LGBT

Waggoner for Police Commission

Maria Poblet
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Waggoner for Police Commission

By Harry Britt, Matt Gonzalez, and Aaron Peskin

OPINION Given the escalating scandals in the San Francisco Police Department, the time is ripe to appoint a police commissioner who understands the recurring problems and the need for reform.

The supervisors have the opportunity to appoint such a commissioner: David Waggoner. Waggoner’s extensive background in policy reform, community policing, and criminal justice issues will be a valuable asset to the commission.

Waggoner has worked as a pro bono attorney before the Oakland Civilian Police Review Board and has earned the respect and admiration of people from highly diverse political and social backgrounds. His integrity and sense of justice and fairness inspire trust and confidence — and frankly, we could use a lot more of that in this city.

Credibility with historically marginalized communities — including people of color, new immigrants, the homeless, people with disabilities and the LGBT community — is essential in developing the kind of mutual respect that makes the department’s work effective or even possible. David Waggoner has that credibility.

In 2003, in response to years of strained relations between the SFPD and the community, the voters approved Proposition H. Prop. H gave the Police Commission more authority to adjudicate cases of officer misconduct and changed the makeup of the commission by giving the board three appointments to balance the mayor’s four.

Despite these significant steps toward reform, eight years later we have a Police Department that is under investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI and struggling to overcome serious credibility and morale problems.

Case in point: in the last year alone, the department’s credibility was undermined by a major crime lab scandal, the disclosure of Fourth Amendment violations in SRO hotels, use of excessive force on the mentally ill, and widespread withholding of evidence of officer misconduct from attorneys. These scandals resulted in the dismissal of hundreds of cases.

A number of outstanding policy issues remain in need of serious attention. In 2005, the Civil Grand Jury published a report on compensation in the Police Department, finding that officers receive greater salary increases than other city employees while San Francisco is in a state of fiscal stress. In 2007, the grand jury recommended filling significant numbers of desk jobs with civilians. When the department finally rolled out a pilot program this year, it called for only 15 civilians.

The San Francisco Police Department needs to improve its training of officers, including fostering a respect for the civil liberties that San Franciscans cherish. This should be basic to all police work. However, last year San Francisco paid $11.5 million in lawsuits because of police misconduct.

San Francisco needs police commissioners who understand the challenges of police work but who also are willing to explore the nature of endemic problems that have led to embarrassing scandals. We need commissioners who have a broader understanding of criminal justice policy and how it can be changed to promote public safety.

We join with the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association, Community United Against Violence, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and a host of other elected officials, community activists, attorneys, and local leaders in wholeheartedly supporting the appointment of David Waggoner to the San Francisco Police Commission. It’s about time. 

 

Harry Britt is a former president of the Board of Supervisors and the author of the landmark 1982 legislation that created the Office of Citizen Complaints. Matt Gonzalez is chief attorney in the Public Defender’s Office, a former president of the Board of Supervisors, and a co-sponsor of Prop. H. Aaron Peskin is chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, a former president of the Board of Supervisors, and a co-sponsor of Prop H.

 

Film Listings

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

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

The eighth Another Hole in the Head Film Festival runs June 2-17 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF. For tickets ($11) and complete schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

*Blank City “No one was doing what they were trained to do” — key to the explosion in Super-8 movie-making in late ’70s and mid-’80s New York City, according to John Lurie, star of 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise. Filling in the blanks of a burnt-out city-turned-artistic playground, musicians like Lurie and Jim Jarmusch made films, and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Kern plopped themselves in front of the camera or behind it. Those grainy artifacts were populated by performers oozing with character and charisma, à la Steve Buscemi and Debbie Harry, while combos that ran the generational gamut, from Patti Smith to the Contortions to Sonic Youth, provided the soundtracks as well as the vivid onstage visuals. French filmmaker Celine Danhier does the noble work of trying to encapsulate and couple the disparate No Wave and Transgressive cinemas under the umbrella of shared geography — the squatter-friendly, pre-Times Square-cleanup New York — though organizationally and conceptually Blank City has a tough time surmounting flaws like choppy chronology and uneven allotments of screen time. The No Wave years get short shrift — you’re yearning to see more of the actual films. Should these two movements be paired in the first place — and where does the wildly successful 1983 hip-hop document Wild Style fall (and why isn’t the same year’s Style Wars included)? Danhier fails to make convincing connections, though the snippets of interviews with provocateurs like Amos Poe and Lydia Lunch almost make up for it (who knew, say, that late Dreamlander Cookie Mueller was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s dealer, as John Waters gossips?), and snippets of movies such as the vibrant Downtown 81 (1981) transmit the scene’s energy — loud, clear, and cacophonous. (1:35) (Chun)

