how it could have happened. (2:00) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom. (2:10) California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Undertow This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. (1:40) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Waiting for "Superman" As was the case with Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, his latest documentary has an active internet campaign: pledge to see Waiting for "Superman." The films seem like apples and oranges at first glance — Truth warned about the extinction of our species, the end of life as we know it, while "Superman" takes on the public education system. But the picture Guggenheim paints in the latter is a bleak one: our schools are failing America’s youth. In clear, relatable words, he reveals the causes of this national epidemic lack of funding, misguided unions, no accountability. Like Truth, "Superman" is a smart and inspiring call to arms. Guggenheim’s wisest choice was following a group of young schoolchildren who want nothing more than to get a good education. Their struggle provides a necessary contrast to the bureaucracy. In showing the problem’s human face, the film offers further proof — as if we needed more—that something must be done to fix a broken system. For supplemental interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:51) California, Marina, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps This seems just the moment for a sequel to Oliver Stone’s indictment-celebration of financial-sector yuppies: one again, all eyes are focused on Wall Street’s fluctuating fortunes and sleazy insider dealings. Oscar winner Michael Douglas reprises his role as the enjoyably sinister Gordon Gekko, but it’s kinda like watching Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter in anything post-Silence of the Lambs (1991), with a celebrated character floundering amid a script that doesn’t measure up to what came before. Gekko’s not even the main focus here, with Shia LaBeouf stepping up as Jake, a whiz kid who’s already made millions (unlike Charlie Sheen’s character in the first film, whose financial aspirations allowed him to be manipulated by the shellac-haired GG). See, Jake’s engaged to Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan, fretting elegantly); they’ve already got a sweet loft and enough dough to kick hundreds of thousands over to Jake’s real estate-agent mom (a superfluous Susan Sarandon). Anyway, the main conflict involves evil banker Josh Brolin taking down Jake’s firm and driving his boss to suicide; meanwhile, Jake is a pure-hearted idealist lured into wrongdoing only to save his pet cause, alternative energy. Yeah, really. Any time there’s a financial concept to be explained, Stone revs up animated graphs and numbers, vainly attempting to create thrills from the inherently boring. And in case you were wondering, the once and future Bud Fox does indeed make a cameo, his winking, leathery visage a sad reminder that he was once a promising film actor before choosing a path of serial marriage and sitcom megabucks. (2:13) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) A loving, exhaustively fleshed-out tribute to now one of the more neglected stars to emerge from the classic rock firmament, Who Is Harry Nilsson? is lent the weight of the interviewees who knew and-or loved the singer-songwriter (including Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Yoko Ono, Micky Dolenz, Eric Idle, Paul Williams, and Robin Williams) and given much depth, courtesy of its almost two-hour length and its close ties to Nilsson himself: the musician’s attorney and estate representative Lee Blackman secured the funding for The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) co-director Jon Scheinfeld; widow Una and Nilsson’s children opened up on camera; and Sony allowed the remixing of more than two dozen songs. As bittersweet and uniquely shaped as a Nilsson song, this evocative classic-rock-fan must-see comes fully kitted out with charming and revealing rare performance footage of the man who otherwise refused to perform live, and much of the music that made 1971’s Nilsson Schmilsson a rock blockbuster and LP collection essential and transported such songs as Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You into pop vernacular. Anecdotes, testimonials, home movies, and family snapshots fill out the picture of Nilsson, who despite his undeniable brilliance for lyrics and melody, and heaven-sent vocal gifts, seemed often driven to self-destruct as quickly as possible. Scheinfeld stops short of connecting all the dots explicitly. But the music, given its righteous due, goes a long way toward answering those hanging questions in the title and in the heart of Nilsson fans. (1:56) Roxie. (Chun)

You Again (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen’s latest, once again set in tony London, has all the moving parts for a satisfying farce of self-sabotage, but the writer-director never gets past touching up his character sketches — which are far from interesting in themselves. There is Helena (Gemma Jones), elderly and recently divorced; she wants something stronger than tea and a psychic to rescue her from reality. Her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) either wants a child or her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). She gets migraines and has an eye for art, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, hubby Roy (Josh Brolin) eyes the available young body across the way from his study (Freida Pinto) when he’s not grousing about his fledgling career as a novelist. Helena’s ex Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is off in his own corner of the movie, taking up with a dopey prostitute (Lucy Punch) who, unlike his wife, is not old. There are sparks of life when these fine actors are allowed to play off one another — Jones and Brolin, in particular, work up a nicely caustic repartee — but a chirpy narrator belies the wobbly narrative construct. And unlike 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, the ethnically marked objects of desire don’t get any good lines. Banderas as an art dealer is paint-by-numbers fantasy, while Pinto’s Dia is embarrassingly elaborated: always in red, a musicology PhD student who wants to be someone’s muse, she responds favorably to Roy’s slovenly flirtations, and, the kicker, has a father who translates Eastern European authors. Jones’ spiritualist is the only one who gets a Hollywood ending, and while I suppose that’s meant ironically, there’s plenty of soft-headedness to go around. (1:38) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

Quick Lit: Oct. 1-Oct. 5

David Talbot

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October 1, 2010

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Literary readings, book tours, and talks this week

Litquake is back from Oct. 1-9 with more than 550 authors and events. Find out how to catch some this week after the jump.

Friday, Oct. 1

Litquake 2010 kickoff
Grab you litquake program and enjoy music by “Diva Deluxe” Suzy Williams and Brad Kay as they perform songs based on the work of well-known authors Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler, and more. You can also sip cocktails while browsing the gallery’s latest exhibit “Everyday,” showcasing new works by California tattoo artists. Litquake programming through Oct. 9.
5 p.m., free
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna, SF
www.litquake.org

Saturday, Oct. 2

Off the Richter Scale
From poetry to comics to dad lit, this Litquake opening weekend event will feature literary tweeters, bloggers, illustrators, mystery writers, fathers, poets, historians, and more.
Noon – 4 p.m., free
Variety Preview Room Theatre
582 Market, SF
www.litquake.org

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival
Enjoy a stellar line-up of poets and environmental writers including Brenda Hillman, Robert Haas, Allison Hawthorne Deming, Al Young, David Meltzer, Camille T. Dungy, and more. Also featuring a poem installation by Arthur Okamura, live music, environmental updates and information, and more.
Noon-4:30 p.m., free
Civic Center Park
Martin Luther King, Jr. at Center, Berk.
www.poetryflash.org

Sunday, Oct. 3

Barely Published Authors
Readings by up-and-coming masters of prose from the Bay Area including Jeremy Hatch, Mimi Lok, Caitlin Myer, Andre Perry, Paul Spinrad, Ian Tuttle, Alia Volz, and Olga Zilberbourg. Emceed by Ransom Stephens.
7 p.m., free
Make-Out Room
3225 22nd St., SF
www.litquake.org

“CLA All-Stars: 25 Years of San Jose’s Center for Literary Arts”
Join best-selling authors Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey), Mary Roach (Packing for Mars, Stiff, Spook, Bonk), Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio), and Andrew Sean Greer (The Story of a Marriage) as they read from their latest works. This program was developed in collaboration with the San Jose Center for Literary Arts and Litquake.
6:30 p.m., $10
The California Historical Society Museum
678 Mission, SF
(415) 357-1848

Ein Zweigabend: A Zweig Evening
Enjoy this literary and musical eveing dedicated to the works and memory of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, featuring violinist Gregory Sykes, pianist Ian Scarfe, and vocalist Patrick Marks playing some of Zweig’s favorite music. Wine, champagne, and hors d’oeuvres.
7 p.m., $20 suggested donation
Green Arcade
1680 Market, SF
(415) 431-6800

North Beach Literary Tour
Learn more about the literary tradition of North Beach, from the Gold Rush, to the Beats, and into the modern era. The one mile tour concludes at Focus Gallery on 1534 Grant with readings by political satirists, socially savvy novelists, outlaw poets, and cultural historians Phil Bronstein, Will Durst, Ben Fong-Torres, Alan Kaufman, Ellen Sussman, and Jody Weiner.
5:30 p.m., free
Meet at The Beat Museum
540 Broadway, SF
www.litquake.org

Off the Richter Scale, Day Two
Day Two of Off the Richter Scale features panel discussions on alternative publishing and literature in translation and readings by Hedgebrook Alums and writers on California and San Francisco.
Noon – 4 p.m., free
Variety Preview Room Theatre
582 Market, SF
www.litquake.org

Monday, Oct. 4

Final Flight
Join author Peter Stekel for a reading and discussion of his new book, Final Flight: The Mystery of a WWII Plane Crash and the Frozen Airmen in the High Sierra.
6 p.m., free
University Press Books
2430 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 548-0585

Tao Lin
Tao Lin takes his trademark minimalism in a different direction as he ponders the meaning of illicit sex for a generation with no rules in his new book, Richard Yates, named after the real-life writer. In Richard Yates, Lin narrates a tale about a young man dealing with the consequences of an affair with an underage, self-destructive girl.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

“Original Shorts: Bottom’s Up”
Join this year’s esteemed scribblers as they reveal their original takes on the theme “Bottoms Up,” with Dodie Bellamy, Elizabeth Bernstein, Joshua Braff, Anne Finger, Shanthi Sekaran, Namwali Serpell, and James Warner.
7 p.m., free
Heart Wine Bar
1270 Valencia, SF
www.litquake.org

“Words and Waves”
A night of surf lit with Krista Comer and Elizabeth Pepin, Doug Dorst, Daniel Duane, Thomas Farber, Steven Kotler, emcee Mark Massara, Michael Scott Moore, Matt Warshaw, and Jaimal Yogis.
6:30 p.m., $5-$10 donation entitles you to order of the happy hour menu all night
Park Chalet
1000 Great Hwy, SF
www.litquake.org

Tuesday, Oct. 5

“Dave Cooper Gets Bent”
Award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Dave Cooper will sign his new book, Bent, and discuss his career in comics.
7 p.m., $5
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission, SF
www.cartoonart.org

I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works
Hear New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton explain why social networks, the openness of the Internet, and all the handy new gadgets are becoming the foundation for “anchoring communities” that tame information overload and help us to determine what is important at this reading of his new book, I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted. Part of Litquake.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
www.booksmith.com

“Tales of Hollywood Hell”
Litquake and Porchlight Storytelling collaborate for a special one-night show of true stories from inside the world’s entertainment machine. Book options, screenplays, adaptations, celebrity, and just plain Hollywood weirdness, explained without notes or memorization, featuring Exene Cervenka, Michael Tolkin, Martin Cruz Smith, Kristen Tracy, Jack Boulware, Joyce Maynard, and Jill Soloway. Hosted by Porchlight’s Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick.
8 p.m., $15
Herbst Theater
401 Van Ness, SF
www.litquake.org

“Virtual Reality: The Effect of Fiction on Your Mind”
Attend this Litquake panel discussion that looks into the readers’ interaction with the characters they meet in works of fiction, whether or not it’s healthy to visit imaginary worlds, and how well the authors themselves know their own characters. Featuring Robert Burton, M.D., former Chief of Neurology, Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, Elaine Petrocelli, President of Book Passage, Michelle Richmond, author of The Year of Fog and No One You Know, Blakey Vermeule, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Stanford University, and Mark Vonnegut, M.D., pediatrician, memoirist, and son of the late Kurt Vonnegut.
6:30 p.m., $12
Mechanic’s Institute
57 Post, SF
(415) 393-0100

Crusader of the cables: Fannie Mae Barnes

Andrew Lam

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September 30, 2010

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Whoever said a cable car couldn’t be operated on woman power alone clearly had never met the steam engine on this grandmother. Fannie Mae Barnes of Oakland, California was the first woman ever to operate a cable car grip – not because it was a higher paying position, or an easier gig, but because she was told that women didn’t have the strength to do the job right.

Barnes started pumping iron, passed the 25-day grip operator training program notorious for its 80 percent drop out rate, and became a source of civic pride. She even drove the Olympic torch up the Hyde Street hill en route to the 2002 Winter Olympics. A documentary about her achievement, “Getting a Grip,” will be shown tonight at Lunafest, a traveling film festival that screens movies made by and about women to benefit the Breast Cancer Fund. We caught up with Barnes for a phone interview about knocking down one of the city’s diehard gender divisions of labor.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What made you want to be a cable car operator?

Fannie Mae Barnes: It wasn’t about being a conductor, it was the grip up front, which is totally different from the conductor. In ’98 I went up front and became the first female ever to be certified as a grip.

SFBG: What’s the difference?

FMB: The difference is this: on the cable car it takes two people to operate, you have the person in the rear that does the back break at any given time it’s needed and collect the fares. Up front you have the gripman that controls the cable car. There’s a huge device that weighs about 375 pounds and it’s called the grip and it grips the cable that’s underneath the ground that’s moving at nine and a half miles per cable speed. It’s a ITAL job. It’s very different from conducting.

SFBG: So you’re lifting a 375 pound weight to operate the cable car?

FMB: As far as pulling back, yeah. The cable car itself weighs eight tons, empty. It’s a miniature train. A lot of guys will try to muscle the grip, but it’s really more a finesse thing – you have to leverage it with your body weight.

SFBG: How did you become the first woman to operate the grip?

FMB: Well they had said that they always need gripmen because it’s a difficult job. They had mentioned that it was a job that woman could not do because we lacked the upper body strength. So I said hey, come on now, you know, there’s absolutely nothing a woman can’t do. I mean if you can take care of a family, I mean, come on. This was in ’97 that this article came out. So in ’97 I decided I had to step up to the plate and be that woman, so I did it. I worked out extensively for six months to a year. I couldn’t let the year 2000 come into existence without a woman up front. So I did it, February 14th, 1997.

SFBG: What were you doing before you started working at the cable cars?

FMB: I was driving buses. I drove buses for 11 years. Some of my friends who had drove buses had left and were over in the cable cars division, so that’s what I did. And once I started working there I loved it. It’s a totally different scene, you know, you have a lot of tourists and they just want to ride and have fun.

SFBG: What kind of reaction did you get from the other cable car grips?

FMB: Well a lot of the guys were betting money against me that I would not make it. But then I had positive input too from some guys, so I went with the positive side. I knew that I was going to make it because I was training hard for it and it was something that I felt that I could do, and anytime you really apply yourself and it’s something that you want to do, you can do it.

SFBG: What gave you that conviction to know you could be that first woman? Is that something your family taught you?

FMB: Yeah, more or less. My mom always taught me growing up that whatever you want to do hon, you can do it, you just have to set your mind to it and go for it.

SFBG: So what are you doing with your golden years of retirement?

FMB: I work with an organization, Ghana Women and Children of North America. We’ve only been existence for a year, we do non-profit work with organizations in Africa. We put electricity in a primary and secondary school, we bought them two computers, a printer, and we opened up the Internet for them.

Lunafest

Featuring films Getting a Grip, Top Spin, and Tightly Knit

Thur/30 6 p.m., $20

Herbst Theater

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 392-4400

www.lunafest.org

Snap Sounds: Clubroot

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 29, 2010

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CLUBROOT

II MMX

(LoDubs, 2010)

Purposely constructed anonymity as a reaction to this supposed Internet Age of Information is by now pretty passe in music circles (cf. Silver Columns, jj, Burial). So some may have rolled their eyes when future dubber Clubroot went that route with his first releases, even though the music was intellectually sensuous and the first full-length release received raves from Dubstepforum to Pitchfork.

Indeed, it seemed that Clubroot was following a little too closely in Burial’s footstep — no photos, no live sets, no given name — yet the music was tweeked slightly from that brainy dubstep god’s blueprint and showed a unique promise. But by now we’re all trained for the big, and in most cases anticlimactic, reveal. Since Clubroot’s been promoting a second album on Portland’s LoDubs label, he’s come out as 25-year-old Dan Richmond of St. Alban’s, UK, and is hitting the road for some live shows — ditching the reclusiveness (even though only obscured pics of him exist, and I wonder if he’ll be disguised for his upcoming show at Triple Crown). All signs, however, point not to anticlimax but to dance floor swoon.

II MMX is a 2 CD set that contains much of first album Clubroot, but the newer stuff advances beyond earlier hyper-cerebral and sometimes too-gloomy intentions for a trip into the deep forest. Yes, tracks like “Orbiting,” “Waterways,” “Dust Storm,” and the unfortunately titled “Cherubs Cry” channel some good ol’ pan flute sounds, tablas, and disembodied choruses that may call to mind New Age label Wyndham Hill or groups like Deep Forest, Enigma, even Enya. This is not a kiss of death — there’s a Balearic-derived trend blowing through right now that’s excavating those once-tacky sounds and making something fresh with them. It’s a neat trick, quite pleasant, and Clubroot is pulling it off. Call it dubstep’s version of chillwave.

While he can still show some spooked-out dubstep teeth on tracks like “Whistles & Horns” and “Physically” (and in his live mixes, like the one above for the inimitable Mary Anne Hobbs), Clubroot’s forging ahead in the pursuit of the thing every critic is calling post-dubstep, but which none can properly define. Good for him. Pack up that warped urban sitar loop and lead us into the trees, Clubroot — whoever you may be.

(Reports from Seattle’s Decibel festival last week indicate that the live show’s a keeper, a LoDubs showcase that really stokes the diverse crowd. It’s not all ethereal — check out LoDubs head Jon AD’s killer lazer house-y set from the fest here. )

CLUBROOT With DJG, Djunya, and Jon A.D. Thurs/30, 10 p.m., $10. Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF. www.triplecrownsf.com.

High on arrival

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 28, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC If hip-hop is jazz, then Curren$y can be described as a traditionalist. His debut album, Pilot Talk (DD172/Def Jam), is pure braggadocio, with rhymes about fancy cars and free-flowing liquor and free-loving women. The music, lovingly produced and arranged by Ski Beatz, sounds like an update of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, all the way down to the New York session musicians recruited to crank out mellow grooves. It’s as if Curren$y has reinterpreted the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” for the new millennium.

In the world of jazz, the traditionalists famously waged war against the free jazz nuts who wanted to strip the form of tonality, and then against the fusionists who sought to infect it with slovenly rock and roll. With help from Dixieland revivalists and Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary, they succeeded. In contrast, rap nerds have always viewed avant-garde experimentation with suspicion at best, and complete ignorance at worst. The furthest we’ll go, it seems, is the high-tech funk of Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: Son of Chico Dusty, or Madlib’s Medicine Show of gutbucket blues and crusty soul-jazz loops.

If fitted with John Coltrane’s sheets of sound or Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, Pilot Talk would be a strangely awesome experience. As is, it’s soothing yet enlightening, like an animated chop session after smoking a joint or two with a friend. Curren$y clearly made it on blunted terms: the album artwork depicts a lone airplane flying over a landscape of lush green marijuana foliage.

So Pilot Talk is like weed talk, with several narratives hidden underneath the stoner blather. On “Example,” Curren$y claims “reimbursement for paid dues,” then states, “I am an example of what can happen when you quit being afraid to gamble.” On “Seat Change,” he mocks a girl who wants to “ride with a G,” concluding that “somewhere along the line she fucked up and realized she lost her seat.” His lines are pimp slick but thankfully shorn of delusion. When he flips a bevy of yeyo metaphors for “Audio Dope,” he clearly does it in service of the concept, not to build a farcical image of himself as a drug kingpin. The image is of a neighborhood (or, more accurately, Internet) baller.

Curren$y’s persistence comes from years spent toiling for various rap crews, hip-hop’s version of the mailroom. As a young scrapper from New Orleans’s Uptown neighborhood, he rolled with C-Murder’s TRU family before C-Murder infamously caught a life bid for murder, then transferred to Master P’s No Limit label. Then he landed at Lil Wayne’s fledgling Young Money Entertainment, dropping burner verses for Weezy’s The Carter II and Dedication mixtapes, before landing under the aegis of reformed hip-hop mandarin Damon Dash, whose DD172 label released Pilot Talk in July. It’s ironic that since Curren$y’s departure, Weezy has decided to transform Young Money into an overpublicized pop star boot camp for teen idols like Nicki Minaj and Drake. Then again, the fact that even Curren$y sounds alternative when posited against mainstream rap’s scions demonstrates how rigid the culture has truly become.

However, Curren$y also benefits from marketing, albeit of a viral nature. Pilot Talk boasts the cream of the blog rap crop, including Mikey Rocks from the Cool Kids, Big K.R.I.T., and Jay Electronica (who sharply compares Flavor Flav’s signature bow tie to the Nation of Islam’s attire). Even much-beloved weed rapper Devin the Dude drops a verse for “Chilled Coughphee.” A writer friend of mine, Christopher Weingarten, remarked to me that when Devin the Dude jumps in with sly wit like “I can fuck a bum up quick / But that’s some tenth grade shit,” it only underscores Curren$y’s relative lack of vocal presence.

Other critics have theorized that Pilot Talk‘s artistic triumph is largely due to Ski Beatz’s memorable accompaniment. An NY vet whose catalog ranges from membership in early-’90s woulda-beens Original Flavor to credits on Jay-Z’s 1996 classic Reasonable Doubt and Camp Lo’s “Luchini AKA (This Is It),” Ski Beatz initially produced Pilot Talk‘s tracks himself and then hired talented unknowns like bassist Brady Watt to transform them into instrumental gems. True, any rapper would sound incredible against the majestic sunshine funk of “Address.” But give Curren$y credit for lodging its hook in your brain — “Still nothing changed but the address.”

CURREN$Y

With C-Plus and NPire Da Great, J-Billion and P-Funk, DJ ANT-1

Wed/29, 9 p.m., $16–$20

330 Ritch

330 Ritch, SF

(415) 541-9574

www.330ritch.com

Why “The Social Network” isn’t just “the Facebook movie”

Sue Vaughan

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September 28, 2010

2

Why “The Social Network” isn’t just “the Facebook movie”

Based on the founding of Facebook and Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network has already received rave reviews from critics. I offer no dissent: the film is unquestionably one of the year’s best. I recently spoke to three of its lead actors — Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Armie Hammer — and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

We’re all Facebook friends now. (Lie.)

Being Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg may not be the villain he’s often made out to be.

“I don’t think he necessarily neglects social interaction,” Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerberg, explained. “I just think he feels alienated by it … He feels kind of uncomfortable interacting in the way he sees everyone else interacting.” But then, that’s not Zuckerberg the person: it’s Zuckerberg the character in The Social Network. In order to play the world’s youngest billionaire, Eisenberg put himself into the mindset of Sorkin’s creation. But he also did his fair share of research on the real Zuckerberg — not to imitate him, but to get a better handle on who he is.

“I read everything I could find about Mark,” Eisenberg said. “I took fencing lessons, because he’s a fencer. I had every video of him converted to mp3, so I could have him on my iPod. This was all to help me focus.”

