Labor

Don’t rush the Candlestick EIR

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Don’t rush the Candlestick EIR

EDITORIAL The Candlestick Point redevelopment project is by far the biggest land-use decision facing San Francisco today, and one of the most significant in the city’s modern history. The project, sponsored by Lennar Corp., would bring 10,500 housing units and 24,000 additional residents to the area. Those residents would need new schools, playgrounds, open space, and transportation systems. Industrial and commercial development would create some 3,500 permanent jobs, and those people would need ways to get to work. Plans calls for new roadways, including a bridge over the fragile Yosemite Slough. The 708-acre site includes areas with significant toxic waste issues.

It’s no surprise that the draft environmental impact report on the project weighs in at 4,400 pages. It took two years to review the land use, transportation, air quality, water quality, population, employment, noise, hazardous materials, and other potential issues.

And now the Planning Department and Redevelopment Agency wants all public comment to be completed in a 45-day period that includes the winter holidays. That’s crazy – and it’s a sign that the city just wants to rush this project through without adequate oversight, review, or discussion.

The EIR in a project this size is a major political battleground. It’s one of the few times that the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors will get to weigh in on the entire project and look at its local and citywide impacts. It’s quite possibly the only time prior to construction when the economic, social, and environmental issues around the project will get widespread public discussion.

And anyone who reads these reports on a regular basis can tell you that they’re thick, dense, tough to follow, and filled with minute details and arcana that add up to very big policy decisions. Among the most pressing issues:

• The housing mix. The city’s own General Plan notes that almost two-thirds of all new housing built in San Francisco needs to be available at below-market rates. Lennar won’t even meet half that target. So the project would create an even greater unmet demand for affordable housing — something the EIR, at least on first read, glosses over. The report refers to “a broad range of housing options of varying sizes, types, and levels of affordability [that would] be developed at Candlestick Point” and states that “such housing would be in close proximity to the jobs provided by the project, [so] it is likely that future employees at Candlestick Point would seek housing at the project site prior to searching for housing in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. However, if future employees did seek housing elsewhere in the neighborhood, the effects would not be adverse.”

Actually, if comparatively well-paid employees at the project’s research and development facilities decided to move into the existing Hunters Point/Bayview neighborhood, it would almost certainly drive up housing prices, displacing existing residents.

• Transportation options. The project projects significant improvements in Muni service — but doesn’t say how the city will pay for them. There’s a sizable focus on cars — the EIR estimates the project will need more than 21,000 parking spaces. That’s a lot more cars on the streets of the city, a lot more traffic in the southeast — and a direct clash with the city’s transit-first policies.

• What jobs, and for whom? The 3,500 permanent jobs that would be created are badly needed in that neighborhood, which has the highest unemployment rate in the city. But a comprehensive labor pool study, and a discussion of how existing residents will be trained for projected jobs, appears to be missing from the EIR.

• Hazardous materials. The EIR broadly proclaims that “construction activities associated with the project would not result in a human health risk involving the disturbance of naturally occurring asbestos, demolition of buildings that could contain hazardous substances in building materials, or possible disturbance of contaminated soils or groundwater within one-quarter mile of an existing school.” That is — at the very least — a matter of some dispute.

There’s lots more – 4,400 pages more – and if the approval process is going to be anything other than an utter farce, the Planning and Redevelopment directors need to extend the public comment period for at least another 45 days. *

Film listings

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Film listings

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

OPENING

Invictus Elected President of South Africa in 1995 — just five years after his release from nearly three decades’ imprisonment — Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) perceives a chance to forward his message of reconciliation and forgiveness by throwing support behind the low-ranked national rugby team. Trouble is, the Springboks are currently low-ranked, with the World Cup a very faint hope just one year away. Not to mention the fact that despite having one black member, they represent the all-too-recent Apartheid past for the country’s non-white majority. Based on John Carlin’s nonfiction tome, this latest Oscar bait by the indefatigable Clint Eastwood sports his usual plusses and minuses: An impressive scale, solid performances (Matt Damon co-stars as the team’s Afrikaaner captain), deft handling of subplots, and solid craftsmanship on the one hand. A certain dull literal-minded earnestness, lack of style and excitement on the other. Anthony Peckham’s screenplay hits the requisite inspirational notes (sometimes pretty bluntly), but even in the attenuated finals match, Eastwood’s direction is steady as she goes — no peaks, no valleys, no faults but not much inspiration, either. It doesn’t help that Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens contribute a score that’s as rousing as a warm milk bath. This is an entertaining history lesson, but it should have been an exhilarating one. (2:14) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Me and Orson Welles See “Citizen Welles.” (1:54)

*The Princess and the Frog Expectations run high for The Princess and the Frog: it’s the first Disney film to feature an African American princess, the first 2D Disney cartoon since the regrettable Home on the Range (2004), and the latest entry from the writing-directing team responsible for The Little Mermaid (1989) and Aladdin (1992). Here’s the real surprise — The Princess and the Frog not only meets those expectations, it exceeds them. After years of disappointment, many of us have given up hope on another classic entry into the Disney 2D animation canon. And yet, The Princess and the Frog is up there with the greats, full of catchy songs, gorgeous animation, and memorable characters. Set in New Orleans, the story is a take off on the Frog Prince fairy tale. Here, the voodoo-cursed Prince Naveen kisses waitress Tiana instead — transferring his froggy plight to her as well. A fun twist, and a positive message: wishing is great, but it takes hard work to make your dreams come true. For those of us raised on classic Disney, The Princess and the Frog is almost too good to believe. (1:37) Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*The Private Lives of Pippa Lee See “Life Out of Balance.” (1:40) Albany, Bridge, Smith Rafael.

A Single Man Tom Ford directs Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in this 1960s-set tale of a man mourning the death of his longtime partner. (1:39) Sundance Kabuki.

Uncertainty A knocked-up girl (Lynn Collins) and a guy with a coin in his pocket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) stand on the Brooklyn Bridge, circle the issue, flip the coin, then bolt in opposite directions. The coin was clearly purchased in some dusty, mysterious Chinatown magic shop from a loopy-seeming octogenarian codger, because at each end of the bridge, the pair reunite for two 24-hour bouts of the title’s psychological state that unspool side by side in time but diverge in mood and pace and genre: on the Brooklyn side, we get a slow-paced family drama; in Manhattan, a pulse-raising action-thriller. In other words, a monument, a monumental decision, and a premise spun out of such pure and visible artifice that it seems unlikely to translate into absorbing filmmaking. It does, though, somehow, in the hands of writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (2005’s Bee Season, 2001’s The Deep End), who adroitly move Uncertainty’s central characters through familial scenes weighted down by quiet grief, strife, love, and worry and through the more heightened anxiety of chase and gunplay and ceaseless surveillance. While the framework remains a distracting fact, something constructed while we watched and then imposed on us, the film, heavily improvised, is carefully edited to guide us without tripping between the two threads of story. And in each — in what is becoming a pleasurable habit — we watch Gordon-Levitt bring texture and depth to the smallest moments in a conversation or scene. (1:45) Roxie. (Rapoport)

ONGOING

Armored (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

*Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Consider that ridiculous title. Though its poster and imdb entry eliminate the initial article, it appears onscreen as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That’s the bad lieutenant, not to be confused with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant. The bad lieutenant has a name: Terence McDonagh, and he’s a police officer of similarly wobbly moral fiber. McDonagh’s tale — inspired by Ferrara and scripted by William Finkelstein, but perhaps more important, filmed by Werner Herzog and interpreted by Nicolas Cage — opens with a snake slithering through a post-Hurricane Katrina flood. A prisoner has been forgotten in a basement jail. McDonagh and fellow cop Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) taunt the man, taking bets on how long it’ll take him to drown in the rising waters. An act of cruelty seems all but certain until McDonagh, who’s quickly been established as a righteous asshole, suddenly dives in for the rescue. Unpredictability, and quite a bit of instability, reigns thereafter. Every scene holds the possibility of careening to heights both campy and terrifying, and Cage proves an inspired casting choice. At this point in his career, he has nothing to lose, and his take on Lt. McDonagh is as haywire as it gets. McDonagh snorts coke before reporting to a crime scene; he threatens the elderly; he hauls his star teenage witness along when he confronts a john who’s mistreated his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes); he cackles like a maniac; he lurches around like a hunchback on crack. Not knowing what McDonagh will do next is as entertaining as knowing it’ll likely be completely insane. (2:01) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Blind Side When the New York Times Magazine published Michael Lewis’ article “The Ballad of Big Mike” — which he expanded into the 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game —nobody could have predicated the cultural windfall it would spawn. Lewis told the incredible story of Michael Oher — a 6’4, 350-pound 16-year-old, who grew up functionally parentless, splitting time between friends’ couches and the streets of one of Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods. As a sophomore with a 0.4 GPA, Oher serendipitously hitched a ride with a friend’s father to a ritzy private school across town and embarked on an unbelievable journey that led him into a upper-class, white family; the Dean’s List at Ole Miss; and, finally, the NFL. The film itself effectively focuses on Oher’s indomitable spirit and big heart, and the fearless devotion of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family who adopted him (masterfully played by Sandra Bullock). While the movie will delight and touch moviegoers, its greatest success is that it will likely spur its viewers on to read Lewis’ brilliant book. (2:06) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Daniel Alvarez)

Brothers There’s nothing particularly original about Brothers — first, because it’s based on a Danish film of the same name, and second, because sibling rivalry is one of the oldest stories in the book. The story is fairly straightforward: good brother (Tobey Maguire) goes AWOL in Afghanistan, bad brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) comforts his sister-in law (Natalie Portman), attraction develops, but then — and here’s where things get awkward — good brother comes home. Throughout much of Brothers, the script is surprisingly restrained, holding the film back from Movie of the Week territory. Those moments of subtlety are the movie’s strongest, but by the end they’ve given way to giant, maudlin explosions of angst, which aren’t nearly as impressive. Still, the acting is consistently strong. Maguire is especially good as Captain Sam Cahill in a performance that runs the gamut from doting father to terrifyingly unbalanced. It’s unfortunate that the quiet scenes, in which all the actors excel, are overshadowed by the big, plate-smashing ones. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) Roxie. (Peitzman)

Christmas with Walt Disney Specially made for the Presidio’s recently opened Walt Disney Family Museum, this nearly hour-long compilation of vintage Yuletide-themed moments from throughout the studio’s history (up to Walt’s 1966 death) is more interesting than you might expect. The engine is eldest daughter Diane Disney Miller’s narrating reminiscences, often accompanied by excerpts from an apparently voluminous library of high-quality home movies. Otherwise, the clips are drawn from a mix of short and full-length animations, live-action features (like 1960’s Swiss Family Robinson), TV shows Wonderful World of Disney and Mickey Mouse Club, plus public events like Disneyland’s annual Christmas Parade and Disney’s orchestration of the 1960 Winter Olympics’ pageantry. If anything, this documentary is a little too rushed –- it certainly could have idled a little longer with some of the less familiar cartoon material. But especially for those who who grew up with Disney product only in its post-founder era, it will be striking to realize what a large figure Walt himself once cut in American culture, not just as a brand but as an on-screen personality. The film screens Nov 27-Jan 2; for additional information, visit http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/index.html. (:59) Walt Disney Family Museum. (Harvey)

*Collapse Michael Ruppert is a onetime LAPD narcotics detective and Republican whose radicalization started with the discovery (and exposure) of CIA drug trafficking operations in the late 70s. More recently he’s been known as an author agitator focusing on political coverups of many types, his ideas getting him branded as a factually unreliable conspiracy theorist by some (including some left voices like Norman Solomon) and a prophet by others (particularly himself). This documentary by Chris Smith (American Movie) gives him 82 minutes to weave together various concepts — about peak oil, bailouts, the stock market, archaic governmental systems, the end of local food-production sustainability, et al. — toward a frightening vision of near-future apocalypse. It’s “the greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth, our own suicide,” as tapped-out resources and fragile national infrastructures trigger a collapse in global industrialized civilization. This will force “the greatest age in human evolution that’s ever taken place,” necessitating entirely new (or perhaps very old, pre-industrial) community models for our species’ survival. Ruppert is passionate, earnest and rather brilliant. He also comes off at times as sad, angry, and eccentric, bridling whenever Smith raises questions about his methodologies. Essentially a lecture with some clever illustrative materials inserted (notably vintage educational cartoons), Collapse is, as alarmist screeds go, pretty dang alarming. It’s certainly food for thought, and would make a great viewing addendum to concurrent post-apocalyptic fiction The Road. (1:22) Shattuck. (Harvey)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2:38) Smith Rafael.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (1:36) 1000 Van Ness.

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education’s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Albany, Piedmont. (Chun)

The End of Poverty? (1:46) Four Star.

Everybody’s Fine Robert De Niro works somewhere between serious De Niro and funny De Niro in this portrait of a family in muffled crisis, a remake of the 1991 Italian film Stanno Tutti Bene. The American version tracks the comings and goings of Frank (De Niro), a recently widowed retiree who fills his solitary hours working in the garden and talking to strangers about his children, who’ve flung themselves across the country in pursuit of various dreams and now send home overpolished reports of their achievements. Disappointed by his offspring’s collective failure to show up for a family get-together, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey to connect with each in turn. Writer-director Kirk Jones (1998’s Waking Ned Devine) effectively underscores Frank’s loneliness with shots of him steering his cart through empty grocery stores, interacting only with the occasional stock clerk, and De Niro projects a sense of drifting disconnection with poignant restraint. But Jones also litters the film with a string of uninspired, autopilot comic moments, and manifold shots of telephone wires as Frank’s children (Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, and Sam Rockwell) whisper across the miles behind their father’s back — his former vocation, manufacturing the telephone wires’ plastic coating, funded his kids’ more-ambitious aims — feel like glancing blows to the head. A vaguely miraculous third-act exposition of everything they’ve been withholding to protect both him and themselves is handled with equal subtlety and the help of gratingly precocious child actors. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Everything Strange and New In Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), wears overalls too large and a look of pained, dazed acquiescence. It’s as if not just his clothes but his life were given to the wrong person — and there’s a no-exchange policy. He loves wife Reneé (the writer Beth Lisick) and their kids. But those two unplanned pregnancies mean she’s got to stay home; daycare would cost more than she’d earn. So every day Wayne returns from his dead-end construction job to the home whose mortgage holds them hostage; and every time Reneé can be heard screaming at their not-yet-school-age boys, at the end of her tether. Sometimes he silently just turns around to commiserate over beer with buddies likewise married with children, but doing no better. Wayne’s voiceover narration endlessly ponders how things got this way — more or less as they should be, yet subtly wrong. He might be willing (or at least able) to let go of the idea of happiness. But Reneé’s inarticulate fury at her stifling domestication keeps striking at any nearby punching bag, himself (especially) included. Something’s got to change. But can it? Veteran local experimentalist and cinematographer Bradshaw’s first feature, which he also wrote, never stoops to narrative cliché. Or to stylistic ones, either — there’s a spectral poetry to the way he photographs the Oakland flats. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

*Fantastic Mr. Fox A lot of people have been busting filmmaker Wes Anderson’s proverbial chops lately, lambasting him for recent cinematic self-indulgences hewing dangerously close to self-parody (and in the case of 2007’s Darjeeling Limited, I’m one of them). Maybe he’s been listening. Either way, his new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, should keep the naysayer wolves at bay for a while — it’s nothing short of a rollicking, deadpan-hilarious case study in artistic renewal. A kind of man-imal inversion of Anderson’s other heist movie, his debut feature Bottle Rocket (1996), his latest revels in ramshackle spontaneity and childlike charm without sacrificing his adult preoccupations. Based on Roald Dahl’s beloved 1970 book, Mr. Fox captures the essence of the source material but is still full of Anderson trademarks: meticulously staged mise en scène, bisected dollhouse-like sets, eccentric dysfunctional families coming to grips with their talent and success (or lack thereof).(1:27) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

The Maid In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. (Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious.) When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist her, she stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away — until the arrival of Lucy (Mariana Loyola), whose unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory, from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life. If writer-director Sebastián Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving “mugshot” of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine as it accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. But her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act. (1:35) Shattuck. (Erik Morse)

The Men Who Stare at Goats No! The Men Who Stare at Goats was such an awesome book (by British journalist Jon Ronson) and the movie boasts such a terrific cast (George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor). How in the hell did it turn out to be such a lame, unfunny movie? Clooney gives it his all as Lyn Cassady, a retired “supersolider” who peers through his third eye and realizes the naïve reporter (McGregor) he meets in Kuwait is destined to accompany him on a cross-Iraq journey of self-discovery; said journey is filled with flashbacks to the reporter’s failed marriage (irrelevant) and Cassady’s training with a hippie military leader (Bridges) hellbent on integrating New Age thinking into combat situations. Had I the psychic powers of a supersoldier, I’d use some kind of mind-control technique to convince everyone within my brain-wave radius to skip this movie at all costs. Since I’m merely human, I’ll just say this: seriously, read the book instead. (1:28) Shattuck. (Eddy)

*The Messenger Ben Foster cut his teeth playing unhinged villains in Alpha Dog (2006) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007), but he cements his reputation as a promising young actor with a moving, sympathetic performance in director Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Moverman (who also co-authored the script) is a four-year veteran of the Israeli army, and he draws on his military experience to create an intermittently harrowing portrayal of two soldiers assigned to the U.S. Army’s Casualty Notification Service. Will Montgomery (Foster) is still recovering from the physical and psychological trauma of combat when he is paired with Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a by-the-book Captain whose gruff demeanor and good-old-boy gallows humor belie the complicated soul inside. Gut-wrenching encounters with the families of dead soldiers combine with stark, honest scenes that capture two men trying to come to grips with the mundane horrors of their world, and Samantha Morton completes a trio of fine acting turns as a serene Army widow. (1:45) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

Ninja Assassin Let’s face it: it’d be nigh impossible to live up to a title as awesome as Ninja Assassin –- and this second flick from V for Vendetta (2005) director James McTeigue doesn’t quite do it. Anyone who’s seen a martial arts movie will find the tale of hero Raizo overly familiar: a student (played by the single-named Rain) breaks violently with his teacher; revenge on both sides ensues. That the art form in question is contemporary ninja-ing adds a certain amount of interest, though after a killer ninja vs. yakuza opening scene (by far the film’s best), and a flashback or two of ninja vs. political targets, the rest of the flick is concerned mostly with either ninja vs. ninja or ninja vs. military guys. (As ninjas come “from the shadows,” most of these battles are presented in action-masking darkness.) There’s also an American forensic researcher (Noemie Harris) who starts poking around the ninja underground, a subplot that further saps the fun out of a movie that already takes itself way too seriously. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Old Dogs John Travolta and Robin Williams play lifelong friends, business partners, and happily child-free bachelors whose lives change when the latter is forced to care for the 7-year-old twins (Conner Rayburn, Ella Bleu Travolta) he didn’t know he’d sired. You know what this will be like going in, and that’s what you get: a predictable mix of the broadly comedic and maudlin, with a screenplay that feels half-baked by committee, and direction (by Walt Becker, who’s also responsible for 2007’s Wild Hogs) that tries to compensate via frantic over-editing of setpieces that end before they’ve gotten started. The coasting stars seem to be enjoying themselves, but the momentary cheering effect made by each subsidiary familiar face –- including Seth Green, Bernie Mac, Matt Dillon, Ann-Margret, Amy Sedaris, Dax Shepard, Justin Long, and Luis Guzman, some in unbilled cameos –- sours as you realize almost none of them will get anything worthwhile to do. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

Pirate Radio I wanted to like Pirate Radio, a.k.a., The Boat That Rocked –- really, I did. The raging, stormy sounds of the British Invasion –- sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and all that rot. Pirate radio outlaw sexiness, writ large, influential, and mind-blowingly popular. This shaggy-dog of a comedy about the boat-bound, rollicking Radio Rock is based loosely on the history of Radio Caroline, which blasted transgressive rock ‘n’ roll (back when it was still subversive) and got around stuffy BBC dominance by broadcasting from a ship off British waters. Alas, despite the music and the attempts by filmmaker Richard Curtis to inject life, laughs, and girls into the mix (by way of increasingly absurd scenes of imagined listeners creaming themselves over Radio Rock’s programming), Pirate Radio will be a major disappointment for smart music fans in search of period accuracy (are we in the mid- or late ’60s or early or mid-’70s –- tough to tell judging from the time-traveling getups on the DJs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Darby, among others?) and lame writing that fails to rise above the paint-by-the-numbers narrative buttressing, irksome literalness (yes, a betrayal by a lass named Marianne is followed by “So Long, Marianne”), and easy sexist jabs at all those slutty birds. Still, there’s a reason why so many artists –- from Leonard Cohen to the Stones –- have lent their songs to this shaky project, and though it never quite gets its sea legs, Pirate Radio has its heart in the right place –- it just lost its brains somewhere along the way down to its crotch. (2:00) Oaks, Piedmont, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Planet 51 (1:31) Oaks, 1000 Van Ness.

*Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire This gut-wrenching, little-engine-that-could of a film shows the struggles of Precious, an overweight, illiterate 16-year-old girl from Harlem. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe is so believably vigilant (she was only 15 at the time of filming) that her performance alone could bring together the art-house viewers as well as take the Oscars by storm. But people need to actually go and experience this film. While Precious did win Sundance’s Grand Jury and Audience Award awards this year, there is a sad possibility that filmgoers will follow the current trend of “discussing” films that they’ve actually never seen. The daring casting choices of comedian Mo’Nique (as Precious’ all-too-realistically abusive mother) and Mariah Carey (brilliantly understated as an undaunted and dedicated social counselor) are attempts to attract a wider audience, but cynics can hurdle just about anything these days. What’s most significant about this Dancer in the Dark-esque chronicle is how Damien Paul’s screenplay and director Lee Daniels have taken their time to confront the most difficult moments in Precious’ story –- and if that sounds heavy-handed, so be it. Stop blahging for a moment and let this movie move you. (1:49) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

Red Cliff All Chinese directors must try their hands at a historical epic of the swords and (arrow) shafts variety, and who can blame them: the spectacle, the combat, the sheer scale of carnage. With Red Cliff, John Woo appears to top the more operatic Chen Kaige and a more camp Zhang Yimou in the especially latter department. The body count in this lavishly CGI-appointed (by the Bay Area’s Orphanage), good-looking war film is on the high end of the Commando/Rambo scale. The endless, intricately choreographed battle scenes are the primary allure of this slash-’em-up, whittled-down version of the Chinese blockbuster, which was released in Asia as a four-hour two-parter. Yet despite some notably handsome cinematography that rivals that of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in its painterliness, seething performances by players like Tony Leung and Fengyi Zhang, and recognizable Woo leitmotifs (a male bonding-attraction that’s particularly pronounced during Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro’s zither shred-fests, fluttering doves, a climactic Mexican standoff, the added jeopardy of a baby amid the battle), the labyrinthian complexity of the story and its multitude of characters threaten to lose the Western viewer –- or anyone less than familiar with Chinese history –- before strenuous pleasures of Woo’s action machine kick in. The completely OTT finale will either have you rolling your eyes its absurdity or laughing aloud at its contrived showmanship. Despite Woo’s lip service to the virtues of peace and harmony, is there really any other way, apart from the warrior’s, in his world? (2:28) Shattuck. (Chun)

The Road After an apocalypse of unspecified origin, the U.S. –- and presumably the world –- is depleted of wildlife and agriculture. Social structures have collapsed. All that’s left is a grim survivalism in which father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (whimpery Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to find food sources and avoid fellow humans, since most of the latter are now cannibals. Flashbacks reveal their past with the wife and mother (Charlize Theron) who couldn’t bear soldiering on in this ruined future. Scenarist Joe Penhall (a playwright) and director John Hillcoat (2005’s The Proposition) have adapted Cormac McCarthy’s novel with painstaking fidelity. Their Road is slow, bleak, grungy and occasionally brutal. All qualities in synch with the source material –- but something is lacking. One can appreciate Hillcoat and company’s efforts without feeling the deep empathy, let alone terror, that should charge this story of extreme faith and sacrifice. The film just sits there –- chastening yet flat, impact unamplified by familiar faces (Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker) road-grimed past recognition. (1:53) California, Piedmont. (Harvey)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with “new freedoms” and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded “wide load” — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Piedmont. (Chun)

2012 I don’t need to give you reasons to see this movie. You don’t care about the clumsy, hastily dished-out pseudo scientific hoo-ha that explains this whole mess. You don’t care about John Cusack or Woody Harrelson or whoever else signed on for this embarrassing notch in their IMDB entry. You don’t care about Mayan mysteries, how hard it is for single dads, and that Danny Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor jointly stand in for Obama (always so on the zeitgeist, that Roland Emmerich). You already know what you’re in store for: the most jaw-dropping depictions of humankind’s near-complete destruction that director Emmerich –- who has a flair for such things –- has ever come up with. All the time, creative energy, and money James Cameron has spent perfecting the CGI pores of his characters in Avatar is so much hokum compared to what Emmerich and his Spartan army of computer animators dish out: the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy emerging through a cloud of toxic dust like some Mary Celeste of the military-industrial complex, born aloft on a massive tidal wave that pulverizes the White House; the dome of St. Paul’s flattening the opium-doped masses like a steamroller; Hawaii returned to its original volcanic state; and oodles more scenes in which we are allowed to register terror, but not horror, at the gorgeous destruction that is unfurled before us as the world ends (again) but no one really dies. Get this man a bigger budget. (2:40) Empire, California, 1000 Van Ness. (Sussman)

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Oh my God, you guys, it’s that time of the year: another Twilight chapter hits theaters. New Moon reunites useless cipher Bella (Kristen Steward) and Edward (Robert Pattinson), everyone’s favorite sparkly creature of darkness. Because this is a teen wangstfest, the course of true love is kind of bumpy. This time around, there’s a heavy Romeo and Juliet subplot and some interference from perpetually shirtless werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Chances are you know this already, as you’ve either devoured Stephenie Meyer’s book series or you were one of the record-breaking numbers in attendance for the film’s opening weekend. And for those non-Twilight fanatics — is there any reason to see New Moon? Yes and no. Like the 2008’s Twilight, New Moon is reasonably entertaining, with plenty of underage sexual tension, supernatural slugfests, and laughable line readings. But there’s something off this time around: New Moon is fun but flat. For diehard fans, it’s another excuse to shriek at the screen. For anyone else, it’s a soulless diversion. (2:10) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Up in the Air After all the soldiers’ stories and the cannibalism canards of late, Up in the Air’s focus on a corporate ax-man — an everyday everyman sniper in full-throttle downsizing mode — is more than timely; it’s downright eerie. But George Clooney does his best to inject likeable, if not quite soulful, humanity into Ryan Bingham, an all-pro mileage collector who prides himself in laying off employees en masse with as few tears, tantrums, and murder-suicide rages as possible. This terminator’s smooth ride from airport terminal to terminal is interrupted not only by a possible soul mate, fellow smoothie and corporate traveler Alex (Vera Farmiga), but a young tech-savvy upstart, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who threatens to take the process to new reductionist lows (layoff via Web cam) and downsize Ryan along the way. With Up in the Air, director Jason Reitman, who oversaw Thank You for Smoking (2005) as well as Juno (2007), is threatening to become the bard of office parks, Casual Fridays, khaki-clad happy hours, and fly-over zones. But Up in the Air is no Death of a Salesman, and despite some memorable moments that capture the pain of downsizing and the flatness of real life, instances of snappily screwball dialogue, and some more than solid performances by all (and in particular, Kendrick), he never manages to quite sell us on the existence of Ryan’s soul. (1:49) SF Center. (Chun)

*William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe A middle-class suburban lawyer radicalized by the Civil Rights era, Kunstler became a hero of the left for his fiery defenses of the draft-card-burning Catonsville Nine, the Black Panthers, the Chicago Twelve, and the Attica prisoners rioting for improved conditions, and Native American protestors at Wounded Knee in 1973. But after these “glory days,” Kunstler’s judgment seemed to cloud while his thirst for “judicial theatre” and the media spotlight. Later clients included terrorists, organized-crime figures, a cop-killing drug dealer, and a suspect in the notorious Central Park “wilding” gang rape of a female jogger –- unpopular causes, to say the least. “Dad’s clients gave us nightmares. He told us that everyone deserves a lawyer, but sometimes we didn’t understand why that lawyer had to be our father” says Emily Kunstler, who along with sister Sarah directed this engrossing documentary about their late father. Growing up under the shadow of this larger-than-life “self-hating Jew” and “hypocrite” –- as he was called by those frequently picketing their house –- wasn’t easy. Confronting this sometimes bewildering behemoth in the family, Disturbing the Universe considers his legacy to be a brave crusader’s one overall –- even if the superhero in question occasionally made all Gotham City and beyond cringe at his latest antics. (1:30) Roxie. (Harvey)

Dick Meister: The Oakland General Strike

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Within two days in December of 1946, a general strike all but shut down Alameda County. It is much less remembered than the San Francisco general strike but it was no less effective.

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister is a former city editor of the Oakland Tribune, labor editor of the SF Chronicle and labor reporter on KQED-TV’s “Newsroom.”)

It was 7 a.m. on a cold, rainy day in the heart of downtown Oakland 63 years ago this month.

Dozens of strikers, picket signs held high, were gathered outside the Kahn’s and Hastings department stores on Broadway on that gloomy Sunday morning of December 1, 1946. Suddenly, some 200 Oakland and Berkeley police, many in riot gear, swept down the street. They roughly pushed aside pickets and pedestrians alike as they cleared the street and the surrounding eight square blocks. They set up machine guns across from Kahn’s while tow trucks moved in to snatch away any cars parked in the area.

Behind them came an armed guard of 16 motorcycle police and five squad cars.
The lead car carried Oakland Chief Robert Tracy and the strikers’ nemeses, Paul St. Sure, a representative of the employers who fiercely opposed their demand for union contracts, and Joseph R. Knowland, the virulently anti-labor newspaper publisher who controlled the local political establishment. That included the Oakland City Council, which had demanded that the police move against strikers.

Out of reach

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Out of reach

news@sfbg.com

On a sunny afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, a remarkable bounty covered a buffet table: coconut quinoa, organic mushroom tabouli, homemade vegan desserts, and an assortment of other yummy treats. The food and event were meant to raise awareness about public school lunches, although it was hard to imagine these dishes, brought by well-heeled food advocates, sitting under the fluorescent lights of a San Francisco public school cafeteria.

The spread was for the Slow Food USA Labor Day “eat-in,” a public potluck meant to publicize the proposed reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, national legislation that regulates the food in public schools. The crowd was in a festive, light-hearted mood. There was a full program of speeches by sustainability experts and a plant-your-own-vegetable-seeds table set up in one corner of the plaza.

A bedraggled couple who appeared homeless made their way through the jovial crowd and started scooping up the food in a way that suggested it had been a long time since their last roasted local lamb shish kebob. Their presence shouldn’t have been a surprise; most events involving free trips down a food table are geared toward a different demographic in this park, which borders the Tenderloin.

In a flash, an event volunteer was on the case, nervous in an endearingly liberal manner. “Sir,” she began. “This food is for the Child Nutrition Act.” And then she paused, searching for what to say next. I imagined her thinking: “Sir, this food is to raise awareness about the availability of sustainable food to the lower classes, not to be eaten by them,” or, “Sir, this good, healthy, local food is not for you.”

But there was no good way to say what she meant to convey. She knew it, and delivered her final line hurriedly before walking away. “If you could just, well, just don’t take like 25 things, okay?” Indifferent to the volunteer’s unspoken reprimand, the couple continued to eat, ignoring the whispers and stares of the social crusaders around them, who all seemed to take issue with their participation in this carefully planned political action.

It was a telling scene from a movement that has yet to really confront its class issues. Though organic grocery stores and farmers markets have sprung up on San Francisco’s street corners, it remains to be seen whether our current mania for sustainable, local food will positively affect the lower classes, be they farm workers or poor families.

Even iconic food writer Michael Pollan acknowledges the challenge the sustainability movement faces in widening its relevance for the poor, citing the high cost of local and organic food as just one of the issues that Slow Foodies and their allies must tackle before they can count the “good food” movement a success.

LOCAL ORGANIC LABOR

For the average heirloom tomato eater, the words “organic farm” often conjure up an idyllic agrarian picture: happy communes of earnest farmers growing veggies straight from the goodness of their hearts. In reality, a lot of the people who plant, tend, and harvest produce are poorly paid Latino immigrants. And it might come as a surprise that those who work on small or organic farms often face the same exploitative working conditions as those in conventional agriculture.

To learn how organic farm workers should be treated, consider Swanton Berry Farm, whose fields stretch out along the coastal highway just north of Santa Cruz. Swanton was the first organic farm in California to sign a contract with the United Farm Workers, a move that highlights the owners’ conviction that farm workers be viewed as skilled professionals. Employees are offered ownership shares in the farm and are provided health insurance, retirement plans, comfortable housing, and unlimited time off to attend to pressing family matters.

“Organic is a lot cleaner. Working with pesticides, you have to worry about wearing gloves and covering your skin. Here, you can pick that strawberry right off the plant and eat it,” Adelfo Antonio told the Guardian. He has worked these fields for 20 years, the last five as a supervisor. His high regard for his job and employers is apparent. As we talked, he kept at least one eye fixed on his coworkers, who stretched plastic sheets across the dirt of the field to protect their rows of seed from the coming autumn winds.

Antonio said he appreciates the culture of mutual respect on this farm. “People like how they are treated here. When conflicts come up, our management is open to working through them,” he said. A few minutes later, a break was called, illustrating his point. There had been some disruptive behavior in the company housing and a discussion ensued between the crew and one of the farm’s owners about house rules. The group formulated a plan to avoid trouble in the future.

But Swanton’s egalitarian fields are the exception among American organic farms. The average salary of the estimated 900,000 farm workers in California — the birthplace of the organic and farm labor movements in the U.S. — is around $8,500, more than $2,000 below the federal poverty line.

In 2006, the California Institute for Rural Studies put out a rare study of working conditions on the state’s 2,176 organic farms that suggested that in some respects, workers are better off on conventional farms. Although the average wage was higher on organic fields — $8.20 for entry-level work, compared with $7.91 on conventional farms — traditional agriculture outstripped organic on certain employee benefits. A mere 36 percent of organic businesses were found to provide health insurance to their employees, as opposed to 46 percent on conventional farms.

Unable to rely on chemicals for pest control, organic farms often face higher labor costs in the fields. “Wages and benefits should always be viewed in the wider context of sustainability, and that includes a farm’s ability to stay in business from one year to the next, i.e. its profitability,” said Jane Baker, a spokesperson for California Certified Organic Farmers, the state’s major organic certification agency.

The inequity faced by farm workers belies the fact that the organic movement began as an alternative to the industrialized food system. “Back then, we never would have imagined that you’d be buying an organic product that was built on the backs of workers. For us, social justice was every bit as important as the environmental part,” said Marty Mesh, an organic farmer since 1973 and executive director of Florida Certified Organic Growers & Consumers.

Mesh was involved in the debates over the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s first codification of the National Organic Program. He said that although many farmers advocated for regulations surrounding working conditions, the federal government found it hard to stomach labor stipulations. Many involved felt their inclusion would hurt the growth of the organic industry. So the social movement aspect of organic farming was left on the cutting room floor.

That has not been the case overseas. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, whose organic label is recognized worldwide, adopted explicit social justice language in its basic standards in 2003, stating in their “Principles of Organic Agriculture” document that “organic agriculture should provide everyone involved with a good quality of life and contribute to … reduction of poverty.”

CCOF now offers a dual track certification process wherein California farms can forgo specific IFOAM requirements. The lack of guidelines of worker treatment has led to some problems. “We’ve seen many of the same issues on organic farms that we do in conventional agriculture, on small and big farms alike,” Michael Marsh, directing attorney of California Rural Legal Assistance, told us. CRLA is an organization that regularly provides low cost legal assistance to agricultural workers, whom Marsh has seen bring charges against organic farmers for cases of sexual harassment, underpayment, and job safety concerns.

Sometimes the organic label is even used to justify vioutf8g workers rights. In 2003, the California Legislature considered a bill that would ban “stoop labor,” activities like hand-weeding which require working in bent positions that can cause musculoskeletal degeneration. Organic farmers’ associations lobbied against the bill, claiming that pesticide-free agriculture would suffer under such restrictions. Also, although chemical pest-killers are banned from organic farming, some popular natural pesticides like copper and sulfur have been known to cause irritation of the throat, eyes, and respiratory system.

“This is one of the hardest nuts to crack in the sustainable food world,” said Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change, a San Francisco-based foundation that has developed campaign strategies for improving agricultural working conditions. Three years ago, Dimock left his post as chairman at Slow Food USA, at a time when farm labor conditions “were generally not at the top of the list. Slow Food as an organization is just beginning to figure out what it can do in a meaningful way on this issue.”

Roots of Change has found some success in identifying farm labor challenges and possible solutions through a series of worker-grower forums. It has pinpointed immigration reform as one key to progress. Anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of farm workers in California are undocumented, which puts even fair bosses at risk of being prosecuted for employing illegal immigrants.

Many farm owners turn to labor contractors — essentially agricultural temp agencies — to supply field hands. Use of these middle men largely shields the owner from legal responsibility for illegal hiring, but “the bad farm labor contractors cheat workers, take their pay, and risk their health and safety,” Dimock said.

Some Californian farm labor contractors have become notorious for their disregard of minimum wage and other labor standards, taking advantage of workers who are discouraged to seek help for fear of deportation. The role played by irresponsible contractors is one of many issues that can remain unseen by the buyers of food from farms that rely on the inadequate public information available on agricultural working conditions.

WHEN BUSINESS AND LABOR COLLABORATE

Food management company Bon Appetit in Palo Alto has built a good reputation as a sustainable company, buying its produce and other foodstuffs as locally and organically as possible. “I’ve learned a lot working here,” said Jon Hall, head chef of Bon Appetit’s University of San Francisco cafeteria. “In other kitchens, if you can get something for five cents a pound cheaper, that’s what you buy. If I did that here, people would notice. [My bosses at Bon Appetit] would say, ‘Why’d you buy that?’ ”

But when Bon Appetit executives decided to take on the issue of worker treatment on the farms that supplied their food, they found it difficult to find reliable information on the subject. “We always felt like there was something there that needed to be done and change that needed to take place,” said vice president Maisie Greenwalt. “But we didn’t know who to talk to.”

Her cue to act came from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group from Immokalee County, Fla. The farm workers’ organization brought nationwide publicity to the slavery-like conditions in the area’s tomato fields. Greenwalt accompanied the group on an information-gathering trip to Immokalee and saw firsthand the places where recent immigrants were held to work against their will, living in squalor and being paid little as $20 a week.