*Dumbstruck Don’t get it twisted and splintered, Charlie McCarthy: this almost-earnest doc devoted to one of the world’s geekiest forms of entertainment, ventriloquism, knows its subject comes cloaked in cheese and then some. But despite a slightly clunky, by-the-book structure — writer-director Mark Goffman (The West Wing, Law & Order: SVU) never quite takes the potentially loaded material beyond its certain safe, linear confines — Dumbstruck surprises with its profiles of the very eccentric people who are driven to spiel through dummies. Kim, a former Miss Ohio beauty queen, is trying to rise above kiddie shows and hit the coveted cruise circuit, as her mother wrings her hands at home, worrying that her daughter will never stop playing with dolls and start popping out some real children. Wilma has hit rock bottom, ostracized by her family because of her love of ventriloquism and on the verge of eviction, and Terry has made it to the top after years of struggle, winning America’s Got Talent and ultimately a $100 million contract at a Vegas Casino. Goffman obviously put in the hours with his subjects — you just wish he had dug deeper into the interior life of his ventriloquists: why does Kim, who resembles a human Barbie doll, feel compelled to perform through her grotesque floozy puppet, and why did the waifish tween Dylan choose the smooth-talking black doll as his counterpart? I’ll be waiting for answers in the Waiting for Guffman-style feature that just might come in Dumbstruck‘s wake. (1:24) (Chun)

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

Mia and the Migoo A young girl fights to protect the planet in this traditionally-animated French import. (1:32)

The Tree of Life See “The Importance of Being Self-Important.” (2:18)

X-Men: First Class Matthew Vaughn (2010’s Kick-Ass) helms this reboot of the comic-book series, with a new cast headed up by James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and January Jones. (2:20)

ONGOING

*L’Amour Fou Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later. Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton. Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) but also forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed, but this is clearly Bergé’s show. (1:43) (Sussman)

The Beaver It’s been more than 15 years since Jodie Foster sat in the director’s chair; she’s back with The Beaver, which tells the unique story of Walter Black (Mel Gibson), a clinically depressed man who struggles through his suicidal desires with the help of a beaver puppet. Walter uses the puppet — which he also voices — as a way of connecting with his family and the outside world. The film examines both the comedic aspects and the devastating reality of mental illness, and the script walks the line between dark and light — it’s the first feature from Kyle Killen, who created the critically adored but short-lived TV series Lone Star. The Beaver gets points for ambition, but it’s ultimately too all over the place to come together in the end. The moments of humanity are undercut by scenes of Walter and his wife Meredith (Foster) having sex with the puppet in the bed — intentionally funny, but jarring nonetheless. Still, Foster’s direction is solid and, for all its faults, The Beaver is a great reminder of Gibson’s legitimate talent. (1:31) (Peitzman)

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

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

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

The Conspirator It may not be your standard legal drama, but The Conspirator is a lot more enjoyable when you think of it as an extended episode of Law & Order. The film chronicles the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the lone woman charged in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It’s a fascinating story, especially for those who don’t know much of the history past John Wilkes Booth. But while the subject matter is compelling, the execution is hit-or-miss. Wright is sympathetic as Surratt, but the usually great James McAvoy is somewhat forgettable in the pivotal role of Frederick Aiken, Surratt’s conflicted lawyer. It’s hard to say what it is that’s missing from The Conspirator: the cast — which also includes Evan Rachel Wood and Tom Wilkinson — is great, and this is a story that’s long overdue to be told. Still, something is lacking. Could it be the presence of everyone’s favorite detective, the late Lennie Briscoe? (2:02) (Peitzman)