It also helped that Eisenberg could relate to Zuckerberg, a notoriously awkward public speaker: there’s video of the Facebook founder stammering, sweating bullets, generally not making a great case for himself. For Eisenberg, a character’s neuroses are what make him worth playing.

“I assume that everybody is neurotic in some way, or everybody interesting is neurotic,” he reflected. “It seems to me, why would you want to play anyone else? What other layers would there be besides neuroses?”

In writing his version of the real-life person, Sorkin grew to care about Zuckerberg. The end result is a character who isn’t always pleasant or charming, but who does inspire sympathy. In a way, that’s how Sorkin feels about his non-fictional counterpart.

“[Zuckerberg] is awkward in public,” Sorkin said. “He knows it, because he’s been told it so many times. He doesn’t care that much about money, so I don’t think that his billions of dollars are making things that much easier for him. So I actually feel affection and respect and empathy for him.”

The Mark-Eduardo bromance
The Social Network may be about the founding of Facebook, but at its heart, it’s also the story of a friendship betrayed. As in real life, Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on his best friend and co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

“Obviously, there’s a massive betrayal, and within that betrayal [Eduardo] loses his innocence and realizes that you never know someone,” Garfield said. “You never fully know someone. The only person you’ll ever know is yourself and even then, you won’t really know yourself.”

There’s no hint that Zuckerberg and Saverin were ever more than friends — though that would make for an interesting movie, too. At the same time, Garfield likened the betrayal his character experiences to a break-up. During the interview, he reflected on a time he’d been dumped out of the blue — and the pain that followed. “You know that confusion you have when you’re broken up with, and you have no idea why?” he asked. “You haven’t been told clearly why, because that person’s protecting you.”

Garfield was reluctant to identify his character as “too trusting,” because he views trust as a positive quality. But Eduardo does have an honor system and moral code that make Mark’s betrayal all the more hurtful. “To me, it wasn’t about the money,” Garfield said, referring to Saverin’s $600 million lawsuit against Zuckerberg. “It was about teaching Mark a lesson.”

In fact, the desired outcome Garfield imagines his character wanted is a bromantic ideal. If Mark were to realize the error of ways, perhaps he’d apologize to Eduardo, and they could repair their friendship. It might not make for a gripping ending to the film, but it would be a happier conclusion for Saverin. “I think with Mark, up until the end, [Eduardo]’s hoping at some point Mark’s going to go, ‘Look, I’m really, really sorry, man. I really messed up. I love you so much, and I just was jealous of you for this. And I acted out like this. Can we be friends again? I’ll give you back as much money as you want. Let’s move in together and we’ll play basketball every day, and we’ll cuddle at night and watch reality TV.’ Part of Eduardo in those depositions is just waiting for that moment.”

Isn’t it bromantic?

Taking sides
It was important for Sorkin that his script not take a side. Instead, it presents the story of Facebook’s founding from three different perspectives: those of Zuckerberg, Saverin, and the also-involved-at-square-one Winklevoss twins. Meanwhile, director David Fincher made sure that all the actors believed their characters: they all tell what they believe to be the truth. “Every time we did a scene, even if it was part of Eduardo’s telling of the story, David Fincher would come up to me between each take and say, ‘You know you’re right in this scene. You’re the right one,’” Eisenberg reflected. “And then he’d go up to Andrew Garfield, and say, ‘You’re right in this scene.’ So we all thought we were right.”

Playing twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (with help from body double Josh Pence), Armie Hammer had to maintain sympathy for both and project that to the audience. “With these twins, when you look at them on paper, they’re tall, athletic, good-looking guys who go to Harvard,” he noted. “They have a lot of things going for them that would make a lot of people in the audience go, ‘I don’t like these guys. They suck.’”

But Hammer planted himself firmly in their mindset. As is the case with Saverin, the Winklevosses aren’t necessarily interested in the money they’d receive from their lawsuit against Zuckerberg — it’s really about principle. These are characters of honor, and they were wronged. No matter how wealthy or dashing they are, Hammer insisted to himself that they deserved justice. “When we shot this, I had to side completely with them, just to bring truth to it,” he explained. “I had to say, yes, these guys did invent Facebook, and yes, Mark Zuckerberg stole it from them.”

Sorkin’s script is purposely ambiguous. While he was researching the story behind Facebook’s founding — along with The Accidental Billionaires author Mezrich — he discovered conflicting versions of the truth. His solution? Show it all, and let the audience decide for themselves.

“What we came away with was three very different versions of a story,” Sorkin said. “So instead of picking one and deciding, ‘Well, I think that’s the truth. That’s the story I’ll tell.’ Or picking one and deciding, ‘I think that’s the juiciest. That’s the story I’ll tell.’ What I liked was that there were three different versions of the story.”

In Hammer’s mind, the authorial choice to leave it up in the air creates more of a challenge for the audience. “You are responsible for siding with the people that you recognize the most, or recognize yourself in the most,” he said.

Sorkinspeak
Those familiar with Sorkin’s work (The West Wing, Sports Night) know that his dialogue has a distinct sound. He considers himself a playwright, which might explain the fast-paced back-and-forth that dominates his scripts. The Social Network had a Sorkin sound that Eisenberg immediately clung to.

“When I had the audition for the movie, I made a little tape to send to them in Los Angeles,” he recalled. “They said, ‘This scene is ten pages but please try to do it in five.’ ‘Cause I guess what they were getting were these kind of indulgent moments that people are used to doing in movies, whereas it was immediately evident to me how it should be read.”

All the actors I interviewed gushed over Sorkin’s novel-length script. For Garfield, it was essential to treat the script as the Bible — though that’s not the case for every film. He worked hard to get into character as Eduardo, adopting characteristics that were foreign to him. That it was a matter of letting the script work its magic. “The rhythm of Sorkinian language — you just don’t get in the way of it,” he noted. “An actor wants to put his own mark on something, but that’s your ego and you don’t need that. So you just try to not get in the way of these beautiful sequences of thoughts that have been expressed so deftly and seeped with subtext.”

Sorkin wasn’t quite so effusive about his own work, but he was willing to talk about his process. As he said, creating a fictional version of Mark Zuckerberg helped Sorkin find affection for the real person. But even before that, he knew it was important not to make him too black-and-white.

“When you’re writing an antihero, what I try to do with a character like that, is write it as if they are making their case to God why they should be allowed into heaven,” Sorkin said. He made the comparison to Jack Nicholson’s iconic “you can’t handle the truth!” speech from the Sorkin-penned A Few Good Men (1992).

“You can’t have them twirl their mustache,” he continued. “You can’t think they’re a bad guy — you just have to put obstacles in front of them.”

As for the rhythm of the dialogue — “Sorkinian language,” as Garfield calls it, or “Sorkinspeak” — the writer admits a heavy theatrical influence. He said it began at a young age when his parents took him to plays that were above his age level, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “I wouldn’t understand the story that was going on, but I loved the sound of the dialogue,” Sorkin remembered. “It sounded like music to me, and I really wanted to imitate that sound — just words crashing into each other, and speeches. It follows the same patterns as the movements of a symphony.”

In replicating that sound, Sorkin’s script carried the actors where they needed to go. “It’s all there in the script,” Garfield said. “All you have to do is be truthful in that situation and allow the thoughts to turn into words, and the words to turn into an action.”

The Facebook
The Social Network has been widely referred to as “the Facebook movie,” but its cast and crew insist that such a designation is misleading. “Sports Night wasn’t about sports,” Sorkin said. “[The Social Network] isn’t about people friending and poking people and falling in love on the internet. Maybe I just give things the wrong title.”

We did speak about Facebook extensively during our interviews. How could we not? With 500 million users, the site has become a part of daily life. It’s hard to know how we functioned before it. Even Eisenberg, who is not on Facebook himself, understands the sentiment. “In the movie, [Mark] kind of sees this void online,” he noted. “We look at Facebook now in retrospect, like, ‘How could this not have existed?’ That’s how Mark viewed it.”

Sorkin isn’t on Facebook either, though he and Eisenberg both set up accounts while they were filming. While he acknowledged that part of his hesitation comes from a generational divide, Sorkin was upfront about his negative perception of the site. And no, it has nothing to do with Zuckerberg himself. “For a device that’s supposed to make us better connected and bring us closer together, I feel like it’s doing the opposite,” Sorkin opined. “I feel like social networking is to socializing what reality TV is to reality. In a way we’re performing for each other.”

Hammer shared a similar point of view. He mentioned negative experiences on Facebook in the past, though he was smart enough not to elaborate. “The dark side of Facebook is it turns these people into voyeurs,” he said. “And if not voyeurs, then even worse, it turns them into narcissists, where they think that they’ve put themselves on the cover of their own Rolling Stone.”

Or even worse than that: compulsive pokers.

The Social Network opens in Fri/1 in Bay Area theaters.

Film listings

David Talbot

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September 28, 2010

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. The film intern is Ryan Prendiville. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

Case 39 Renée Zellweger, Bradley Cooper, and yet another spooky kid actor star in this supernatural thriller. (1:49)

*A Film Unfinished See “False Witness.” (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Freakonomics Did you know that a 50-dollar incentive just might impact how much a ninth-grader is willing to study? Crazy, huh? It’s ho-hum “studies” like this that make Freakonomics’ interesting concept — finding new and interesting ways to interpret everyday life — a completely average affair. Based on the popular book series, the film version is stacked with a strong lineage of documentary filmmakers, who each tackle a section. Morgan Spurlock (2004’s Super Size Me) heads a fun, if inconclusive, look at the effect a first name can have on a person. Elsewhere, Eugene Jarecki (2005’s Why We Fight) has the most thought-provoking segment, which analyzes possible reasons for the drastic drops in crime rates in the 90s (legalized abortion being the most controversial of the bunch). All the directors handle the material they’re given with a lot of creativity — the problem is that the material just isn’t very interesting. But if you’re looking for a painstakingly slow investigation of corruption in the world of sumo wrestling, this one’s for you. (1:25) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Landon Moblad)

Fresh Fresh may be a surprisingly hard sell in the Bay Area. Even though self-styled gourmands are as abundant here as subsidized corn in Iowa, they may have already seen 2008’s Food, Inc. And although Fresh bills itself as a next step in a dialogue on sustainable agriculture, it’s a bit of retread. Author and reluctant leader of the movement Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and small farm messiah Joel Salatin make obligatory appearances, if only in less depth than Food, Inc. While no more talky than Food Inc., Fresh‘s production frequently relies on stock footage against stagy interviews. The effect is more folksy than insightful. When it works, particularly in sections featuring urban farmer Will Allen, Fresh comes off as hopeful. But if you’re looking for a tool to educate someone about why they shouldn’t buy groceries at Target, you might want to shop around. (1:12) Red Vic, Smith Rafael. (Prendiville)

Let Me In In 2008, chilly Swedish import Let the Right One In offered an alternative, and an antidote, to the first Twilight movie’s sparkly vampire fantasy. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own book for director Tomas Alfredson, and the tale — about a bullied, neglected 12-year-old boy who befriends the seemingly same-aged, mysterious new girl in his apartment complex, only to discover her monstrous secret — became a favorite among critics and genre fans unafraid of foreign flicks. Just two years later, writer-director Matt Reeves (whose Cloverfield was also a 2008 release) offers his own take on Lindqvist’s story, with Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year’s The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) taking the leads, and Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas, and current Mad Men scene-stealer Cara Buono playing the peripheral adults. Reeves’ version is just fine — he shifts the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains, and Americanizes the original’s 80s setting (Reagan clips, new wave radio hits) — but doesn’t bring enough new to the table to justify remaking what was already a pretty fantastic film. Still, horror fans who haven’t seen the original, or who can’t be bothered to read subtitles, will no doubt appreciate this atmospheric spin on the age-old shared belief that growing up really sucks. For my interview with Reeves, including his explanation of why he chose to do a remake of a film he greatly admired, check out www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:55) Shattuck. (Eddy)

*The Social Network See “Status Update.” (2:00) Marina.

Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo Director Bradley Beesley delves into the sort of unearthed Americana usually excavated by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. In Oklahoma, a state that incarcerates women at higher rates than any other, female convicts have only recently been allowed participate in a 70-year-old rodeo for prison inmates. The filmmaker (best known for his work with fellow Oklahomans the Flaming Lips) avoids turning his documentary into a politicizing polemic, humanely focusing on what drives participants to risk potential death in a manner reminiscent of Roman gladiators. An overall lyrical sensibility is balanced by the main event, which excites in a Jackass sort of way. Even staunch death row supporters will find something to like: bones are broken and blood spilt between horns and hooves, as the riders attempt to hold on to culture beyond the prison walls, if only for eight seconds at a time. (1:30) Red Vic. (Prendiville)

*Waiting for “Superman” As was the case with Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, his latest documentary has an active internet campaign: pledge to see Waiting for “Superman.” The films seem like apples and oranges at first glance — Truth warned about the extinction of our species, the end of life as we know it, while “Superman” takes on the public education system. But the picture Guggenheim paints in the latter is a bleak one: our schools are failing America’s youth. In clear, relatable words, he reveals the causes of this national epidemic lack of funding, misguided unions, no accountability. Like Truth, “Superman” is a smart and inspiring call to arms. Guggenheim’s wisest choice was following a group of young schoolchildren who want nothing more than to get a good education. Their struggle provides a necessary contrast to the bureaucracy. In showing the problem’s human face, the film offers further proof — as if we needed more—that something must be done to fix a broken system. For supplemental interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:51) (Peitzman)

*Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) A loving, exhaustively fleshed-out tribute to now one of the more neglected stars to emerge from the classic rock firmament, Who Is Harry Nilsson? is lent the weight of the interviewees who knew and-or loved the singer-songwriter (including Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Yoko Ono, Micky Dolenz, Eric Idle, Paul Williams, and Robin Williams) and given much depth, courtesy of its almost two-hour length and its close ties to Nilsson himself: the musician’s attorney and estate representative Lee Blackman secured the funding for The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) co-director Jon Scheinfeld; widow Una and Nilsson’s children opened up on camera; and Sony allowed the remixing of more than two dozen songs. As bittersweet and uniquely shaped as a Nilsson song, this evocative classic-rock-fan must-see comes fully kitted out with charming and revealing rare performance footage of the man who otherwise refused to perform live, and much of the music that made 1971’s Nilsson Schmilsson a rock blockbuster and LP collection essential and transported such songs as Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You into pop vernacular. Anecdotes, testimonials, home movies, and family snapshots fill out the picture of Nilsson, who despite his undeniable brilliance for lyrics and melody, and heaven-sent vocal gifts, seemed often driven to self-destruct as quickly as possible. Scheinfeld stops short of connecting all the dots explicitly. But the music, given its righteous due, goes a long way toward answering those hanging questions in the title and in the heart of Nilsson fans. (1:56) Roxie. (Chun)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen’s latest, once again set in tony London, has all the moving parts for a satisfying farce of self-sabotage, but the writer-director never gets past touching up his character sketches — which are far from interesting in themselves. There is Helena (Gemma Jones), elderly and recently divorced; she wants something stronger than tea and a psychic to rescue her from reality. Her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) either wants a child or her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). She gets migraines and has an eye for art, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, hubby Roy (Josh Brolin) eyes the available young body across the way from his study (Freida Pinto) when he’s not grousing about his fledgling career as a novelist. Helena’s ex Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is off in his own corner of the movie, taking up with a dopey prostitute (Lucy Punch) who, unlike his wife, is not old. There are sparks of life when these fine actors are allowed to play off one another — Jones and Brolin, in particular, work up a nicely caustic repartee — but a chirpy narrator belies the wobbly narrative construct. And unlike 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, the ethnically marked objects of desire don’t get any good lines. Banderas as an art dealer is paint-by-numbers fantasy, while Pinto’s Dia is embarrassingly elaborated: always in red, a musicology PhD student who wants to be someone’s muse, she responds favorably to Roy’s slovenly flirtations, and, the kicker, has a father who translates Eastern European authors. Jones’ spiritualist is the only one who gets a Hollywood ending, and while I suppose that’s meant ironically, there’s plenty of soft-headedness to go around. (1:38) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Goldberg)

ONGOING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: “I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane.” You can see why director Vikram Jayanti scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” (1:42) Roxie. (Chun)

Alpha and Omega (1:28) 1000 Van Ness.

*The American George Clooney caught in a moodily paranoid, yet exquisitely photographed, ’70s-style suspense-arthouse death-trap? Belmondo and Beatty could empathize. Nonetheless, veteran rock photographer and Control (2007) director Anton Corbijn suffuses the chilly proceedings with a fresh, wintry beauty, the carefully balanced sense of highly charged tension and silky smoothness that a gunsmith would appreciate, and a resonance that feels personal. How else would an ex-rock shooter like Corbijn, who’s made iconic images of the Clash, U2, and others, connect with this tale of an assassin masquerading as a photographer, one who’s constantly glancing behind and around himself — justifiably wary of being caught in another killer’s sights — and seemingly just as wary of the director’s, and audience’s, gaze? A character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Camus novella or a Melville brooder, Jack/Edward, or more accurately “the American,” (Clooney) is in exile after a bad collision with a girlfriend and hitmen in Sweden and hiding out in a picturesque Italian village, conspicuously the more-cold-than-cool outsider and doing one immaculate job for a gorgeous mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten). Is he a good or bad guy? The local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who knows and sees all like a great eye in the sky, is trying to find out, as is the most beautiful prostitute in town (Violante Placido). The answers are nowhere near as clear or as plainly painted as a Sergio Leone Western, although Corbijn nods to the maestro when stone-cold killer Henry Fonda, then playing shockingly against type, appears on a cafe TV screen in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the director’s care and attention to beauty — as well as the lines carved in the face of Clooney’s lean, mean-looking American, a whore like any other — say more than words. (1:43) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Buried Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ first English-language feature has one of the most deeply unsettling openings in recent memory: a pitch-black screen gradually soundtracked by the waking, disorientation, and frantic scratching made by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) as he realizes he’s been buried alive. A U.S. civilian contractor (the good, reconstructionist kind, not the gun-crazy, mercenary “security” type) in Iraq, he struggles to calm down as he uses a pocket lighter to view the coffin he’s trapped in. Finding a flashlight and cell phone, he soon receives a call from his kidnappers informing he has just 90 minutes of oxygen (and probably less time on the phone’s running-down battery) to raise a considerable ransom. Chris Sparling’s clever screenplay and Cortés’ surprisingly cinematic treatment (given the single location’s extreme claustrophobia) keep this potentially one-note real-world horror movie nail-bitingly tense throughout, while Reynolds runs a grueling emotive gamut with aplomb. (1:34) SF Center. (Harvey)

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Catfish Please do not reveal the secret to Catfish — relax, I’m not going to. What I will say is this: Catfish’s uber-secretive, Paranormal Activity-esque ad campaign is effective, but the film ultimately stands on its own merits. This is an intriguing, relatable documentary, and if the studio feels that they’ll sell more tickets by promoting it in a certain way, so be it. Without giving away too much, Catfish is the spontaneous documentary that arose when filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost began filming Rel’s brother, Nev. Like so many of us, Nev finds himself drawn to a person he’s never met — embarking on a relationship through Facebook photos and wall posts. Of course, as is so often the case with the internet, nothing is quite what it seems. Catfish has already found its critics, particularly those who insist the documentary is a fake. I believe it, but either way it’s an impressive achievement: the best film yet about social networking. (1:26) Metreon. (Peitzman)

*The Desert of Forbidden Art Uzbekistan probably hasn’t been at the top of your vacation wish list, but it might be after seeing this documentary by Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope — at least if you’re a modern art lover. It centers on the Nukus Museum, an extraordinary institution founded by the late Igor Savitsky, a frustrated painter who came here first from Moscow as an archaeologist, then became fascinated with the remote region’s ethnic folk artifacts. By 1966 official policy had turned from wiping out regional traditions and identities to embracing them, so he was given public funds to showcase his collection here. But unbeknownst to the bureaucrats back home (until it was too late), he’d already found a new passion, and was busy funneling his budget toward it: Finding and archiving a wealth of virtually unknown Soviet modern art that had been created without notice (often in hiding) since Stalin’s cultural watchdogs condemned the once-favored avant-garde movement of the 1920s in favor of sentimental, propagandic “Soviet realism.” This stuff is the bomb — almost literally, since workaholic Savitsky finally died in 1984 of excess exposure to toxic restoration chemicals. There are poignant and colorful human stories here, but The Desert of Forbidden Art‘s exhilarating primary appeal lies in the fact that it features probably more eye-poppingly great visual art that you’ve never seen or known about before than quite possibly any documentary before it. You may well walk out with a question: so, are there cheap flights to Uzbekistan? (1:20) Four Star. (Harvey)

Devil (1:20) 1000 Van Ness.