Greenwalt saw the travesty as a wake-up call. Collaborating with the Immokalee activists, Bon Appetit developed a workers’ rights contract that all their tomato suppliers must now sign. “After Bon Appetit sent me the contract, I sort of at first didn’t see the point. But then I spoke with the [Coalition of Immokalee Workers] and it made sense. Worker abuse has been around for centuries,” said Tom Wilson of Alderman Farms, one of the company’s tomato growers.
Greenwalt says Bon Appetit cafeterias were prepared to eliminate tomatoes from their menus. “Every chef and manager I talked to said they would rather not serve tomatoes than serve the tomatoes that were coming from these conditions.” But every one of their suppliers signed, agreeing to conditions such as a mandatory worker-controlled safety committee and a “minimum fair wage.”

The success convinced Bon Appetit that this style of food buyer participation is crucial to making positive progress on farm worker treatment. The company is now conducting a nationwide survey of working conditions on organic farms. “Labor’s not a new issue,” said Carolina Fojo, one of the company’s researchers. “But for some reason, people are just now talking about it. We’ve found it can be a sensitive topic for a lot of farmers.”

Visually, Hall’s USF food court is similar to traditional college eateries. But plate-side, Bon Appetit’s commitment to sustainability is clear; specials vary seasonally and food is sourced locally whenever possible. The price for a semester’s meal plan is $3,810, more than twice that of San Francisco State University. Hall’s customers, college students who may eat three meals a day here, often approach him with questions about their food. Queries range from where to how the food was grown, but in no instances that Hall has been aware of, about the workers who grew it.

Labor issues are not the popular cause these days, at least in the sustainable food movement. Unlike the “eat local” and organic food movements, equitable treatment of farm workers has yet to spawn trendy slogans for tote bags or a book on the best-seller list.

One UC Santa Cruz study found that, when asked to rank their concern about food system related topics, Central Coast grocery shoppers assigned higher concern levels to animal treatment on farms than that of humans. But Hall is confident this will change as Bon Appetit and others continue to bring attention to the economically disadvantaged on the front lines of our local and organic food systems.

“This is the next frontier,” he said. “I can see it brewing.”

SERVING THE CHILDREN

In school cafeterias across the city, a different low-income group has its own challenges fitting into the sustainable food movement. San Francisco Unified School District manages one of the city’s most important food sources.

Every school day, Student Nutrition Services dishes out 31,000 cafeteria meals; of those, 84 percent go to students who qualify for free lunch or for the reduced price of $2 for elementary school students. It is not a stretch to say that for many of these kids, this is their one chance at healthy food for the day — certainly their only chance to learn about local and organic food. But the school district faces one of the major issues the sustainability movement has yet to resolve. Local and organic food costs a lot to produce, which makes it more expensive. If pricing was more socially equitable and accounted for living wages for farm workers, costs might rise even more. This is a problem. Federal funds supply about $2.49 for each free student lunch in San Francisco and less for the meals of students who do not qualify for reduced prices. After logistical costs like labor and transportation are accounted for, 90 cents per meal is left over for the food itself.

This is not enough to fund a menu like Hall’s. Given the numbers, it should come as no surprise that examining an average SFUSD school lunch — as San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer did in his Oct. 29 “Between Meals” online column — turns up a lot of recently thawed, bland food matter. But this is not to say that cafeteria meals have not seen progress. Student Nutrition Services eliminated junk food in 2003, signaling a new attention to nutrition on a menu previously dominated by pizza and french fries.

Unlike working conditions for farm workers, school lunches have the benefit of visibility to middle class consumers and activists. Demonstrable efforts are being made to send some of that 90-cent budget toward local food. But with such a limited budget, institutions like SFUSD can only address a small slice of what is important about sustainable food. Yes, efforts are being put toward buying kids local, pesticide-free food that doesn’t further jeopardize their future by using excessive fossil fuel on transportation. But these limited efforts do nothing to affect the social aspect of sustainability — those who produce the food are again left invisible.

The school salad bar program, started in 2007, uses organic and local vegetables in its buffet line as much as possible. The majority of the bars are strategically located in schools where more than half the student body qualifies for free and reduced-price lunches, a response to a Community Healthy Kids survey that put the number of ninth-graders who had eaten a single vegetable in the last week at 29 percent. Student reaction to the bars has been encouraging. Many poor families credit them with increasing the amount of produce in their kids’ diets.

“This program is an anomaly,” said Paula Jones, director of San Francisco Food Systems. “Other schools around the country just don’t see things like this.”

But a generation’s worth of antitax sentiment has limited the variety of the salad bars and other attempts at getting fresh food onto kids’ lunch trays. Due to high labor costs, the school district buys pre-chopped vegetables, severely limiting sourcing options. In the meantime, another generation of low-income kids is growing up on processed, packaged foods. Jones said making sustainable food available to all children is an issue the community must help take on. “The bottom line is, it’s going to take a lot of people talking about this to realize this is not just the school district’s problem.”

Jones’ organization works on getting healthy food to the city’s underserved populations. Nutritionally, this is the salient mission of our age. Despite its current vogue, only 10 percent of Americans buy organic, and shoppers who consistently choose healthy foods usually find themselves spending 20 percent more. Several California studies have indicated that socioeconomically depressed neighborhoods have disturbingly high rates of food insecurity and obesity.

Despite the enormity of the challenge, Jones remains positive. “We lead in this issue. San Francisco is ready, and we have the will.” She counts among the city’s biggest successes in this area the fact that all farmers markets, typically more expensive than average supermarkets, now accept food stamps.

THE FRESHEST FOR THE POOREST

On a bright autumn Wednesday, market assistant manager John Fernandez stands outside his “office,” a white van with the Heart of the City logo. The Heart of the City Farmers Market takes place in a plaza just between City Hall and the Tenderloin twice a week, year-round. Fernandez said it has the highest food stamp sales — second only to that of the Hollywood market — in California and has played a role in allowing low income families and individuals in the area to fit local and organic food into their budget.

Fernandez has worked here for 13 years, and said that the use of food stamps has doubled since last summer. Most of his food stamp customers are families and individuals coming back week after week. They pass by the van to have Fernandez swipe their food stamp cards through a machine and hand them the yellow plastic coins used to buy everything from persimmons to what is far and away the market’s most popular item: the live chickens that squawk from cages at one end of the line of stalls.

Efreh Ghanen was one of the shoppers we talked to who felt that being able to use her food stamps at the farmers market had improved the health of her family. Ghanen, who shops with her mother and sister, likened Heart of the City to the Yemeni markets where they bought their food growing up. “The honey, fruit, and vegetables here are fresher,” she said. “They just taste better.”

“I definitely wouldn’t be able to shop here if it weren’t for the food stamp program,” echoed Shana Lancaster. She teaches at Paul Revere Elementary School in Bernal Heights, a position funded through AmeriCorps whose low pay automatically qualifies her for the food stamp program. She selects an armful of organic Gala apples while noting the value of shopping local for working people like herself. “I like supporting the farmers. Everyone here at the market has a story. These days, everyone is struggling.”

But both Lancaster and Ghanen tell us that when they can’t afford to shop at the farmers markets, they head straight for corporate retailers like Safeway and Walgreens, buying whatever they need to get by.

Programs like these are essential if the sustainability movement is to remain relevant and widen its reach. Just as the environment will degrade if industrial agriculture continues unabated, so too will local and organic food sources falter if the majority of our society cannot afford to buy their wares.

In the end, the obstacles are about class. Low-income groups, be they the people who grow the organic food or the schoolchildren who benefit from eating it, need to become more of a focus of the “good food” movement. What Slow Foodies and other activists must keep in mind is that over-accessorizing a cause (as with esoteric artisan products and exclusive dining experiences) makes it less a vehicle for change and more like reshuffling of the same old injustices. Social change, by definition, has to be for everyone. Because elitism tastes as bad as it always has.

For more information, check out “Fair Food: Field to Table,” a multimedia project recently released by the California Institute for Rural Studies. CIRS is one of the leading researchers of working standards on Californian farms and its data is found throughout this article. Watch the Fair Food documentary for free at www.fairfoodproject.org.

Poll showed SF voters had favorable attitude toward new revenue measures

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By Rebecca Bowe

taxtini.jpg
Would you pay five cents more for this if it was going to fund local health care services?

So the city of San Francisco is staring down a $522 million deficit for next year. Does this mean local elected officials are seriously exploring options for new revenue measures? When we asked Board President David Chiu last week if new revenue options were in the cards for next year, he replied, “that has to be one part of the equation.”

David Metz, a partner in Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, says he discovered that a majority of San Franciscans supported certain revenue-generating options after his firm was commissioned by the San Francisco Labor Council to conduct a poll. FMMM&A has conducted polls on hundreds of tax and bond measures since 1980, when the firm was established.

“There was a majority of support for a number of different options,” Metz told the Guardian. FMMM&A asked 600 “likely voters” in San Francisco in July if they would approve temporary tax increases that would be imposed for no more than three years to help prop up city services. Tossing out a few ideas for bringing in more money, this is what they found:

· 72 percent of respondents said they would support a nickel-per-drink tax on alcoholic beverages in bars, in order to bolster city health-care services. 27 percent were opposed.

· 58 percent said they would vote for an increase in tax charges to hotel / motel guests. 37 percent said nay.

· 60 percent said they’d support a temporary half-cent sales tax increase. 38 percent opposed it.

· 53 percent said they’d support a 2 percent, temporary tax on the value of cars registered in San Francisco, while 44 percent said they’d reject it.

Dick Meister: We need jobs! Now!

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The most sensible job creation program comes from the AFL-CIO and a coalition of civil rights and other organizations

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.)

Of all the ideas out there on how to pull us out of the economic mess we’re in, none makes more sense than the program laid out by the AFL-CIO and a coalition of civil rights groups and other organizations.

Marriage by fire: Grooms find the joy

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grooms 112809 sm.jpg

GROOMS
Rejoicer
(Death by Audio)

By Kimberly Chun

Grooms is a slightly better name than Muggabears, the moniker of vocalist-guitarist Travis Johnson’s original teenaged bedroom recording project — it errs on the side of blah-blankness rather than cute-grotesquerie. Regardless, **Rejoicer** makes me want to look for Johnson in the future.

Sonic Youth and its **Speed Trials** ilk are the touchstones here — from the refined, sensuous use of carefully controlled noise blasts to Johnson’s smudgy, adolescent yowl — while the addition of drummer Jim Sykes conjures thoughts of his former combo Parts and Labor. It’s as if the threesome were on a treasure hunt for junked beauty among the grunge era’s corroded metal salvage shop — with breaks for twanging, seductively supple guitar torture — and listening to this thoughtfully assembled collection of songs, I’d say they’ve found what they were searching for.

Do it naturally

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Do it naturally

culture@sfbg.com

SEX Future sexologists will pinpoint the 2000s as the decade in which the sex toy industry finally crawled from its toxic swamp toward the green light. Before now, mainstream sex toys were garish in appearance, sloppily constructed, and intended to be dumped in a landfill after a few months of use. Made in shady overseas factories by exploited workers, many contained chemicals, like phthalates, that have been linked to cancer and were powered by frequently disposed-of batteries. Virtually nothing about the assembly or life cycle of the average sex toy indicated any consideration of consumer safety, labor standards, or environmental sustainability.

Fast-forward to today. Toys are available in a range of medical-grade, recyclable, and body-safe materials that don’t threaten users with possible tumors. There are rechargeable, recyclable, hand-cranked, organic, or solar-powered erotic accoutrements for the picking. A growing number of businesses manufacture locally. Retailers are using their influence to spread the natural sex toy word. And the products are actually selling.

The Bay Area has been pivotal in catalyzing these changes. Many of the most influential and promising environmentally-minded sex entrepreneurs, retailers, and advocates are based here — we house more green-compliant adult manufacturers than any other city. In a city where the word "sexual" is happily associated with innumerable prefixes — homo-, bi-, poly-, pan-, a-, omni- — we’ve earned a new variation: ecosexual.

If you’ve turned yourself on in the past 33 years, you probably know about Good Vibrations (www.goodvibes.com), the sex-toy juggernaut that evolved from a small women-owned cooperative into a worldwide phenomenon. I met with Carol Queen, PhD and staff sexologist, and Camilla Lombard, publicity manager, at Good Vibes’ Polk Street retail location, where large posters announced a new "Ecorotic" line: "Have Sustainable Sex! Kiss uninspired evenings goodbye!" The candy-colored Ecorotic toys, rechargeable and organic, occupied the most prominent display tables and cases.

Good Vibes has influenced some of the industry’s most important ecosexual developments. In 2001, the popular German magazine Stern ran the first feature on the harmful effects phthalates in sex toys, and Queen recalled, "The [journalists] stopped at Good Vibrations on their way back from Asia, after having gone to enormous toy factories in China and Hong Kong. They thought they were going to do a Life magazine-type spread on sex toy factories there. But their photographer was a medical doctor and when he smelled the air in the factories, he knew something was wrong. So they came to us the day after they got off the plane from Asia looking for alternatives. We started that conversation well over 10 years ago." (More than 70 percent of the world’s sex toys are still manufactured in China, where safety and environmental standards can be sketchy.)

Good Vibrations was among the first major retailers to phase phthalates out of their inventory, but they are, to this day, among the minority to do so. Included in this minority is Libida (www.libida.com), which like Good Vibrations is a local, women-centered adult e-boutique. Libida’s founder, Petra Zebroff, has a doctorate in human sexuality. (While most cities can’t boast of a single sex shop with PhD-certified sexologists on staff, San Francisco, perhaps unsurprisingly has several). I asked Petroff for advice on choosing a safe product. She warned, "If you smell a strong chemical smell or it’s unusually inexpensive — phthalates are the cheap way to make a rubber pliable — it probably contains materials that are not good for you or the environment."

As an alternative, the staff at Libida and Good Vibes suggests silicone, a recyclable, hypoallergenic, and nonporous substance also used in cookware and medical devices. Both retailers stock products by Vixen Creations (www.vixencreations.com), a local woman-owned dildo company celebrating 17 successful years. Vixen develops and manufactures popular silicone toys at its San Francisco factory, where each toy is crafted by hand and given a lifetime warranty — something unprecedented in the field.

Like silicone, wood is used in body-safe and eco-conscious sex toys, but has the added benefit of being naturally beautiful. Founded in 2005, NobEssence (www.nobessence.com) sells handmade sculptural toys that resemble antique curios. CEO Jason Yoder has an environmentalist’s background, having worked as an auditor for SA8000, a global accountability standard of ethical working conditions. During a phone conversation, Yoder remarked, "We hold ourselves to that standard not because we want to seem greener but because it’s self-evident that it’s the right thing to do." NobEssence sources sustainably farmed and harvested hardwood, and suppliers sign a code of conduct designating penalties for labor or ecological violations.

Borosilicate glass is another aesthetically pleasing material option. Sexual locavores who enjoyed the recent Dale Chihuly retrospective at the de Young Museum must visit Glass Kandi (569 Geary, SF. www.glassdildome.com), where each uniquely hand-blown toy is a gleaming parcel of sexy sui generis. "I have more glass dildos in my kitchen than I do in this store," owner Samantha Liu told me mischievously. "I’d been using this stuff for years." When I heard her say "kitchen," my eyes instinctively fell upon her "Produce Collection": halcyon dildos of garden-variety cucumbers, jalapenos, and bananas — plus a Chinese bitter melon and a cob of corn. "I’ve had people send me pictures with one of these in a fruit basket," Liu said. Liu designs most of the toys herself and works with local glassblowers to materialize them into objects of desire. Borosilicate glass may not be the recyclable kind, but these crystalline baubles would be criminal to discard.

Stationary toys like glass and wood dildos have their advantages, but sometimes it’s helpful when a toy moves on your behalf. With unique technical innovations, two local companies, JuicyLogic (www.juicylogic.com) and Jimmyjane (www.jimmyjane.com), have introduced impressive reinterpretations of the traditional vibrator, clearly illustrating that the demand for green solutions has never been higher than now.

JuicyLogic, started by Zebroff of Libida, is the company behind the only solar-powered vibrator on the market. "I started JuicyLogic in an ongoing effort to focus on finding and making green sex toys," she explained. "The idea of Sola Vibe came up when we found out that the only solar-powered vibrator on the market was being discontinued. We knew there was nothing else available, and we wanted to make sure solar power was an option for vibrator users." Like many green crusaders, Zebroff hopes to reduce battery waste. "The average person uses up eight batteries per year, leaving 2.4 billion batteries disposed of each year. I thought of how vibrators use batteries as their main source of power, and I felt an obligation to advocate for other sources of energy for vibrators." When the alternative source didn’t seem to exist, she created it herself: a silicone vibrator equipped with a solar panel containing 2.5 hours of vibrating bliss.

Jimmyjane, like JuicyLogic, is an inventive young company. Founded in 2004 by Ethan Imboden, an industrial designer and engineer, Jimmyjane is recognized as the industry’s current technological leader. With patented external docking devices that power a lithium ion battery, Jimmyjane’s vibrators are sleeved in silicone, hygienically sealed, and fully operable three meters underwater, displaying a thoughtfulness of design, a mechanical know-how, and a cavalier extravagance that distinguish them from others. Jimmyjane just released the Form 2, a smaller vibrator using similar technology. The nifty items in the Form series have more functions than most cell phones and rival Apple products in sleekness of design. Why the detail? Imboden answered, "We realized early on that if Jimmyjane is going to be a part of peoples’ sexuality — because sexuality is such an intimate and a vulnerable aspect of our lives — there are a whole set of responsibilities that go with that. We don’t market ourselves as an eco-company because for us, it’s an assumption that that’s our responsibility." They’ve certainly done their part: the Forms require not a single alkaline battery.

Thrillingly, the city’s DIY-oriented sexual community is also producing ecosex craft innovations that are as groundbreaking as they are thought-provoking. Madame Butterfly (www.butterflyrope.com) is a textile artist who handspins bondage rope out of raw silk, bamboo, and other natural materials. On the more steampunk side of things, SFSU student Martin Cooper recently unveiled an attention-grabbing, water-powered fucking machine in a nine-foot wood and metal frame. If it looks a little medieval, well, that’s part of the attraction.

Back at Good Vibrations, I asked Queen why San Francisco has become the crux of the ecosex movement. "It’s the sex-positivity," she said. "I think it’s because in the Bay Area — I hate the word ‘normal’ when talking about sex — but here this discussion is normalized in a different way than it is everywhere else." It’s true that savvy entrepreneurs are just a small part of our larger, sex-positive culture. Still, the ecosexual movement may be the proof that our culture as a whole is pushing forward toward a more sustainable future. After all, everything starts with sex.

Film listings

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Film listings

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

OPENING

Christmas with Walt Disney Specially made for the Presidio’s recently opened Walt Disney Family Museum, this nearly hour-long compilation of vintage Yuletide-themed moments from throughout the studio’s history (up to Walt’s 1966 death) is more interesting than you might expect. The engine is eldest daughter Diane Disney Miller’s narrating reminiscences, often accompanied by excerpts from an apparently voluminous library of high-quality home movies. Otherwise, the clips are drawn from a mix of short and full-length animations, live-action features (like 1960’s Swiss Family Robinson), TV shows Wonderful World of Disney and Mickey Mouse Club, plus public events like Disneyland’s annual Christmas Parade and Disney’s orchestration of the 1960 Winter Olympics’ pageantry. If anything, this documentary is a little too rushed –- it certainly could have idled a little longer with some of the less familiar cartoon material. But especially for those who who grew up with Disney product only in its post-founder era, it will be striking to realize what a large figure Walt himself once cut in American culture, not just as a brand but as an on-screen personality. The film screens Nov 27-Jan 2; for additional information, visit http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/index.html. (:59) Walt Disney Family Museum. (Harvey)

*Fantastic Mr. Fox "See 21st Century Fox." (1:27) Four Star, Marina.