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

*Everything Must Go Just skirting the edge of sentimentality and banality, Everything Must Go aims to do justice by its source material: Raymond Carver’s rueful, characteristically spare short story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” from the 1988 collection Where I’m Calling From. And it mostly succeeds with some restraint from its director-writer Dan Rush, who mainly helmed commercials in the past. Everything Must Go gropes toward a cinematic search for meaning for the Willy Lomans on both sides of the camera — it’s been a while since Will Ferrell attempted to stretch beyond selling a joke, albeit often extended ones about masculinity, and go further as an actor than 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. The focus here turns to the despairing, voyeuristic whiskey drinker of Carver’s highly-charged short story, fills in the blanks that the writer always carefully threaded into his work, and essentially pushes him down a crevasse into the worst day of his life: Ferrell’s Nick has been fired and his wife has left him, changing the locks, putting a hold on all his bank accounts, and depositing his worldly possessions on the lawn of their house. Nick’s car has been reclaimed, his neighbors are miffed that he’s sleeping on his lawn, the cops are doing drive-bys, and he’s fallen off the wagon. His only reprieve, says his sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), is to pretend to hold a yard sale; his only help, a neighborhood boy Kenny who’s searching for a father figure (Christopher Jordan Wallace, who played his dad Notorious B.I.G. as a child in 2009’s Notorious) and the new neighbor across the street (Rebecca Hall). Though Rush expands the characters way beyond the narrow, brilliant scope of Carver’s original narrative, the urge to stay with those fallible people — as well as the details of their life and the way suburban detritus defines them, even as those possessions are forcibly stripped away — remains. It makes for an interesting animal of a dramedy, though in Everything Must Go‘s search for bright spots and moments of hope, it’s nowhere near as raw, uncompromising, and tautly loaded as Carver’s work can be. (1:36) (Chun)

Fast Five There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in Fast Five, in addition to a much demolition derby-style crunch — instances that stretch credulity and simultaneously trigger a chuckle at the OTT fantasy of the entire enterprise. Two unarmed men chained to the ceiling kick their way out of a torture cell, jump favela rooftops to freedom with nary a bullet wound in sight, and, in the movie’s smash-’em-up tour de force, use a bank vault as a hulking pair of not-so-fuzzy dice to pulverize an unsuspecting Rio de Janeiro. Not for nothing is rapper Ludacris attached to this franchise — his name says it all (why not go further than his simple closing track, director Justin Lin, now designated the keeper of Fast flame, and have him providing the rap-eratic score/running commentary throughout?) In this installment, shady hero Dominic (Vin Diesel) needs busting out of jail — check, thanks to undercover-cop-turned-pal Brian (Paul Walker) and Dominic’s sis Mia (Jordana Brewster). Time to go on the lam in Brazil and to bring bossa nova culture down to level of thieving L.A. gearheads, as the gearhead threesome assemble their dream team of thieves to undertake a last big heist that will set ’em up for life. Still, despite the predictable pseudo-twists — can’t we all see the bromance-bonding between testosteroni boys Diesel and Dwayne Johnson coming from miles of blacktop away? — there’s enough genre fun, stunt driving marvels, and action choreography here (Lin, who made his name in ambitious indies like 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, has developed a knack for harnessing/shooting the seeming chaos) — to please fans looking for a bigger, louder kick. (1:41) (Chun)

The First Grader After a government announcement offering free elementary school educations to all Kenyans, an elderly man, Maruge (Oliver Litondo), shuffles to the nearest rural classroom in search of reading lessons. Though school officials (and parents, miffed that the man would take a child’s place in the already overcrowded system) protest, open-minded head teacher Jane (Naomie Harris) allows him to stay and study. Maruge’s freedom-fighter past, which cost him his family at the brutal hands of the British, is an important part of this true story, which otherwise would’ve felt a bit too heavy on the heartwarming tip. (His classmates, actual students at the school used for filming, are pretty unavoidably adorable.) As directed by Justin Chadwick (2008’s The Other Boleyn Girl ), Harris and Litondo turn in passionate performances, but the film unfolds like a heavy-handed TV movie. The facts of this story are inspiring enough — the film shouldn’t have to try so hard. (1:43) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Forks Over Knives Lee Fulkerson steps up as the latest filmmaker-turned-guinea-pig to appear in his own documentary about nutrition. As he makes progress on his 12-week plan to adopt a “whole foods, plant-based diet” (and curb his Red Bull addiction), he meets with other former junk food junkies, as well as health professionals who’ve made it their mission to prevent or even reverse diseases strictly through dietary changes. Along the way, Forks Over Knives dishes out scientific factoids both enlightening and alarming about the way people (mostly us fatty Americans, though the film investigates a groundbreaking cancer study in China) have steadily gotten unhealthier as a direct result of what they are (or in some cases, are not) eating. Fulkerson isn’t as entertaining as Morgan Spurlock (and it’s unlikely his movie will have the mainstream appeal of 2004’s Super Size Me), but the staunchly pro-vegan Forks Over Knives certainly offers some interesting, ahem, food for thought. (1:36) (Eddy)