*Easy A Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked ’00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. The brainy grandchild of 1930s screwball comedies and the knowing offspring of more recent spoofs of the Clearasil years like Clueless (1995) — with blood ties to the on-point pop of pater familias John Hughes — Easy A doesn’t quite aspire to the grainy, your-so-called-reality of YouTube auteurs, à la The Virginity Hit, though Bert V. Royal’s script is just as steeped in the culture of viral gossip and TMZ-writ-small, as well as the high-low literary and cinematic referents, that ’80s babies-and-up were succored on. Welcome to the postmodern mixed-up world of the girl who gets straight As, a marked contrast to all the bromancin’ going down in other parts of the cineplex: Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is curious enough to venture fully down the rabbit hole of bad-girl schoolyard celebrity after fabricating a story about losing her virginity. Despite the swelling disapproval of Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her virginal Christian fundamentalist crew, Olive’s soon giving pity faux-fucks to all the misfits on campus in exchange for gift cards to big-box stores. Her hilariously staged tryst with classmate Brandon (Dan Byrd), who’s sick of getting beaten up every day because he’s gay, is up there with anything in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). And though Easy A often seems pitched more to adults, like Olive’s wise-cracking parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci), its entertainingly self-aware fiction is still likely to bridge generational divides as much as anything on Facebook. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck. (Chun)

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and “the art of doing nothing.” India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Four Star, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Going the Distance If you live in San Francisco, don’t try to date someone in New York. It’s just not worth the hassle. But hey, maybe you’re as adorable as Drew Barrymore, and your boyfriend’s as charming as Justin Long — you can’t be expected to let a little geographical complication get in the way. That’s the driving force behind Going the Distance, a romcom that stars real-life couple Barrymore and Long as Erin and Garrett, two crazy kids trying to make it work cross-country. In many ways, the film is your standard boy-meets-girl story, but it’s cute enough that the predictability factor doesn’t really matter. The cast is universally strong, with bonus points to the standouts: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day as Garrett’s embarrassing roommate, and Christina Applegate as Erin’s germaphobe sister. The humor is surprisingly sharp — and raunchy, which earned Going the Distance an R-rating. I’m not going to say Long’s bare ass is worth the price of admission, but it’s certainly a selling point. (1:43) SF Center. (Peitzman)

*Heartbreaker French import Heartbreaker is a star-driven romantic comedy that underlines how lame and formulaic Hollywood’s current endeavors in that genre almost invariably are. Not that it isn’t formulaic — but you don’t feel nose-led by a committee of script-coarsening hacks, and the usual escapist lifestyle pleasures don’t come off as a product-placement parade. Alex (Romain Duris) is the star performer in a biz run with pragmatic sibling Mélanie (Julie Ferrier) and her genially vague husband Marc (François Damiens). They orchestrate breakups with maximum guile but also strict ethical rules (“We open their eyes, not their legs … We only step in if the woman is unhappy”), usually hired by families desperate to wean daughters from bad relationships. An amusing montage of Alex essaying various roles — window washer, sushi chef, redeemable criminal — establishes this is an enterprise both elaborately thought-out and costly. Indeed, Alex and Co. are in debt, thanks to his theatrical perfectionism. Ergo they’ve no choice but to violate rules and accept a lucrative new assignment whose target seems far from unhappy. There’s never any doubt where Heartbreaker is headed. Cocky Alex will fall hard, repent his professional Don Juan fakery, almost lose the game, then grovel sufficiently to pull a Graduate as scruffy charmer triumphs over dully respectable Mr. Right. What happens after the fade, when reality dawns? We probably don’t want to know. Yet Heartbreaker earns that suspension of disbelief, arriving at a unabashedly melodramatic climax just as romantically intoxicating as it aims to be. (1:44) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Howl Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of “Howl,” the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudo-spiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. (1:30) Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Marke B.)

I’m Still Here This examination of Joaquin Phoenix’s self-imposed Hollywood exile is neither fascinating nor insightful. More like tedious and aggravating, really. Whether or not “JP” — as the erstwhile Oscar nominee refers to himself as he takes on a new persona as unwashed hip-hop artist — is faking his downward spiral is supposed to be the great attraction for Casey Affleck’s apparently vérité vehicle. But Phoenix is so (deliberately?) unlikable it’s hard to care one way or the other. If he is having a breakdown, conveniently captured on film from multiple angles, he’s still a spoiled, private jet-taking movie star moping about existential woes while living a privileged life (hotel suites, fawning personal assistants, etc.) If he’s faking it, it’s unclear what the point of I’m Still Here is supposed to be, other than a “fuck you” to the industry that made Phoenix rich and famous. Either way, ugh. (1:48) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, “Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island.” In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Jack Goes Boating Not all miserable people are interesting — sometimes they’re just miserable and dull. Case in point: all of the characters in Jack Goes Boating, adapted by Robert Glaudini from his play. The titular Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also directs) is an awkward limo driver with filthy dreads and an anger management problem. He does his best to court equally awkward Connie (Amy Ryan), while his best friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) watch their marriage collapse, spectacularly. Given the talent involved, Jack Goes Boating might be mistaken for a better film than it is. There are moments, in fact, when it’s almost good. But the movie is unpleasant on every level — and not in an engaging way, like far better Noah Baumbach films about dysfunction. The romance is strained and unrelatable: you want Jack and Connie to make it work, if only so that the movie can end. (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father (“the sperm donor,” played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Peitzman)

Last Train Home In disaster movies, there’s a familiar scene: panicked throngs press against barriers, crushing one another, pleading “I have to get through!” to impassive guards. Watching the documentary Last Train Home, you realize an over-dramatic Hollywood cliché is a depressing reality in other parts of the world, as workers in China annually endure massive crowds to get home for New Year’s. Filmmaker Lixin Fan focuses on one couple among the 130 million taking part in the world’s largest migration. Their sacrifice (being away from their children for work) is called into question when their daughter runs away to the city to sew jeans and party. By the producers of 2007’s equally cinematic Up the Yangtze, this doc unfolds like a scripted film, until the family’s conflict shatters the fourth wall, and you’re reminded that people actually have to endure intense hardships so that we can have cheap pants with 40-inch waists. (1:27) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Prendiville)

*Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole Owl fever is everywhere — from the megahit Webcam trained on Molly the Barn Owl in San Marcos to the omnipresent ’70s-flavored owl necklaces designed by Real Housewife kook Kelly Bensimon. Animated fantasy Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is yet another sign that the fascination hasn’t faded yet. Less sophisticated than Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and more straight-faced than this year’s Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, this animated talking-animal epic displays director Zach Snyder in family-friendly fantasy mode. While venturing out of the safety of their nest and attempting to test their wings, youthful barn owlet Soren (Jim Sturgess) and competitive brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) are captured by the hench-owls of Nyra (Helen Mirren) and Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton), two Aryan Nation-esque critters who style themselves as the Pure Ones. They’re bent on imposing a strict heirarchy on the owl kingdom, subjugating the “lesser” birds, and destroying a mythical crew of warrior owls called the Guardians. And thanks to Legend of the Guardians‘ cunning detail and solid 3-D effects, that world of good vs. evil takes on a breadth and depth that both children and adults can probably fly with. Though the owls’ eyes can seem a bit too cartoonishly, and wildly unrealistically, expressive, the director who made 300 (2006) and Watchman (2009) and creative team Animal Logic still can’t resist giving the kids a little gritty kick with bloodless yet visceral bird battle scenes, and those nuggets of mouse parts that the cute li’l owlets puke up. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line “You just fucked with the wrong Mexican.” Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to “the nice parts.”) Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Never Let Me Go The time is not so long ago, and the atmosphere is of a rural England that resists change. So it takes a while for us to realize that this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed book (by fellow novelist Alex Garland) takes place in an alternative recent past in which society has indeed changed in ways that are few, yet enormous. Raised at what appears to be a familiar if slightly peculiar English boarding school, the students of Hailsham are given limited but highly specific education preparing them for an adulthood of service. A short adulthood, that is, for they are clones grown from “originals,” considered not quite human, their purpose being eventual willing harvest for organs by a populace whom medical science breakthroughs can now allow extraordinarily long lifespans. Placidly preparing for that future sacrifice are best friends Ruth (Keira Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the latter such a born accommodator that she doesn’t utter a peep of protest when Ruth grabs Tommy as her boyfriend — destroying all Kathy’s hopes and probably dimming Tommy’s somewhat as well. Directed by Mark Romanek (2002’s One Hour Photo), Never Let Me Go spans a couple of decades, but its aura of mournful melancholy never wavers. The results are well cast, handsomely outfitted (Rachel Portman contributes a plaintive string score), tasteful, and just a little bit more monotonous and less touching than you might hope. Not particularly plot-driven, this is a good film that’s also another illustration (like such recent examples as 2009’s The Road and 2008’s Revolutionary Road) of how sometimes no amount of intelligent effort can make a movie achieve everything that some literature can. (1:43) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

The Romantics Katie Holmes comes out of semi-retirement to bear gloomy witness, as Laura, to the nuptials of Tom (Josh Duhamel) and Lila (Anna Paquin) at one of those doomed Hollywood weddings where there seems to be little chance of the proceedings going further than “speak now or forever hold your peace.” The three compose a tense, unhappy triangle within their larger cohort of college friends (including Adam Brody, Elijah Wood, and Malin Akerman), who call themselves the Romantics in part — as Laura explains in an awkward, Rachel Getting Married–esque rehearsal-dinner toast — because of their history of incestuous intraclique couplings. Ten years postgraduation, aided by an open bar, the gang carry forward this tradition while stumbling around the grounds of an East Coast beach house looking for the AWOL groom, grimly reviewing their incremental progress in life since college, and, in Laura and Tom’s case, laying out for us in a series of raw, heated info-dumps their secret history, complete with angry recitations of Keats and metaphoric representations of their embattled relationship. The character deficits (particularly Tom’s) revealed by these and other exchanges make it difficult to know who or what to root for in this film (adapted from director-screenwriter Galt Niederhoffer’s novel), and by the time the wedding party is headed down the aisle, most of the romance has drained away. (1:35) Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) California. (Sam Stander)

Soul Kitchen Director Fatih Akin (2004’s Head-On) offers a tribute to the German Heimat (“homeland”) film, as well as to his own hometown, Hamburg, with this gritty comedy set in a restaurant dubbed Soul Kitchen. Star Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script with Akin, really did own a similar greasy spoon, and his knowledge of what makes an eatery soar or fail is exaggerated here to humorous and occasionally surreal effect. Bousdoukos’ character, the scruffy Zinos, loves funk music; he’s also in an existential funk, having just seen his girlfriend move to Shanghai. What’s worse, he’s just injured his back, necessitating the hiring of snooty chef Shayn (Head-On‘s Birol Ünel); his ne’er-do-well brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) is freshly out of jail; and he owes big bucks to the local tax board. Also, an old childhood pal turned sleazy businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is circling his property with sharky hunger. Will everything that can possibly go wrong, go wrong, with a side of ketchup and mayonnaise? Of course it will. Stylish direction and a game cast, including winning newcomer Anna Bederke as Zinos’ shot-gulping waitress, make Soul Kitchen a fun if non-essential diversion. (1:33) Lumiere. (Eddy)

*The Tillman Story To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught. Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the “friendly fire” circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House. Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else. The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. (1:34) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom. (2:10) California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Undertow This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. (1:40) Bridge. (Harvey)

The Virginity Hit To its credit, The Virginity Hit is not what you’d expect. The trailer and concept recall the teen sex comedy trend that sprung up after 1999’s American Pie, but the actual film is a far more grounded in reality. It’s also not nearly as good. The Virginity Hit is a well executed mockumentary, in that it feels amateur even in its most absurd moments. The movie follows Matt (Matt Bennett) in his attempts to lose his virginity after a disastrous attempt with his girlfriend Nicole (Nicole Weaver). As you’ve probably guessed, hilarity ensues — and it ensues, for a YouTube generation, in the form of viral videos and crude parodies. The problem with The Virginity Hit is that it just isn’t funny: the tone is all over the place, and the bits that should be amusing fall flat. It’s interesting as an experiment and the cast is quite convincing, but the material never elevates the film past its gimmick. (1:26) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps This seems just the moment for a sequel to Oliver Stone’s indictment-celebration of financial-sector yuppies: one again, all eyes are focused on Wall Street’s fluctuating fortunes and sleazy insider dealings. Oscar winner Michael Douglas reprises his role as the enjoyably sinister Gordon Gekko, but it’s kinda like watching Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter in anything post-Silence of the Lambs (1991), with a celebrated character floundering amid a script that doesn’t measure up to what came before. Gekko’s not even the main focus here, with Shia LaBeouf stepping up as Jake, a whiz kid who’s already made millions (unlike Charlie Sheen’s character in the first film, whose financial aspirations allowed him to be manipulated by the shellac-haired GG). See, Jake’s engaged to Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan, fretting elegantly); they’ve already got a sweet loft and enough dough to kick hundreds of thousands over to Jake’s real estate-agent mom (a superfluous Susan Sarandon). Anyway, the main conflict involves evil banker Josh Brolin taking down Jake’s firm and driving his boss to suicide; meanwhile, Jake is a pure-hearted idealist lured into wrongdoing only to save his pet cause, alternative energy. Yeah, really. Any time there’s a financial concept to be explained, Stone revs up animated graphs and numbers, vainly attempting to create thrills from the inherently boring. And in case you were wondering, the once and future Bud Fox does indeed make a cameo, his winking, leathery visage a sad reminder that he was once a promising film actor before choosing a path of serial marriage and sitcom megabucks. (2:13) Empire, Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Whiz Kids “One of the bad things about all methods of dating,” according to 17-year-old Harmain Khan, “is that if you want to date something, you have to destroy it.” A rather advanced notion about relationships, if not for the fact that the teen is actually referring to using electron spin resonance to date fossilized crocodile teeth. Yeah. And yet, he’s the most oddly charismatic among the three nerds at center in Tom Shepard and Tina DiFeliciantonio’s Whiz Kids. Like 2002’s Spellbound, the doc follows quirky kids as they prepare for an important competition, in this case the Intel Science Talent Search. Though the film isn’t ground-breaking, the subjects amuse with their odd mixture of scientific maturity and age-appropriate social naiveté; there’s a lot to relate to, even if they’re hoping to get into Harvard and solve the environmental crisis, and you at that age were just hoping to make it to graduation. (1:22) Balboa. (Prendiville)

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop An intriguing misfire on par with his 2006 OTT bodice-heaver Curse of the Golden Flower, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop sees filmmaker Zhang Yimou playfully dispensing with the serious rep cultivated by such films as Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1981), movies that made Zhang a central figure amid Chinese film’s Fifth Generation. Deep into middle age, with crowd-pleasers like Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) behind him, Zhang appears fully committed to the low road of commercial entertainments — an approach completely in line with his country’s embrace of market-driven economics. But why remake the Coen brothers’ career-making 1984 noir tribute, Blood Simple? Zhang does little to refresh and improve on Coens’ noir retool, apart from drenching the proceedings in his homeland’s very dated, broad slapstick, including a jarringly out-of-place noodle-dough twirling scene, and setting some of the action on the glorious painted-desert mountainsides of the Gansu province. It’s as if Zhang has decided to send up himself — the film’s vivid palette and adulterous couple compares unfavorably with 1990’s Ju Dou — as well as with the brudders Coen. (1:35) Four Star. (Chun)

You Again (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Matt Reeves on vampires, remakes, and “Let Me In”

Sue Vaughan

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September 27, 2010

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Matt Reeves on vampires, remakes, and “Let Me In”

When Let Me In — the film which dares an Americanized do-over of 2008 Swedish import Let the Right One In — was first announced, fans of the original film let rip synchronized screeches of “Whyyyyy?”, shortly followed by angry, ten-point arguments as to why Hollywood is really sucking balls lately. Consensus was that Let the Right One In, which picked up armloads of festival and critical awards (including the San Francisco Film Critics’ Circle’s Best Foreign Language Film honors), was not a film that deserved to be put through the remake machine. Sure, it only made a couple of million bucks stateside, but maybe it wasn’t the kind of film (unlike 2008’s similarly vampire-themed Twilight) that the masses were supposed to gobble up. After all, it had subtitles. Such a drag.

Matt Reeves, he of Cloverfield (2008) and Felicity fame, is aware of the fanboy-hater contingent that awaits his latest release. His Let Me In is a largely faithful retread, with some recognizable kid actors — Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year’s The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick Ass) — and the lure of legendary British horror house Hammer (back in the producing biz after decades) helping him attract audiences. I suspect many people who’ll go see Let Me In may not have seen Let the Right One In — either because the original’s release wasn’t wide or lengthy enough, or because of that whole foreign-film bias. (Also, diehard fans of the first film may boycott the new version, just on principle. Hey, I did it with the recent A Nightmare on Elm Street, which in my mind NEVER HAPPENED).

Gotta say, though, Let Me In could have been worse than “faithful,” which is way better than “redundant” or “totally offensive.” Reeves, who penned the script from John Ajvide Lingqvist’s novel (Lindqvist himself wrote the script for the 2008 film) stays true to the material, shifting the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains and injecting some Cold War and new wave flair into the 80s setting. I spoke with him recently, just after the film’s screening at Austin, TX’s Fantastic Fest — coincidentally the very festival where Let the Right One In won the Jury Prize for Best Horror Feature in 2008. He kindly put up with my many remake-themed queries.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: How was Fantastic Fest?

Matt Reeves: It was great. It’s been fantastic (laughs). It’s really cool that they chose Let Me In to open the festival, because this is one of the places that Let the Right One In was incredibly well-received. I knew that there’d be a passionate audience for Lindqvist’s story here, and that also we’d have to past the test of being watched by people who really have a passionate love for Tomas Alfredson’s [2008] film. I thought, if we’re embraced here, and if we pass that test, then that will be a really big hurdle, and the screening went really, really well. It was very exciting.

SFBG: I didn’t realize until I was watching the movie that it was a Hammer Films production. How’d you get hooked up with them?

MR: Well, they got the rights to the film. I think that the Swedish producers met with lots of different places, and I think maybe they were drawn to the idea of being the first Hammer vampire film in over 30 years. But they were the ones who got the rights, is the answer. It’s interesting because I think a lot of people, in terms of their concern about this movie being a remake — there’s a lot of question about it being, “Oh, well, Hollywood comes in with a lot of money and ups the effects, and does all this stuff,” but Hammer is an independent company. And we didn’t have a lot of resources. It was a pretty small film, actually. It was definitely a labor of love, and one that we made in this kind of passionate way.

I think it’s pretty cool to be part of the relaunching of Hammer, especially since as a kid these are the kind of movies that terrified me (laughs). All of the Christopher Lee vampire films, I watched. But I was so afraid of them that my biggest memory of Hammer is actually watching them from behind a chair, late at night on local television. They’d show these Hammer films, and I’d come across them, and there’d be some kind of garish blood or lurid scene. I found them very disturbing! And there’s something ironic about the idea that, after they invaded my nightmares, now I’m somehow part of the relaunching. It’s cool but also kind of ironic.

SFBG: Why do you think vampires are such a consistently popular film subject, especially today?

MR: In the best genre films, you’re able to smuggle in something under the surface that you exploit through the metaphor. In this case, I think Lindqvist was really telling a story about the pain of adolescence and coming of age. But I think it really says something about the vampire myth that all of these vampire stories are so different: True Blood is different from Twilight, which is different from Let Me In. And it really does say something about what an incredibly durable myth that is, that you can translate it into so many different contexts. It can be about so many different things, even though on the surface they seem like they’re about the same subject. I don’t think those three versions of the story could be any more different, and that is very interesting, I think.

It’s always about what you use that metaphor for, and I think what attracted me to this one was that it was such a different way of presenting actually a very realistic story. It seems kind of contradictory to say, but it isn’t. He’s using this horror story, this vampire story, to describe how growing up, being bullied and having that difficulty, essentially feels like a horror story. It’s talking specifically about that kind of trauma, of growing up in that way and it feeling like a nightmare.

SFBG: You mentioned that the audience in Austin embraced the movie, but I feel like there’s been a lot of people, especially on the internet, who’ve been horrified by the idea of remaking Let the Right One In. What’s your response to that reaction?

MR: When I first got involved, it was almost a year before the movie was even released, and nobody had ever heard of it. When they showed it to me — I was trying to get a passion project of mine made, and they felt that it didn’t have an overt genre to it. It was more of kind of an independent character piece. And they said, “You know, right now it’s a challenging time to make this. We really love the writing, but we’re not going to make this. But we’d love to work with you, and we want to remake this film. We’re trying to get the rights to it.” After I watched it, I literally called them up the next day and said, “I don’t know if you should remake this movie. It’s great.” And they said, “Yeah, but we think there’s a way to bring it to an audience that won’t necessarily see a subtitled film, and we love this story. Think about it.”

The thing about it is, I so connected to that coming-of-age story, and then I found out it was based on a book. So I read Lindqvist’s book, and he had actually written the screenplay for Alfredson’s film. He did a very faithful adaptation of his book. And I kind of fell in love with the story even more. I ended up writing to Lindqvist, because I kind of saw this opportunity to take that story and translate it into an American context. He grew up in the 80s, I’m about his age, and he’s talking about this coming-of-age in Sweden. And I started thinking about that kind of story in the 80s America that I remember, the Reagan era. I thought that might be very interesting, and would be a film that essentially would be another interpretation of this story, as opposed to being anything that is trying to step on the toes of this beautiful film.

I entered it with that in mind: I wanted to find a way to do something that was personal and yet still faithful to this story. The level at which I was daunted at that point was just that I felt a responsibility that it had to be done in this way that was very personal, because I didn’t want in any way to seem to be, I don’t know, dissing that movie. I thought it was remarkable. And then when the movie came out, it earned such acclaim. I wasn’t surprised, because I thought, “Well, the movie’s a masterpiece. So of course it’s gonna get that kind of reaction.” But then I was sort of like, “Uh-oh. What did I do?” Because by that point I’d already written the screenplay and I was deeply committed to it. I thought, “Wow, I wonder if people will even give this film a chance.”

On the outside, I totally get it, because most remakes are horrendous, and they’re usually one of two approaches: there’s the soulless retread, where somebody goes through the motions but none of the passions or emotions come through, or the kind of run-roughshod bastardization version of the story, where you kind of use some piece of the story, but you kill all original intentions. I think those are both very dispiriting approaches, and they’re what people are used to from a lot of Hollywood remakes. When people were having that response, I couldn’t even say that I was like, “What’s the matter with them?” I put myself in their shoes and thought, “You know, I would think the same thing.” But I knew I was making it really as a labor of love, and it was a story I cared about. And I thought, well, we’ll see what happens. I know that I’m a fan. So if I’m a fan I feel, not the responsibility to the fans, I feel the responsibility as a fan. And so I was just trying to do as personal and committed version of the film as I could, and I knew the rest would have to take care of itself.

SFBG: Why do you think horror is the genre that’s been remade the most?

MR: That’s a good point. I think because the stories are incredibly visual, and people see a chance to take that kind of story —

SFBG: And make it 3D.

MR: I don’t know about making it 3D. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s more of that. Although now, I see that there is this feeling that adding 3D to something as a magic formula does not necessarily work either. I think [remakes happen] because horror movies are very cinematic, visual storytelling that works at a universal level, but there’s still this sense that, to reach a wider, English-speaking audience, that they could be [remade] in English. [Like the Japanese Ring movies, for example.] I think that people who see those movies, producers and studios, they see how that translation might work, because they see a visual medium, and they see those stories being told, and they think, “Oh, well we know that story works, and it’s not just about language.” I’m gonna guess that’s why, but to be honest with you, I have no idea.

SFBG: Do you think all of the horror ideas are used up? Why can’t people come up with original scripts?

MR: Oh, people can come up with original scripts. We should throw in the towel now if somebody can’t come up with an original script that isn’t a remake.

SFBG: Are there more remakes than there used to be?

MR: There have been remakes always in the history of Hollywood. But I will say, at the same time that there are probably just as many remakes, there are also fewer movies that were ever made than there were in the past. I think, percentage-wise, the amount of remakes is much higher. And it is dispiriting because you do want to see original ideas coming through. Part of me thinks and hopes that it’s cyclical. I know there will always be remakes, but I think that there are some great ones: I love John Carpenter’s The Thing. There are lots of remakes that I think are tremendous.