Ninja Assassin Let’s face it: it’d be nigh impossible to live up to a title as awesome as Ninja Assassin –- and this second flick from V for Vendetta (2005) director James McTeigue doesn’t quite do it. Anyone who’s seen a martial arts movie will find the tale of hero Raizo overly familiar: a student (played by the single-named Rain) breaks violently with his teacher; revenge on both sides ensues. That the art form in question is contemporary ninja-ing adds a certain amount of interest, though after a killer ninja vs. yakuza opening scene (by far the film’s best), and a flashback or two of ninja vs. political targets, the rest of the flick is concerned mostly with either ninja vs. ninja or ninja vs. military guys. (As ninjas come "from the shadows," most of these battles are presented in action-masking darkness.) There’s also an American forensic researcher (Noemie Harris) who starts poking around the ninja underground, a subplot that further saps the fun out of a movie that already takes itself way too seriously. (1:33) (Eddy)

Oh My God? See "Pray Tell." (1:38) Lumiere.

Old Dogs John Travolta and Robin Williams play lifelong friends, business partners, and happily child-free bachelors whose lives change when the latter is forced to care for the 7-year-old twins (Conner Rayburn, Ella Bleu Travolta) he didn’t know he’d sired. You know what this will be like going in, and that’s what you get: a predictable mix of the broadly comedic and maudlin, with a screenplay that feels half-baked by committee, and direction (by Walt Becker, who’s also responsible for 2007’s Wild Hogs) that tries to compensate via frantic over-editing of setpieces that end before they’ve gotten started. The coasting stars seem to be enjoying themselves, but the momentary cheering effect made by each subsidiary familiar face –- including Seth Green, Bernie Mac, Matt Dillon, Ann-Margret, Amy Sedaris, Dax Shepard, Justin Long, and Luis Guzman, some in unbilled cameos –- sours as you realize almost none of them will get anything worthwhile to do. (1:28) Oaks. (Harvey)

Red Cliff All Chinese directors must try their hands at a historical epic of the swords and (arrow) shafts variety, and who can blame them: the spectacle, the combat, the sheer scale of carnage. With Red Cliff, John Woo appears to top the more operatic Chen Kaige and a more camp Zhang Yimou in the especially latter department. The body count in this lavishly CGI-appointed (by the Bay Area’s Orphanage), good-looking war film is on the high end of the Commando/Rambo scale. The endless, intricately choreographed battle scenes are the primary allure of this slash-’em-up, whittled-down version of the Chinese blockbuster, which was released in Asia as a four-hour two-parter. Yet despite some notably handsome cinematography that rivals that of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in its painterliness, seething performances by players like Tony Leung and Fengyi Zhang, and recognizable Woo leitmotifs (a male bonding-attraction that’s particularly pronounced during Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro’s zither shred-fests, fluttering doves, a climactic Mexican standoff, the added jeopardy of a baby amid the battle), the labyrinthian complexity of the story and its multitude of characters threaten to lose the Western viewer –- or anyone less than familiar with Chinese history –- before strenuous pleasures of Woo’s action machine kick in. The completely OTT finale will either have you rolling your eyes its absurdity or laughing aloud at its contrived showmanship. Despite Woo’s lip service to the virtues of peace and harmony, is there really any other way, apart from the warrior’s, in his world? (2:28) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

The Road After an apocalypse of unspecified origin, the U.S. –- and presumably the world –- is depleted of wildlife and agriculture. Social structures have collapsed. All that’s left is a grim survivalism in which father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (whimpery Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to find food sources and avoid fellow humans, since most of the latter are now cannibals. Flashbacks reveal their past with the wife and mother (Charlize Theron) who couldn’t bear soldiering on in this ruined future. Scenarist Joe Penhall (a playwright) and director John Hillcoat (2005’s The Proposition) have adapted Cormac McCarthy’s novel with painstaking fidelity. Their Road is slow, bleak, grungy and occasionally brutal. All qualities in synch with the source material –- but something is lacking. One can appreciate Hillcoat and company’s efforts without feeling the deep empathy, let alone terror, that should charge this story of extreme faith and sacrifice. The film just sits there –- chastening yet flat, impact unamplified by familiar faces (Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker) road-grimed past recognition. (1:53) Embarcadero, California, Piedmont. (Harvey)

Sophie’s Revenge Zhang Ziyi stars as the titular woman who seeks you-know-what after her boyfriend dumps her. (1:47) Four Star.

ONGOING

Art and Copy Doc maker Doug Pray (1996’s Hype!, 2001’s Scratch, 2007’s Surfwise) uses the mid-twentieth century’s revolution in advertising to background an absorbing portrait of the industry’s leading edge, with historical commentary, philosophical observations, and pop-psych self-scrutiny by some of the rebel forces and their descendants (including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein). We see the ads that made a permanent dent in our consciousness over the past five decades. We hear conference-room tales of famous campaigns, like "Got Milk?" and "I Want My MTV." And during quieter interludes, stats on advertising’s global cultural presence drift on-screen to astonish and unnerve. Lofty self-comparisons to cave painters and midwives may raise eyebrows, but Pray has gathered some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their métier thoughtfully, wittily, and quite earnestly. There are elisions in the moral line some of them draw in the process, and it would have been interesting to hear, amid the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this packaging and selling gets us, in a branding-congested age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a deleterious effect on the planet. Instead the film occasionally veers in the direction of becoming an advertisement for advertising. Still, Art and Copy complicates our impressions of a vilified profession, and what it reveals about these creatives’ perceptions of their vocation (one asserts that "you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture") makes it worth watching, even if you usually fast-forward through the ads. (1:30) Roxie. (Rapoport)

*Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Consider that ridiculous title. Though its poster and imdb entry eliminate the initial article, it appears onscreen as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That’s the bad lieutenant, not to be confused with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant. The bad lieutenant has a name: Terence McDonagh, and he’s a police officer of similarly wobbly moral fiber. McDonagh’s tale — inspired by Ferrara and scripted by William Finkelstein, but perhaps more important, filmed by Werner Herzog and interpreted by Nicolas Cage — opens with a snake slithering through a post-Hurricane Katrina flood. A prisoner has been forgotten in a basement jail. McDonagh and fellow cop Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) taunt the man, taking bets on how long it’ll take him to drown in the rising waters. An act of cruelty seems all but certain until McDonagh, who’s quickly been established as a righteous asshole, suddenly dives in for the rescue. Unpredictability, and quite a bit of instability, reigns thereafter. Every scene holds the possibility of careening to heights both campy and terrifying, and Cage proves an inspired casting choice. At this point in his career, he has nothing to lose, and his take on Lt. McDonagh is as haywire as it gets. McDonagh snorts coke before reporting to a crime scene; he threatens the elderly; he hauls his star teenage witness along when he confronts a john who’s mistreated his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes); he cackles like a maniac; he lurches around like a hunchback on crack. Not knowing what McDonagh will do next is as entertaining as knowing it’ll likely be completely insane. (2:01) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Blind Side When the New York Times Magazine published Michael Lewis’ article "The Ballad of Big Mike" — which he expanded into the 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game —nobody could have predicated the cultural windfall it would spawn. Lewis told the incredible story of Michael Oher — a 6’4, 350-pound 16-year-old, who grew up functionally parentless, splitting time between friends’ couches and the streets of one of Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods. As a Sophomore with a 0.4 GPA, Oher serendipitously hitched a ride with a friend’s father to a ritzy private school across town and embarked on an unbelievable journey that led him into a upper-class, white family; the Dean’s List at Ole Miss; and, finally, the NFL. The film itself effectively focuses on Oher’s indomitable spirit and big heart, and the fearless devotion of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family who adopted him (masterfully played by Sandra Bullock). While the movie will delight and touch moviegoers, its greatest success is that it will likely spur its viewers on to read Lewis’ brilliant book. (2:06) Cerrito, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Daniel Alvarez)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) Red Vic, Roxie. (Peitzman)

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Swanbeck)

Defamation When you begin to perceive all criticism as persecutorial, you might forget it’s possible to be wrong. That’s the worry driving Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, opening theatrically following a stormy reception at July’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The documentarian (2003’s Checkpoint) says that as an Israeli Jew he’s never actually experienced anti-Semitism. So he sets out to explore that prejudice’s status quo — or so he claims, somewhat disingenuously. Because Defamation‘s real agenda is positing anti-Semitism as a distorted, exploited, propagandic bludgeon used to taint any critique of Israeli government policies or the foreign lobbies supporting them. This is a theory bound to inflame angry emotions, not least the "self-hating Jew" accusation. It must be said that Shamir lays himself at risk — à la Michael Moore — of selectively gathering only evidence that supports his agenda. Anti-Semitism certainly does exist today, in many different forms, around the world. And if Defamation‘s deliberate omissions and occasional snarky tone hamper its case, Shamir nonetheless makes legitimately troubling points. His most controversial interviewee is Norman Finklestein, whose book The Holocaust Industry got him pilloried as a Holocaust denier (untrue) and quite likely cost him his teaching position. The son of Shoah survivors, he thinks "the Nazi Holocaust is now the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression" and that "pathological narcissism" desensitizes many American Jews to other people’s sufferings. The author can be persuasively reasonable. To Defamation‘s credit, however, it doesn’t yell "Cut!" when Finklestein whips himself into a crank-case frenzy that masochistically self-destructs his credibility. Absolute righteousness ain’t pretty, anywhere on the political spectrum. (1:33) Roxie. (Harvey)

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (1:36) 1000 Van Ness.

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Chun)

*Good Hair Spurred by his little daughter’s plaintive query ("Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?"), Chris Rock gets his Michael Moore freak on and sets out to uncover the racial and cultural implications of African-American hairstyling. Visiting beauty salons, talking to specialists, and interviewing celebrities ranging from Maya Angelou to Ice-T, the comic wisecracks his way into some pretty trenchant insights about how black women’s coiffures can often reflect Caucasian-set definitions of beauty. (Leave it to Rev. Al Sharpton to voice it ingeniously: "You comb your oppression every morning!") Rock makes an affable guide in Jeff Stilson’s breezy documentary, which posits the hair industry as a global affair where relaxers work as "nap-antidotes" and locks sacrificially shorn in India end up as pricey weaves in Beverly Hills. Maybe startled by his more disquieting discoveries, Rock shifts the focus to flamboyant, crowd-pleasing shenanigans at the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show. Despite such softball detours, it’s a genial and revealing tour. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Croce)

*The House of the Devil Ti West’s The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice the babysitter to the Dark Lord. "Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move. Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Its period setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly. Ultimately, it isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. (1:33) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Maid In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. (Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious.) When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist her, she stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away — until the arrival of Lucy (Mariana Loyola), whose unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory, from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life. If writer-director Sebastián Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving "mugshot" of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine as it accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. But her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act. (1:35) Clay, Shattuck. (Erik Morse)

The Men Who Stare at Goats No! The Men Who Stare at Goats was such an awesome book (by British journalist Jon Ronson) and the movie boasts such a terrific cast (George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor). How in the hell did it turn out to be such a lame, unfunny movie? Clooney gives it his all as Lyn Cassady, a retired "supersolider" who peers through his third eye and realizes the naïve reporter (McGregor) he meets in Kuwait is destined to accompany him on a cross-Iraq journey of self-discovery; said journey is filled with flashbacks to the reporter’s failed marriage (irrelevant) and Cassady’s training with a hippie military leader (Bridges) hellbent on integrating New Age thinking into combat situations. Had I the psychic powers of a supersoldier, I’d use some kind of mind-control technique to convince everyone within my brain-wave radius to skip this movie at all costs. Since I’m merely human, I’ll just say this: seriously, read the book instead. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*The Messenger Ben Foster cut his teeth playing unhinged villains in Alpha Dog (2006) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007), but he cements his reputation as a promising young actor with a moving, sympathetic performance in director Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Moverman (who also co-authored the script) is a four-year veteran of the Israeli army, and he draws on his military experience to create an intermittently harrowing portrayal of two soldiers assigned to the U.S. Army’s Casualty Notification Service. Will Montgomery (Foster) is still recovering from the physical and psychological trauma of combat when he is paired with Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a by-the-book Captain whose gruff demeanor and good-old-boy gallows humor belie the complicated soul inside. Gut-wrenching encounters with the families of dead soldiers combine with stark, honest scenes that capture two men trying to come to grips with the mundane horrors of their world, and Samantha Morton completes a trio of fine acting turns as a serene Army widow. (1:45) Albany, Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

*Michael Jackson’s This Is It Time –- and a tragic early death –- has a way of coloring perception, so little surprise that these thought pops into one’s head throughout This Is It: when did Michael Jackson transform himself into such an elegant, haute-pop sylph? Such a pixie-nosed, lacy-haired petit four of music-making delicacy? And where can I get his to-die-for, pointy-shouldered, rhinestone-lapeled Alexander McQueen-ish jacket? Something a bit bewitching this way comes as Michael Jackson –- now that he’s gone, seemingly less freakish than an outright phenomenon –- gracefully flits across the screen in this final (really?) document of his last hurrah, the rehearsals for his sold-out shows at O2 Arena in London. This Is It is far from perfect: this grainy video scratchpad of a film obviously wasn’t designed by the perfectionist MJ to be his final testament to pop. Director Kenny Ortega does his best to cobble together what looks like several rehearsal performances with teary testimonials from dancers (instilled with the intriguing idea that they are extensions of the surgery-friendly Jackson’s body onstage), interviews with musicians, minimal archival footage, and glimpses of Jacko protesting about being encouraged to "sing through" certain songs when he’s trying to preserve his voice, urging the band to play it "like the record," and still moving, dancing, and gesticuutf8g with such grace that you’re left with more than a tinge of regret that "This Is It," the tour, never came to pass. It’s a pure, albeit adulterated, pleasure to watch the man do the do, even with the gaps in the flow, even with the footage filtered by a family intent on propping up the franchise. Amid the artistry and kitsch, critics, pop academics, and superfans will find plenty to chew over –- from Jackson’s curiously timed physical complaints as the Jackson 5 segment kicks in, to the surreally CGI-ed, golden-age-of-Hollywood mash-up sequence. (1:52) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Chun)

New York, I Love You A dreamy mash note to the city that never sleeps, New York, I Love You is the latest installment in a series of omnibus odes to world metropolises and the denizens that live and love within the city limits. Less successful than the Paris, je t’aime (2006) anthology — which roped in such disparate international directors as Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron and Olivier Assayas — New York welcomes a more minor-key host of directors to the project with enjoyable if light-weight results. Surely any bite of the Big Apple would be considerably sexier. Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo tease out a one-night stand with legs, and Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q generate a wee bit of verbal fire over street-side cigs, yet there’s surprisingly little heat in this take on a few of the 8 million stories in the archetypal naked city. Most memorable are the strangest couplings, such as that of Natalie Portman, a Hasidic bride who flirtatiously haggles with Irrfan Khan, a Jain diamond merchant, in a tale directed by Mira Nair. Despite the pleasure of witnessing Julie Christie, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman in action, many of these pieces — written by the late Anthony Minghella, Israel Horovitz, and Portman, among others — feel a mite too slight to nail down the attention of all but the most desperate romantics. (1:43) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

Pirate Radio I wanted to like Pirate Radio, a.k.a., The Boat That Rocked –- really, I did. The raging, stormy sounds of the British Invasion –- sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and all that rot. Pirate radio outlaw sexiness, writ large, influential, and mind-blowingly popular. This shaggy-dog of a comedy about the boat-bound, rollicking Radio Rock is based loosely on the history of Radio Caroline, which blasted transgressive rock ‘n’ roll (back when it was still subversive) and got around stuffy BBC dominance by broadcasting from a ship off British waters. Alas, despite the music and the attempts by filmmaker Richard Curtis to inject life, laughs, and girls into the mix (by way of increasingly absurd scenes of imagined listeners creaming themselves over Radio Rock’s programming), Pirate Radio will be a major disappointment for smart music fans in search of period accuracy (are we in the mid- or late ’60s or early or mid-’70s –- tough to tell judging from the time-traveling getups on the DJs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Darby, among others?) and lame writing that fails to rise above the paint-by-the-numbers narrative buttressing, irksome literalness (yes, a betrayal by a lass named Marianne is followed by "So Long, Marianne"), and easy sexist jabs at all those slutty birds. Still, there’s a reason why so many artists –- from Leonard Cohen to the Stones –- have lent their songs to this shaky project, and though it never quite gets its sea legs, Pirate Radio has its heart in the right place –- it just lost its brains somewhere along the way down to its crotch. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Planet 51 (1:31) Oaks, 1000 Van Ness.

*Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire This gut-wrenching, little-engine-that-could of a film shows the struggles of Precious, an overweight, illiterate 16-year-old girl from Harlem. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe is so believably vigilant (she was only 15 at the time of filming) that her performance alone could bring together the art-house viewers as well as take the Oscars by storm. But people need to actually go and experience this film. While Precious did win Sundance’s Grand Jury and Audience Award awards this year, there is a sad possibility that filmgoers will follow the current trend of "discussing" films that they’ve actually never seen. The daring casting choices of comedian Mo’Nique (as Precious’ all-too-realistically abusive mother) and Mariah Carey (brilliantly understated as an undaunted and dedicated social counselor) are attempts to attract a wider audience, but cynics can hurdle just about anything these days. What’s most significant about this Dancer in the Dark-esque chronicle is how Damien Paul’s screenplay and director Lee Daniels have taken their time to confront the most difficult moments in Precious’ story –- and if that sounds heavy-handed, so be it. Stop blahging for a moment and let this movie move you. (1:49) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Presidio. (Chun)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont. (Chun)

2012 I don’t need to give you reasons to see this movie. You don’t care about the clumsy, hastily dished-out pseudo scientific hoo-ha that explains this whole mess. You don’t care about John Cusack or Woody Harrelson or whoever else signed on for this embarrassing notch in their IMDB entry. You don’t care about Mayan mysteries, how hard it is for single dads, and that Danny Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor jointly stand in for Obama (always so on the zeitgeist, that Roland Emmerich). You already know what you’re in store for: the most jaw-dropping depictions of humankind’s near-complete destruction that director Emmerich –- who has a flair for such things –- has ever come up with. All the time, creative energy, and money James Cameron has spent perfecting the CGI pores of his characters in Avatar is so much hokum compared to what Emmerich and his Spartan army of computer animators dish out: the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy emerging through a cloud of toxic dust like some Mary Celeste of the military-industrial complex, born aloft on a massive tidal wave that pulverizes the White House; the dome of St. Paul’s flattening the opium-doped masses like a steamroller; Hawaii returned to its original volcanic state; and oodles more scenes in which we are allowed to register terror, but not horror, at the gorgeous destruction that is unfurled before us as the world ends (again) but no one really dies. Get this man a bigger budget. (2:40) California, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness. (Sussman)

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Oh my God, you guys, it’s that time of the year: another Twilight chapter hits theaters. New Moon reunites useless cipher Bella (Kristen Steward) and Edward (Robert Pattinson), everyone’s favorite sparkly creature of darkness. Because this is a teen wangstfest, the course of true love is kind of bumpy. This time around, there’s a heavy Romeo and Juliet subplot and some interference from perpetually shirtless werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Chances are you know this already, as you’ve either devoured Stephenie Meyer’s book series or you were one of the record-breaking numbers in attendance for the film’s opening weekend. And for those non-Twilight fanatics — is there any reason to see New Moon? Yes and no. Like the 2008’s Twilight, New Moon is reasonably entertaining, with plenty of underage sexual tension, supernatural slugfests, and laughable line readings. But there’s something off this time around: New Moon is fun but flat. For diehard fans, it’s another excuse to shriek at the screen. For anyone else, it’s a soulless diversion. (2:10) Cerrito, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Peitzman)