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

*Hesher Young teen TJ (Devin Brochu) has lost his mom, and her shockingly sudden passing has sent his entire family into a tailspin. His father (Rainn Wilson) can barely rouse himself from his heavily medicated stupor, while his lonely grandmother (Piper Laurie) is left to care for the wrecked men folk as best she can. All TJ can do is to try to desperately hang onto the smashed car that has been sold to the used car salesman and then the junkyard. So it almost seems like a dream when he catches the attention of an aloof, threatening metalhead named Hesher (a typecast-squashing, perfectly on-point Joseph Gordon-Levitt), squatting in an empty suburban model home. Hesher threatens to kill him, then moves in, becoming his so-called “friend” and brand-new, unwanted shadow. What’s a grieving family lost in its own tragic inertia supposed to do with a home invasion staged by an angry, malevolent spirit? Coming to terms with Hesher’s presence becomes a lot like going through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: there’s the denial that he’s taken over the living-room TV and rejiggered the cable to get a free porn channel, the anger that he’s set fire to your enemy’s hot rod and left you at the scene of the crime, and lastly the acceptance that there’s no good, right, or unmessy way to say goodbye. Director Spencer Susser (with co-writer David Michod of 2010’s Animal Kingdom) modeled the character of Hesher after late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and that fact, along with the film’s independent-minded spirit, is probably one of the reasons why Metallica allowed more than one of their songs to be used in the film. Hesher itself also likely had something to do with it: if the intrigue with heavy-metal-parking-lot culture doesn’t do donuts in your cul-de-sac, then the sobering story might. (1:45) (Chun)

Hobo With a Shotgun Hobo With a Shotgun began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ‘ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out. Grizzled Rutger Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ‘n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some. When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese. Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse. (1:26) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Incendies When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. (2:10) (Harvey)

*Into Eternity Danish artist Michael Madsen (no, not that Michael Madsen) sneaks into Werner Herzog territory with this rather existential documentary about nuclear waste storage. Though he lacks Herzog’s distinctive, delightful style (his narration is way too corny, and his interview subjects lack any discernable quirks), Madsen is onto something here. Ostensibly, his film is an exploration of Finland’s Onkalo, an enormous underground facility built to store highly dangerous waste until it is no longer radioactive. Ho-hum, until you realize the facility must remain intact and functional for 100,000 years. How, Into Eternity asks, can we plan that far in the future? We can anticipate most natural-disaster scenarios, but what about human intrusion? How can we prevent future civilizations from drilling into the deadly cache, either accidentally or deliberately? How do we warn them? Should we warn them? Will humans even be around that far in the future? All we are is dust in the wind? Needless to say, this quiet, stylistically unassuming doc goes way, way deeper than 500 meters below Finland’s ancient bedrock. (1:15) Roxie. (Eddy)

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

*Meek’s Cutoff After three broke down road movies (1994’s River of Grass, 2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy), Kelly Reichardt’s new frontier story tilts decisively towards socially-minded existentialism. It’s 1845 on the choked plains of Oregon, miles from the fertile valley where a wagon train of three families is headed. They’ve hired the rogue guide Meek to show them the way, but he’s got them lost and low on water. When the group captures a Cayeuse Indian, Solomon proposes they keep him on as a compass; Meek thinks it better to hang him and be done with it. The periodic shots of the men deliberating are filmed from a distance — the earshot range of the three women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson) who set up camp each night. It’s through subtle moves like these that Meek’s Cutoff gives a vivid taste of being subject to fate and, worse still, the likes of Meek. Reichardt winnows away the close-ups, small talk, and music that provided the simple gifts of her earlier work, and the overall effect is suitably austere. (1:44) (Goldberg)

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

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

Potiche When we first meet Catherine Deneuve’s Suzanne — the titular trophy wife (or potiche) of Francois Ozon’s new airspun comedy — she is on her morning jog, barely breaking a sweat as she huffs and puffs in her maroon Adidas tracksuit, her hair still in curlers. It’s 1977 and Suzanne’s life as a bourgeois homemaker in a small provincial French town has played out as smoothly as one of her many poly-blend skirt suits: a devoted mother to two grown children and loving wife who turns a blind eye to the philandering of husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini), Suzanne is on the fast track to comfortable irrelevance. All that changes when the workers at Robert’s umbrella factory strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, with the help of union leader and old flame Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as big as a house), negotiates a peace, and soon turns around the company’s fortunes with her new-found confidence and business savvy. But when Robert wrests back control with the help of a duped Babin, Suzanne does an Elle Woods and takes them both on in a surprise run for political office. True to the film’s light théâtre de boulevard source material, Ozon keeps things brisk and cheeky (Suzanne sings with as much ease as she spouts off Women’s Lib boilerplate) to the point where his cast’s hammy performances start blending into the cheery production design. Satire needs an edge that Potiche, for all its charm, never provides. (1:43) (Sussman)