It comes down to, you understand why a studio or a producer is interested in remaking. You hope that they fall in love with the story first, but they certainly see an opportunity to sell a story to another audience. But it comes down to the intention of the filmmakers and their personal commitment, and if they are connected in a way that you can see their passion, and that there’s something expressed there that’s worthwhile, then that’s totally valid. I think that movies like that are great. And obviously that’s what I tried to do. But I’m totally with you: it’d be horrible if the only thing that happened was that we only saw things that were being remade. The thing is, though, if you’re not seeing a remake, you’re still oftentimes seeing movies are the same movie [as one that came before], with a different title, but the same story, the same plot. It is dispiriting. You want to see some vitality and risk-taking.

As ironic as it sounds, that was what I loved about this story: yes, it’s a remake, but it’s a very risky story. It’s a story on the shoulders of two 12-year olds. It’s an adult story with mixtures of tones. It’s got tremendously dark, adult things with really, really tender childlike stuff. That juxtaposition is quite powerful, and it’s certainly not an easy sell by any means. Who knows how we’ll even do. But I loved Lindqvist’s story, and I connected to it on a personal level. My druthers in life is not to go out and [do remakes]. In fact, I resisted even this one when it was first presented to me. But it was an opportunity to do something, ironically, that felt personal to me.

Let Me In opens Fri/1 in Bay Area theaters.

Free (of) wi-fi

Andrew Lam

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September 24, 2010

0

Ah! The sun! Would that I weren’t typing this in a cafe with an excessive amount of windows. Or that I was in one of San Francisco’s last stalwart salons to eschew the wired world. That’s right, there are still cafes out there that don’t have wireless Internet. Spots where you can sit your sweet self down and feel absolutely no urge to chain-check your Facebook newsfeed.

These are places where you’re still keeping up with your double soy latte joneses, but are forced to devote your attention to finishing (continuing, starting, rueing) your multi-dimensional wade through Gravity’s Rainbow. Or to eavesdropping on your neighbors’ conversation about the recent spate of cats on leashes sightings. Or even – gasp! – have a conversation of your own. And should all the actual reality get to be to much don’t fret, I don’t believe these places are confiscating iPhones. Yet.

Four Barrel Coffee

Four Barrel’s got no wireless because to be on your computer would mean taking your eyes off the see and be seen parade that treks back and forth beneath the behemoth sailor’s rope and lightbulbs sculpture that hangs like a blunt sword of Damocles above the entryway. Should the beautiful people parade wear through the surface, turn your gaze to the back of the cafe, where lithe coffee crafters roast the brand’s beans on site.

375 Valencia, SF

(415) 252-0800

www.fourbarrelcoffee.com

Delancey Street Crossroads Cafe

Winner of this year’s “Best Al Fresco Feel Good,” Delancey Street Foundation’s Crossroads Cafe not only provides on-the-job training for adults in transition, but also had one of the most comfortable, indoor-outdoor cafe seating in which you can’t log on. To supplant this digi-dearth, its got more than enough diversion: a bookstore, ice cream cones, waffles, and the prettiest little garden patio from which to spy on Giants fan stadium processionals.

699 Delancey, SF

(415) 836-5624

www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/entercafe

Borderlands

“A nice place to sit, read, and converse,” reads the motto of this charming space. In the thick brush of the Mission’s most dense latte land, Borderlands is one of the only cafes where you will find people that look as though they could be working on the next great American novel, not that the next great American hashtag doesn’t have its charms as well. Pop next door to pat the thought-provoking skin of the hairless kitty cat in the sci-fi bookstore of the same name for that extra smack of the real real.

870 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-6998

www.borderlands-cafe.com

Momi Toby’s Revolution Cafe and Art Bar

Say you want a revolution? Would you settle for a cafe where you can sit indoor and out, segueing effortlessly between caffeine and alcohol as afternoon thickens to dusk? Fab, here’s your flophouse. Momi Toby’s shoots and scores with the Parisian round table and wooden chair look. With beers on tap, a reputable food menu that can include bagels to pizettas, and candles produced when darkness falls outside the streetside windows, it’s easy to see why they’re not concerned with the remote access crowd. This place is for lounging and contemplation, not hyperlinks and trackbacks. Bonus points for not having a website.

528 Laguna, SF

(415) 626-1508

The real Steve Moss

Mary Magee

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September 23, 2010

83

Some folks are so mad about D. 10 candidate Steve Moss that they have put together a website titled The Real Steve Moss that pulls together public records and poses a series of questions in an effort to make Moss provide concrete answers about his residency and his handling of tax-payer dollars before the November election rolls around.

“If Mr. Moss believes that he is such a great candidate, we suggest he answer critics instead of hiding out and just dodging the questions,” The Real Steve Moss website states. “Anyone who won’t answer direct questions while running, certainly won’t in office.”

The website challenges Moss to provide more details about his residency, including the exact date he moved back to D10, the identity and move-in date of the person(s) currently living in his Dolores Park home in D8, along with copies of his utility, internet, cable and telephone bills and records from his D8 Dolores Park home and the place he is currently renting in 18th Street to prove Moss’ residency claims.

“If your Dolores home wasn’t occupied till August 2010, did you maintain services such as Internet, cable and telephone, and if so why?” the website asks.

The Real Steve Moss also drills into questions about the $1.5 million that the Department of the Environment paid to Moss’ private company, M-Cubed.
Last week, the Department of Environment confirmed to the Guardian that a grant was awarded to M-Cubed sometime between 2000 and 2001.
“The total amount of the agreement was $1.5 million and the purpose of the agreement was to set up an energy cooperative in Bayview Hunter’s Point,” the Department told us.

Yet, 990 forms filed by Moss’s SF Community Power Cooperative and his parallel SF Community Power non-profit in 2002 and 2003 do not reflect large infusions of tax payer dollars that the City reportedly paid to Moss’ private company M.Cubed to set up an energy cooperative.

As “The Real Steve Moss” notes, “information easily obtained from Mr.Moss’ for profit, non-profit, and campaign websites do not appear to match records obtained from the City, State or the IRS.”

And while the Guardian waits for the Department of the Environment to respond to our request for more information about this grant, The Real Steve Moss drills into other questions about Moss’ money flow.

“What exactly did you do with the $4m plus in mostly public and private funding that you stated was to create a newswire and help Bayview Hunters Point residents?” The Real Steve Moss asks, presumably referring to, amongst other donations, a series of $50,000 grants that the Goldman Fund, where Moss’ wife works, paid to Moss’ SF Community Power.

“Exactly how many paid jobs did you create and for how long? Why is your non-profit paying such a lot of rent and for what? Why is your non-profit’s communications bills so high? How much money did you pay yourself from your non-profit and for profit companies funded in majority by taxpayer funds?”
Hopefully, Moss will respond to these and other questions posed at The Real Steve Moss with concrete evidence. And soon. So, stay tuned.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2010/09/21/plan-c-endorses-sweet-and-moss-d10

After dubstep

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 21, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Dom Maker and Kai Campos met a few years ago at university in South London, where they bonded over the emerging wobble of what would become the biggest underground music of the decade: dubstep. Campos introduced Maker to some tracks he was producing on his computer, and in a year’s time they both started making music together. These were the early years, before the duo became Mount Kimbie and would advance dubstep beyond its typically rigid hopscotch game between ferocious bass and synth rattle. Mount Kimbie got down on simple software, played around with some loops, sang a bit, and ventured out of their bedrooms to suck the life of countryside and alleyway sounds into hungry recording devices.

“I started using the computer because it was the only way I could record my music on my own,” Maker tells me during an e-mail correspondence. “I tried numerous times to start a band, but nothing came about. I thought I would try it myself, and I was surprised that some of the material came out sounding so electronic.”

That desire for a band’s musicality transferred over to Mount Kimbie’s unique approach to make songs that reside on the fence — surely now a sad, rotting wooden fence — separating dance hits and pastoral folk. The duo passed a demo of original beats around and caught the attention of Paul Rose, a.k.a. Scuba, head of the independent British label Hotflush Recordings, who signed them even though they don’t produce the sort of face-melting dubstep that incites one-hand-in-the-air frenzies. You can absorb Maker and Campos’ sounds while swinging in a deserted beachside playground. I’d say that it’s music for trains and spaceships, grottos or mountaintops. But hey, that’s just me.

Last year Mount Kimbie dropped the EPs Maybes and Sketch on Glass, both on Hotflush, two stunning odysseys into the future of digital sound. Maker’ and Campos’ efforts have culminated with this summer’s excellent full-length debut, Crooks and Lovers (also on Hotflush), an electronic soundscape prone to the sort of expansive emotional wandering that you typically hear only in dusty blues records.

“As we have progressed as Mount Kimbie, both of us have become more interested in looking at [different] ways of recording and creating sound than just through the use of software synths,” Maker says. “The album is very sample-based, along with a lot of our own field recordings and recorded guitar and vocals.” This amalgamation of live and digital sound taps into electricity of a listener’s nerve endings. Finally, some of the nebulous forms of technological feeling whirling with me — cultivated by years of video game playing and Internet surfing and everyday 21st century living — are affirmed, even vindicated. I’m one step closer to naming them.

There’s something urgent about Crooks and Lovers: It navigates a nebulous emotional tension so present in this age as we use gadgetry to bridge our loneliness and exuberance. “Tunnelvision” opens the record with a foreboding ambient noise. As if to spirit us away to the other side of that warp hole, the humming bass empties into a floral guitar riff marked by layers of scrambled vocals and softly burping electronics.

“[“Tunnelvison” is] made up almost entirely of material that we field recorded in a wind tunnel in the small village that I live in by the sea in Brighton,” Maker says. “It is interesting to work with sounds that have more feeling of place.” This sort of topography of emotion carries over throughout Crooks and Lovers. In “Before I Move Off,” a collage of bleeping keys washes over heavy percussion and a dreamy string melody. The songs continually build in a repetitive momentum toward release. Tension expands, contracts, and lets go, rotating in a feverish order.

Some songs linger within introspection. Round synthesized cords and off-kilter drum patterns enclose “Ruby” and “Carbonated” into an abyss that feels more like a great open sky than a frighteningly deep hole in Guatemalan soil. These cuts are matched by outward expressions of joy: “Mayor,” maybe the only banger on the record, lets the sub-bass erupt in helicopter jolts of energy over whirling keys that burst in gasps of smoke. But dubstep’s integral wobble is toned down here, a softer and less obnoxious gyration of energy that fits into the song’s methodical momentum. And always the fissured vocal cuts emerge from the shadows, coded and manipulated and barely recognizable, but striking — a reflection of our own inchoate inner gurgles of sound-patterns unable to organize themselves into the right words or shapes to let us express what we feel.

None of Mount Kimbie’s singles on Crooks and Lovers stand out with the same level of warmth and power as say “William” or “Serged” on their previous EPs. But the record is cohesive, meant to rise and fall in a full listening experience. It’s the sort of record that connects with common personal experiences, and then stretches them outward. After listening to it a few times — and it is a record that has immense replay value — I understand a bit more where Mount Kimbie is coming from and how they fit into today’s electronic music landscape.

If Burial is the fettered graveyard of the dubstep alter-verse, then Mount Kimbie is the haunted hillside where spectral ghosts, fleshed robots, and strange wisps of ephemeral life make their retreat during an indigo dusk that could just as easily be dawn. There’s something utterly enchanting there. Field recordings of everyday noise and mechanical grind weave slinky shapes around digital drum patterns that limp and leap and do windmills around sampled chirps and spherical bleeps. It’s a soundtrack for dissolution: the rigid lines between human and computer, sentience and thingness, city and nature, all melt away into the gushing blood that pumps through the sewer arteries beneath Mount Kimbie.

If my rampant speculations offend, then let me add that the loose framework of their resonant topography is very open to interpretation. “Mount Kimbie is a fictional creation that is just made up from two different names, both are part of the track name of a song by another band,” says Maker and Campos. “It is quite nice to be under a name that has no meaning and suggests nothing. We are not fans of being blatant with meanings.” And so the sun sets over the old town of dubstep. What’s next?

MOUNT KIMBIE

With Dntel, Asura, Mary Ann Hobbes and DJG

Sat/25, 9 p.m., $10

Mount Kimbie with Dntel, Asura, Mary Ann Hobbes, and DJG

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.inticketing.com

Let them eat mayhem

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

September 21, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

CULTURE/LIT “I work in advertising,” says Shannon O’Malley. “I just want to make people read my evil shit.” The evil shit O’Malley refers to isn’t a sales jingle, but recipes for apocalyptic cakes. Want to know how to make an Agent Orange Carrot Cake? Rachael Ray, Paula Dean, and even Sandra Lee probably can’t help, but O’Malley has just the right ingredients to tantalize your “cyst-ridden pus hole.” A collaboration with photographer Keith Wilson, her colorful picture book Apocalypse Cakes: Recipes From the End will be published by Running Press in the spring of 2011 — for now, you can feast on some appetizers from the tome (and order recipe cards) on her website. I recently met with O’Malley to discuss the sweet and the deadly. We were at a cafe, but neither of us ate dessert.

SFBG I guess I look at apocalyptic cakes from an arty angle, and also from a nihilistic one.

Shannon O’Malley Yeah! Fatalist gluttons! [Laughs]

SFBG I like the juxtaposition of something tasty and sweet with something harsh and disastrous.

SO Me too.

SFBG How did the first cake come about?

SO Not from any preoccupation on my behalf. I’m not a good cook, I don’t bake cakes. It happened because in December of 2008, it was my partner’s birthday. She’s obsessed with the apocalypse and actually wrote her undergraduate thesis on zombies. She got me into reading J.G. Ballard.

When you’re with someone who talks about something a lot, it sort of seeps into your brain. Her birthday came around, and I didn’t want to buy her something, I wanted to make something for her. Around the same time, she was obsessing about cake, so that whenever anything went wrong, she’d say, “I want cake.”

The whole week before her birthday I thought I’d make her a cake cookbook — a zine of fucked up cakes. But I thought that was sort of vanilla, excuse the pun. The night before, I started to really ask myself what she liked, and I thought of the apocalypse. Cake and the apocalypse — it made perfect sense. I stayed up all night on the computer making this eight-page color zine called Apocalypse Cakes. I started thinking about the plagues, and just took this shitty JPG I found on the Internet of red velvet cake, and called it Raining Blood Red Velvet Cake.

I did all the writing and Photoshopping and layout. I started at 11 p.m. and basically stayed up all night because I loved it so much.

At the time I was living in Austin, and I went to Kinko’s before I had to go to my ad agency job. I bound it and made a couple copies. That night I gave it to her for birthday. Then I started showing the zine to my friends and being like, “Look what I made — isn’t this funny? Aren’t I fucking funny?” That’s when I decided it should be a book.

SFBG Is that when you began your blog?

SO Yes. At first I thought it would only be text. But then I got with my friend Keith Wilson, who is a filmmaker here in town, and he said, “No, you need pictures.”

He and I got together, and our first two cakes were the Raining Blood Red Velvet Cake and the Branch Davidian Texas Pecan Pie. We made them at my house. We set the Branch Davidian Texas Pecan Pie on fire in the yard in front of my house. He styled it. He’s super meticulous and way more object- and space-oriented than I am, and he has a great eye for macabre details.

SFBG How did your Photoshop project compare to images that were set designed?

SO It totally changed things. Keith adds something that on my own would give me trouble. I don’t want to go through the trouble to make things just-so, but he totally gets into that. His mom was a caterer, and that helped him with his food assembly skills.

SFBG Do you often have the name of the cake first and go from there?

SO It started with me having all these different names and themes. Some of the early ones included the Sodom and Gomorrah Fruit Cake — traditional apocalyptic myths from the Bible. But then I started to branch out and Keith and I would talk. He’d say, “A lot of people think that immigrants coming to the United States is apocalyptic — why don’t we do an immigration cake?” So I came up with Immigration Mayhem Mexican Chocolate Cake. We started riffing off of each other and decided the recipe should be in Spanish, so honkies can’t read it.

Now, either of us can have the original idea. I name them and do the write-ups and pay for the production, and on Saturdays, he comes over with his camera and we art direct the set together. He snaps the photos, and then I retouch them. We’ve done that for eight or nine months.

SFBG Do current events have a larger presence within the project than they did initially?

SO Definitely. Now it has become more overtly political. The Immigration Mayhem Mexican Chocolate Cake looks at certain people’s fears of their world crumbling. In addition to a cake with a swarm of locusts, we also have President Palin Half-Baked Alaska. Some of them come from our political perspective, and some of them are just stupid and gross and fun. Like Whore of Babylon Fruit Tart. Science fiction is also inspiring. We have a meteorite cake, and one about insurgent robots.

SFBG What does your girlfriend think of the project now? Does she give feedback?

SO She loves it. She’s been integral to it. When it was just a blog, a local art show had a call for entries and I thought, “Man, I wish I could enter a blog in the art show.” I thought that maybe I could have a computer at the gallery so people could browse the blog. She collects vintage cookbooks and has all this retro cooking imagery, and she said, “Why don’t you make old-timey recipe cards?” I don’t know if you’ve seen this one: Jonestown Kool-Aid Cake.

Once I got started working with the cakes, friends would come up to me and say things like, “What about Jonestown?” An old roommate suggested that cake. You know one day they’re going to build condos where the compound was in Guyana.

At a certain point I realized that every region has its apocalypse. The Seismic Haitian Mud Cake — that isn’t the end of the world, but it’s their fucking end of the world.

SFBG Do you find the format of a recipe lends itself to your sarcasm and sensibility?

SO The template has helped me. I know how long each write-up will be and that I have to make a recipe. But I’m apart from the text — when you make something that resonates with people, it sort of becomes its own thing. People get excited about it, so it’s gotta be made.

SFBG What are some of your favorite cakes?

SO I really like the China World Domination Red Bean Cake. It was conceptual, it was easy to make — I bought the cakes at a Chinese grocery store — and it makes fun of people who are xenophobic.

SFBG Since you began working on this, has the apocalyptic materialized for you more often?

SO I’ve always been into the archetype of the murderous housewife — situations that seem so perfectly dainty and wonderful, but have something dark behind them.

SFBG Like John Waters’ Serial Mom.

SO Exactly. I was just thinking of Kathleen Turner, and how John Waters’ movies are about seeing how shitty the strait-laced people are from the perspective of the people of the underworld. I like the dichotomy of, “You think it’s nice, don’t you? Well, it’s not.”

When I was writing a lot of this, I was working at an ad agency, and I was constantly bombarded with product names and messages about why products are awesome. There are write-ups where I talk of specific company names. One cake that we did for the book is all about the ubiquity of antidepressants and other blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Lipitor. It’s called Big Pharma Nut Cake.

People talk and write to me about the apocalypse more. Someone will say, “Hey, I found this article about the Super Hadron Collider and black holes.” But do I see the apocalyptic in the everyday? Not really.

In writing this book, I had to learn about the ten plagues of Egypt. The apocalypse hasn’t come to me — I had to go to it. *

www.shannonomalley.com

Film listings

David Talbot

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September 21, 2010

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. The film intern is Ryan Prendiville. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

*Buried Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ first English-language feature has one of the most deeply unsettling openings in recent memory: a pitch-black screen gradually soundtracked by the waking, disorientation, and frantic scratching made by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) as he realizes he’s been buried alive. A U.S. civilian contractor (the good, reconstructionist kind, not the gun-crazy, mercenary "security" type) in Iraq, he struggles to calm down as he uses a pocket lighter to view the coffin he’s trapped in. Finding a flashlight and cell phone, he soon receives a call from his kidnappers informing he has just 90 minutes of oxygen (and probably less time on the phone’s running-down battery) to raise a considerable ransom. Chris Sparling’s clever screenplay and Cortés’ surprisingly cinematic treatment (given the single location’s extreme claustrophobia) keep this potentially one-note real-world horror movie nail-bitingly tense throughout, while Reynolds runs a grueling emotive gamut with aplomb. (1:34) (Harvey)

*The Desert of Forbidden Art Uzbekistan probably hasn’t been at the top of your vacation wish list, but it might be after seeing this documentary by Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope — at least if you’re a modern art lover. It centers on the Nukus Museum, an extraordinary institution founded by the late Igor Savitsky, a frustrated painter who came here first from Moscow as an archaeologist, then became fascinated with the remote region’s ethnic folk artifacts. By 1966 official policy had turned from wiping out regional traditions and identities to embracing them, so he was given public funds to showcase his collection here. But unbeknownst to the bureaucrats back home (until it was too late), he’d already found a new passion, and was busy funneling his budget toward it: Finding and archiving a wealth of virtually unknown Soviet modern art that had been created without notice (often in hiding) since Stalin’s cultural watchdogs condemned the once-favored avant-garde movement of the 1920s in favor of sentimental, propagandic "Soviet realism." This stuff is the bomb — almost literally, since workaholic Savitsky finally died in 1984 of excess exposure to toxic restoration chemicals. There are poignant and colorful human stories here, but The Desert of Forbidden Art‘s exhilarating primary appeal lies in the fact that it features probably more eye-poppingly great visual art that you’ve never seen or known about before than quite possibly any documentary before it. You may well walk out with a question: so, are there cheap flights to Uzbekistan? (1:20) Four Star. (Harvey)

*Howl See "O Victory Forget Your Underwear" and "Franco’s Reign." (1:30) Elmwood, Smith Rafael.

Jack Goes Boating Not all miserable people are interesting — sometimes they’re just miserable and dull. Case in point: all of the characters in Jack Goes Boating, adapted by Robert Glaudini from his play. The titular Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also directs) is an awkward limo driver with filthy dreads and an anger management problem. He does his best to court equally awkward Connie (Amy Ryan), while his best friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) watch their marriage collapse, spectacularly. Given the talent involved, Jack Goes Boating might be mistaken for a better film than it is. There are moments, in fact, when it’s almost good. But the movie is unpleasant on every level — and not in an engaging way, like far better Noah Baumbach films about dysfunction. The romance is strained and unrelatable: you want Jack and Connie to make it work, if only so that the movie can end. (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Last Train Home In Lixin Fan’s documentary, a Chinese couple moves from their rural village to the city to find factory work, hoping to provide a better life for the young daughter they leave behind. (1:27) Shattuck.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole In which owls enter the uncanny valley. (1:31) Presidio.