(Untitled) The sometimes absurd pretensions of the modern art world have –- for many decades –- been so easily, condescendingly ridiculed that its intelligently knowing satire is hard to come by. (How much harder still would it be for a fictive film to convey the genius of, say Anselm Kiefer? Even Ed Harris’ 2000 Pollock less vividly captured the art or its creation –- better done by Francis Ford Coppola and Nick Nolte in their 1989 New York Stories segment –- than the usual tortured-artist histrionics.) Bay Arean Jonathan Parker attempts to correct that with this perhaps overly low-key witticism. Erstwhile Hebrew Hammer Adam Goldberg plays a composer of painfully retro, plink-plunk 1950s avant-gardism. (His favorite instrument is the tin bucket.) His lack of success is inevitable yet chafes nonetheless, because he’s a) humorlessly self-important, and b) sibling to a painter (Eion Bailey) whose pleasant, unchallenging abstracts are hot properties amongst corporate-art buyers. But not hot enough for his gorgeous agent (Marley Shelton), who puts off showing him at her Chelsea gallery in favor of cartoonishly "edgy" artists –- like soccer hooligan Vinnie Jones as a proponent of lurid taxidermy sculpture –- and takes a contrary (if unlikely) fancy to Goldberg. (How could her educated like not know his music is even less cutting-edge than the brother’s canvases?) (Untitled) holds interest, but it’s at once too glib and modest –- exaggerative sans panache. This is equivalently if differently problematic from Parker’s 2005 Henry James-goes-Marin County The Californians. It can’t compare to his 2001 feature debut, the excellent Crispin Glover-starring translation of Melville’s Bartleby to Rhinoceros-like modern office culture. (1:30) Bridge, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Where the Wild Things Are From the richly delineated illustrations and sparse text of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, director Spike Jonze and cowriter (with Jones) Dave Eggers have constructed a full-length film about the passions, travails, and interior/exterior wanderings of Sendak’s energetic young antihero, Max. Equally prone to feats of world-building and fits of overpowering, destructive rage, Max (Max Records) stampedes off into the night during one of the latter and journeys to the island where the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Michael Berry Jr.) live — and bicker and tantrum and give in to existential despair and no longer all sleep together in a big pile. The place has possibilities, though, and Max, once crowned king, tries his best to realize them. What its inhabitants need, however, is not so much a visionary king as a good family therapist — these are some gripey, defensive, passive-aggressive Wild Things, and Max, aged somewhere around 10, can’t fix their interpersonal problems. Jonze and Eggers do well at depicting Max’s temporary kingdom, its forests and deserts, its creatures and their half-finished creations from a past golden era, as well as subtly reminding us now and again that all of this — the island, the arguments, the sadness — is streaming from the mind of a fierce, wildly imaginative young child with familial troubles of his own, equally beyond his power to resolve. They’ve also invested the film with a slow, grim depressive mood that can make for unsettling viewing, particularly when pondering the Maxes in the audience, digesting an oft-disheartening tale about family conflict and relationship repair. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe A middle-class suburban lawyer radicalized by the Civil Rights era, Kunstler became a hero of the left for his fiery defenses of the draft-card-burning Catonsville Nine, the Black Panthers, the Chicago Twelve, and the Attica prisoners rioting for improved conditions, and Native American protestors at Wounded Knee in 1973. But after these "glory days," Kunstler’s judgment seemed to cloud while his thirst for "judicial theatre" and the media spotlight. Later clients included terrorists, organized-crime figures, a cop-killing drug dealer, and a suspect in the notorious Central Park "wilding" gang rape of a female jogger –- unpopular causes, to say the least. "Dad’s clients gave us nightmares. He told us that everyone deserves a lawyer, but sometimes we didn’t understand why that lawyer had to be our father" says Emily Kunstler, who along with sister Sarah directed this engrossing documentary about their late father. Growing up under the shadow of this larger-than-life "self-hating Jew" and "hypocrite" –- as he was called by those frequently picketing their house –- wasn’t easy. Confronting this sometimes bewildering behemoth in the family, Disturbing the Universe considers his legacy to be a brave crusader’s one overall –- even if the superhero in question occasionally made all Gotham City and beyond cringe at his latest antics. (1:30) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Economic snapshot for November 2009

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The Center for American Progress reports that weakness in the labor market is threatening the fledgling economic recovery. Policy should center on creating jobs to boost U.S. middle class economic security and help those who are most vulnerable.

Friday, November 20, 2009

By Christian E. Weller

(The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.)

Lingering weakness in the labor market is threatening the fledgling economic recovery. Millions of jobs have been lost and unemployment has risen to the highest level in almost three decades. The labor market weakness will make it harder for families to repay their high levels of debt and thus will likely contribute to high foreclosures, credit card defaults, and bankruptcies.

Policy has shown what it can do to revive a depressed financial market and turn the corner for a shrinking economy. Policy attention should now lie squarely on job creation to ensure that the recent improvements are not short lived. Strong labor market gains are necessary to boost the American middle class’ economic security and help those who are economically most vulnerable. Extended unemployment benefits, increased health insurance coverage, and support for state and local government programs will all help achieve those goals.

1. The U.S. economy has turned the corner. Gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5% in the third quarter of 2009, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008 and the largest gain since the third quarter of 2007. The economic stimulus legislation helped to increase consumer spending, home purchases, and federal government spending in the summer of 2009, which all contributed to faster growth.

Students win major sweatshop victory

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By Tim Redmond

It’s gotten surprisingly little press (outside of the NY Times), but the decision by Russell Athletic to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who had been thrown out of work when the company closed a factory in the wake of a union-organizing effort is a very big deal.

It’s easy to criticize student activists; they’re too idealistic, they’re just kids who don’t understand the real world, nobody listens to them anyway, or maybe (as one of my professors at Wesleyan once said about anti-apartheid activists) they just don’t have enough homework.

But the folks at United Students Against Sweatshopsnot only took on a good cause — they developed a brilliant strategy that actually worked. Targeting Russell Athletic made perfect sense for college students: Russell makes millions of dollars off university licensing deals. So students at hundreds of college campuses could work locally, demanding that their school cut its ties with Russell until it settled with the union in Honduras.

The local pressure worked. More than 80 colleges and universities, including Harvard, NYU and Stanford, agreed to cut off the deals that allowed Russell to use their logos on sportswear — and that convinced Russell to turn 180 degrees around and accept the union in Honduras.

“This is the culmination of 12 years of student organizing around this issue,” Shaun Martinez, a 2008 graduate of USC and a national staff organizer for USAS, told me. “We have never before been able to reverse a decision when a company closed a factory to stop union organizing efforts.”

The student group was able to leverage its success with colleges and universities to put pressure on Russell’s other major partners — like the NBA — and when NBA officials started hearing the message, Russell had no choice but to settle.

So chalk one up to the students; they’ve won a major victory not just for organized labor and the anti-sweatshop movement but for campus organizing everywhere.

Workers walk out at the St. Francis

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By Steven T. Jones
westin.jpg
The Westin St. Francis Hotel on Union Square this morning became the latest target for the striking hotel workers of UNITE-HERE Local 2, which has been springing three-day strikes on local hotels. As we reported in today’s Guardian, the union’s contract expired back in August and the hotel chains are trying to force benefit concessions and increased health care costs on their workers.

The union urged guests of the St. Francis to observe the picket line that has gone up and to find other accommodations when staying in San Francisco, even offering to help with that process through its website. This strike will end by the first shift on Saturday morning.

Five years ago during the last labor standoff between hotel workers and management, Mayor Gavin Newsom walked the picket line in front of the St. Francis after hotels refused his request to end their lockout of employees, which affected almost every major hotel in town.

Film listings

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Film listings

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

OPENING

*Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans See "Call of the Weird." (2:01) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

*Black Dynamite A lot of movies have spoofed in passing the cliches and excesses of 70s blaxploitation movies. But this collaboration between director Scott Sanders and coscenarist-star Michael Jai White makes you realize they only scratched the surface. It takes real love to meticulously reproduce not just the obvious retro pimp-wear, but every cheesy 70s graphic, wah-wah soundtrack riff, arbitrary plot development, and horrendous interior decoration tip the genre once offered up with a straight face. The brawny White plays our titular hero, a one-man ghetto militia out to avenge the inevitable death of the inevitable kid brother, in the process naturally exposing The Man’s latest heinous plot to keep the Black Man down. Between dealings with the CIA, the mob, pushers, narcs, and righteous soul sisters, B.D. of course finds plenty of time to satisfy a rainbow coalition of topless foxes. (There are also sidekicks like Arsenio Hall as Tasty Freeze and comedian Tommy Davison as Cream Corn.) Every ludicrous yet deadpan detail here is perfect, such that you could take any few seconds here and pass them off as snipped from a real grindhouse relic circa 1975. It’s in the bigger picture that Black Dynamite eventually flags a bit — when the movie ought to be getting its second wind, instead it begins to run out of steam, with a White House finale that’s just too silly. Nonetheless, this is easily one of the year’s best comedies. After inexplicably bombing in limited theatrical release elsewhere last month, it’s finally reaching the Bay Area in midnight-only showings, and is not to be missed. (1:28) Castro, Grand Lake. (Harvey)

The Blind Side When the New York Times Magazine published Michael Lewis’ article "The Ballad of Big Mike" — which he expanded into the 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game —nobody could have predicated the cultural windfall it would spawn. Lewis told the incredible story of Michael Oher — a 6’4, 350-pound 16-year-old, who grew up functionally parentless, splitting time between friends’ couches and the streets of one of Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods. As a Sophomore with a 0.4 GPA, Oher serendipitously hitched a ride with a friend’s father to a ritzy private school across town and embarked on an unbelievable journey that led him into a upper-class, white family; the Dean’s List at Ole Miss; and, finally, the NFL. The film itself effectively focuses on Oher’s indomitable spirit and big heart, and the fearless devotion of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family who adopted him (masterfully played by Sandra Bullock). While the movie will delight and touch moviegoers, its greatest success is that it will likely spur its viewers on to read Lewis’ brilliant book. (2:06) Cerrito, Grand Lake, Presidio. (Daniel Alvarez)

Defamation See "What’s Hate Got to Do With It?" (1:33) Roxie.

*The House of the Devil Ti West’s The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice the babysitter to the Dark Lord. "Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move. Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Its period setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly. Ultimately, it isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. (1:33) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*The Messenger Ben Foster cut his teeth playing unhinged villains in Alpha Dog (2006) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007), but he cements his reputation as a promising young actor with a moving, sympathetic performance in director Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Moverman (who also co-authored the script) is a four-year veteran of the Israeli army, and he draws on his military experience to create an intermittently harrowing portrayal of two soldiers assigned to the U.S. Army’s Casualty Notification Service. Will Montgomery (Foster) is still recovering from the physical and psychological trauma of combat when he is paired with Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a by-the-book Captain whose gruff demeanor and good-old-boy gallows humor belie the complicated soul inside. Gut-wrenching encounters with the families of dead soldiers combine with stark, honest scenes that capture two men trying to come to grips with the mundane horrors of their world, and Samantha Morton completes a trio of fine acting turns as a serene Army widow. (1:45) Albany, Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

Planet 51 In this animated adventure, Earth astronauts realize they’re the aliens when they visit a populated planet elsewhere in the galaxy. (1:31) Oaks.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon The one with the werewolf. (2:10) Cerrito, Grand Lake, Presidio.

*William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe A middle-class suburban lawyer radicalized by the Civil Rights era, Kunstler became a hero of the left for his fiery defenses of the draft-card-burning Catonsville Nine, the Black Panthers, the Chicago Twelve, and the Attica prisoners rioting for improved conditions, and Native American protestors at Wounded Knee in 1973. But after these "glory days," Kunstler’s judgment seemed to cloud while his thirst for "judicial theatre" and the media spotlight. Later clients included terrorists, organized-crime figures, a cop-killing drug dealer, and a suspect in the notorious Central Park "wilding" gang rape of a female jogger –- unpopular causes, to say the least. "Dad’s clients gave us nightmares. He told us that everyone deserves a lawyer, but sometimes we didn’t understand why that lawyer had to be our father" says Emily Kunstler, who along with sister Sarah directed this engrossing documentary about their late father. Growing up under the shadow of this larger-than-life "self-hating Jew" and "hypocrite" –- as he was called by those frequently picketing their house –- wasn’t easy. Confronting this sometimes bewildering behemoth in the family, Disturbing the Universe considers his legacy to be a brave crusader’s one overall –- even if the superhero in question occasionally made all Gotham City and beyond cringe at his latest antics. (1:30) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Amelia Unending speculation surrounds the fate of aviator Amelia Earhart, who, with navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared in 1937 over the Pacific while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. However, Mira Nair’s biopic Amelia clarifies at least one fact: that Earhart (played by Hilary Swank) was a free-spirited freedom-loving lover of being free. We learn this through passages of her writing intoned in voice-over; during scenes with publisher and eventual husband George Putnam (Richard Gere); and via wildlife observations as she flies her Lockheed Electra over some 22,000 miles of the world. Not much could diminish the glory of Earhart’s achievements in aviation, particularly in helping open the field to other female pilots. And Swank creates the impression of a charming, intelligent, self-possessed woman who manages to sidestep many of fame’s pitfalls while remaining resolute in her lofty aims. She’s also slightly unknowable in her cheery, near-seamless virtue, and the film’s adoring depiction, with its broad, heavy strokes, at times inspires a different sort of restlessness than the kind that compels Earhart to take flight. Amelia is structured as a series of flashbacks in which the aviator, while circling the earth, retraces her life –- or rather, the highlights of her career in flying, her marriage to Putnam, and her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), another champion of aviation (and the father of author Gore). And this, too, begins to feel lazily repetitive, as we return and return again to that cockpit to stare at a doomed woman as she stares emotively into the wild blue yonder. (1:51) Elmwood. (Rapoport)

Art and Copy Doc maker Doug Pray (1996’s Hype!, 2001’s Scratch, 2007’s Surfwise) uses the mid-twentieth century’s revolution in advertising to background an absorbing portrait of the industry’s leading edge, with historical commentary, philosophical observations, and pop-psych self-scrutiny by some of the rebel forces and their descendants (including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein). We see the ads that made a permanent dent in our consciousness over the past five decades. We hear conference-room tales of famous campaigns, like "Got Milk?" and "I Want My MTV." And during quieter interludes, stats on advertising’s global cultural presence drift on-screen to astonish and unnerve. Lofty self-comparisons to cave painters and midwives may raise eyebrows, but Pray has gathered some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their métier thoughtfully, wittily, and quite earnestly. There are elisions in the moral line some of them draw in the process, and it would have been interesting to hear, amid the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this packaging and selling gets us, in a branding-congested age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a deleterious effect on the planet. Instead the film occasionally veers in the direction of becoming an advertisement for advertising. Still, Art and Copy complicates our impressions of a vilified profession, and what it reveals about these creatives’ perceptions of their vocation (one asserts that "you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture") makes it worth watching, even if you usually fast-forward through the ads. (1:30) Roxie. (Rapoport)

*The Box In recent interviews, Donnie Darko (2001) director Richard Kelly has sounded like he’s outright begging to go Hollywood with The Box. But try as he might (and the horribly cheesy trailer does try to puff up this dread-imbued, downbeat thriller into the stuff of big-box blockbuster numbers), Kelly can’t stop himself from making a movie that rises above its intentions — and its trashy entertainment value. Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) seem like a perfect, beautiful couple, until the cracks begin to quickly appear in their sporty, well-groomed facade: the victim of a girlhood accident, Norma has a startling masochistic streak, while NASA engineer and would-be astronaut Arthur is eager to channel his interest in exploring outer space toward mysteries closer to home: a box that suddenly appears, courtesy of the maimed, besuited Arlington Stewart (Frank Langella). Press the button and someone will die — but the couple will receive one million dollars. Pointing to the existential parable of No Exit like a pretentious, AP-course-loaded high-schooler, The Box also touches on such memorable genre-busters as Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with its Pandora’s box conceit, but more obviously it’s boxed in and stuck in the ’70s, fascinated by the fear, loathing, and paranoia generated by conspiracy-obsessed flicks like The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Those films reveled in a romantic fatalism and radiating all-encompassing negativity that had its roots in the conformity-fearing Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and found its amplified, arguable apotheosis in the body horror of David Cronenberg. The analog synth score by Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Regine Chassagne and Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett also cues memories of Cronenberg, while the soft-focus shots of Cameron Diaz with Charlie’s Angels hair and well-chosen songs like "Bell Bottom Blues" conjure a mood that overcomes narrative potholes as big as the Scanners-like gap in Arlington Stewart’s face. (1:56) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) California. (Peitzman)

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Lumiere, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

*The Damned United Like last year’s Frost/Nixon, The Damned United features a lush 70’s backdrop, a screenplay by Peter Morgan, and a commanding performance by Michael Sheen as an ambitious egotist. A promising young actor, Sheen puts on the sharp tongue and charismatic monomania of real-life British soccer coach Brian Clough like a familiar garment, blustering his way through a fictionalized account of Clough’s unsuccessful 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United. Though the details of high-stakes professional "football" will likely be lost on American viewers, the tale of a talented, flawed sports hero spiraling deeper into obsession needs no trans-Atlantic translation, and the film is an engrossing portrait of a captivating, quotable character. (1:38) Opera Plaza. (Richardson)

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (1:36) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Chun)

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism Informative, nostalgic, and incredibly depressing, Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies traces film criticism from ye olden days (Vachel Lindsay’s appreciation of Mary Pickford) to today (Harry Knowles drooling over Michael Bay). Peary, himself a film critic, captures big-name writers working (or recently out-of-work) today, with Roger Ebert, A.O. Scott, J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and multiple others explaining why they chose to make a career out of their love for movies, and how the gig has changed over the years. Peary clearly believes the heyday of film criticism is over, having hit peak in the 60s and 70s, when new releases by filmmakers like Scorsese and Altman were argued-about in print and on talk shows by longtime rivals Andrew Sarris (who weighs in here) and the late Pauline Kael. Of course, these days, anyone with a blog can call him or herself a film critic, and while For the Love of Movies acknowledges the importance of the internet, it also points out that when "everyone’s a critic," quality control suffers. Welcome to the future. (1:21) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Fourth Kind (1:38) 1000 Van Ness.