Queen to Play From first-time feature director Caroline Bottaro comes this drama about … chess. Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, here are a few more fast facts: it’s set in idyllic Corsica and features, as an American expat, Kevin Kline in his first French-speaking role. (Side note: is there a Kline comeback afoot? First No Strings Attached, then The Conspirator, and now Queen to Play. All within a few short months.) Lovely French superstar Sandrine Bonnaire plays Héléne, a hotel maid who has more or less accepted her unremarkable life — until she happens to catch a couple (one half of which is played by Jennifer Beals, cast because Bottaro is a longtime fan of 1983’s Flashdance!) playing chess. An unlikely obsession soon follows, and she asks Kline’s character, a reclusive doctor who’s on her freelance house-cleaning route, to help her up her game. None too pleased with this new friendship are Héléne’s husband and nosy neighbors, who are both suspicious of the doctor and unsure of how to treat the formerly complacent Héléne’s newfound, chess-inspired confidence. Queen to Play can get a little corny (we’re reminded over and over that the queen is “the most powerful piece”), and chess is by nature not very cinematic (slightly more fascinating than watching someone type, say). But Bonnaire’s quietly powerful performance is worth sticking around for, even when the novelty of whiskery, cardigan-wearing, French-spouting Kline wears off. (1:36) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Rio (1:32)

Something Borrowed (1:53)

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

*Thor When it comes to superhero movies, I’m not easily impressed. Couple that with my complete disinterest in the character of Thor, and I didn’t go into his big-screen debut with any level of excitement. Turns out Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a genre standout — the best I’ve seen since 2008’s Iron Man. For those who don’t know the mythology, the film follows Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as he’s exiled from the realm of Asgard to Earth. Once there, he must reclaim his mighty hammer — along with his powers — in order to save the world and win the heart of astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Hemsworth is perfectly cast as the titular hero: he’s adept at bringing charm to a larger-than-life god. The script is a huge help, striking the ideal balance between action, drama, and humor. That’s right, Thor is seriously funny. On top of that, the effects are sensational. Sure, the 3D is once again unnecessary, but it’s admittedly kind of fun when you’re zooming through space. (2:03) (Peitzman)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. (1:24) (Eddy)

Water for Elephants A young man named Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) turns his back on catastrophe and runs off to join the circus. It sounds like a fantasy, but this was never Jacob’s dream, and the circus world of Water for Elephants isn’t all death-defying feats and pretty women on horses. Or rather, the pretty woman also rides an elephant named Rosie and the casualties tend to occur outside the big top, after the rubes have gone home. Stumbling onto a train and into this world by chance, Jacob manages to charm the sadistic sociopath who runs the show, August (Christophe Waltz), and is charmed in turn by August’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a star performer and the object of August’s abusive, obsessive affections. Director Francis Lawrence’s film, an adaptation of Sarah Gruen’s 2006 novel, depicts a harsh Depression-era landscape in which troupes founder in small towns across America, waiting to be scavenged for parts — performers and animals — by other circuses passing through. Waltz’s August is a frightening man who defines a layoff as throwing workers off a moving train, and the anxiety of anticipating his moods and moves supplies most of the movie’s dramatic tension; Jacob and Marlena’s pallid love story feeds off it rather than adding its own. The film also suffers from a frame tale that feels awkward and forced, though Hal Holbrook makes heroic efforts as the elderly Jacob, surfacing on the grounds of — what else? — a modern-day circus to recount his tale of tragedy and romance. (2:00) (Rapoport)