Never Let Me Go The time is not so long ago, and the atmosphere is of a rural England that resists change. So it takes a while for us to realize that this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed book (by fellow novelist Alex Garland) takes place in an alternative recent past in which society has indeed changed in ways that are few, yet enormous. Raised at what appears to be a familiar if slightly peculiar English boarding school, the students of Hailsham are given limited but highly specific education preparing them for an adulthood of service. A short adulthood, that is, for they are clones grown from "originals," considered not quite human, their purpose being eventual willing harvest for organs by a populace whom medical science breakthroughs can now allow extraordinarily long lifespans. Placidly preparing for that future sacrifice are best friends Ruth (Keira Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the latter such a born accommodator that she doesn’t utter a peep of protest when Ruth grabs Tommy as her boyfriend — destroying all Kathy’s hopes and probably dimming Tommy’s somewhat as well. Directed by Mark Romanek (2002’s One Hour Photo), Never Let Me Go spans a couple of decades, but its aura of mournful melancholy never wavers. The results are well cast, handsomely outfitted (Rachel Portman contributes a plaintive string score), tasteful, and just a little bit more monotonous and less touching than you might hope. Not particularly plot-driven, this is a good film that’s also another illustration (like such recent examples as 2009’s The Road and 2008’s Revolutionary Road) of how sometimes no amount of intelligent effort can make a movie achieve everything that some literature can. (1:43) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Romantics Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Josh Duhamel, and assorted other pretty people star in this wedding-themed ensemble comedy. (1:35) Shattuck.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Hold onto your wallets: greedy Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, reprising his Oscar-winning role) returns. (2:13) Cerrito, Elmwood, Four Star, Marina.

Whiz Kids "One of the bad things about all methods of dating," according to 17-year-old Harmain Khan, "is that if you want to date something, you have to destroy it." A rather advanced notion about relationships, if not for the fact that the teen is actually referring to using electron spin resonance to date fossilized crocodile teeth. Yeah. And yet, he’s the most oddly charismatic among the three nerds at center in Tom Shepard and Tina DiFeliciantonio’s Whiz Kids. Like 2002’s Spellbound, the doc follows quirky kids as they prepare for an important competition, in this case the Intel Science Talent Search. Though the film isn’t ground-breaking, the subjects amuse with their odd mixture of scientific maturity and age-appropriate social naiveté; there’s a lot to relate to, even if they’re hoping to get into Harvard and solve the environmental crisis, and you at that age were just hoping to make it to graduation. (1:22) Balboa. (Prendiville)

You Again Two generations of former high school rivals (Kristen Bell vs. Odette Yustman and Sigourney Weaver vs. Jamie Lee Curtis) do battle on the eve of a family wedding. (1:30) Elmwood, Presidio.

ONGOING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane." You can see why director Vikram Jayanti scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." (1:42) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Alpha and Omega (1:28) 1000 Van Ness.

*The American George Clooney caught in a moodily paranoid, yet exquisitely photographed, ’70s-style suspense-arthouse death-trap? Belmondo and Beatty could empathize. Nonetheless, veteran rock photographer and Control (2007) director Anton Corbijn suffuses the chilly proceedings with a fresh, wintry beauty, the carefully balanced sense of highly charged tension and silky smoothness that a gunsmith would appreciate, and a resonance that feels personal. How else would an ex-rock shooter like Corbijn, who’s made iconic images of the Clash, U2, and others, connect with this tale of an assassin masquerading as a photographer, one who’s constantly glancing behind and around himself — justifiably wary of being caught in another killer’s sights — and seemingly just as wary of the director’s, and audience’s, gaze? A character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Camus novella or a Melville brooder, Jack/Edward, or more accurately "the American," (Clooney) is in exile after a bad collision with a girlfriend and hitmen in Sweden and hiding out in a picturesque Italian village, conspicuously the more-cold-than-cool outsider and doing one immaculate job for a gorgeous mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten). Is he a good or bad guy? The local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who knows and sees all like a great eye in the sky, is trying to find out, as is the most beautiful prostitute in town (Violante Placido). The answers are nowhere near as clear or as plainly painted as a Sergio Leone Western, although Corbijn nods to the maestro when stone-cold killer Henry Fonda, then playing shockingly against type, appears on a cafe TV screen in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the director’s care and attention to beauty — as well as the lines carved in the face of Clooney’s lean, mean-looking American, a whore like any other — say more than words. (1:43) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Animal Kingdom More renowned for its gold rush history and Victorian terrace homes than its criminal communities, Melbourne, Australia gets put on the same gritty map as Martin Scorsese’s ’70s-era New York City and Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s Los Angeles with the advent of director-writer David Michôd’s masterful debut feature. The metropolis’ sun-blasted suburban homes, wood-paneled bedrooms, and bleached-bone streets acquire a chilling, slowly building power, as Michôd follows the life and death of the Cody clan through the eyes of its newest member, an unformed, ungainly teenager nicknamed J (James Frecheville). When J’s mother ODs, he’s tossed into the twisted arms of her family: the Kewpie doll-faced, too-close-for-comfort matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver), dead-eyed armed robber Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Pope’s best friend Baz (Joel Edgerton), volatile younger brother and dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), and baby bro Darren (Luke Ford). Learning to hide his responses to the escalating insanity surrounding the Codys’ war against the police — and the rest of the world — and finding respite with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), J becomes the focus of a cop (Guy Pearce) determined to take the Codys down — and discovers he’s going to have use all his cunning to survive in the jungle called home. Stunning performances abound — from Frecheville, who beautifully hides a growing awareness behind his character’s monolithic passivity, to the adorably scarifying Weaver — in this carefully, brilliantly detailed crime-family drama bound to land at the top of aficionados’ favored lineups, right alongside 1972’s The Godfather and 1986’s At Close Range and cult raves 1970’s Bloody Mama and 1974’s Big Bad Mama. (2:02) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Bran Nue Dae An energetic screen translation of a 1990 Australian stage musical, Rachel Perkins’ film is tourist cliché spun into crowd-pleasing slop, like a Down Under Riverdance. Young Aboriginal Willie (Rockie McKenzie) escapes the "corrective" environ of a 1969 Perth Catholic boarding school and flees homeward, only to be pursued by mercilessly hammy Geoffrey Wright’s racist priest baddie. The crude humor, generic tunes, and hectically shot and dance-poor numbers have about as much to do with Aussie abo culture as The Lion King does with "Africa" — it’s prefab feel-good pap posing as multicultural representation. (1:28) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

Catfish Please do not reveal the secret to Catfish — relax, I’m not going to. What I will say is this: Catfish’s uber-secretive, Paranormal Activity-esque ad campaign is effective, but the film ultimately stands on its own merits. This is an intriguing, relatable documentary, and if the studio feels that they’ll sell more tickets by promoting it in a certain way, so be it. Without giving away too much, Catfish is the spontaneous documentary that arose when filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost began filming Rel’s brother, Nev. Like so many of us, Nev finds himself drawn to a person he’s never met — embarking on a relationship through Facebook photos and wall posts. Of course, as is so often the case with the internet, nothing is quite what it seems. Catfish has already found its critics, particularly those who insist the documentary is a fake. I believe it, but either way it’s an impressive achievement: the best film yet about social networking. (1:26) Metreon. (Peitzman)

Devil (1:20) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

*Easy A Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked ’00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. The brainy grandchild of 1930s screwball comedies and the knowing offspring of more recent spoofs of the Clearasil years like Clueless (1995) — with blood ties to the on-point pop of pater familias John Hughes — Easy A doesn’t quite aspire to the grainy, your-so-called-reality of YouTube auteurs, à la The Virginity Hit, though Bert V. Royal’s script is just as steeped in the culture of viral gossip and TMZ-writ-small, as well as the high-low literary and cinematic referents, that ’80s babies-and-up were succored on. Welcome to the postmodern mixed-up world of the girl who gets straight As, a marked contrast to all the bromancin’ going down in other parts of the cineplex: Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is curious enough to venture fully down the rabbit hole of bad-girl schoolyard celebrity after fabricating a story about losing her virginity. Despite the swelling disapproval of Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her virginal Christian fundamentalist crew, Olive’s soon giving pity faux-fucks to all the misfits on campus in exchange for gift cards to big-box stores. Her hilariously staged tryst with classmate Brandon (Dan Byrd), who’s sick of getting beaten up every day because he’s gay, is up there with anything in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). And though Easy A often seems pitched more to adults, like Olive’s wise-cracking parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci), its entertainingly self-aware fiction is still likely to bridge generational divides as much as anything on Facebook. (1:30) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and "the art of doing nothing." India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) Four Star, Shattuck. (Galvin)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Four Star, Lumiere, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

Going the Distance If you live in San Francisco, don’t try to date someone in New York. It’s just not worth the hassle. But hey, maybe you’re as adorable as Drew Barrymore, and your boyfriend’s as charming as Justin Long — you can’t be expected to let a little geographical complication get in the way. That’s the driving force behind Going the Distance, a romcom that stars real-life couple Barrymore and Long as Erin and Garrett, two crazy kids trying to make it work cross-country. In many ways, the film is your standard boy-meets-girl story, but it’s cute enough that the predictability factor doesn’t really matter. The cast is universally strong, with bonus points to the standouts: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day as Garrett’s embarrassing roommate, and Christina Applegate as Erin’s germaphobe sister. The humor is surprisingly sharp — and raunchy, which earned Going the Distance an R-rating. I’m not going to say Long’s bare ass is worth the price of admission, but it’s certainly a selling point. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*Heartbreaker French import Heartbreaker is a star-driven romantic comedy that underlines how lame and formulaic Hollywood’s current endeavors in that genre almost invariably are. Not that it isn’t formulaic — but you don’t feel nose-led by a committee of script-coarsening hacks, and the usual escapist lifestyle pleasures don’t come off as a product-placement parade. Alex (Romain Duris) is the star performer in a biz run with pragmatic sibling Mélanie (Julie Ferrier) and her genially vague husband Marc (François Damiens). They orchestrate breakups with maximum guile but also strict ethical rules ("We open their eyes, not their legs … We only step in if the woman is unhappy"), usually hired by families desperate to wean daughters from bad relationships. An amusing montage of Alex essaying various roles — window washer, sushi chef, redeemable criminal — establishes this is an enterprise both elaborately thought-out and costly. Indeed, Alex and Co. are in debt, thanks to his theatrical perfectionism. Ergo they’ve no choice but to violate rules and accept a lucrative new assignment whose target seems far from unhappy. There’s never any doubt where Heartbreaker is headed. Cocky Alex will fall hard, repent his professional Don Juan fakery, almost lose the game, then grovel sufficiently to pull a Graduate as scruffy charmer triumphs over dully respectable Mr. Right. What happens after the fade, when reality dawns? We probably don’t want to know. Yet Heartbreaker earns that suspension of disbelief, arriving at a unabashedly melodramatic climax just as romantically intoxicating as it aims to be. (1:44) Albany, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

I’m Still Here This examination of Joaquin Phoenix’s self-imposed Hollywood exile is neither fascinating nor insightful. More like tedious and aggravating, really. Whether or not "JP" — as the erstwhile Oscar nominee refers to himself as he takes on a new persona as unwashed hip-hop artist — is faking his downward spiral is supposed to be the great attraction for Casey Affleck’s apparently vérité vehicle. But Phoenix is so (deliberately?) unlikable it’s hard to care one way or the other. If he is having a breakdown, conveniently captured on film from multiple angles, he’s still a spoiled, private jet-taking movie star moping about existential woes while living a privileged life (hotel suites, fawning personal assistants, etc.) If he’s faking it, it’s unclear what the point of I’m Still Here is supposed to be, other than a "fuck you" to the industry that made Phoenix rich and famous. Either way, ugh. (1:48) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, "Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island." In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Peitzman)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line "You just fucked with the wrong Mexican." Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Albany, Clay. (Harvey)

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to "the nice parts.") Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life
isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Mesrine: Killer Instinct This first half of a two-part film about notorious French bank robber Jacques Mesrine examines the early life of its subject, before he was a flamboyant, headline-grabbing folk hero. The very first scene uses 70s-style split-screens to revel Mesrine’s violent 1979 death; writer-director Jean-François Richet (2005’s Assault on Precinct 13) then jumps back 15 or so years for a glimpse of our (anti-) hero’s soldiering days in Algeria. Before long, "Jacky" (an outstanding Vincent Cassel, in a César-winning performance) is back in Paris, horrifying his upper-class parents and young wife by choosing the underworld over conventional pencil-pushing. (A near-unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu appears as a mob boss.) Killer Instinct, which is adapted from Mesrine’s own prison-penned autobiography, suffers from some standard biopic problems — it tries to cram in too much, and feels mighty rushed at times. But there’s still plenty of bad, bad behavior to enjoy, including the film’s spectacular last act, a breakneck recreation of one of the daring prison escapes that helped make Mesrine a legend. Continuation Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, which beings where this film ends, is now playing. (1:53) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 If you see writer-director Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct (review above), you’re pretty much obligated to see this sequel, especially since the earlier film beings with the main character’s death, then flashes back and never catches up to it. This installment was actually filmed first, allowing star Vincent Cassell to pack on nearly 50 pounds to play the oldier, portlier version of the legendary French bank robber. Mesrine’s prowess as an escape artist allows him to spend much of this film on the lam with partner François (Mathieu Amalric) and girlfriend Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier). Along the way, the headline-hungry crook declares himself a revolutionary, poses for Paris Match, kidnaps a billionaire, spends his ill-gotten money on diamonds and BMWs, tortures a journalist, and does as much as he can to further the Myth of Mesrine. The foreknowledge of Mesrine’s ultimate end lends a sense of ticking-clock doom; the first time we see it, in Killer Instinct, it’s from the point of view of Mesrine and Sylvia. Richet films the death scene here from the perspective of the police who tracked him, with increasing frustration, for years. Clever twists like this make it preferable to watch both films back-to-back, though Cassell’s commanding performance makes each a worthwhile stand-alone. (2:14) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Sam Stander)

*Sicilian Girl Spoiled daddy’s girl Rita Atria (Veronica D’Agostino) is traumatized at age 11 when her beloved papa is killed by Mafia associates. At 17, she’s pushed over the edge when an older brother meets the same fate. It’s then, in 1991,
that she breaks the omertà, or code of silence, by cooperating with judicial authorities, putting herself under severe witness-protection limitations while still at high assassination risk. This dramatized real-life story doesn’t offer cliché heroism: as portrayed by fireball D’Agostino, Rita is bratty, obstinate, not especially bright or pretty, her dedication more selfishly vengeful than concerned with the public good. She’s also a naive teenager susceptible to manipulation, especially by questionably motivated boyfriends. Yet she takes a stand and refuses to back down. The likely consequences of that courage make for a suspenseful drama director Marco Amenta ably steers to a conclusion both tragic and inspiring. (1:50) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Soul Kitchen Director Fatih Akin (2004’s Head-On) offers a tribute to the German Heimat ("homeland") film, as well as to his own hometown, Hamburg, with this gritty comedy set in a restaurant dubbed Soul Kitchen. Star Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script with Akin, really did own a similar greasy spoon, and his knowledge of what makes an eatery soar or fail is exaggerated here to humorous and occasionally surreal effect. Bousdoukos’ character, the scruffy Zinos, loves funk music; he’s also in an existential funk, having just seen his girlfriend move to Shanghai. What’s worse, he’s just injured his back, necessitating the hiring of snooty chef Shayn (Head-On‘s Birol Ünel); his ne’er-do-well brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) is freshly out of jail; and he owes big bucks to the local tax board. Also, an old childhood pal turned sleazy businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is circling his property with sharky hunger. Will everything that can possibly go wrong, go wrong, with a side of ketchup and mayonnaise? Of course it will. Stylish direction and a game cast, including winning newcomer Anna Bederke as Zinos’ shot-gulping waitress, make Soul Kitchen a fun if non-essential diversion. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*The Tillman Story To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught. Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the "friendly fire" circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House. Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else. The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. (1:34) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom.(2:10) California, Cerrito, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Undertow This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. (1:40) Bridge. (Harvey)

The Virginity Hit To its credit, The Virginity Hit is not what you’d expect. The trailer and concept recall the teen sex comedy trend that sprung up after 1999’s American Pie, but the actual film is a far more grounded in reality. It’s also not nearly as good. The Virginity Hit is a well executed mockumentary, in that it feels amateur even in its most absurd moments. The movie follows Matt (Matt Bennett) in his attempts to lose his virginity after a disastrous attempt with his girlfriend Nicole (Nicole Weaver). As you’ve probably guessed, hilarity ensues — and it ensues, for a YouTube generation, in the form of viral videos and crude parodies. The problem with The Virginity Hit is that it just isn’t funny: the tone is all over the place, and the bits that should be amusing fall flat. It’s interesting as an experiment and the cast is quite convincing, but the material never elevates the film past its gimmick. (1:26) Metreon. (Peitzman)

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop An intriguing misfire on par with his 2006 OTT bodice-heaver Curse of the Golden Flower, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop sees filmmaker Zhang Yimou playfully dispensing with the serious rep cultivated by such films as Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1981), movies that made Zhang a central figure amid Chinese film’s Fifth Generation. Deep into middle age, with crowd-pleasers like Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) behind him, Zhang appears fully committed to the low road of commercial entertainments — an approach completely in line with his country’s embrace of market-driven economics. But why remake the Coen brothers’ career-making 1984 noir tribute, Blood Simple? Zhang does little to refresh and improve on Coens’ noir retool, apart from drenching the proceedings in his homeland’s very dated, broad slapstick, including a jarringly out-of-place noodle-dough twirling scene, and setting some of the action on the glorious painted-desert mountainsides of the Gansu province. It’s as if Zhang has decided to send up himself — the film’s vivid palette and adulterous couple compares unfavorably with 1990’s Ju Dou — as well as with the brudders Coen. (1:35) Opera Plaza, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

REP PICKS

*Three in the Attic You can get a pretty good idea where much of America’s head was at in 1968 via this largely forgotten American International Pictures release, which was a huge sleeper hit. What did Joes Blow and College think about all this love, peace, freedom, and revolution stuff? That it was gonna be a lot easier to find and ball swinging chicks, hopefully. Ergo Steven Yafa’s screenplay, directed by spotty industry veteran Richard Wilson (who curiously never made another feature after this peak commercial success) was the perfect male fantasy for the times. Campus stud Paxton Quigley (Christopher Jones) is a love ’em and leave ’em type who surprisingly surrenders to monogamy — briefly — upon meeting flaxen-haired Tobey (Yvette Mimieux). But what’s a poor boy to do when girls are practically forcing him to be bad? Soon he’s scheduling regular secret assignations with schoolteacher Eulice (Judy Pace), who affects the corniest honey-dripping Southern accent you ever did hear, and hippie ditz Jan (Maggie Thrett), who says things like "Do you think it possible for a woman to be both Jewish and psychedelic at the same time?" (After posing as a homosexual to get a first sympathy shag from her, he snarks "I sometimes think that faggots make with with more chicks than I do!" Har.) When all three find out he’s been getting triple tail, they do the practical thing: Drug him, then imprison him in Tobey’s sorority attic, taking turns "punishing" our hero by fucking him to exhaustion, penance, or death. Needless to say, this was one notion of female empowerment that highly appealed to guys at the time, making them feel hip while basically feeding them ye olden insatiable-female orgiastic fantasy with a gloss of love beads and ironed hair. Awesomely dated, Three in the Attic takes itself more seriously than you’d expect, which does not mean it gets away with it. One thing that hasn’t dated, however, is Chad and Jeremy’s theme song "Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course." The cofeature on this Vortex Room bill is 1976’s lower-education horror Massacre at Central High. (1:30) Vortex Room (www.myspace.com/thevortexroom). (Harvey)

What is “Catfish”?

Sue Vaughan

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September 16, 2010

0

Do not read this interview before seeing Catfish. I say that for a few reasons: 1. It’s mildly spoilery. 2. Some of it doesn’t make sense out of context. 3. I really want you to see Catfish. The documentary — or reality thriller, as it’s been called — follows filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost as they film Rel’s brother Nev’s online relationship. It’s a unique and contentious experience that I was still mulling over when I sat down with the documentarians and their subject. Here’s a transcript of our interview, minus some digressions about Saturday Night Live in the 80s and my attempts at Facebook stalkage.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: When did you realize you were making the movie that you made?

Henry Joost: When we discovered the songs — that scene. We just turned to each other and were like, “OK, we should probably not stop rolling for the next however long this takes.”
Rel Schulman: Yeah, we sort of just were swimming in the story very innocently up until that point, just trusting the fact that Nev was somehow engaging, and that he’d always been, and that we’d always filmed him and we film each other all the time. Something was happening and it felt like it might go somewhere, but we had no idea where.
Nev Schulman: And also, I have a history in my own life of — to a fault, sort of — pursuing things headstrong, without much consideration, just sort of going for it. And Rel’s observed those many situations where I’ve ended up getting hurt or in trouble or whatever it is, and I think always just sort of regretted not filming them. So he was like, “Henry, if it’s Nev, it’s probably going to get interesting. Let’s film it.”

SFBG: There’s a lot of secrecy surrounding Catfish, particularly with the ad campaign. Why do you feel like that’s important to how people view the film?

HJ: We feel like we want the audience to have the same experience we had, and we didn’t know what we were getting into, so it’s important that the audience doesn’t know what they’re getting into either in order to have the same reactions we had.
RS: It’s a really unusual movie. It doesn’t fit into any typical categories. We can’t compare it to anything we’ve ever seen before. And I think, when people start boxing movies and categorizing them into genres, you start expecting something. And this movie is not what you expect. The experience is not what we expected.

SFBG: The film has been called a “reality thriller.” What’s your response to that? Would you agree with it?

RS: Sure. I also agree with the word “documentary,” but apparently that’s a poisonous word at the box office.
HJ: I’ve never been aware of any other reality thrillers, so if we’re starting a new genre, then, sure.
NS: People are drawing the connection a lot to other documentary thrillers that aren’t real. And there have been a lot of those. Blair Watch sort of started the whole thing. Paranormal Activity. District 9, to some extent. That is certainly a very popular style now. The only difference is this is actually a real reality thriller.
HJ: And I would say the studio wants those comparisons. And we trust them.

SFBG: There’s already debate about authenticity. Does it matter to you if people understand Catfish to be truth?

HJ: It’s funny, because at screenings, it doesn’t come up that often. But it comes up in almost every interview. I’m not really sure why that is. But at Sundance, it kind of caught us off-guard. Someone asked a question at a Q&A. They said, “I thought this was a great movie, but I think it’s a fake documentary.” And the wind was taken out of our sails. We got kind of upset and a little defensive. You know, it’s strange to know how to react to that, when you have a real experience, and then someone says, “I don’t believe you.”
NS: I think also something to consider, now that we’ve sort of joking about it to some extent, for them to have written this movie would have been an unbelievably amazing accomplishment. To get into the details of this family and where we were in Michigan and even down to the snaggletooth on the pet dog they have at their house, you can’t write that. How do you possibly come up with something like that? Truth is just stranger than fiction. And we understand that the coincidence involved and the pieces of the puzzle that had to sort of fall into place, is crazy. That I had this experience, share an office with these guys, we’re filmmakers, Rel always sort of tends to film me — it’s crazy that it happened, and it’s hard to believe. But it’s real.