*Good Hair Spurred by his little daughter’s plaintive query ("Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?"), Chris Rock gets his Michael Moore freak on and sets out to uncover the racial and cultural implications of African-American hairstyling. Visiting beauty salons, talking to specialists, and interviewing celebrities ranging from Maya Angelou to Ice-T, the comic wisecracks his way into some pretty trenchant insights about how black women’s coiffures can often reflect Caucasian-set definitions of beauty. (Leave it to Rev. Al Sharpton to voice it ingeniously: "You comb your oppression every morning!") Rock makes an affable guide in Jeff Stilson’s breezy documentary, which posits the hair industry as a global affair where relaxers work as "nap-antidotes" and locks sacrificially shorn in India end up as pricey weaves in Beverly Hills. Maybe startled by his more disquieting discoveries, Rock shifts the focus to flamboyant, crowd-pleasing shenanigans at the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show. Despite such softball detours, it’s a genial and revealing tour. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Croce)

Law Abiding Citizen "Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) as re-imagined by the Saw franchise folks" apparently sounded like a sweet pitch to someone, because here we are, stuck with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler playing bloody and increasingly ludicrous cat-and-mouse games. Foxx stars as a slick Philadelphia prosecutor whose deal-cutting careerist ways go easy on the scummy criminals responsible for murdering the wife and daughter of a local inventor (Butler). Cut to a decade later, and the doleful widower has become a vengeful mastermind with a yen for Hannibal Lecter-like skills, gruesome contraptions, and lines like "Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten." Butler metes out punishment to his family’s killers as well as to the bureocratic minions who let them off the hook. But the talk of moral consequences is less a critique of a faulty judicial system than mere white noise, vainly used by director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer in hopes of classing up a grinding exploitation drama. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness. (Croce)

The Maid In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. (Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious.) When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist her, she stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away — until the arrival of Lucy (Mariana Loyola), whose unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory, from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life. If writer-director Sebastián Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving "mugshot" of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine as it accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. But her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act. (1:35) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Erik Morse)

The Men Who Stare at Goats No! The Men Who Stare at Goats was such an awesome book (by British journalist Jon Ronson) and the movie boasts such a terrific cast (George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor). How in the hell did it turn out to be such a lame, unfunny movie? Clooney gives it his all as Lyn Cassady, a retired "supersolider" who peers through his third eye and realizes the naïve reporter (McGregor) he meets in Kuwait is destined to accompany him on a cross-Iraq journey of self-discovery; said journey is filled with flashbacks to the reporter’s failed marriage (irrelevant) and Cassady’s training with a hippie military leader (Bridges) hellbent on integrating New Age thinking into combat situations. Had I the psychic powers of a supersoldier, I’d use some kind of mind-control technique to convince everyone within my brain-wave radius to skip this movie at all costs. Since I’m merely human, I’ll just say this: seriously, read the book instead. (1:28) Empire, Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Michael Jackson’s This Is It Time –- and a tragic early death –- has a way of coloring perception, so little surprise that these thought pops into one’s head throughout This Is It: when did Michael Jackson transform himself into such an elegant, haute-pop sylph? Such a pixie-nosed, lacy-haired petit four of music-making delicacy? And where can I get his to-die-for, pointy-shouldered, rhinestone-lapeled Alexander McQueen-ish jacket? Something a bit bewitching this way comes as Michael Jackson –- now that he’s gone, seemingly less freakish than an outright phenomenon –- gracefully flits across the screen in this final (really?) document of his last hurrah, the rehearsals for his sold-out shows at O2 Arena in London. This Is It is far from perfect: this grainy video scratchpad of a film obviously wasn’t designed by the perfectionist MJ to be his final testament to pop. Director Kenny Ortega does his best to cobble together what looks like several rehearsal performances with teary testimonials from dancers (instilled with the intriguing idea that they are extensions of the surgery-friendly Jackson’s body onstage), interviews with musicians, minimal archival footage, and glimpses of Jacko protesting about being encouraged to "sing through" certain songs when he’s trying to preserve his voice, urging the band to play it "like the record," and still moving, dancing, and gesticuutf8g with such grace that you’re left with more than a tinge of regret that "This Is It," the tour, never came to pass. It’s a pure, albeit adulterated, pleasure to watch the man do the do, even with the gaps in the flow, even with the footage filtered by a family intent on propping up the franchise. Amid the artistry and kitsch, critics, pop academics, and superfans will find plenty to chew over –- from Jackson’s curiously timed physical complaints as the Jackson 5 segment kicks in, to the surreally CGI-ed, golden-age-of-Hollywood mash-up sequence. (1:52) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

New York, I Love You A dreamy mash note to the city that never sleeps, New York, I Love You is the latest installment in a series of omnibus odes to world metropolises and the denizens that live and love within the city limits. Less successful than the Paris, je t’aime (2006) anthology — which roped in such disparate international directors as Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron and Olivier Assayas — New York welcomes a more minor-key host of directors to the project with enjoyable if light-weight results. Surely any bite of the Big Apple would be considerably sexier. Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo tease out a one-night stand with legs, and Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q generate a wee bit of verbal fire over street-side cigs, yet there’s surprisingly little heat in this take on a few of the 8 million stories in the archetypal naked city. Most memorable are the strangest couplings, such as that of Natalie Portman, a Hasidic bride who flirtatiously haggles with Irrfan Khan, a Jain diamond merchant, in a tale directed by Mira Nair. Despite the pleasure of witnessing Julie Christie, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman in action, many of these pieces — written by the late Anthony Minghella, Israel Horovitz, and Portman, among others — feel a mite too slight to nail down the attention of all but the most desperate romantics. (1:43) Bridge, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

Pirate Radio I wanted to like Pirate Radio, a.k.a., The Boat That Rocked –- really, I did. The raging, stormy sounds of the British Invasion –- sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and all that rot. Pirate radio outlaw sexiness, writ large, influential, and mind-blowingly popular. This shaggy-dog of a comedy about the boat-bound, rollicking Radio Rock is based loosely on the history of Radio Caroline, which blasted transgressive rock ‘n’ roll (back when it was still subversive) and got around stuffy BBC dominance by broadcasting from a ship off British waters. Alas, despite the music and the attempts by filmmaker Richard Curtis to inject life, laughs, and girls into the mix (by way of increasingly absurd scenes of imagined listeners creaming themselves over Radio Rock’s programming), Pirate Radio will be a major disappointment for smart music fans in search of period accuracy (are we in the mid- or late ’60s or early or mid-’70s –- tough to tell judging from the time-traveling getups on the DJs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Darby, among others?) and lame writing that fails to rise above the paint-by-the-numbers narrative buttressing, irksome literalness (yes, a betrayal by a lass named Marianne is followed by "So Long, Marianne"), and easy sexist jabs at all those slutty birds. Still, there’s a reason why so many artists –- from Leonard Cohen to the Stones –- have lent their songs to this shaky project, and though it never quite gets its sea legs, Pirate Radio has its heart in the right place –- it just lost its brains somewhere along the way down to its crotch. (2:00) Elmwood, Oaks, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire This gut-wrenching, little-engine-that-could of a film shows the struggles of Precious, an overweight, illiterate 16-year-old girl from Harlem. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe is so believably vigilant (she was only 15 at the time of filming) that her performance alone could bring together the art-house viewers as well as take the Oscars by storm. But people need to actually go and experience this film. While Precious did win Sundance’s Grand Jury and Audience Award awards this year, there is a sad possibility that filmgoers will follow the current trend of "discussing" films that they’ve actually never seen. The daring casting choices of comedian Mo’Nique (as Precious’ all-too-realistically abusive mother) and Mariah Carey (brilliantly understated as an undaunted and dedicated social counselor) are attempts to attract a wider audience, but cynics can hurdle just about anything these days. What’s most significant about this Dancer in the Dark-esque chronicle is how Damien Paul’s screenplay and director Lee Daniels have taken their time to confront the most difficult moments in Precious’ story –- and if that sounds heavy-handed, so be it. Stop blahging for a moment and let this movie move you. (1:49) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Presidio. (Chun)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Skin This is one of those movies that works in large part because you know it’s a true story –- its truth is almost too strange to be credible as fiction. In 1955 the Laings, a white Afrikaner couple (played by the blond and blue-eyed likes of Sam Neill and Alice Krige) gave birth to a second child quite unlike their first, or themselves. Indeed, Sandra (Ella Ramangwane) was, by all appearances, black. Mrs. Laing insisted she hadn’t been unfaithful –- further, the couple were firm believers in the apartheid system –- and it was eventually determined Sandra’s looks were the result of a rare but not-unheard-of flashback to some "colored" genes no doubt well-buried far in their colonialist ancestry. Living in rural isolation, the well-intentioned Laings were able to keep Sandra oblivious to her being at all "different." But when time came to send her off to boarding school, she got a rude awakening in matters of race and class, resulting in court battles and myriad humiliations. Sophie Okonedo (2004’s Hotel Rwanda) plays the rebellious adult Sandra, who must reject her upbringing to find an identity she can live with –- as opposed to the wishful-thinking one her parents insist upon. Based on the real protagonist’s memoir, Anthony Fabian’s first feature observes the institutional cruelty and eventual fall of apartheid from the uniquely vivid perspective of someone yanked from privilege to prejudice. It’s a sprawling, involving story that affords excellent opportunities for its very good lead actors (also including Tony Kgoroge as Sandra’s abusive eventual husband). (1:47) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

2012 I don’t need to give you reasons to see this movie. You don’t care about the clumsy, hastily dished-out pseudo scientific hoo-ha that explains this whole mess. You don’t care about John Cusack or Woody Harrelson or whoever else signed on for this embarrassing notch in their IMDB entry. You don’t care about Mayan mysteries, how hard it is for single dads, and that Danny Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor jointly stand in for Obama (always so on the zeitgeist, that Roland Emmerich). You already know what you’re in store for: the most jaw-dropping depictions of humankind’s near-complete destruction that director Emmerich –- who has a flair for such things –- has ever come up with. All the time, creative energy, and money James Cameron has spent perfecting the CGI pores of his characters in Avatar is so much hokum compared to what Emmerich and his Spartan army of computer animators dish out: the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy emerging through a cloud of toxic dust like some Mary Celeste of the military-industrial complex, born aloft on a massive tidal wave that pulverizes the White House; the dome of St. Paul’s flattening the opium-doped masses like a steamroller; Hawaii returned to its original volcanic state; and oodles more scenes in which we are allowed to register terror, but not horror, at the gorgeous destruction that is unfurled before us as the world ends (again) but no one really dies. Get this man a bigger budget. (2:40) California, Empire, Grand Lake, Marina, 1000 Van Ness. (Sussman)

(Untitled) The sometimes absurd pretensions of the modern art world have –- for many decades –- been so easily, condescendingly ridiculed that its intelligently knowing satire is hard to come by. (How much harder still would it be for a fictive film to convey the genius of, say Anselm Kiefer? Even Ed Harris’ 2000 Pollock less vividly captured the art or its creation –- better done by Francis Ford Coppola and Nick Nolte in their 1989 New York Stories segment –- than the usual tortured-artist histrionics.) Bay Arean Jonathan Parker attempts to correct that with this perhaps overly low-key witticism. Erstwhile Hebrew Hammer Adam Goldberg plays a composer of painfully retro, plink-plunk 1950s avant-gardism. (His favorite instrument is the tin bucket.) His lack of success is inevitable yet chafes nonetheless, because he’s a) humorlessly self-important, and b) sibling to a painter (Eion Bailey) whose pleasant, unchallenging abstracts are hot properties amongst corporate-art buyers. But not hot enough for his gorgeous agent (Marley Shelton), who puts off showing him at her Chelsea gallery in favor of cartoonishly "edgy" artists –- like soccer hooligan Vinnie Jones as a proponent of lurid taxidermy sculpture –- and takes a contrary (if unlikely) fancy to Goldberg. (How could her educated like not know his music is even less cutting-edge than the brother’s canvases?) (Untitled) holds interest, but it’s at once too glib and modest –- exaggerative sans panache. This is equivalently if differently problematic from Parker’s 2005 Henry James-goes-Marin County The Californians. It can’t compare to his 2001 feature debut, the excellent Crispin Glover-starring translation of Melville’s Bartleby to Rhinoceros-like modern office culture. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Where the Wild Things Are From the richly delineated illustrations and sparse text of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, director Spike Jonze and cowriter (with Jones) Dave Eggers have constructed a full-length film about the passions, travails, and interior/exterior wanderings of Sendak’s energetic young antihero, Max. Equally prone to feats of world-building and fits of overpowering, destructive rage, Max (Max Records) stampedes off into the night during one of the latter and journeys to the island where the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Michael Berry Jr.) live — and bicker and tantrum and give in to existential despair and no longer all sleep together in a big pile. The place has possibilities, though, and Max, once crowned king, tries his best to realize them. What its inhabitants need, however, is not so much a visionary king as a good family therapist — these are some gripey, defensive, passive-aggressive Wild Things, and Max, aged somewhere around 10, can’t fix their interpersonal problems. Jonze and Eggers do well at depicting Max’s temporary kingdom, its forests and deserts, its creatures and their half-finished creations from a past golden era, as well as subtly reminding us now and again that all of this — the island, the arguments, the sadness — is streaming from the mind of a fierce, wildly imaginative young child with familial troubles of his own, equally beyond his power to resolve. They’ve also invested the film with a slow, grim depressive mood that can make for unsettling viewing, particularly when pondering the Maxes in the audience, digesting an oft-disheartening tale about family conflict and relationship repair. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Yes Men Fix the World Can you prank shame, if not sense, into the Powers That Be? Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, the jesters-activists who punked right-wing big-business in the documentary The Yes Men (2003), continue to play Groucho Marx to capitalism’s mortified Margaret Dumont in this gleeful sequel. Decked in sharp suits and packing fake websites and catchphrases, the duo bluffs its way into conferences and proceeds to give corporate giants the Borat treatment. The stunts are often inspired and, in their visions of fantasy justice, poignant: Bichlbaum and Bonnano pose as Dow envoys and announce the company’s plans to send billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, and later appear as HUD representatives offering a corrective to the shameful neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Yes Men may not fix the world, but their ruses once more prove the awareness-raising potential of comedy. (1:30) Smith Rafael. (Croce)

Checkout time

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Checkout time

news@sfbg.com

Two consecutive three-day strikes by hotel workers signaled a change in strategy for local labor, which is struggling to hold on to past gains in an increasingly bitter contract dispute during this economic downturn.

Hotel employees affiliated with UNITE HERE! Local 2 walked off the job at the Grand Hyatt on Nov. 6, kicking off a 72-hour work stoppage that labor organizers said was centered on the Hyatt but aimed at more than a dozen luxury hotels staffed by Local 2 workers.

Another strike, in front of the Palace Hotel, started Nov. 10 and ended at midnight Nov. 12. In both actions, hundreds of Local 2 members and other supporters expressed frustration at the hotels, claiming the hotel industry is scaling back employee benefits while reaping impressive profits.

"The hotel industry pulled down $110 billion in profits last year," said Mike Casey, president of Local 2, which represents approximately 12,000 hospitality workers in San Francisco and San Mateo. "Despite the so-called down economy, we feel like we should be able to move forward, at least modestly."

Casey and other Local 2 organizers pointed to the recent windfall of the Hyatt chain’s owners, the Pritzger family, who scooped up $950 million in an initial public offering for the company. "One family is getting all this money, and they’re quibbling over $250,000," said Casey, referring to the amount he says it would take to meet all of the local union’s demands.

Meanwhile, stalled negotiations have left workers without a contract since Aug. 14. Key factors in the dispute involve proposed rule changes for new hires and cuts in health care coverage that striking workers called unacceptable.

"We’re seeing an average increase in health care costs of about 12 percent per year," said Jeff Myers, a banquet waiter at the Westin St. Francis, and a member of Local 2’s 125-person negotiating team. "The hotel is paying for 2 percent of that."

"We expect to be in a long fight," said Carlos Narvaez, a 13-year employee at the Palace Hotel, where he works as a purchasing clerk. "But it’s a fight for justice, not only for us, but for new hires, who would be most affected."

Narvaez explained that under the new contract proposed by the hotels, new hires would be ineligible for pensions, and probationary periods for benefits would be extended from months to years. "If they’re planning to replace us, (new employees) don’t know what’s coming."

The tactic of going after one hotel at a time, rather than a blanket work stoppage, indicated the union’s desire to put pressure on hotel owners while limiting economic hardship to the rest of the city, and the potential for negative blowback. The latest round of negotiations broke down Nov. 12 when Hyatt rejected Local 2’s proposal for a one-year contract with some concessions on pay, rather than the customary five-year deal.

"You can’t have it both ways. If you want a cheap contract, fine, we’ll do it for a limited time. You can’t have a cheap long-term contract," Casey said, noting a one-year contract is partly a bet by Local 2 that the economy will be in better shape next year.

It also happens to line up with contract expiration dates for UNITE HERE! hotel workers in several cities throughout the U.S. and Canada, potentially giving the union greater leverage in contract negotiations next year.

At the Grand Hyatt strike, workers marched several blocks to the Westin St. Francis, where they held an impromptu picket for 20 minutes before returning to the Grand Hyatt. "It’s just a taste of what could happen," Casey said, splitting the group into two disciplined forces that filled the sidewalk while leaving the entrance to the St. Francis clear.

"They’re afraid it’s going to turn into 2004," Casey said of hotel owners, referring to a two-week stalemate in 2004 in which hotels reacted to the strike by locking out employees of several hotels and bringing in workers from other locations in an attempt to break the strike. But Casey said new times call for new tactics.

"If we did it the same way each time, [management] would be ready for us," Casey said. "We have to keep them on their toes" while staying visible and building incremental support for strikes. "If the strikes last long enough, a boycott could build that would be truly widespread. But let’s hope the hotels come to their senses before then."

The picket lines were festive and noisy, with union members banging drums and shouting catchy call-and-response slogans into no fewer than six bullhorns.

"What time is it?" the bullhorns blared. "It’s checkout time!" the picket line called back. Valets and bellhops at the Grand Hyatt, most wearing foam earplugs and sunglasses, winced as one man beat a large, ornate kettle drum less than five feet from the lobby entrance.

"This is designed to be measured and escautf8g," Casey said of the single-hotel strike approach. Though the two strikes have ended, Casey said boycotts remain in place for both the Grand Hyatt and the Palace Hotel, whose lavish centennial gala last weekend was marred by an additional Local 2 protest outside.

Hotel representatives have been taciturn about the dispute and its impact, issuing short, carefully-worded responses expressing disappointment at Local 2’s actions, and offering sheepish apologies to surprised guests. No hotel representatives were available to speak on record as of press time

Elena Duran, a server at the Palace Hotel, said behind-the-scenes operations have been thrown into disarray by the strikes. "Yesterday there was a fire in the kitchen," Duran said during the Palace strike, "because the new workers don’t know what they’re doing."

Any hotel labor dispute invariably invites comparisons with the 2004 strike. In that conflict, Mayor Gavin Newsom personally intervened, shaking hands with striking workers and declaring that San Francisco would not do business across picket lines. The mayor’s office did not respond to queries about the latest dispute. Local 2 press coordinator Riddhi Mehta said Casey and other union members, as well as their counterparts from the hotels, met with Newsom Nov. 10 for "informational purposes."

City Attorney Dennis Herrera, a likely mayoral candidate, stopped by the picket lines at the Grand Hyatt to offer words of support, telling the cheering strikers: "We are a world-class city. It’s not about the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s not about the views. It’s not about the cable cars. It’s about the work that you do every day."

While Local 2 organizers would welcome Newsom’s renewed support, they aren’t holding their breath. Rumors that Newsom had cut short his vacation to help defuse the situation were greeted with cautious optimism by negotiating team members.

Myers said the hotels were essentially attempting to externalize their employee’s health care costs, which would impose a burden on the city budget. Because of San Francisco’s universal health care program, Myers said, "If hotel workers can’t pay their co-pay, that cost will go to the city. That is abundantly clear to the mayor."

Dick Meister: The man who didn’t die

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Joe Hill told his IWW comrades just before he stepped in front of the firing squad, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.)

It’s Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud.

“Fire!” he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn’t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, “ain’t never died.” He lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.

Clean freak

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Clean freak

Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s newest "house" film, The Maid, swaps customary debates of bedroom politics for the upstairs/downstairs relations of domestic labor. In an upper-middle class subdivision of Santiago, 40-year-old maid Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), perpetually stony and indignant, operates a rigorous dawn-to-dusk routine for the Valdez family, her employers for 20 years. Although Raquel rarely behaves as an intimate of her longtime hosts, she remains convinced that love, not labor, bonds them. Whether the family shares Raquel’s feelings of devotion is highly dubious: father Mundo (Alejandro Goic) often ignores or avoids her except when giving orders; daughter Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro) actively despises her and lobbies for her dismissal from mother Pilar (Claudia Celedón), whose sense of noblesse oblige is a patronage bound by a mix of affection and pity.