*Win Win Is Tom McCarthy the most versatile guy in Hollywood? He’s a successful character actor (in big-budget movies like 2009’s 2012; smaller-scale pictures like 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck; and the final season of The Wire). He’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (2009’s Up). And he’s the writer-director of two highly acclaimed indie dramas, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). Clearly, McCarthy must not sleep much. His latest, Win Win, is a comedy set in his hometown of New Providence, N.J. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who’s feeling the economic pinch. Betraying his own basic good-guy-ness, he takes advantage of a senile client, Leo (Burt Young), when he spots the opportunity to pull in some badly-needed extra cash. Matters complicate with the appearance of Leo’s grandson, Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a runaway from Ohio. Though Mike’s wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is suspicious of the taciturn teen, she allows Kyle to crash with the Flaherty family. As luck would have it, Kyle is a superstar wrestler — and Mike happens to coach the local high school team. Things are going well until Kyle’s greedy mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up and starts sniffing around her father’s finances. Lessons are learned, sure, and there are no big plot twists beyond typical indie-comedy turf. But the script delivers more genuine laughs than you’d expect from a movie that’s essentially about the recession. (1:46) (Eddy)

 

Film Listings

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

OPENING

The Hangover Part II What could possibly go wrong this time? (1:42) Four Star, Marina, Presidio, Shattuck.

Hobo With a Shotgun See “Last Train to Fuck Town.” (1:26) Lumiere.

*Into Eternity Danish artist Michael Madsen (no, not that Michael Madsen) sneaks into Werner Herzog territory with this rather existential documentary about nuclear waste storage. Though he lacks Herzog’s distinctive, delightful style (his narration is way too corny, and his interview subjects lack any discernable quirks), Madsen is onto something here. Ostensibly, his film is an exploration of Finland’s Onkalo, an enormous underground facility built to store highly dangerous waste until it is no longer radioactive. Ho-hum, until you realize the facility must remain intact and functional for 100,000 years. How, Into Eternity asks, can we plan that far in the future? We can anticipate most natural-disaster scenarios, but what about human intrusion? How can we prevent future civilizations from drilling into the deadly cache, either accidentally or deliberately? How do we warn them? Should we warn them? Will humans even be around that far in the future? All we are is dust in the wind? Needless to say, this quiet, stylistically unassuming doc goes way, way deeper than 500 meters below Finland’s ancient bedrock. (1:15) Roxie. (Eddy)

Kung Fu Panda 2 Po (Jack Black) and company return for 3D martial-arts misadventures. (1:30) Cerrito, Four Star, Presidio.

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

ONGOING

American: The Bill Hicks Story (1:41) Sundance Kabuki.

*L’Amour Fou Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later. Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton. Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) but also forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed, but this is clearly Bergé’s show. (1:43) Albany, Embarcadero. (Sussman)

The Beaver It’s been more than 15 years since Jodie Foster sat in the director’s chair; she’s back with The Beaver, which tells the unique story of Walter Black (Mel Gibson), a clinically depressed man who struggles through his suicidal desires with the help of a beaver puppet. Walter uses the puppet — which he also voices — as a way of connecting with his family and the outside world. The film examines both the comedic aspects and the devastating reality of mental illness, and the script walks the line between dark and light — it’s the first feature from Kyle Killen, who created the critically adored but short-lived TV series Lone Star. The Beaver gets points for ambition, but it’s ultimately too all over the place to come together in the end. The moments of humanity are undercut by scenes of Walter and his wife Meredith (Foster) having sex with the puppet in the bed — intentionally funny, but jarring nonetheless. Still, Foster’s direction is solid and, for all its faults, The Beaver is a great reminder of Gibson’s legitimate talent. (1:31) Elmwood, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

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

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

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

The Conspirator It may not be your standard legal drama, but The Conspirator is a lot more enjoyable when you think of it as an extended episode of Law & Order. The film chronicles the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the lone woman charged in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It’s a fascinating story, especially for those who don’t know much of the history past John Wilkes Booth. But while the subject matter is compelling, the execution is hit-or-miss. Wright is sympathetic as Surratt, but the usually great James McAvoy is somewhat forgettable in the pivotal role of Frederick Aiken, Surratt’s conflicted lawyer. It’s hard to say what it is that’s missing from The Conspirator: the cast — which also includes Evan Rachel Wood and Tom Wilkinson — is great, and this is a story that’s long overdue to be told. Still, something is lacking. Could it be the presence of everyone’s favorite detective, the late Lennie Briscoe? (2:02) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