SFBG: What was the process in terms of getting permission to use everything you filmed of this family? Were they aware of the movie you were making while you were filming?

RS: Well, we didn’t know either. At the point where we knew what we were doing, which was basically when we got there, we very clearly — we came out to Angela, and just asked her: “We’ve been filming all along on Nev’s side of the story, not knowing where it’s going to go. Turns out it went here. We’d like to hear your side of the story.”
HJ: We wouldn’t have made the movie if we didn’t have her consent, or their consent.
RS: We wouldn’t have wanted to, or been able to. And now they’re all supporters of the film.

SFBG: Catfish did really well at Sundance, and it’s continuing to build up a lot of buzz. How have your lives changed since it first premiered?

NS: Well, for me, I feel like in a weird way I’m kind of right back where I started. Except now the stakes are a little higher and the opportunities are better. I’ve got a lot of great choices to make, and I’m very excited about where this will lead. I’ve just got a whole new sort of fresh start on what I’d like to do in my strange quarter-life crisis of not knowing what to do.
RS: That’s what started the movie in the first place, is that he was wookin’ pa nub. And she was wookin’ pa him. We’re all still together pretty much every day. We have the same office, similar lifestyle, but now we’ve got a couple new friends in H-Wood. I think maybe making our next movie might be — not necessarily easier. Opportunity is really the only thing that’s changed so far.

SFBG: What about your opinion of social networking?

RS: Because of time, I think it’s changed. Besides the fact that we made this movie and had this experience, over the last two years, everyone’s opinion of social networking has changed. From 2008 to 2010, the Facebook monster has gotten bigger and bigger and more powerful and more scary and more controlling, with or without Catfish.
HJ: Although I feel like you can’t blame Facebook for it. That’s like blaming the city of San Francisco for what people do in it. It’s just an infrastructure. It’s really the people who use it and how they use it that you should get upset about.
NS: Yeah. I mean, if people didn’t want a feature in Facebook, it just wouldn’t be there.

SFBG: What was interesting to me is that when the internet started, it was way more anonymous — you didn’t know whom you were chatting with. And now people have this idea that if you can see their picture, and you can see their friends and family, you know exactly who they are.

RS: Yeah, I see what you’re getting at, and you’re dead right. The three of us have become more suspicious of social networking and certainly less naïve. But at the same time, we try really hard to remain open-minded about meeting new people, meeting strangers and new experiences online. Because it’s such a huge democratic playground that anything could happen. For that reason, you’ve gotta be careful, but for the very same reason, anything could happen and might be the next best thing.

SFBG: What about changes to how you approach filmmaking? Just because Catfish is such a unique documentary.

RS: We had immediate access to our subject in this movie. He was right under our noses the whole time and willing to be filmed from close quarters at any moment in the day. I don’t know how we’re going to find that again, so we’re not going to force it. So we might just let the next doc find us, and in the meantime, tackle a narrative script.

SFBG: Nev, what is it like for you to watch Catfish now? Has enough time passed that you don’t feel awkward or uncomfortable viewing it?

NS: I’ve always kind of enjoyed it, because the experience was sort of such a blur for me, I kind of get to relive it every time I watch it. It was really hard at first, because when we came back from Michigan, I kind of got back together with my ex-girlfriend, and ended up becoming very seriously involved with her. She obviously didn’t really like watching the movie, because it was about the girl I kind of fell in love with in-between our relationship. So that was a huge hurdle to get over. I don’t know — that doesn’t really have any pertinence to the article. But yeah, there have been times when I’ve hated watching it and I’m just sick of it, but right now, I’m kind of into it. I’m excited. They had to kind of drag me out of a screening the other day. I was like, “I want to watch! What happens?”

SFBG: I mean, you say it’s not pertinent, but it’s a really personal film. You’re all very actively involved with it, and you’re all on screen the entire time. I think it’s different in that way.

RS: I’m pretty nervous about the whole country seeing it, and not just judging it as a movie — because it feels like less of a movie than it is just our lives and our experience. There’s no shield. There’s no protection that like, this is a script we wrote and actors we hired to portray our thoughts. It’s just us. And mostly him [Nev]. I just kind of have my fingers crossed that people like us.
NS: It hurts when I see blogs or message boards with people who have negative comments. It’s hard. It sucks. I can imagine making a film as a director and then saying, “Well, they don’t get it,” or, “OK, sure, they don’t like it, but whatever.” But when someone says they think that we exploited them, or they think that we’re frauds and liars, that’s them calling me a liar. That’s like, yikes.
HJ: Yeah, and saying that we made it up is implying the worst about us.

SFBG: But also flattering!

HJ: Also flattering in a strange way. But it’s just not our style.
NS: We’re nice guys.
RS: [laughs] You can’t say that. That’s going to make people think you’re not a nice guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJfaz_w7-f8

Catfish opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Music to cross the globe for

Andrew Lam

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September 15, 2010

0

If you hoisted up a park bench, cut the back off of it, removed the legs, placed it on top of cushion on a saw stand, and commenced to thrum on it with headless croquet mallets with a dear friend, you’d have created a bootleg version of the txalaparta, a traditional instrument from the Basque region of Spain. Two of the area’s most renowned musicians took this contraption on a trip to play with indigenous nomadic musicians the world over, creating Nomadak TX, a music documentary where notes are exchanged in culture-to-culture melodies.

Igor Otxoa is a member of the group, Oreka TX, that embarked on the project that took them to India, Mongolia, Lapland, and the Sahara. Days away from the group’s launch of their North American tour –and in the midst of a visa kerfuffle that threatened to derail the whole thing — Otxoa (who is staying in Spain while band members Mikel Ugarte and Harkaitz Martinez de San Vicente man the txalaparta in the States) answered our questions via email from San Sebastian. His group will be in town next week (Thurs/23) at the Basque Cultural Center for a live performance of the music in Nomadak TX.

Oh you say you like guttural rhythm? Do we have the trailer for you…

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Why do you play the txalaparta?

Igor Otxoa: I saw it played in my neighborhood fiesta and I loved it. “Percussion and related to Basque culture, that’s for me!” I told myself. After that I saw it again at school played by the Artze brothers, some of the ones that brought back the instrument. After that, I started looking for somewhere I could learn it.

SFBG: The txalaparta almost disappeared at one point in the 20th century. Is there a well-documented tradition of how to play it, or have you developed your approach independently?

IO: The way to play it that we received was the one that the last of the old txalaparta players left to us. In the ’60s there were only two txalaparta player couples, the Zuaznabar brothers and the Goikoetxea brothers, and they left us the way of playing that they learned from their grandfathers. But after that there was a process in which the Beltran brothers and the Artze brothers started to develop the instrument in a more musical way. We are from the next generation — we learned from the Beltrans, and we developed the instrument in our own way.

SFBG: Why is it important that it be a two person instrument?

IO: It was related to the work on the farms, and as in many percussion instrument that come from a tradition of work, it became an instrument. For us the txalaparta it is not the physical instrument itself — it is the way of playing it, sharing the rhythm between two people. That is why we don’t understand the txalaparta without two players. It’s its peculiarity, what makes it unique in the world, this way of sharing the rhythm between two players.

SFBG: Tell us about the motivation behind the film Nomadak TX. Why nomadic peoples?

IO: We choose the countries and peoples we wanted to meet for different reasons. One was the level of nomadity that they had. Another reason was the music of those cultures. We were very interested in the Khoomi singing in Mongolia. And the Bereber women´s singing. And the Indian rhythms. Another reason was the materials that condition the way of living in those parts of the world. The ice and snow that takes up many months in Saapmi, the sand and stones of in the Sahara dessert, the wood in India, and the air in Mongolia. We wanted to play txalaparta with those materials. And we got to!

SFBG: How did you locate the musicians that would be in the movie?

IO: Sometimes we made the arrangements before traveling. The musicians, we contacted them by different ways — the Internet helped a lot. Other times we didn’t contact any of them and it was just who we found on the trip. We think that like in music, on the trips the improvisation was the most interesting as we never knew what we would find. We had unforgettable musical surprises on all the trips. For us it had the same value: the music of a professional musician in a studio or old men singing in a yurt in the Mongolian steppe.

SFBG: In Nomadak TX you make txalapartas out of everything from ice to stone — why the multi-media?

IO: That was one of the most marvelous moments of the project. We never expected to do a txalaparta with ice. Our idea was that we were going to play with the txalaparta of wood and the Terje Isungset “Iceman” in Saapmi would play with ice. But we tried it, and it was so nice to work with the ice. If you cut too much we would throw water on it and in few seconds it was frozen and the note was changed!

SFBG: Now that you’re doing the North America tour, inquiring minds want to know — when’s the Oreka TX hip hop remix coming out?

IO: Good question! I hope that during the USA Tour we will be able to contact good hip-hop musicians that can work on it. It is not our music style, so if we want to have a quality result, better if someone from USA makes it!

Oreka TX’s Nomadak TX live concert

Thurs/23 8 p.m., free

SF Basque Cultural Center

599 Railroad, SF

www.sfbcc.us

Censored in a brave new world

David Talbot

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September 14, 2010

4

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The world was a different place in 1976 when Carl Jensen, a professor of communications at Sonoma State University, founded Project Censored to highlight important national news stories that were underreported or outright ignored by the mainstream press.

Back then, there were few good alternatives to television networks or major newspapers and magazines, and stories omitted from those channels usually escaped public notice. There was no such thing as Google News, no one had ever heard of a blog, and the word “twitter” was associated with birds or gossip. So it was up to Project Censored to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of the news by delivering an annual rundown of the top 25 most significant articles that hadn’t been widely distributed.

But even if the corporate media was censoring important information back then, today’s highly fragmented media world has opened the floodgates to endless news and propaganda of every possible variety, leaving citizens awash in more information than they can possibly process.

The shared American narrative and agenda disappeared as the Internet boomed and newspapers shrank. While major media outlets have been consolidated into the hands of fewer corporations and the once stable media industry has been in flux, the general public has splintered into factions that seem to reside in disparate realities.

Extremism and the promotion of narrow corporate interests have gained footholds. Even on national television networks, personalities such as Glenn Beck are gaining traction by painting President Barack Obama as a dangerous radical, a Big Brother figure, or worse. Once-accepted imperatives like addressing global warming are undermined by seemingly legitimate news stories.

Yet the public is playing a bigger role than ever. Blogs abound, and nearly anyone can spark a public outcry by capturing egregious behavior on film with his or her cell phone. Thanks to a team of hackers who know a thing or two about encryption technology, WikiLeaks has emerged as a wild card of the new media landscape by cutting loose thousands of classified government documents and airing military footage never intended for a mass audience.

It’s a brave new world of media consumption, but Project Censored’s mission hasn’t really changed. More than ever, people need help sifting through this cacophony to figure out what they truly need to know.

For 35 years, the project has distributed its Censored list nationwide to shed light on the top stories not brought to you by the mainstream press. These days, stories are submitted, researched by students, filtered through LexisNexis to determine which outlets have covered them, and then voted on by a team of judges. An international network of 30 colleges and universities contributes to the project, and volunteers from around the world submit stories for consideration. At the end of each project cycle, the work is released in a compendium.

Past judges have included luminaries such as Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, to whom Censored 2011 (Seven Stories Press, 2010) is dedicated. Even journalist Walter Cronkite publicly stated, “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.”

Project Censored Director Mickey Huff, a history professor at Diablo Valley College who sports a long ponytail and a pointy beard and talks at an excited pace, uses air quotes when saying the phrase “news decisions” because his concern is censorship. But how does he define censorship?

“There are many factors afoot that prevent stories from getting reported,” he says. “What we’re saying is that anything that interferes with a free flow of information is censorship. It’s not the blacking out of a story, it’s the framing of a story. It’s the angle. It’s what views are being left out. In old school ‘objective journalism'<0x2009>” — air quotes — “you’re supposed to get both sides of the story. Yeah, well, sometimes there are six sides.”

The preface to Censored 2011 offers a harsh critique of mainstream news. “In America, unsubstantiated opinions, rumors, and gossip surrounding important issues masquerade as real news,” it states. “We live in a propaganda culture where factual information is routinely censored by degree.”

To be sure, public relations outfits and staged press events routinely influence the content of the daily news, and media watchdog groups often spotlight the fiction or egregious bias that finds its way onto the airwaves. Yet in a culture where truth is so often mangled and information so scattered — and the state of politics and the economy so frightening — both sides of the political spectrum have moved toward the fringes. And thumbing through Censored 2011, one wonders if Project Censored itself has wandered into uncharted territory.

Huff and former Project Censored director Peter Phillips recently coauthored an op-ed exploring the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs), hoping to publish it through the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. To their dismay, IPS rejected it. Huff found the decision cruelly ironic — he felt he’d been censored.

Chapters 6 and 7 of Censored 2011 also delve into SCADs — a construct that seeks to buck the “conspiracy theory” label in favor of a more sophisticated framework. They are defined as “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes.” The introduction to the book alludes to those chapters as “beyond urgent,” and Kristina Borjesson equates a lack of mainstream media coverage of questions surrounding 9/11 — perhaps the mother of all SCADs, from the 9/11 Truth Movement’s perspective — as censorship.

Huff and Phillips noted that they are not part of the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, arguing that urging mainstream coverage of that particular set of questions is just a small piece of their wider body of work. There are signs, however, that returning to that particular topic over the past several years has harmed some people’s perceptions of the project.

One person familiar with Project Censored noted that at least two former judges had parted ways over “the 9/11 fixation … a really weak link in the entire operation. It rearranges atomized factoids into theories.” Yet the project should still be viewed as valuable and relevant, this person added.

“There is absolutely no question that they’ve done extremely important work over the years,” noted Reese Erlich, a prominent journalist who has covered the Iraq war and won awards from Project Censored for his work in the past. “The mainstream media in this country are failing to report all kinds of issues.” Yet Erlich turns a critical eye onto the so-called 9/11 Truth narrative. “My biggest gripe is that by complaining there is a conspiracy … you take away from the ability of people to make positive change,” he noted. “It gives them all the power, and the people have none of the power.”

It’s clear that Project Censored is sensitive to the “conspiracy theorist” label, and as champions of free speech, the directors aren’t shy about addressing it head-on. The first item on the Investigative Research section of its website, for example, is a nearly 10,000-word article titled “Analysis of Project Censored: Are We A Left-Leaning, Conspiracy-Oriented Organization?”

Its self-analysis concludes that the organization is neither, but admits to a certain bias. “The bias of Project Censored seems to be quite simple,” it notes. “We promote protection of First Amendment rights in support of a truly free press, one that holds those in power, elected by the people or appointed, accountable.”

THE TOP 10 CENSORED STORIES OF 2009-2010

1. Buh-bye U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency?

Since the financial meltdown of 2008 sent a jarring ripple effect throughout the global economy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been talking up the idea of an international market that doesn’t use the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. The dollar now holds the status of the predominant anchor currency held in foreign exchange reserves, securing the U.S.’s strategic economic position.

In July 2009 at the Group of Eight Summit in Italy, Medvedev underscored his call for a newly conceived “united future world currency” when he pulled a sample coin from his pocket and showed it off to heads of state, the Bloomberg news service reported. At a conference in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in June 2009, world leaders from Brazil, India, and China listened as Medvedev made his case for a new global currency system anchored on something other than the dollar, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor.

Additionally, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) suggested in a report that the present system of using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency should be subject to a wholesale reconsideration, according to an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper.

Michael Hudson, an author and professor of economics at the University of Missouri, links discussions about an alternative global reserve currency with U.S. military spending. Referencing Medvedev’s calls for a “multipolar world order,” Hudson offers this translation: “What this means in plain English is, we have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the U.S. to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks, and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.”

2. Environmental enemy No. 1: U.S. Department of Defense

The U.S. military burns through 320,000 barrels of oil a day, Sara Flounders of the International Action Center reports, but that tally doesn’t factor in fuel consumed by contractors or the energy and resources used to produce bombs, grenades, missiles, or other weapons employed by the Department of Defense.

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products — yet it has a blanket exemption in commitments made by the U.S. to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Despite its status as top polluter, the Department of Defense received little attention in December of 2009 during talks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, human health is threatened by the long-term environmental impacts of military operations throughout the globe. Depleted uranium contamination from the Iraq conflict has been linked to widespread health problems, Jalal Ghazi reports for New America Media. The Chamoru people of Guam, meanwhile, experience an alarmingly high rate of cancer, which is suspected to be linked to a nearby 1950s U.S. nuclear weapons testing site that left a legacy of radioactive contamination.

“The greatest single assault on the environment comes from one agency: the Armed Forces of the United States,” author Barry Sanders writes in The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism.

3. Internet privacy and personal access at risk

Project Censored cites 13 sources, including articles published in Wired and Mother Jones, for this story, and a Google search for the phrase “Internet kill switch” yields 539,000 results generated by more recent reporting.

The Cybersecurity Act was proposed in June 2009, giving the president the power to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and do whatever is necessary to diffuse a cyber attack. The Senate Homeland Security Committee approved a comprehensive cybersecurity bill this past June, which has drawn sharp criticism for including a provision that would allow the president to shut down networks in the event of an emergency.

Reporting in Wired, Noah Schachtman broke the story that the CIA was investing in Visible Technologies, a software firm that can collect, rank, and analyze millions of posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites. Wired also reported that the Obama administration had followed the lead of George W. Bush by urging a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a spy case weighing whether a U.S. president can bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

4. ICE’s secret detention centers

The federal office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces that reveal no information about their ICE tenants. Reporting in The Nation, Jaqueline Stevens describes ICE’s jail network and the agency’s penchant for secrecy when it comes to withholding public information about the facilities. “The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails,” Stevens writes. “Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors … as well as cover-ups.” As a result, detainees can literally be “lost” by attorneys or family members for days or weeks at a time after being transferred.

5. Blackwater in Pakistan

The notorious private military contractor Blackwater has changed its name to Xe Services, but it hasn’t escaped scrutiny. According to a story that ran in The Nation in December 2009, the contractor is at the center of a covert program in Pakistan run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Karachi. Xe is involved in planning targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, and helps direct a U.S. military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the U.S. military intelligence apparatus who spoke with the Nation. The Pentagon has disputed the claim, stating: “There are no U.S. military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.” More recently, The New York Times reported that Xe had created a web of more than 30 shell companies to win defense contracts, and specifically mentioned that the company employees had loaded bombs and missiles onto predator drones in Pakistan.

6. Cause of death: lack of health care

As the health care debate raged on and Americans heard over and over again about supposed “death panels,” “Obamacare,” and the government’s infringement on personal freedom, at least one important study was largely drowned out. Research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center revealed that lack of health insurance may have figured into 17,000 childhood deaths among hospitalized children in the United States in the span of less than two decades.

The results of a study published in the Journal of Public Health compared more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005, and found that uninsured children in the study were 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance.

“Can we say with absolute certainty that 17,000 children would have been saved if they had health insurance? Of course not,” notes a co-investigator. “From a scientific perspective, we are confident in our finding that thousands of children likely died because they lacked insurance or because of factors directly related to a lack of insurance.”

7. The African land grab

A “land grab,” according to this Project Censored story, is the purchase of vast tracts of land by wealthier nations from mostly poor, developing countries in order to produce crops for export. Throughout the African continent, an estimated 50 million hectares of land either have been acquired or are in the process of being negotiated for purchase over the last several years, with international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, and commodity traders leading the rush for cheap, undeveloped, arable land.

Ethiopia has approved at least 815 foreign-financed agriculture projects since 2007, but the food produced there will be exported rather than used to feed the 13 million people in need of food aid in that country. “Rich countries are eyeing Africa not just for a healthy return on capital, but also as an insurance policy,” notes researcher Devlin Kuyek. “Food shortages and riots in 28 countries in 2008, declining water supplies, climate change, and huge population growth together have made land attractive. Africa has the most land and, compared with other continents, is cheap.”

8. Massacre in Peruvian Amazon over Free Trade Agreement

While the story highlighted by Project Censored is titled, “Massacre in the Amazon,” a later installment by Laura Carlsen, the translator, appeared in the Huffington Post titled “Victory in the Amazon.” The story centers on a movement standing its ground even with tragic loss of life as the consequence: On June 5, 2009, 50 or more Peruvian Amazon Indians were massacred after a 57-day protest against the implementation of decrees under the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States. Decrees that would have opened vast swaths of indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon to private investment by gas, mining, and oil companies prompted Amazon peoples to block highways and gas and oil pipelines. But the conflict escalated when armed Peruvian government agents attacked the protesters with rifles and, according to eye witnesses, burned bodies and threw them into a river. According to Carlsen’s account, Peru’s Congress voted 82 to 12 in the aftermath to repeal two of the decrees that the indigenous groups had been standing against. Daysi Zapata, a representative of the association of indigenous groups, celebrated the triumph: “Today is a historic day. We are thankful because the will of the indigenous peoples has been taken into account, and we just hope that in the future, the governments attend and listen to the people, that they don’t legislate behind our backs.”

9. Human rights abuses continue in Palestine

While there is a great deal of news coverage about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Project Censored highlights human rights abuses as a little-discussed aspect. After a 15-month study conducted by an international team of scholars, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa concluded that Israel is, from the perspective of international law, an occupying power in Palestinian territories and that it has become a colonial enterprise that implements a system of apartheid. An Amnesty International report charges that Israel is denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water by maintaining total control over the shared water resources and pursuing discriminatory policies. And articles that appeared in Electronic Intifada detailed how Israel had begun barring movement between Israel and the West Bank for those holding a foreign passport, including humanitarian aid workers and thousands of Palestinian residents. Project Censored’s introduction touches on the topic: “Rare mainstream media glimpses of Israel’s apartheid system, like the CBS 60 Minutes segment ‘Is Peace Out of Reach?’ in January 2009, air and then fade away after drawing vitriolic, selectively focused criticism.”

10. U.S. funds and supports the Taliban

While this story appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and Washington Post, Project Censored claims they omitted some key facts. The Nation broke the story, and at the time Project Censored was researching it, there was nary a mention in the mainstream media of how American tax dollars wind up in the hands of the Taliban. In some cases, money goes to Afghan companies run by former Taliban members like President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, Ahmad Rate Popal, who was charged in the 1980s with conspiring to import heroin into the United States. U.S. military contractors in Afghanistan also pay suspected insurgents to protect supply routes. “It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the U.S. government funds the very forces American troops are fighting,” according to The Nation story, written by Aram Roston. The Nation article also highlighted a link omitted by the other publications: NCL holdings, a licensed security company in Afghanistan, is run by the son of the Afghan defense minister and has an influential former CIA officer, Milton Bearden, on its advisory board. NCL secured a highly lucrative trucking contract — despite having no apparent trucking experience.