When a rotating cast of interlopers is hired to assist Raquel, the paranoid domestic stoops to machinations most vile to scare them away. She dispatches young Peruvian maid Mercedes (Mercedes Villanueva) by cruelly disposing of her adopted kitten and forces the gruff and hot-tempered Sonia (Anita Reeves) into a violent confrontation before she resigns in disgust. But third comer Lucy (Mariana Loyola) is an altogether different challenge. Her unpredictable influence over Raquel sets the narrative of The Maid on a very different psychological trajectory — from moody chamber piece to eccentric slice-of-life.

If Silva’s film taunts the viewer with the possibility of a horrific climax, either as a result of its titular counterpart — Jean Genet’s 1946 stage drama The Maids, about two servants’ homicidal revenge — or from the unnerving "mugshot" of Saavedra on the movie poster, it is neither self-destructive nor Grand Guignol. Rather, it it is much more prosaic in execution. Filmed almost exclusively in the narrow hallways, bathrooms, and parlors of a Santiago McMansion, Sergio Armstrong’s fidgety hand-held camera captures Raquel’s claustrophobic routine. It also accentuates her Sisyphean conundrum: although she completely rules the inner workings of the house, she remains forever a guest. The more she makes the house into a home, the more it becomes a prison she refuses to escape from.

But while Saavedra’s title role is an interesting case study in the political and emotional complexities of the Latin American domestic, her character’s motivations often evoke as much confusion as wonder. In the absence of some much needed exposition, The Maid’s heavy-handed silences, plaintive gazes, and inexplicable eruptions of laughter feel oddly sterile, and a contrived preciousness begins to creep over the film like an effluvial whitewash. Its abundance makes you aware there is a shabbiness hiding beneath the dramatic facade — the various stains and holes of an unrealized third act.

THE MAID opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

Hell yeah!

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Hell yeah!

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Before the Halloween and Friday the 13th series made slasher cinema’s top instruments of unstoppable evil, and after Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf pretty much had their day, there was a brief sunny window of opportunity for Satan. Or rather, Satan and his Satanists — sounds like a garage band, yes? — who dominated horror for a few years highlighted by Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976). Not to mention 1975’s Race with the Devil, that same year’s The Devil’s Rain (Ernest Borgnine as Satan’s acolyte? Credible!) and 1973’s Satan’s School for Girls.

Ah, those were the days. Who gives much screen time to Beelzebub now, when the multiplexes are cluttered with routine slasher sequels and Japanese horror remakes?

Somebody called Ti West evidently does. Bringing it all back with extra hugs, his new The House of the Devil is a retro thrillfest quite happy to sacrifice that babysitter to the Dark Lord. Without even a tip for her labor.

"Based on true unexplained events" (uh-huh), the buzzed-about indie horror has fanboy casting both old school (Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan — all performing seriously rather than campily) and new (AJ Bowen of 2007’s The Signal and mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig). Its heroine (Jocelin Donahue), a 1980 East Coast collegiate sophomore desperate for rent cash so she can escape her dorm roomie’s loud nightly promiscuity, signs on for a baby- (actually, grandma-) sitting gig advertised on telephone poles. For tonight. During a lunar eclipse. Bad move.

The House of the Devil takes its time, springing nothing lethal until nearly halfway through. Even then, things escalate ever-so-slowly. Its 1980s setting allows for ultratight jeans, feathered hair, rotary dialing, a synth-New Wavey score, and other potentially campy elements the film manages to render respectfully appreciative rather than silly.

All freakdom doesn’t break loose until very late, at which point writer-director West effectively abandons all restraint (and hope), much assisted by The Last Winter (2006) composer Jeff Grace’s suddenly panicked score. The best contemporary horror has understood that potency of waiting. Prolonged development of relatable characters, agonizing our dread for their fates, amplifies standard terror to no end in movies like 2005’s Wolf Creek or Paranormal Activity.

House isn’t significantly better than various fine indie horrors of recent vintage and various nationality that went direct to DVD. (Quality, let alone originality, aren’t necessarily a commercial pluses in this genre.) But it is dang good, and that cuts it above most current theatrical horror releases. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be watching 1977’s Suspiria, 2005’s Satan’s Playground, 1994’s Aswang (a.k.a. The Unearthling) or 1981’s Possession instead of this deft throwback: now those surreal visions truly gave the Devil his due.

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Crossing the line

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Crossing the line

sarah@sfbg.com

Estella (a fake name she used to protect her identity) is a single mother of five who came to the United States from Latin America when her oldest daughter was a baby, hoping for a better future for her family.

But thanks to a shift in San Francisco’s sanctuary policy that Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered last year, Estella’s daughter — we’ll call her Maria, now 15 — was seized by federal immigration authorities this fall, ripped from her family and community, and shipped to a detention center in Miami.

Her crime: she got in a fight with her younger, U.S.-born sister.

The experience shattered Estella’s dreams and terrified her family, whom immigration experts describe as "mixed status" because Estella also has U.S.-born children.

It also convinced Estella to speak out publicly to try to convince Newsom that legislation that ensures due process for kids like her daughter is the right thing to do.

Last month, a veto-proof majority of the Board of Supervisors voted to support amendments to Newsom’s current policy in an effort to make sure juveniles get their day in court before being hastily and needlessly referred to federal immigration authorities.

But the next day, Newsom vetoed the legislation introduced by Sup. David Campos, claiming it violates federal law. And now Newsom is refusing to debate the issue with Campos or meet with the community whose kids are at risk of being deported because someone in local law enforcement suspects them of being here without paperwork and accuses them of committing a serious crime.

Under Newsom’s policy, which he ordered without public review in June 2008, city officials are required to refer juveniles whom they suspect of being undocumented felons to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they book them at Juvenile Hall.

Last month Newsom defended his policy, saying that the city’s sanctuary ordinance, as originally conceived and adopted, was designed to protect law-abiding city residents.

"It was never meant to serve as a shield for people accused of committing serious crimes in our city," Newsom wrote in his veto letter.

His comments followed close on the heels of a San Francisco Chronicle editorial claiming the majority of these juveniles detained are subsequently found guilty of serious crimes.

But this is not true: the Juvenile Probation Department’s 2008 statistics show that 68 percent of the young people arrested in San Francisco that year were found to be innocent.

And as Estella’s story shows, under Newsom’s policy juveniles who have not committed serious crimes are at risk of being reported and detained for possible deportation.

This means a teenager — a 15-year-old girl in this case — could get dropped off in a country she last saw when she was a baby, with no family to meet and take care of her. These kids are at risk of being preyed upon by criminal gangs or "coyotes," often-unscrupulous human traffickers known to abuse and abandon young people during the perilous border crossing.

Most kids in Maria’s situation would want to return to their U.S. home — to their parents, families, friends — the only community they know. But since the federal government has made border crossings increasingly perilous, getting back to the U.S. often requires several thousand dollars in smuggler fees — leaving teens open to harsh exploitation.

In other words, deportation — in Maria’s case, for the crime of a fight with her sister — could be a sentence to years of forced labor, life in a violent gang … or death.

BAD DAY AT SCHOOL


It’s not clear how Maria got into the altercation at school with her sister; fights between siblings and friends in high school are hardly a rare or even terribly remarkable experience. But in this case, Estella told us, a school official reported her daughters’ fight to a social worker, who brought a police officer to Estella’s house for questioning.

As a result, Estella’s daughter was taken to Juvenile Hall. A year ago, she would have had access to a lawyer, who would have helped sort things out. If the fight had been serious or violent, she might have been placed on supervised probation.

But thanks to Newsom’s new policy, probation officers referred her to ICE and its agents swooped in, seized her, and shipped her to Miami.

Ultimately, a juvenile judge in San Francisco recommended Estella’s daughter be put on probation — but by that time, Maria was already in Florida, in a detention center run by a private company under contract to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Detainees have no right to a public defender or free legal services. It’s often hard for their families to find out exactly where they are, so detainees wait in detention for immigration officials to decide what to do next.

Maria was fortunate that ORR recommended temporary reunification. Immigrant advocates say that Estella’s daughter is now back in the Bay Area with her family, but is still under deportation proceedings.

They note that one way parents can get their kids back from ICE is by giving up information — including the names, fingerprints, and addresses of other family members — to federal immigration authorities. But parents are not always willing to do that, especially if it could lead to other family members, including children, being deported.

As of press time, a super-majority on the Board of Supervisors is planning to override Newsom’s veto of Campos’ legislation at its Nov. 10 meeting. But the mayor has said he intends to ignore the Campos legislation — a posture that is not only legally questionable, but leaves immigrant parents facing the ongoing nightmare that their teens could get deported to a country they never knew for a crime they didn’t commit.

Immigrant advocates cite the case of a 14-year-old boy who is under ICE removal proceedings after he brought a BB-gun to school, and a Mexican youth who was deported, even though the District Attorney’s Office dismissed the robbery charges against him.

Patti Lee, managing attorney for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office Juvenile Unit, described how the feds recently snatched a kid outside juvenile court, even though the District Attorney’s Office had dismissed his case.

"The kid was coming into court with his mother and the ICE agent had a photo of him, and grabbed him outside the building," Lee said. "His mom was hysterical and it was traumatic for our staff."

These are not isolated cases. ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice told us that 150 juveniles from San Francisco have been referred to ICE, and 114 have been taken into federal custody and transferred to detention facilities since Newsom ordered his policy change in 2008.

Immigration advocates say some of the kids have been sent to Yolo County, while others have been shipped to Oregon, Washington, Indiana, and Florida, making visits from family members, who may themselves be undocumented, extremely difficult.

Eric Quezada, an immigrant advocate and the executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, told us that while kids may try crossing the border to rejoin their families and friends, "lacking the serious dollars to come back, many are deported into extreme poverty or to be part of a gang."

Lee notes that federal immigration authorities have a duty to reunite children with their families. "But if the family is undocumented, its members are afraid to step forward, afraid to step into the Youth Guidance Center," Lee said. "So there are some children sent back to their alleged country of origin, without a family and resources. Because we can’t track them, that may be a death sentence."

DEATH MARCH


As a volunteer with No Mas Muertes (No More Deaths), a humanitarian camp in Arizona, SF Pride member Molly Goldberg has seen firsthand what being deported and trying to cross the border means to immigrants in terms of loss of dignity and life.

Arizona has been an immigrant rights testing ground for years. Shortly after its creation as an agency, the Department of Homeland Security provided millions of dollars to build a wall blocking the easiest terrain, forcing border crossers into the most rugged and dangerous areas, Goldberg said.

"They are bottle-necking it so folks cross in the most difficult, deadly area," she said.

Since the wall went up, the numbers crossing have gone down — but numbers dying have gone up. Goldberg said 184 people have died so far this year. But the numbers of dead could be much higher. "Because of the vultures and other scavengers, bodies are gone pretty quickly," she said.

This year, Service Employee International Union Local 1021 organizer Robert Haaland accompanied Goldberg to the border. Haaland says what he saw convinced him of the need for Campos’ amendment.

"I kept thinking about the Campos legislation in terms of seeing the impact of people crossing the border after being deported," Haaland said. He described a makeshift memorial to a 14-year-old El Salvadoran girl named Josseline whom smugglers left behind after she got sick from eating a bad can of tuna, according to her younger brother. He managed to cross the border, but Josseline died after wandering alone and without water in the border’s dry and inhospitable no man’s land for a week.

Others get left behind and die because they are wearing the wrong shoes and end up with badly blistered feet or are too weak to continue the grueling trek. Haaland recalled seeing water bottles that volunteers had left on the coyote trails but had subsequently been slashed, presumably by nativist vigilantes.

"The Border Patrol is using the desert as a weapon and harassing people who go to the border to give humanitarian aid," Haaland said.

That’s where some of the kids Newsom has sent for deportation will wind up.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?


Although Newsom has made it clear he intends to keep referring kids to ICE, their whereabouts and fate under his policy remains somewhat of a mystery.

Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesperson for ORR, which is responsible for detained juveniles deemed "unaccompanied" (a category they could be placed in if they refuse to divulge the whereabouts of undocumented family members in the U.S.) said he can’t divulge their precise whereabouts because of juvenile confidentiality rules.

Wolfe told the Guardian that kids could be placed in juvenile halls or shelter-like facilities run by private contractors, depending on their crimes. He said ORR is required to report to Congress annually about the program, but the report for FY 2008-09 won’t be available for a few months.

In the meantime, Wolfe e-mailed the Guardian a copy of ORR’s 2007-08 report, which includes a map featuring colored circles to represent the numbers of apprehended kids based on Department of Homeland Security referrals.

The map shows that in 2007-08, less than 100 juveniles were apprehended in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; 100-250 were apprehended in San Diego; 1,000-1,600 in Phoenix; and 1,600-2,600 at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Presumably, next year’s map will include a colored circle around San Francisco, representing an apprehension rate similar to San Diego. But it probably won’t reveal which facilities these kids were sent to or whether they were ultimately deported, even though these kids were apprehended on the basis of referrals made by local city officials.

Nor will it show what the local community knows full well: that many deported kids cross back over the border to rejoin their families. Only now, because they have been deported, they are forced to go underground and are at risk if being recruited by gangs.

The federal government’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program was transferred from ORR to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. "The program is designed to provide for the care and placement of unaccompanied alien minors apprehended in the U.S. by Homeland Security agents, border patrol officers, or other law enforcement agencies and are taken into care pending resolution of their claims for relief under U.S. immigration law or released to adult family members or responsible adult guardians," reads the U.S. Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. "Resolution of their claims may result in release, granting of an immigration status (such as special immigrant juvenile or asylum), voluntary departure, or removal."

According to a 2008 ORR report, "a great number of UAC have been subjected to severe trauma, including sexual abuse and sexual assault in their home countries or on their journey to the U.S.: gang violence, domestic violence, traumatic loss of a parent, and physical abuse and neglect. In addition, UAC experience the increased probability of ongoing trauma as a result of their uncertain legal status and return to difficult life circumstances."

The report also notes that "UAC have indicated that, among other reasons, they leave their home countries for the U.S. to rejoin family, escape abusive family relationships in their home country, or find work to support their families in their home country."

ORR has approximately 7,200 UAC a year in its facilities, which are operated by organizations such as the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. There are more than 41 ORR-funded care provider facilities in 10 different states.

Last year’s ORR report noted that average length of stay in federal detention facilities is 55 days before children are released to family members and other sponsors, move into the adult system, or are returned to their home countries.

"As these programs increase and ICE increasingly places people in them, there’s a financial incentive to keep detaining people." Francisco Ugarte, an immigration lawyer with San Francisco Immigrant Legal and Education Network, told us.

But Abigail Trillin, staff attorney for Legal Services for Children, says ORR is doing a better job of handling juveniles than ICE did. "ORR has the right and obligation to try and place these kids in the least restrictive option," Trillin said. "But being reunified with your family does not in any way change the fact that you are under federal removal proceedings. So you still have a very significant risk of being deported alone to your country of origin."

Having a documented parent helps a juvenile make the case for staying in the U.S. permanently, as does having grounds for asylum. Having siblings who are U.S. citizens or having been here since you were a small child does not significantly help someone’s case.

But ending up in lockup can makes things worse. "If a child is in an ORR secure detention facility, they are less likely to fight their deportation case — a fight that could take up to two years — than if they were reunified with their family," Trillin said. "We have not yet seen a juvenile move from a secure facility to a foster home, but we have in the case of kids who are in ORR shelters for more than three months and have a legal case for staying."

Still, she said it’s possible a child could be flown to an airport in their country of origin without much subsequent support in most Latin American countries. "If they are Mexican, they are flown to the airport in Tijuana, and if there are no relatives, they are turned over to a child welfare agency in Mexico," Trillin said. "I don’t believe that level of cooperation exists elsewhere, though there might be some temporary shelters for them to wait in while their relatives are coming."

All countries of origin will have some involvement, Trillin noted, to the extent that they are contacted because all these kids need travel documentation. But that support is minimal. As she said, "Our country feels that it’s done its duty once the consulates are contacted."

LETTER OF THE LAW


In his Oct. 28 veto letter, Newsom claimed that the supervisors had changed the sanctuary ordinance by "restricting the ability of local law enforcement officers to report juveniles who are in custody after being booked for the alleged commission of a felony and are suspected of vioutf8g the civil provisions of our sanctuary ordinance."

But in a Nov. 2 response to Newsom’s veto, Campos countered that his amendment won’t shield anyone guilty of such crimes and he invited Newsom to publicly debate the issue. "The board and the people of San Francisco deserve to understand more fully why you intend to ignore this policy and the time-honored democratic processes followed in enacting it," Campos wrote. "At stake is the protection of innocent immigrant children that have been unjustly separated from their families."

He also accused Newsom of spreading misinformation about what federal law requires. "City officials have no affirmative legal duty under federal law to expend limited local resources and funding on immigration enforcement," Campos wrote, citing a July 1, 2008 public memo from the City Attorney’s Office and legal experts from Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and UC Davis Law School who "have all agreed that there is no federal duty to inquire or report."

Noting that the City Attorney’s Office has made it clear that his proposed amendment is "a legally tenable measure," Campos concluded that "the point at which a referral of a minor is made to ICE is ultimately not a legal decision but a policy decision.

"Our criminal justice system rests on the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty; that is why providing youth an opportunity to contest a charge in court is a matter of basic due process," Campos continued. "The current policy is creating a climate of fear in immigrant communities, which means that immigrants who have been victims or witnesses to crimes are afraid to come forward."

The City Attorney’s Office has declined to comment on whether the mayor has the authority to ignore properly approved legislation. "We are not going to comment on legislation that’s still in the legislative process," City Attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey told us.

But Campos believes the mayor lacks any such authority. "Can the mayor ignore legislation because he believes it’s illegal? Does he have the authority to have the final say? I don’t think so," said Campos, who is an attorney.

Trillin sees Newsom’s refusal to debate the issue with Campos as further confirmation that the Mayor’s Office doesn’t have a substantive argument that its sanctuary policy is a good one. "They can’t defend their position. They can’t win on substance," said Trillin, whose organization frequently provides legal guidance and support for immigrant youth.

She noted that the controversy that prompted Newsom’s policy change started with family reunification efforts. City officials were trying to reunite undocumented teenagers who were caught selling crack in downtown San Francisco with their families in Honduras when ICE officials intercepted them at George Bush Intercontinental/Houston Airport in December 2007 and May 2008.

These interceptions led U.S. Attorney Joe Russoniello, who opposed San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance when it was introduced in the 1980s, to claim that flying youth back to their families without first referring them to ICE was tantamount to harboring criminals.

After the apprehended city officials claimed they were acting in accordance with San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance, Russoniello convened a federal grand jury to investigate the city’s juvenile probation department. That investigation still hangs over JPD, even as Sen. Barbara Boxer mulls recommending candidates to replace Russoniello.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists have been blaming the city’s sanctuary policy for the tragic 2008 shootings of three members of the Bologna family, after they discovered that 23-year-old Edwin Ramos, the alleged killer and an MS-13 gang member, was apprehended by San Francisco’s juvenile justice system as a teen, but was never referred to the feds.

Facing this firestorm, Newsom caved to public pressure and followed the advice of Kevin Ryan, his Republican criminal justice director and the only prosecutor fired for cause during the 2006 U.S. attorneys firing scandal, by ordering that the city treat juvenile immigrants as adults, referring them to ICE at the moment of arrest on felony charges.

CHILDREN ON ICE


The same day supervisors approved Campos’ amendment, outgoing LAPD Chief William Bratton urged his department to keep its focus on fighting crime, not illegal immigration, plunging headfirst into the controversy over the federal 287(g) program.