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

*Everything Must Go Just skirting the edge of sentimentality and banality, Everything Must Go aims to do justice by its source material: Raymond Carver’s rueful, characteristically spare short story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” from the 1988 collection Where I’m Calling From. And it mostly succeeds with some restraint from its director-writer Dan Rush, who mainly helmed commercials in the past. Everything Must Go gropes toward a cinematic search for meaning for the Willy Lomans on both sides of the camera — it’s been a while since Will Ferrell attempted to stretch beyond selling a joke, albeit often extended ones about masculinity, and go further as an actor than 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. The focus here turns to the despairing, voyeuristic whiskey drinker of Carver’s highly-charged short story, fills in the blanks that the writer always carefully threaded into his work, and essentially pushes him down a crevasse into the worst day of his life: Ferrell’s Nick has been fired and his wife has left him, changing the locks, putting a hold on all his bank accounts, and depositing his worldly possessions on the lawn of their house. Nick’s car has been reclaimed, his neighbors are miffed that he’s sleeping on his lawn, the cops are doing drive-bys, and he’s fallen off the wagon. His only reprieve, says his sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), is to pretend to hold a yard sale; his only help, a neighborhood boy Kenny who’s searching for a father figure (Christopher Jordan Wallace, who played his dad Notorious B.I.G. as a child in 2009’s Notorious) and the new neighbor across the street (Rebecca Hall). Though Rush expands the characters way beyond the narrow, brilliant scope of Carver’s original narrative, the urge to stay with those fallible people — as well as the details of their life and the way suburban detritus defines them, even as those possessions are forcibly stripped away — remains. It makes for an interesting animal of a dramedy, though in Everything Must Go‘s search for bright spots and moments of hope, it’s nowhere near as raw, uncompromising, and tautly loaded as Carver’s work can be. (1:36) Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Fast Five There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in Fast Five, in addition to a much demolition derby-style crunch — instances that stretch credulity and simultaneously trigger a chuckle at the OTT fantasy of the entire enterprise. Two unarmed men chained to the ceiling kick their way out of a torture cell, jump favela rooftops to freedom with nary a bullet wound in sight, and, in the movie’s smash-’em-up tour de force, use a bank vault as a hulking pair of not-so-fuzzy dice to pulverize an unsuspecting Rio de Janeiro. Not for nothing is rapper Ludacris attached to this franchise — his name says it all (why not go further than his simple closing track, director Justin Lin, now designated the keeper of Fast flame, and have him providing the rap-eratic score/running commentary throughout?) In this installment, shady hero Dominic (Vin Diesel) needs busting out of jail — check, thanks to undercover-cop-turned-pal Brian (Paul Walker) and Dominic’s sis Mia (Jordana Brewster). Time to go on the lam in Brazil and to bring bossa nova culture down to level of thieving L.A. gearheads, as the gearhead threesome assemble their dream team of thieves to undertake a last big heist that will set ’em up for life. Still, despite the predictable pseudo-twists — can’t we all see the bromance-bonding between testosteroni boys Diesel and Dwayne Johnson coming from miles of blacktop away? — there’s enough genre fun, stunt driving marvels, and action choreography here (Lin, who made his name in ambitious indies like 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, has developed a knack for harnessing/shooting the seeming chaos) — to please fans looking for a bigger, louder kick. (1:41) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The First Grader After a government announcement offering free elementary school educations to all Kenyans, an elderly man, Maruge (Oliver Litondo), shuffles to the nearest rural classroom in search of reading lessons. Though school officials (and parents, miffed that the man would take a child’s place in the already overcrowded system) protest, open-minded head teacher Jane (Naomie Harris) allows him to stay and study. Maruge’s freedom-fighter past, which cost him his family at the brutal hands of the British, is an important part of this true story, which otherwise would’ve felt a bit too heavy on the heartwarming tip. (His classmates, actual students at the school used for filming, are pretty unavoidably adorable.) As directed by Justin Chadwick (2008’s The Other Boleyn Girl ), Harris and Litondo turn in passionate performances, but the film unfolds like a heavy-handed TV movie. The facts of this story are inspiring enough — the film shouldn’t have to try so hard. (1:43) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Forks Over Knives Lee Fulkerson steps up as the latest filmmaker-turned-guinea-pig to appear in his own documentary about nutrition. As he makes progress on his 12-week plan to adopt a “whole foods, plant-based diet” (and curb his Red Bull addiction), he meets with other former junk food junkies, as well as health professionals who’ve made it their mission to prevent or even reverse diseases strictly through dietary changes. Along the way, Forks Over Knives dishes out scientific factoids both enlightening and alarming about the way people (mostly us fatty Americans, though the film investigates a groundbreaking cancer study in China) have steadily gotten unhealthier as a direct result of what they are (or in some cases, are not) eating. Fulkerson isn’t as entertaining as Morgan Spurlock (and it’s unlikely his movie will have the mainstream appeal of 2004’s Super Size Me), but the staunchly pro-vegan Forks Over Knives certainly offers some interesting, ahem, food for thought. (1:36) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Hanna The title character of Hanna falls perfectly into the lately very popular Hit-Girl mold. Add a dash of The Boys from Brazil-style genetic engineering — Hanna has the unfair advantage, you see, when it comes to squashing other kids on the soccer field or maiming thugs with her bare hands — and you have an ethereal killing/survival machine, played with impassive confidence by Atonement (2007) shit-starter Saoirse Ronan. She’s been fine-tuned by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), a spy who went out into the cold and off the grid, disappearing into the wilds of Scandinavia where he home-schooled his charge with an encyclopedia and brutal self-defense and hunting tests. Atonement director Joe Wright plays with a snowy palette associated with innocence, purity, and death — this could be any time or place, though far from the touch of modern childhood stresses: that other Hannah (Montana), consumerism, suburban blight, and academic competition. The 16-year-old Hanna, however, isn’t immune from that desire to succeed. Her game mission: go from a feral, lonely existence into the modern world, run for her life, and avenge the death of her mother by killing Erik’s CIA handler, Marissa (Cate Blanchett). The nagging doubt: was she born free, or Bourne to be a killer? Much like the illustrated Brothers Grimm storybook that she studies, Hanna is caught in an evil death trap of fairytale allegories. One wonders if the super-soldier apple didn’t fall far from the tree, since evil stepmonster Marissa oversaw the program that produced Hanna — the older woman and the young girl have the same cold-blooded talent for destruction and the same steely determination. Yet there’s hope for the young ‘un. After learning that even her beloved father hid some basic truths from her, this natural-born killer seems less likely to go along with the predetermined ending, happy or no, further along in her storybook life. (1:51) SF Center. (Chun)