Project Censored celebrates the release of Censored 2011 at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Thursday, Sept, 16 at 7:00 p.m. To learn more, visit www.projectcensored.org.

Film listings

David Talbot

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September 14, 2010

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

OPENING

Alpha and Omega A pair of relocated wolves try to make their way home in this 3D animated comedy. (1:28)

Catfish Please do not reveal the secret to Catfish — relax, I’m not going to. What I will say is this: Catfish’s uber-secretive, Paranormal Activity-esque ad campaign is effective, but the film ultimately stands on its own merits. This is an intriguing, relatable documentary, and if the studio feels that they’ll sell more tickets by promoting it in a certain way, so be it. Without giving away too much, Catfish is the spontaneous documentary that arose when filmmakers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost began filming Rel’s brother, Nev. Like so many of us, Nev finds himself drawn to a person he’s never met — embarking on a relationship through Facebook photos and wall posts. Of course, as is so often the case with the internet, nothing is quite what it seems. Catfish has already found its critics, particularly those who insist the documentary is a fake. I believe it, but either way it’s an impressive achievement: the best film yet about social networking. (1:26) Metreon. (Peitzman)

Devil "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan," caution the commercials. (1:20) Shattuck.

*Easy A See "Life on the ‘A’ List." (1:30) Marina, Shattuck.

*Heartbreaker See "The Break-Up Artist." (1:44) Albany, Embarcadero.

*Sicilian Girl Spoiled daddy’s girl Rita Atria (Veronica D’Agostino) is traumatized at age 11 when her beloved papa is killed by Mafia associates. At 17, she’s pushed over the edge when an older brother meets the same fate. It’s then, in 1991,
that she breaks the omertà, or code of silence, by cooperating with judicial authorities, putting herself under severe witness-protection limitations while still at high assassination risk. This dramatized real-life story doesn’t offer cliché heroism: as portrayed by fireball D’Agostino, Rita is bratty, obstinate, not especially bright or pretty, her dedication more selfishly vengeful than concerned with the public good. She’s also a naive teenager susceptible to manipulation, especially by questionably motivated boyfriends. Yet she takes a stand and refuses to back down. The likely consequences of that courage make for a suspenseful drama director Marco Amenta ably steers to a conclusion both tragic and inspiring. (1:50) Lumiere, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Town Ben Affleck directs and stars in this drama about a conflicted bank robber. (2:10) California, Cerrito, Presidio.

*Undertow See "Peruvian Twist." (1:40) Bridge.

The Virginity Hit To its credit, The Virginity Hit is not what you’d expect. The trailer and concept recall the teen sex comedy trend that sprung up after 1999’s American Pie, but the actual film is a far more grounded in reality. It’s also not nearly as good. The Virginity Hit is a well executed mockumentary, in that it feels amateur even in its most absurd moments. The movie follows Matt (Matt Bennett) in his attempts to lose his virginity after a disastrous attempt with his girlfriend Nicole (Nicole Weaver). As you’ve probably guessed, hilarity ensues — and it ensues, for a YouTube generation, in the form of viral videos and crude parodies. The problem with The Virginity Hit is that it just isn’t funny: the tone is all over the place, and the bits that should be amusing fall flat. It’s interesting as an experiment and the cast is quite convincing, but the material never elevates the film past its gimmick. (1:26) Metreon. (Peitzman)

ONGOING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane." You can see why director Vikram Jayanti scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." (1:42) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The American George Clooney caught in a moodily paranoid, yet exquisitely photographed, ’70s-style suspense-arthouse death-trap? Belmondo and Beatty could empathize. Nonetheless, veteran rock photographer and Control (2007) director Anton Corbijn suffuses the chilly proceedings with a fresh, wintry beauty, the carefully balanced sense of highly charged tension and silky smoothness that a gunsmith would appreciate, and a resonance that feels personal. How else would an ex-rock shooter like Corbijn, who’s made iconic images of the Clash, U2, and others, connect with this tale of an assassin masquerading as a photographer, one who’s constantly glancing behind and around himself — justifiably wary of being caught in another killer’s sights — and seemingly just as wary of the director’s, and audience’s, gaze? A character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Camus novella or a Melville brooder, Jack/Edward, or more accurately "the American," (Clooney) is in exile after a bad collision with a girlfriend and hitmen in Sweden and hiding out in a picturesque Italian village, conspicuously the more-cold-than-cool outsider and doing one immaculate job for a gorgeous mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten). Is he a good or bad guy? The local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who knows and sees all like a great eye in the sky, is trying to find out, as is the most beautiful prostitute in town (Violante Placido). The answers are nowhere near as clear or as plainly painted as a Sergio Leone Western, although Corbijn nods to the maestro when stone-cold killer Henry Fonda, then playing shockingly against type, appears on a cafe TV screen in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the director’s care and attention to beauty — as well as the lines carved in the face of Clooney’s lean, mean-looking American, a whore like any other — say more than words. (1:43) Cerrito, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*Animal Kingdom More renowned for its gold rush history and Victorian terrace homes than its criminal communities, Melbourne, Australia gets put on the same gritty map as Martin Scorsese’s ’70s-era New York City and Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s Los Angeles with the advent of director-writer David Michôd’s masterful debut feature. The metropolis’ sun-blasted suburban homes, wood-paneled bedrooms, and bleached-bone streets acquire a chilling, slowly building power, as Michôd follows the life and death of the Cody clan through the eyes of its newest member, an unformed, ungainly teenager nicknamed J (James Frecheville). When J’s mother ODs, he’s tossed into the twisted arms of her family: the Kewpie doll-faced, too-close-for-comfort matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver), dead-eyed armed robber Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Pope’s best friend Baz (Joel Edgerton), volatile younger brother and dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), and baby bro Darren (Luke Ford). Learning to hide his responses to the escalating insanity surrounding the Codys’ war against the police — and the rest of the world — and finding respite with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), J becomes the focus of a cop (Guy Pearce) determined to take the Codys down — and discovers he’s going to have use all his cunning to survive in the jungle called home. Stunning performances abound — from Frecheville, who beautifully hides a growing awareness behind his character’s monolithic passivity, to the adorably scarifying Weaver — in this carefully, brilliantly detailed crime-family drama bound to land at the top of aficionados’ favored lineups, right alongside 1972’s The Godfather and 1986’s At Close Range and cult raves 1970’s Bloody Mama and 1974’s Big Bad Mama. (2:02) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Bran Nue Dae An energetic screen translation of a 1990 Australian stage musical, Rachel Perkins’ film is tourist cliché spun into crowd-pleasing slop, like a Down Under Riverdance. Young Aboriginal Willie (Rockie McKenzie) escapes the "corrective" environ of a 1969 Perth Catholic boarding school and flees homeward, only to be pursued by mercilessly hammy Geoffrey Wright’s racist priest baddie. The crude humor, generic tunes, and hectically shot and dance-poor numbers have about as much to do with Aussie abo culture as The Lion King does with "Africa" — it’s prefab feel-good pap posing as multicultural representation. (1:28) Elmwood, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

Change of Plans (1:40) Sundance Kabuki.

The Concert (1:47) Opera Plaza.

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and "the art of doing nothing." India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) Elmwood, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Expendables Exactly what you’re expecting: a completely ludicrous explosion-o-thon about mercenaries hired by Bruce Willis to take down a South American general who’s actually a puppet for evil CIA agent-turned-coke kingpin Eric Roberts. Clearly, Sylvester Stallone (who directed, co-wrote, stars, and even coaxed a cameo out of Schwarzenegger) knows his audience, but The Expendables — bulging with a muscle-bound cast, including Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Jason Statham, and Steve Austin, plus Jet Li, who suffers many a short-guy joke — is content to simply tap every expected rung on the 80s-actioner homage ladder. There’s no self-awareness, no truly witty one-liners, no plot twists, and certainly no making a badass out of any female characters (really, couldn’t the South American general’s daughter have packed some heat, or kicked someone in the balls — anything besides simply heaving her cleavage around?) The only truly memorable thing here is the inclusion of Mickey Rourke as Stallone’s tattoo-artist pal; I would possibly wager that Rourke was allowed to write his own weepy monologue, delivered in a close-up so extreme it’s more mind-searing than any of the film’s many machine-gun brawls. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Extra Man The polar opposite of buddy cop action flicks and spoofs a la The Other Guys, with only a faint resemblance to the bromances of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, and so on, The Extra Man is a gently weird throwback to another era, much like its title character, Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline). Sweet, cross-dressing-curious teacher and would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano) is drifting though life passively when he stumbles on eccentric playwright Harrison’s room-for-let and his oddball realm of hangers-on. A blustery, prickly, proudly misogynistic collector of Christmas balls, given to spasms of improvisational dancing, Harrison relishes his role as an escort to aged socialites, crankily shucking and jiving to score invites to fancy dinner parties and vacation homes in Florida. When Ives isn’t courting environmental magazine editor Mary (Katie Holmes) or hiding from the fearsome-looking wooly recluse Gershon (John C. Reilly), the mentor-able young man turns out to be more adept at the role than Harrison ever imagined. And like fossilized grande dames in Chanel, literate audiences also might be charmed by director-writer Shari Springer Berman’s unassuming, crushed-out bon mot, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, to a few mannered, less-than-examined, happily twisted New York City subcultures. (1:45) Four Star. (Chun)

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) Empire, Presidio, Shattuck. (Galvin)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

Going the Distance If you live in San Francisco, don’t try to date someone in New York. It’s just not worth the hassle. But hey, maybe you’re as adorable as Drew Barrymore, and your boyfriend’s as charming as Justin Long — you can’t be expected to let a little geographical complication get in the way. That’s the driving force behind Going the Distance, a romcom that stars real-life couple Barrymore and Long as Erin and Garrett, two crazy kids trying to make it work cross-country. In many ways, the film is your standard boy-meets-girl story, but it’s cute enough that the predictability factor doesn’t really matter. The cast is universally strong, with bonus points to the standouts: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day as Garrett’s embarrassing roommate, and Christina Applegate as Erin’s germaphobe sister. The humor is surprisingly sharp — and raunchy, which earned Going the Distance an R-rating. I’m not going to say Long’s bare ass is worth the price of admission, but it’s certainly a selling point. (1:43) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

I’m Still Here This examination of Joaquin Phoenix’s self-imposed Hollywood exile is neither fascinating nor insightful. More like tedious and aggravating, really. Whether or not "JP" — as the erstwhile Oscar nominee refers to himself as he takes on a new persona as unwashed hip-hop artist — is faking his downward spiral is supposed to be the great attraction for Casey Affleck’s apparently vérité vehicle. But Phoenix is so (deliberately?) unlikable it’s hard to care one way or the other. If he is having a breakdown, conveniently captured on film from multiple angles, he’s still a spoiled, private jet-taking movie star moping about existential woes while living a privileged life (hotel suites, fawning personal assistants, etc.) If he’s faking it, it’s unclear what the point of I’m Still Here is supposed to be, other than a "fuck you" to the industry that made Phoenix rich and famous. Either way, ugh. (1:48) Elmwood, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, "Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island." In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Opera Plaza, Presidio, Piedmont, SF Center. (Peitzman)

The Last Exorcism Latest in a long line of Louisiana preachers, genial extrovert Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) isn’t even sure he believes in God anymore — but it’s the family business, and it’s a living. He definitely doesn’t believe in demonic possession, yet has presided over many an "exorcism" if only to fool the psychologically damaged into thinking they’re "cured" of delusional ails. But now he’s decided such hijinks might be more harmful than helpful. So to debunk the whole idea, he takes a documentary filmmaking crew on one last "soul-saving" trek, answering a desperate letter from a widowed farmer (Louis Herthum) whose 16-year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is believed possessed. Cotton deploys theatrical tricks to rig an alleged purging of Satan’s minion. And it works … but this wouldn’t be a horror movie if that rationalist triumph didn’t turn out to be a false finish, followed by all kinds of inexplicable WTF. German director Daniel Stamm’s first English-language feature (written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) is being positioned by Lionsgate as the next viral word-of-mouth horror sensation a la prior faux-docs The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). But the "reality" illusion is more transparent here. Despite some clever buildup tactics, okay twists, and a handful of scares, this ultimately disappoints — a preview audience’s catcalls at its underwhelming fadeout suggested there will be no Last Exorcism 2. (1:27) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line "You just fucked with the wrong Mexican." Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Albany, Clay. (Harvey)

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to "the nice parts.") Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life
isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Mesrine: Killer Instinct This first half of a two-part film about notorious French bank robber Jacques Mesrine examines the early life of its subject, before he was a flamboyant, headline-grabbing folk hero. The very first scene uses 70s-style split-screens to revel Mesrine’s violent 1979 death; writer-director Jean-François Richet (2005’s Assault on Precinct 13) then jumps back 15 or so years for a glimpse of our (anti-) hero’s soldiering days in Algeria. Before long, "Jacky" (an outstanding Vincent Cassel, in a César-winning performance) is back in Paris, horrifying his upper-class parents and young wife by choosing the underworld over conventional pencil-pushing. (A near-unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu appears as a mob boss.) Killer Instinct, which is adapted from Mesrine’s own prison-penned autobiography, suffers from some standard biopic problems — it tries to cram in too much, and feels mighty rushed at times. But there’s still plenty of bad, bad behavior to enjoy, including the film’s spectacular last act, a breakneck recreation of one of the daring prison escapes that helped make Mesrine a legend. Continuation Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, which beings where this film ends, is now playing. (1:53) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 If you see writer-director Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct (review above), you’re pretty much obligated to see this sequel, especially since the earlier film beings with the main character’s death, then flashes back and never catches up to it. This installment was actually filmed first, allowing star Vincent Cassell to pack on nearly 50 pounds to play the oldier, portlier version of the legendary French bank robber. Mesrine’s prowess as an escape artist allows him to spend much of this film on the lam with partner François (Mathieu Amalric) and girlfriend Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier). Along the way, the headline-hungry crook declares himself a revolutionary, poses for Paris Match, kidnaps a billionaire, spends his ill-gotten money on diamonds and BMWs, tortures a journalist, and does as much as he can to further the Myth of Mesrine. The foreknowledge of Mesrine’s ultimate end lends a sense of ticking-clock doom; the first time we see it, in Killer Instinct, it’s from the point of view of Mesrine and Sylvia. Richet films the death scene here from the perspective of the police who tracked him, with increasing frustration, for years. Clever twists like this make it preferable to watch both films back-to-back, though Cassell’s commanding performance makes each a worthwhile stand-alone. (2:14) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Piranha 3D (1:29) 1000 Van Ness.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Sam Stander)

Soul Kitchen Director Fatih Akin (2004’s Head-On) offers a tribute to the German Heimat ("homeland") film, as well as to his own hometown, Hamburg, with this gritty comedy set in a restaurant dubbed Soul Kitchen. Star Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script with Akin, really did own a similar greasy spoon, and his knowledge of what makes an eatery soar or fail is exaggerated here to humorous and occasionally surreal effect. Bousdoukos’ character, the scruffy Zinos, loves funk music; he’s also in an existential funk, having just seen his girlfriend move to Shanghai. What’s worse, he’s just injured his back, necessitating the hiring of snooty chef Shayn (Head-On‘s Birol Ünel); his ne’er-do-well brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) is freshly out of jail; and he owes big bucks to the local tax board. Also, an old childhood pal turned sleazy businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is circling his property with sharky hunger. Will everything that can possibly go wrong, go wrong, with a side of ketchup and mayonnaise? Of course it will. Stylish direction and a game cast, including winning newcomer Anna Bederke as Zinos’ shot-gulping waitress, make Soul Kitchen a fun if non-essential diversion. (1:33) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*The Switch Has any hard-working actor ever made as many mediocre, albeit vigorously marketed, movies as Jennifer Aniston? It seems like an age since her last good one, Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money (2006), though some might go as far back as 2002’s The Good Girl, her dramatic and cinematic breakthrough. Perhaps that dry spell seems extra long due to Aniston’s tabloid overexposure, or maybe it’s just the feeble conceits (a la 2009’s Love Happens) that Aniston allows herself to get roped into. In any case, armed with a sharp script based on a Jeffrey Eugenides short story and a less-than-perfect but comically well-equipped everyman foil in Jason Bateman, The Switch turns out to be a refreshing break from Aniston’s run of predictability: it’s actually good, girl (if a bit far-fetched that even a neurotic, successful financial whiz could be so emotionally constipated). Heeding her biological alarm clock over the objections of best friend Wally (Bateman), Kassie (Aniston) decides to get artificially inseminated by handsome, smart, and charming donor Roland (Patrick Wilson), but nothing goes according to plan when Wally gets wasted at her insemination party and — no use crying over spilled semen — woozily decides to substitute his own emissions for Roland’s. Funny, tender, heart-strings-tugging shenanigans ensue when Kassie returns to NYC after seven years with her adorable, neurotic mini-Wally Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). Bateman is as reliably excellent as ever. Blades of Glory (2007) directors Will Speak and Josh Gordon put care into the details — from the lighting, to the scene-swiping cameos by Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum, to the on-point yet relatively realistic dialogue, and it shows, making this, along with The Kids Are All Right, a, ahem, seminal year for donor-coms. (1:56) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*Takers Likely the best movie to be advertised on billboards all over Oakland in a while, Takers is one of those likeable, smart, and faintly ludicrous genre flicks — a gangsta B with a hip-hop heart, centered on a cadre of high-style, Rat Pack-like bank robbers — that redeems its playas all around. It gives T.I., in both starring and executive producer roles and tellingly emerging from the clink in his first scene, a career beyond the rap game and the pen: he’s a snottily charmismatic Little Caesar here, a slight, serpentine mini-Snoop. It gives the formidable Idris Elba (The Wire) as the group’s leader something to wrap his sonorous Cockney around as he plays off crack ‘ho sister (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) as if they were English-accented castaways on island L.A. It gives Paul Walker, the second-banana princeling of the urban action flick, something to do: namely function as Elba’s lieutenant. And it gives the benighted Chris Brown, who gets his share of fast-stepping glory via a nice, meaty chase scene, a way to recast and strive toward redeeming himself on the silver screen — while giving the little-girls-who-love-bad-boys something to scream about. See, something for everyone (except maybe Zoe Saldana, who gets saddled with the arm candy role). (1:57) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*The Tillman Story To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught. Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the "friendly fire" circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House. Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else. The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. (1:34) SF Center, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Two Escobars In America, the World Cup ends, and most sports fans turn their attentions elsewhere. In other countries, soccer is a year-round happening that inspires religious devotion. Putting this fact into perspectives both glorious and cruel is The Two Escobars, Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s involving new doc about the rise of "narco-soccer" in Colombia, circa the coke-crazed 1980s and early 90s. One Escobar, we’ve all heard of: Pablo, a noted drug kingpin who was also a hero to the slum-dwellers who benefited from his donations of housing and, perhaps more importantly, soccer fields. A rabid footy fan himself, Pablo invested in Colombian teams, an influx of cash that helped the national team become one of the strongest in the world. Escobar number two is Andrés, the affable, wholesome defender who served as team captain in the 1994 World Cup. The events that caused both Escobars to meet untimely and brutal deaths are detailed here, by people who knew them well, in a moving, well-edited film that’s as cautionary as it is celebratory. Highly recommended. (1:40) Roxie. (Eddy)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit. Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop An intriguing misfire on par with his 2006 OTT bodice-heaver Curse of the Golden Flower, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop sees filmmaker Zhang Yimou playfully dispensing with the serious rep cultivated by such films as Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1981), movies that made Zhang a central figure amid Chinese film’s Fifth Generation. Deep into middle age, with crowd-pleasers like Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) behind him, Zhang appears fully committed to the low road of commercial entertainments — an approach completely in line with his country’s embrace of market-driven economics. But why remake the Coen brothers’ career-making 1984 noir tribute, Blood Simple? Zhang does little to refresh and improve on Coens’ noir retool, apart from drenching the proceedings in his homeland’s very dated, broad slapstick, including a jarringly out-of-place noodle-dough twirling scene, and setting some of the action on the glorious painted-desert mountainsides of the Gansu province. It’s as if Zhang has decided to send up himself — the film’s vivid palette and adulterous couple compares unfavorably with 1990’s Ju Dou — as well as with the brudders Coen. (1:35) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Golden age remix: Bay graff gets its props

Andrew Lam

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September 10, 2010

0

Nate1’s business card is totally dope. It’s front depicts a Kry-lon paint can, the brand most used for graffiti in the days he was coming up as a street writer in 1980s San Francisco. “Back then we used to have to make art with automotive paint,” he tells me at 1AM gallery, where his new show on the golden age of Bay tagging, “The Classics” opens today (Fri/10). “We’re talking about paint to paint red wagons and doors,” he remembers, smiling like a man that didn’t mind too much.

The card is striking because it evokes the sentiment behind this artist and the show he’s thrown up. “The Classics” is about those icons of SF’s early days on the graffiti scene, back before anyone with a few bucks could buy specialized Mammoth paint from 1AM’s retail section, cans specially designed for low pressure artistic liberty – but it’s also about where that art form stands today.

1AM owner Anna says that before he came up with the inkling for this particular showing, Nate1 would bring around scrapbooks to street art openings, forcing heads to remember the days when. Finally, they hit upon the idea to base a show on these old masterpieces. On the gallery’s walls are seldom-seen photographs of the “Psycho City” wall in SoMa, the only place where young taggers could work on their art in public, in peace from police presence and neighborhood complaint. UB40’s ubiquitous-at-the-time scrawl is present, as is shots of trains painted by King 157, and Rigel’s game-changing robot piece.

But the show’s no time capsule. What Nate1 wanted to do was pull these works into the present, juxtapose San Francisco relatively (to New York’s) unsung heroes with the realities of today. The artists are adults now, grown community members – Nate1, an original member of the graf crew Masterpiece Creators, has two kids, teaches graffiti art history at 1AM, and owns a clothing company – but they’ve still got skills. Most of the pieces at his show are not classics at all, but mature artists’ reimaginings of the culturally mega works they sprayed onto the sides of buildings and MUNI buses when they were in their teens. The show’s a celebration of where the art form’s been, but also how far it’s come.