Created in 1996 and expanded in the wake of 9/11 purportedly to counter terrorism and violent crime, the 287(g) program allows the federal government to enter into agreements giving local police the authority to enforce federal immigration laws. This has led many immigrants to mistrust and refuse to cooperate with local cops.

"My officers can’t prevent or solve crimes if victims or witnesses are unwilling to talk to us because of the fear of being deported," Bratton wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.

"I think what Chief Bratton is saying is different from what we are hearing in San Francisco" Campos said. "Mayor Gavin Newsom seems to be implying that San Francisco’s juvenile probation officers have no choice. But really, there is no law requiring them to refer kids to ICE. So it seems that what the mayor is doing is creating a de facto 287(g) program that gives local officers the power of federal agents."

That’s why Campos said it’s important for Newsom to participate in a public discussion of his intentions. "We need to ask the mayor if what he is saying is that JPD is an arm of ICE. If that’s the case, we need to know."

President Obama promised during the campaign that immigration reform would be part of his legislative agenda, but the White House hasn’t acted much on the issue. Yet immigration attorney Francisco Ugarte is hopeful that the tide is turning locally, as witnessed by the outpouring of support for Campos’ legislation. "Thirty-three percent of San Francisco residents are foreign-born," Ugarte observed. "That’s a really high number, a significant part of the constituency."

Russoniello told the Guardian that immigrants are not entitled to the same level of due process as citizens, implying that the U.S. has a two-tier criminal justice system. "There are citizens, and then there are people," Russoniello said.

Ugarte finds such arguments laughable. "The federal government has to make the argument that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to undocumenteds," Ugarte said. "These are hare-brained ideas that stem from hate and fear. The wonderful part of our country is that we have respect in the laws for all."

Ugarte believes that blaming the tragic Bologna murders on the city’s immigrant youth policy is like arguing that putting people on parole leads to crime. "Yes, there are going to be bad apples," Ugarte said. "But that doesn’t mean we can solve our problems by sending people to another country. L.A. thought it could get rid of gangs by deporting people to El Salvador. But guess what? They only grew the problem."

Patti Lee of the Public Defender’s Office doesn’t believe that the sanctuary policy will change unless the Board exerts financial pressure on Juvenile Probation. "I do not believe the policy will change because JPD is under orders from the mayor," Lee explained. "But JPD is supposed to comply with the legislation. So the Board of Supervisors, through its Public Safety Committee, could question JPD’s chief about his current process and why he isn’t complying with it. The board does have control over JPD’s budget, so it can put the squeeze on them."

"When police arrest and detain an undocumented child and bring them into detention charged with a felony, the minute they come in front gate, JPD has been directed to contact ICE," Lee said. "So we are not even aware until a day or two later, when we receive a police report or when we get a house list the next day, if someone is ICEed or not."

If the kids are unaccompanied and there are no family members in town, they typically go to juvenile lock-up for 30 days and then are released to ICE and get deported," Lee said.

"They are being ICEed even if they are adjudicated," Lee added, noting how her department got one youth’s charges reduced to misdemeanors but JPD reported the youth to ICE anyway, based on the current policy that any undocumented person booked on a felony should be reported at the moment of booking. "So they were ICEed without due process," Lee said. "And these are children."

Drive the bridge slowly: it could save your life

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Text and video by Sarah Phelan

I shot this footage of driving across the Bay Bridge, the day after the bridge re-reopened the second time this fall.

I’d already filmed this stretch before, the day it reopened for the first time in September. At the time, I wanted to capture what the new approach to San Francisco looks like, and I was extra thankful for the renewed access, which was sorely missed by my family over Labor Day weekend, when my sister-in-law had to be taken by ambulance from Oakland to San Francisco via the San Mateo bridge.

When I shot the bridge the first time, my family was concerned that my sister-in-law didn’t have much time left on this planet, and sadly, they were right: she died Oct. 8, after a long battle with breast cancer.

But I little suspected that I would be filming the bridge re-reopening so soon, or that the newly installed S-curve would be the site of 44 accidents in the ensuing two months. Today’s accident, in which a man driving a truck full of pears lost control and plunged to his death in the Bay, in the wee morning hours, sounds particularly gruesome.

So, maybe it’s worth watching videos like this, just to familiarize yourself with the road before you get behind the wheel. Especially if you have a heavy load on board. (The other major major accident, so far, involved a guy who lost control of a Safeway big rig, scattering frozen pizzas across the top deck and jamming up traffic for hours.)

If you compare the two videos, you’ll see that flashing lights have now been installed, just before you hit the curve, which is serious enough that it makes me want to go, “Wheee!” each time I round it.

I’ve also shot the drive (this time at night) from San Francisco to Oakland, which so far has witnessed far less accidents, possibly because folks have to squeeze through a tunnel before they hit the curve on the lower deck of the bridge.

And please, excuse my music choices and/or background commentaries on these videos. Because as history shows, when you’re driving the bridge, you can’t afford to get distracted by anything else, including whatever’s playing on the radio of my music-challenged car.

But I guess you could watch these videos from the comfort and safety of your laptop, while listening to the music or commentary of your own choice. So enjoy–and keep your hands on the wheel, as the song goes, next time you drive the Bay Bridge, and slow down. It really could save your life.

Meister: ‘Vetoes by silence’ hamper labor

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Labor Hampered by ‘Vetoes of Silence’

By Dick Meister

Nothing is more basic to our democratic society than the principle of majority rule. But what if the eligible voters who fail to cast ballots were automatically recorded as voting “no”?

Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s exactly what the country’s airline and railroad workers face when they vote on whether they want union representation.

Imagine if every election had such a rule. President Obama wouldn’t be president, since less than half the eligible voters turned out for last year’s presidential election. Most, if not all, congressional candidates would also have lost last year — or in any other election year — since voter turnout for congressional elections has typically been less than 40 percent.

Newsom and the next chapter

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By Tim Redmond

It’s a little weird that Gavin Newsom just disappeared after dropping out of the governor’s race. I had a feeling that he wasn’t going to hold up well under the pressure; he loves celebrity, loves to be on the A-List and loves to hear himself talk, but he can’t take a punch. And getting hit, a lot, is a big part of statewide politics. So I suspect that when he realized that this particular dream was over — clunk! — and that in two years, he’s not going to be anything but Gavin Newsom, citizen, he had a little meltdown.

This ought to be cause for concern: Somebody has to run the city for the next two years, and either Newsom is going to buck up, get back to work and try to change the way he does business — or he’s going to be a bitter lame-duck who can’t get anything accomplished except to go all Nixonian and attack his enemies.

I’m really hoping it’s the former — and now that he’s off his statewide horse, I think it’s safe to say that most of the supervisors, including the progressives he so disdains, would be more than willing to start working with him. I’d love to see the mayor come back from Hawaii with a clear understanding of what went wrong with his campaign. As we point out in an editorial today:

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn’t support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement.

I’d love to see the mayor reach out to the folks who have been snubbed all these years. Let’s talk about making the city budget work for everyone — and if that means some new revenue sources (which lots of other cities seemed to be able to pull off), at least he doesn’t have to worry about running statewide after raising local taxes.

He can take a hard look at where his cuts have really hit and try to work with labor to spread the pain a little better and chop from the top, not just the bottom.

He can become a real, serious clean-energy leader by strongly supporting CCA and taking a visible public role in the campaign against PG&E’s anti-public-power initiative.

The city’s ready for a Gavin, Chapter Two. And he wouldn’t be the first politician to rebound from a defeat, learn his lesson and start his career up again.

Any bets on whether that’s going to happen?

The battle for District 6

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The battle for District 6

tredmond@sfbg.com

The race to replace Chris Daly — the always progressive, sometimes hotheaded supervisor who has dominated District 6 politics for almost a decade — is becoming one of the most important battles of 2010, with the balance of power on the board potentially in play.

Through whatever accident of politics and geography, San Francisco’s even-numbered districts — five of which will be up for election next fall — haven’t tended to fall in the progressive column. Districts 2 (Marina-Pacific Heights) and 4 (Outer Sunset) are home to the city’s more conservative supervisors, Michela Alioto-Pier and Carmen Chu. District 8 (the Castro) has elected the moderate-centrist Bevan Dufty, and District 10 is represented by Sophie Maxwell, who sometimes sides with the progressives but isn’t considered a solid left vote.

District 6 is different. The South of Market area is among the most liberal-voting parts of San Francisco, and since 2000, Daly has made his mark as a stalwart of the board’s left flank. And while progressive are hoping for victories in districts 8 and 10 — and will be pouring considerable effort and organizing energy into those areas — Daly’s district (like District 5, the Haight/Western Addition; and District 9, Mission/Bernal Heights) ought to be almost a gimme.

But the prospect of three progressive candidates fighting each other for votes — along with the high-profile entry of Human Rights Commission director Theresa Sparks, who is more moderate politically — has a lot of observers scratching their heads.

Is it possible that the progressives, who have only minor disagreements on the major issues, will beat each other up and split the votes enough that one of the city’s more liberal districts could shift from the progressive to the moderate column?

A FORMIDABLE CANDIDATE


A few months ago, District 6 was Debra Walker’s to lose. The Building Inspection Commission member, who has lived in the district for 25 years, has a long history on anti-gentrification issues and strong support in the LGBT community.

Jim Meko, who also has more than a quarter century in the district and chaired the Western SOMA planning task force, was also a progressive candidate but lacked Walker’s name recognition and all-star list of endorsements.

Then rumors began to fly that school board member Jane Kim — who moved into the district a few months ago — was interested in running. Kim has been a leading progressive voice on the school board and has proven she can win a citywide race. She told me she’s thinking seriously about running, but hasn’t decided yet.

Having Kim in the race might not have been a huge issue — in District 9 last year, three strong progressives competed and it was clear that one would be the ultimate winner. But over the past two weeks, Theresa Sparks has emerged as a likely contender — and if she runs, which seems more than likely at this point, she will be a serious candidate.

Sparks picked up the kind of press most potential candidates would die for: a front-page story in SF Weekly and a long, flattering profile in San Francisco magazine, which called her "San Francisco’s most electrifying candidate since Harvey Milk." Sparks does have a compelling personal tale: a transgender woman who began her transition in middle age, survived appalling levels of discrimination, became a civil rights activist and now is seeking to be the first trans person elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

She has experience in business and politics, served on the Police Commission, and was named a Woman of the Year by the California State Assembly (thanks to her friend Sen. Mark Leno, who would likely support her if she runs).

"Anyone who knows Theresa knows that she is smart, a formidable candidate, can fundraise, and will run a strong race," Robert Haaland, a trans man and labor activist who supports Walker, wrote on a Web posting recently.

She’s also, by most accounts (including her own) a good bit more moderate than Walker, Meko, and Kim.

LAW AND ORDER


Sparks doesn’t define herself with the progressive camp: "I think it’s hard to label myself," she said. "I try to look at each issue independently." Her first major issue, she told me, would be public safety — and there she differs markedly from the progressive candidates. "I was adamantly against cuts to the police department," she said. "I didn’t think this was a good time to reduce our police force."

She said she supported Sup. David Campos’ legislation — which directs local law enforcement agents not to turn immigrant youth over to federal immigration authorities until they’re found guilty by a court — "in concept." But she told me she thinks the bill should have been tougher on "habitual offenders." She also said she supports Police Chief George Gascón’s crackdown on Tenderloin drug sales.

And she starts off with what some call a conflict of interest: Mayor Gavin Newsom just appointed her to the $160,000-a-year post as head of the HRC, and she doesn’t intend to step down or take a leave while she runs. She told me she doesn’t see any problem — she devoted more than 20 hours a week to Police Commission work while holding down another full-time job. "I don’t know why it would be an issue," she said, noting that Emily Murase ran for the school board while working as the director of the city’s Commission on the Status of Women.

But some see it differently. "It would be as if the school superintendent hired someone to a senior job just as that person decided to run for school board," Haaland said.

Sparks’ election would be a landmark victory for trans people. For a community that has been isolated, dismissed, and ignored, her candidacy (like Haaland’s 2004 run in District 5) will inspire and motivate thousands of people. And it’s a tough one for the left — opposing a candidate whose election would mean so much to so many members of one of the city’s most marginalized communities could be painful. "A lot of folks will say that the progressives will never support a transgender candidate," Haaland noted.

But in terms of the city’s geopolitics, it’s also true that electing Sparks would probably move District 6 out of the solidly progressive column.

"If we lose D6, it’s huge," Walker noted. "This is where most of the new development is happening, where law-and-order issues are playing out, where we can hope to save part of the city for a diverse population."

More than that, if progressives lose District 6 and don’t win District 8, it will be almost impossible to override mayoral vetoes and control the legislative agenda. And that’s huge. On issue like tenants rights, preventing evictions, controlling market-rate housing development, advancing a transit-first policy — and raising new revenue instead of cutting programs — the moderates on the board have been overwhelmingly on the wrong side.

Kim, for her part, doesn’t want to talk about the politics of the 2010 elections — except to say that she’s thinking about the race and will probably decide sometime in the next two months. But she agreed with my analysis of how any left candidate should view this election: if she’s going to enter, she needs to present a case that, on the issues that matter, she’d be a better supervisor than either of the two long-term district residents with strong progressive credentials already in the race.

"I don’t have an answer to that now," Kim told me. "And when I make my decision, I will."

Greens

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Greens

paulr@sfbg.com

If there is a better-known vegetarian restaurant in the world than Greens, I’ve never heard of it. But — that sounds a little like hype, and hype is on cozy terms with falsehood. Greens is also 30 years old this year, and since restaurants often age in dog years, or worse, we are talking about a place that can’t ignore the many risks of geriatric life, among them fatigue, complacency, boredom, and a descent into tourist-trappiness. No doubt there are others.

Apart from the fusty, undersized sign above the door, Greens still looks sensational. It helps, surely, that the restaurant was designed around a giant wall of multi-light windows that look directly west, across the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge. Stepping into the restaurant (from the Fort Mason parking lot, prosaic even by parking-lot standards) is like stepping into a postcard; even the tables away from the windows have an expansive view of sea and sky. (And even the table for four in the small, semi-private room at the south end of the main dining room has a commanding view of the bridge.)

A view can be a mixed blessing. View restaurants are often bad, while vegetarian restaurants can be pointedly austere. Greens incorporates its singular view into a theme of subdued, white-linen elegance that gives no clue to the meatless nature of the food. It is one of those rare places that combines high style and a pedigreed menu with something for everyone, even doubtful omnivores.

Greens’ cuisine, in fact, has long seemed to me to have more in common with that of Zuni Café, its exact contemporary, than with the city’s other tony vegetarian temples. The grill is skillfully deployed for smokiness, and the rustic cooking of Italy is well-represented on the menu, since so much of Italian cuisine is naturally meatless and produce-driven. But the kitchen takes inspiration and influences from around the world, including Southeast Asia and the American Southwest.

For a quarter-century, my foundational text for vegetarian cooking has been The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison. Madison was Greens’ opening chef, but she left in the early 1980s and was replaced by Annie Somerville, who still runs the show while having published several Greens-related cookbooks of her own, which I also regularly consult. Given the stability in the kitchen, it’s not surprising that the restaurant’s cooking style hasn’t changed much over the years. In fact, you can still get the fabled black-bean chili, a dish about as old as the place itself and muscley enough to sate most meat-eaters.

But … how about a pizza to start? In the early 1990s, on my first visit to Greens, I noticed that the menu offered the same Mexican pizza I’d been making from the cookbook. I was prepared to be shamed, but the restaurant’s pie turned out to be a disappointment, mainly because of a stinginess (it seemed to me) with the toppings. As a home cook, I applied toppings with abandon, but home cooks don’t have to make a profit.

Nonetheless, the gods must somehow have divined my dismay, because a recent corn and grilled onion pizza ($16) was a veritable cornucopia of late-summer bounty: corn kernels, yellow cherry tomatoes as sweet-tart as fruit, plenty of cheese (fontina and grana padano), and blobs of garlicky pesto, all on a nicely blistered crust. It was like waking up on Christmas morning and finding even more presents under the tree than you had tentatively counted the night before. But I am mixing my seasonal imagery. The interval from Labor Day to Thanksgiving could well be the best time to visit Greens, since the kitchen still has access to summer produce even as the delights of autumn (among them peppers and squash) start to trickle in.

Squash — sunburst and butternut — figured in the fabulous Zuni stew ($14.50), "Zuni" here being a reference to the Indian tribe, not the restaurant. The stew (arranged around a set of grilled polenta triangles) was a mélange of (besides the cubed squash) corn kernels, Rancho Gordo beans, diced red bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, and roasted Early Girl tomatoes and flavored with onions, ancho chilis, majoram, sage, and chipotle lime butter. It was tasty, colorful, noticeably spicy, and managed to honor a pair of seasons as well as the ancient Indian trifecta of corn, beans, and squash.

Back to the Mediterranean for the farro sampler ($16.75), a potpourri of farro salad scented with lemon and mint, cucumber coins, cherry tomatoes, summer and shelling beans with tarragon, baby beets on a mache nest, hummus (garlicky!), black and green olives, triangles of grilled pita, and a rather thrilling, earthy-sweet tomato jam that went nicely with the pita and hummus but could as easily been spooned over vanilla ice cream.

Some ice creams — huckleberry, say — don’t need and probably wouldn’t accept such help. Huckleberry ice cream (the color of grape chewing gum) turned up in the company of a wonderful apple-huckleberry galette ($8.75) whose pecan streusel could have stood on its own, or perhaps with the cardamom cream mille-feuille laid atop slices of roasted pear ($8.50). I have never entirely accepted the stewed or poached pear, but roasting helps retain firmness — an important consideration with pears, whether red, green, or some other color.

GREENS

Dinner: Nightly, 5:30–9 p.m.; Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:45 a.m.–-2:30 p.m.;

Brunch: Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Bldg. A, Fort Mason Center

(415) 771-6222

www.greensrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

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Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

EDITORIAL It’s possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn’t what he wanted right now. It’s possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one’s political career." It’s possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

But since it’s also possible — even likely — that Newsom still hopes to have a political career, and that his decision to drop out of the governor’s race was as much about his failure to gain any traction as it was about his family obligations, it’s worth talking about why his campaign failed and what he can and should do next.

For starters, Newsom never expected to beat Attorney General Jerry Brown in the big-donor fundraising battle. He was hoping to put together a grassroots operation, to mobilize the Obama constituency, and build a war chest with tens of thousands of small donors organized through social media and technology. And that kind of effort could have worked — Brown has name recognition and money, but not much else. It’s hard to imagine large masses of young activists donating time and energy to his primary campaign.

The problem was, those legions of California activists weren’t terribly excited about Newsom either. And there are good reasons for that — reasons Newsom needs to understand if he wants to run for statewide elected office in the future.

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn’t support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement in a Democratic primary.

Now he’s back from the campaign trail — and he has two years to pick up on the lessons of his ignominious political collapse. If he wants any kind of a political future, he needs to change. First, he needs to start engaging and working with the supervisors — even the ones who disagree with him. (Showing up for "question time" would be a huge step). He needs to take the city’s structural budget deficit seriously and present plans for progressive taxes to help close it. He needs to show he can take on big powerful local interests — PG&E, for example — by opposing the utility’s anti-public power initiative and putting his political capital on the line to support community choice aggregation.

Newsom the imperial mayor has, we hope, been a bit humbled. Let’s see if he comes out of this chapter as an embittered, angry (and ultimately unsuccessful) mayor committed to punishing his enemies — or a serious city leader who can live up to his own hype.

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