“This show was put together by a writer, for a writer.” Nate1 is now addressing a crowd who has assembled the night for a sneak peek tour through the artwork that through months of searching and finding, he has deemed “The Classics.” In the audience are no small amount of writers from the ’80s scene: Rise is here, and Mike Bam. They’re among the artists Nate1 called on to create new pieces for the show. Throughout his tour, they pick up on Nate1’s more obscure points and chime in with clarifications, added bits of information.

“So dope!” Nate1 gets stoked on an original piece at his show “The Classics”

Some of the artists on display, like Rigel with his robot, re-imagined classic works from days of old and put them on canvass to grand affect. Others expanded on long dormant skills with new technology. Nate1 stops in front of a piece by Vogue entitled “Teenage Love.” It’s a painted closeup of Kry-lon cans, the glint of the metal popping in the bright, happy colors of everybody’s youth. “He did that with spray paint,” Nate1 announces to the assembled crowd, staggering backwards as if blown away by the technical mastery involved in this act. “Jesus!”

Still others made pieces of art that reflect the change in their lives, in everybody’s lives since those days of fat laces and “bus hopping” (which Nate1, in his best art history professor’s voice helpfully defines as when a graf artist boards a bus solo or en masse and “you take a tool of your choice to mark the surface”). Rise is called to the front when the corner that houses his work is introduced. A father himself, he has struggled with the “spiritual blackout” of alcoholism, only to finally see the light in a world with strange issues that dwarf running from the cops and fingers covered in aerosol paint. His intricate painting “Heaven Only Knows” shows a rising figure in Masonic imagery, surrounded by social ills, the seven deadly sins inscribed on paint cans, labyrinthine, interlocking words describing the scene, all of it framed by his son’s small hands on a video game controller. He talks about seeing names of military consultants in the credits of his offspring’s game manuals, explaining to his sons that though the games are fun to play, they’re still a tool of social conditioning. “Something that frustrates me is the condition of how things are going,” says Rise, a self-identified conspiracy theory enthusiast.

What may draw street art aficionados to “The Classics” is the promise of a look at the old school “OGs,” as Nate1 puts it. And that’s here: James Prigoff’s vast compendium of snapshots from 1980s taggers and their art has been selectively drawn from by Nate1. There’s a classic framed photo that shows a group of kids falling out the windows of a bus, adrenaline pumping in the aftermath of a writer’s party at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in honor of the first San Francisco book of street art. The shots serve as a tangible reminder of a time that wasn’t captured in graff mags, not endlessly cataloged on the Internet.

But what one walks away from “The Classics” with is the postmodern riffing images created for the show. It’s the fact that our local street art scene has become a school worthy of imitation, analysis, and homage that impresses. ’80s street artists – those night-crawling, fence-jumping, anti-social social crusaders, have finally and fully been embraced into the world of “art.” And they’ve got the business cards to prove it.

“The Classics”

Through Oct. 16

1AM gallery

1000 Howard, SF

(415) 861-5089

www.1amsf.com

The man behind the meme

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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September 7, 2010

9

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When I finally manage to get in touch with Berkeley rap phenom Brandon McCartney, a.k.a. Lil B, he’s just landed in Oakland, having returned from a brief — and in his words, “amazing!” — stay in Atlanta with Internet-rap legend Soulja Boy. He played a show or two down South, and got a lot of love from local radio. “It’s just amazing the respect I’m getting offline,” says, “just from being at a computer, doing what I do.”

What does Lil B do online? He has a prolific Twitter account, more than 100 MySpace accounts, a self-published book on positive living (Takin’ Over, available from Kele Publishing), and dozens of hastily-made videos on YouTube. Most of the top comments on his YouTube account are from B himself, and he leaves comments on blog posts about Lil B with a blogger account, Tropical Doves (tropicaldoves.blogspot.com). At a recent New York City show, Lil B’s status as an Internet star was apparent as soon as he stepped on the stage — dozens of cameras (and one spatula) went up in the air to record or TwitPic the performance, making online footage available to everyone, including anyone unlucky enough to be in the back of the room.

Lil B’s friendship with Soulja Boy makes sense; both are young, motivated rappers who have found ways to harness various social media platforms to generate huge followings online. Their songs and dances are, in essence, Internet memes — dances and credos that get adopted and modified by their listeners, the sort of thing ad agencies throw millions of dollars at in vain attempts to imitate. Together, they make some of the most fun, mindless swag rap out there, ideal for watching on YouTube, on repeat. In “Swag OD,” a recent black-and-white video directed and edited by B during his stay in the South, they ride around suburban Atlanta office parks in Soulja’s black Mercedes. “Ice chain, ice, ice watch, ice neck/ Ice watch, ice, ice, hoes, ice chest (rich!),” B raps at one point. “Swag OD” has this jaded, over-it sound, Soulja sort of yawning between bars. Something’s not right.

Soulja Boy’s blasé attitude is pitch perfect for the aging child star — how else should he feel? But Lil B, who claims to be a Berkeley hippie at heart, seems out of place putting on this act. Even on crushingly low-brow YouTube hits like “Suck My D*&* HO” (his second most watched video, with about 300,000 views), B brings way more energy. This enthusiasm — on stage, on camera, wherever — accounts for a good portion of Lil B’s appeal. You can tell he loves what he’s doing.

The “Suck My D*&* HO” video is a great starting point for those curious about Lil B. “Ten on my dick and my girlfriend Persian,” B lipsyncs from inside an Apple store. “Bitch sucked my dick ’cause I look like a surgeon.” That Lil B gets all sorts of special treatment for looking like people he doesn’t actually resemble — Madonna, Mel Gibson, Matlock, Moses, Jesus, Patrick Ramsey, to name a few — is just something you have to accept if you want to enjoy his music. It’s akin to the suspension of disbelief you bring to a summer blockbuster.

That’s why it surprises me to hear Lil B lamenting all the dishonesty in rap. The problem is structural, he explains. To rap you have to rhyme, and in his words, “It can’t all be true ’cause you’re consciously changing around words and scenarios in your mind to make it add up in the rap.” While rappers may whine about a perceived decline in quality of rap over the years, it’s rare to hear one criticize inherent flaws in the medium; plenty of early-1990s backpack rappers dazzle with their knowledge of Egyptology’s finer points, but this sort of meta-critique is far more impressive. It also pinpoints something people often forget about Lil B: he’s clever, and he cares about and thinks about rap music. It seems like he really wants to overcome this central flaw in hip-hop and doesn’t see any problem with making songs that are nothing but lies in the process. It makes his hoes-on-my-dick-cause-I-look-like-X bit that much more clever — something like a parody of the absurd claims that rap music traffics in.

Though B’s mixtape collaborations with Soulja Boy will likely be fruitful for generating mainstream publicity, and his YouTube dirty raps good for getting pageviews and new followers, what he considers his most honest work, the work he’s most proud of, is his upcoming album Rain in England. The beats, all produced by Lil B, have an ambient, waves-of-sound feel, with occasional keyboard flourishes but no percussion or clear time-signature. It sounds half new age, half spoken word. “The crazy thing is that a lot of people say it’s like spoken word,” B agrees, when I ask him about the similarities. “But really I wrote that as if I was writing a rap.” That Lil B never made beats before Rain in England highlights his enigmatic appeal: it’s often hard to tell whether he’s brilliant, just sort of crazy, or both. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he explains, “but somehow Rain in England came about.” He speaks of the recording as if it was inevitable — an odd thing to suggest about a new age/spoken word/rap album. Artistic intent aside, B knows his market: the album is being released on Weird Forest, an experimental/electronic label. How’s that for a guy who collaborates with Soulja Boy?

It’s worth noting that Lil B wrote Rain in England at a coffee shop. Also, he talks about it the way you hear people with lots of tattoos explain their tattoos. “I’m gonna look back and [the album’s] gonna remind me of the time period I was in,” he says. The album’s subject matter is about as un-stereotypically “hip-hop” as its process would suggest. On one track, “My Windowsill,” Lil B free-associates about his neighborhood and his future while looking out his window; on another, “All Women,” Lil B rhapsodizes about the beauty and wisdom of the fairer sex. It’s a far cry from the Lil B of YouTube fame: the Lil B who makes songs like “Violate That Bitch,” which would probably make Tipper Gore return to politics, if she ever heard it; the Lil B who, alongside San Francisco’s Messy Marv, claims he is Hannah Montana, on a song that would make your gender studies TA’s head spin. But it’s still Lil B.

That this apparent divide is downright bizarre is not lost on B. “I have a lot of different, you know, feelings and personalities,” he tells me, explaining that this translates into versatility. “I can do ‘Swag OD’ but then my favorite musical artist right now could be Antony and the Johnsons. That’s the difference between me and these other rappers, and other musical artists in general.” This is true to a certain extent: Lil B has a tendency to draw on other genres of music that don’t have a home in mainstream rap — or even rap in general — to infuse his music with pathos.

A relatively recent video for Lil B’s “The Worlds Ending” is a great example of this technique; the first two minutes present B smoking a joint with a gun to his head, listening to “Angeles” by Elliott Smith. Once he starts rapping, it’s B at his darkest and most poignant. He touches on taxes, drugs, death, consumer culture, and tornado watches in Orange County — in his mind, a sign of the apocalypse — with a gun to his head the whole time. Sure, Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and others have been doing something similar for more than a minute, but Lil B’s lo-fi recordings, accompanied by his hastily-made, no-budget videos, result in a scrappier, less calculated, and ultimately more honest feel.

With all this variegated and prolific output, it’s easy to forget where people first heard Lil B: on the lead-in verse of “Vans”, the Pack’s out-of-nowhere 2006 hit. The Berkeley foursome — of which Lil B is still a part — just released their third album, Wolfpack Party, on Aug. 24, while B was in Atlanta. “I’m still in The Pack 100 percent,” he says, when asked about the new release. “You know, congratulations, and I’m happy The Pack album Wolfpack Party is out. It’s been a while since we [put out] some new material.”

It’s hard not to sense B’s detachment when he offers congratulations to a group he’s a part of, and also difficult not to find it noteworthy that the first thing he says about The Pack is that he’s still part of it. He knows what people are thinking, and that he was out of town with Soulja Boy when the album was released. Wolfpack Party is more self-consciously a party record than other work The Pack has done in the past, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. But Lil B is absent from a significant number of the tracks.

Needless to say, Lil B is a busy young man, even if one leaves out his most notorious facet: the prodigious way he uses his computer and phone to promote his music. He tells me he’s capable of spending 20 consecutive hours online. “There’s always somebody talking to me, hitting me up, uploading a video about me, watching me, you know, giving me comments,” he says. “It’s very addicting.”

Life online is both a blessing and a curse for B, and he’s made a song about that experience too. It’s called “Age of Information.” Toward the end of the track, B claims that the Internet is “destroying the human race,” but in conversation he recognizes that his current trajectory would be impossible without it. “I’m not on TV right now,” he points out. “I don’t have a single on the radio, but people know my songs word-for-word at my shows.”

I recently read in The New York Times that your early 20s are all about figuring out who you are and what you’re going to do with your life, or something like that. It would seem to an outsider that 21-year-old Lil B has a lot to figure out, and that he might be at an artistic crossroads. But that’s not how B sees it. When I ask him which direction he plans on taking his music, he responds, with confidence: “The direction I’m trying to take it in the future is making amazing music.”

Everything that Lil B is working on now, he tells me, will culminate in a forthcoming album with a secret title. “The title is private,” he insists. “I can’t really tell right now.” This from the man who tweets, like, 70 times a day. “I’m just creating and I’m definitely just being truthful and honest, so I’m glad people like me for me,” he says, still waiting at the Oakland airport for a ride back to Berkeley, where he’ll probably head straight to his computer. “That’s the best feeling ever. It’s amazing that I can do me and people are respecting it.”

Funny face, fecal face

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 24, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS/HAIRY EYEBALL “New Work: R. H. Quaytman” It’s appropriate that the paintings commissioned by SFMOMA for R.H. Quaytman’s first West Coast showing were conceived in response to the museum’s own photography holdings as well as the work of SF Renaissance poet Jack Spicer. I’m curious to see what sort of conversation Quaytman’s precise, labor-intensive, and site-specific silk-screens (in “seven interrelated sizes based on the golden ratio”) stage with Spicer’s salty and spicy verse. Oct. 22-Jan. 16, 2011; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org.

“Masami Teraoka: The Inversion of the Sacred” Masami Teraoka built his reputation in the 1980s and ’90s on his apocalyptic ukiyo-e-style paintings, which juxtaposed topical content (AIDS, the globalization of fast food) against their faithful reproduction of an older, “traditional” aesthetic. In recent years he’s turned to Renaissance altar painting as the medium of choice to express his disgust over a whole host of new evils. His latest gilded blasphemy — a triptych that reenvisions the Last Supper as a Papal stag party in hell — encompass the ever-mounting sex abuse scandals linked to the Catholic Church and the gulf oil spill. Oct. 2-Nov.13; Catharine Clark Gallery, cclarkgallery.com.

“Tammy Rae Carland: Funny Face, I Love You” For her second solo show at Silverman Gallery, Mr. Lady Records cofounder and visual artist Tammy Rae Carland presents a suite of new work inspired by female comedians. Carland’s photographs of empty stand-up stages give off a slightly forlorn vibe, to be sure, but her anywhere clubs are also sites of possibility to laugh off gender difference as well as to laugh at it. You’ll leave in stitches. Sept. 10-Oct. 23, 2010; Silverman Gallery, www.silverman-gallery.com.

“10 Years of Fecal Face, An Anniversary Show” A decade in Internet years is a long-ass time, so three cheers to founder John Trippe and his army of global correspondents for sticking to their guns these past 10 years and creating an invaluable resource and platform for Bay Area artists and visual art fans. Tripp has pulled together a who’s who of site and Fecal Face Dot Gallery alum — David Choe, Matt Furie, and Jeremy Fish, to name a few — for this epic retrospective. Support the scene that supports you. Sept. 10-Oct. 9, 2010; Luggage Store Gallery, www.luggagestoregallery.org.

“HARVEST: what have you gathered?” Just in time for the lead-up to Thanksgiving, the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District Gallery lays out quite a spread. “Harvest” asked a diverse group of TL-based artists, “What have you gathered?” Their responses should make for an interesting snapshot of the lives that comprise a neighborhood in flux. Sept. 1–Nov. 30; 134 A Golden Gate, www.nom-tlcbd.org.

“Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker” Fact: the Nazis did many shitty things, such as taking other people’s (wealthy Jews, in particular) cultural property as their own. Such was the fate of the collection of prominent Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who had amassed a sizable number of Northern Renaissance rarities. After much effort conservators finally repieced together the collection in 2006, and now SF gets a peek at Goudstikker’s greatest hits. And what hits they are: for starters, Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Iceskaters (1608) could give Breughel’s peasantry a run for their money. Oct. 29-March 11, 2011; Contemporary Jewish Museum, www.thecjm.org.

“Chris Duncan: Eye Against I” Though it takes its title from a seminal album by Washington, D.C., hardcore-legends Bad Brains, “Eye Against I” can also refer to the mind/body split one undergoes when staring down one of Chris Duncan’s refracted whirlpools of color. Fry art by way of Saul Bass is one way to think about Duncan’s carefully hued spirals of isosceles triangles, but some of the guest artists scheduled for a series of accompanying live events might provide some other ways to re-see the work. Sept. 11- Oct. 16, 2010; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, www.baerridgway.com.

“One Night Stand: A Mills MFA Group Show” Art doesn’t come much cheaper than this. The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed talents in the 2011 Mills MFA class are selling their work for under $50 a pop. Buy now or cry later after they’ve won a SECA award and made the cover of Juxtapoz. Oct. 8, 6-9 p.m.; Branch Gallery, www.branchgallery.com.

“Cliff Hengst and Wayne Smith: New Work” Both Hengst and Smith have been longtime fixtures on the SF art scene, but their work — different as it is in tone and medium — is always refreshing. Here’s hoping Hengst unveils work in line with the small gems in his last showing at 2nd Floor Projects: news photo-sourced images of demonstrations in which everything but the protestors’ signs have been blackened out. Sept. 10-Oct. 29; Gallery 16, www.gallery16.com.

“Suggestions of Life Being Lived” This exciting group show curated by Danny Orendorff and Adriane Skye Roberts promises to live up to the dare laid down by Bikini Kill many moons ago to be “worse than queer.” Bypassing the usual identity politics-centered narratives and concerns that have defined much LGBT art practice, “Suggestions” seeks out new territory for queerness, whether it be in Kirstyn Russell’s photos of gay bars past, Jeannie Simm’s intimate study of an Indonesian maid training agency, or Chris Vargas and Greg Youman’s humorous “real life” Web sitcom Falling in Love With Chris and Greg. Sept. 9-Oct. 23; SF Camerawork, www.sfcamerawork.org.

OUT OF TOWN

Not all fall hits are in the city. Borrow some wheels and head to points north and south to check out these promising shows:

“THE GOLDEN DECADE: PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE CALIFORNIA SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS, 1945-55”

Before SF Art Institute was SF Art Institute, it was known as the California School of Fine Arts and had one of the finest photography programs in post-World War II America. Set up by Ansel Adams, the program counted such celebrated photographers as Dorothea Lange, Homer Page, and Imogen Cunningham among its illustrious faculty. Smith Anderson North in San Anselmo collects an unprecedented showing of photographers who came out of the program at the height of its fame. Sept. 14-Oct. 15; Smith Anderson North, www.smithandersonnorth.com.

“2010 01SJ BIENNIAL”

You may know the way to San Jose, but San Jose knows the way to the future. The 01SJ Biennial has grown into one of the Bay Area’s premier art events, bringing together visual artists, architects, computer programmers, and a whole host of other creative doers and thinkers and unleashing their creations and collaborations across the city, this year, with the prompt to “Build Your Own World.” Sept. 16-19; www.01sj.org.

Just a snack?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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August 17, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC If “California Gurls” is the dirge of pop music, the arrival of Bethany Cosentino ought to make you consider calling off the funeral. That’s not to say her music is pop, exactly. It has pop potential but it’s not a “radio-ready” sound … yet. Her debut album, made with Bobb Bruno under the moniker Best Coast, is rife with short, sweet hooks and infectious choruses untouched by excessive production and studio intervention.

The lo-fi, almost low-effort sensibility yields roughly-hewn, simple melodies as catchy as any summer anthem. Cosentino could easily be transformed into a pop princess if she was up for it. But I don’t think she is. As per indie music’s backward-gazing tendencies this year, Best Coast on its debut LP Crazy For You (Mexican Summer) builds the scaffold of a promising pop record.

Best Coast’s pedigree of influences includes the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Crystals, as well as more contemporary groups like Wavves (frontman Nathan Williams is her boyfriend) and Vivian Girls (drummer Ali Koehler joined the band post-Crazy).

On 13 tracks, Cosentino displays emotional candor and a half-assed style of playing akin to Liz Phair when she left cassette-land for 1993’s Exile in Guyville. Here, Best Coast stages a response to 1960s beach pop, just as Phair responded to phallocentric rock music. This time, the homage isn’t an attempt to redo and revise, but almost to idolize a certain vintage style. There’s also a little bit of Hole — sans Courtney Love’s analgesic rawness — in Cosentino’s woozy, whiney vocals. Imagine Love doing a cover of “Leader of the Pack.”

Crazy For You is as much a testament to laziness as it is a tribute to ’60s girl bands. With lyrics like “I can’t get myself off the couch/ Nothing makes me happy/ Not even TV or a bunch of weed,” Best Coast’s “Goodbye” makes a bid for broken heart song of the year. In a summer of looooong albums (like Joanna Newsom’s three-disc Have One on Me, or more recently, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs ), it’s refreshing to hear short songs — the longest track, “Honey,” clocks in at three minutes and two seconds — that come and go without ever repeating a chorus for too long. In less than two minutes, “Bratty B” provides one of the album’s sunniest and most memorable moments.

In a phone interview, Cosentino opens up about her humble beginnings with guitar. “I was probably in the seventh grade,” she says, a time when she listened to Blink-182 and Green Day in her formative years of listening. “I started playing pop punk and power chords. I took lessons for a year or two but I didn’t ever practice, so I didn’t become too great of a guitar player.”

In other words, she isn’t a guitar virtuoso. That’s where Bruno comes in. Cosentino doesn’t always seem to know where she’s going on Crazy For You, but she gets there with a little TLC. “I write the songs and send a demo version to Bobb and I’ll say, ‘Here’s this song, here’s the vibe I’m looking for,'” Cosentino explains. “Bobb has this way of making it sound the way I envision. He fills in the gaps and does what I can’t do. I really only know how to play power chords. Bobb comes in with the surf-y aspects and does all the lead guitar solos, which I can do, but only on one string so they often don’t sound as great as Bobb makes them sound.”

Though Best Coast is a product of West Coast adoration, it wouldn’t have happened if Cosentino hadn’t moved to New York for college. But the journey east, where she spent one semester at the New School, took too far out of her element. “Obviously I would never have started this band had I stayed in L.A.,” she says. “Leaving really changed me as a person,” Her romanticized vision of New York — born from Seinfeld and Woody Allen movies — ushered her into a concrete love affair that was ultimately unrequited.

A song like Crazy For You‘s opening track “Boyfriend,” with its pining lyrics that border on obsession, sounds like the work of someone desperate. But Cosentino denies this. “I don’t write songs about boys because I’m needy. I’m in a relationship. I’m not a sad girl,” she says. “I write about guys because it’s something I’m influenced by. A lot of people have been saying, ‘Oh she’s so needy, she needs a boyfriend.’ That’s not it at all.”

Like any rising celebrity, Cosentino of course has hobbies, and they often involve smoking weed. Or sometimes they involve deepening her Internet footprint. She maintains a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/bestycoastyy) that is a curio of hilarious tangents plus a blog with Ali Koehler where they rate and discuss the showers in their hotels on tour.

Cosentino also has a Twitter account for her cat, Snacks, who modeled for the album cover of Crazy For You. She’s loathe to dwell too much on Snacks in interviews. Still, it’s part of the ever-growing Cosentino mythos. “I feel like my cat gets talked about in my interviews more than music,” she says. “But I’m happy about that because he deserves it.”

Best Coast is a testament to how bands are favored and, conversely, dampened by the Internet and the hype it creates. All the meme-momentum built up for Best Coast, dating back to its early demos, might not benefit the band in the long run, but it sure is fun for now.

Crazy For You arrives at a perfect time in music, since retro-bedroom rock is the style du jour. But Best Coast is like your summer romance. Once September hits and you’ve had your kicks, you’ll be ready to say goodbye and end things in a peaceful way. Yet your old flame, since she’s a little Crazy, might try and stick around longer than you’d like.

BEST COAST

October 26, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(888) 233-0449

www.gamh.com