*Hesher Young teen TJ (Devin Brochu) has lost his mom, and her shockingly sudden passing has sent his entire family into a tailspin. His father (Rainn Wilson) can barely rouse himself from his heavily medicated stupor, while his lonely grandmother (Piper Laurie) is left to care for the wrecked men folk as best she can. All TJ can do is to try to desperately hang onto the smashed car that has been sold to the used car salesman and then the junkyard. So it almost seems like a dream when he catches the attention of an aloof, threatening metalhead named Hesher (a typecast-squashing, perfectly on-point Joseph Gordon-Levitt), squatting in an empty suburban model home. Hesher threatens to kill him, then moves in, becoming his so-called “friend” and brand-new, unwanted shadow. What’s a grieving family lost in its own tragic inertia supposed to do with a home invasion staged by an angry, malevolent spirit? Coming to terms with Hesher’s presence becomes a lot like going through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: there’s the denial that he’s taken over the living-room TV and rejiggered the cable to get a free porn channel, the anger that he’s set fire to your enemy’s hot rod and left you at the scene of the crime, and lastly the acceptance that there’s no good, right, or unmessy way to say goodbye. Director Spencer Susser (with co-writer David Michod of 2010’s Animal Kingdom) modeled the character of Hesher after late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and that fact, along with the film’s independent-minded spirit, is probably one of the reasons why Metallica allowed more than one of their songs to be used in the film. Hesher itself also likely had something to do with it: if the intrigue with heavy-metal-parking-lot culture doesn’t do donuts in your cul-de-sac, then the sobering story might. (1:45) California, Lumiere. (Chun)

*Incendies When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. (2:10) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Jumping the Broom (1:48) SF Center.

*Meek’s Cutoff After three broke down road movies (1994’s River of Grass, 2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy), Kelly Reichardt’s new frontier story tilts decisively towards socially-minded existentialism. It’s 1845 on the choked plains of Oregon, miles from the fertile valley where a wagon train of three families is headed. They’ve hired the rogue guide Meek to show them the way, but he’s got them lost and low on water. When the group captures a Cayeuse Indian, Solomon proposes they keep him on as a compass; Meek thinks it better to hang him and be done with it. The periodic shots of the men deliberating are filmed from a distance — the earshot range of the three women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson) who set up camp each night. It’s through subtle moves like these that Meek’s Cutoff gives a vivid taste of being subject to fate and, worse still, the likes of Meek. Reichardt winnows away the close-ups, small talk, and music that provided the simple gifts of her earlier work, and the overall effect is suitably austere. (1:44) Roxie, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

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

*Nostalgia for the Light Chile’s Atacama Desert, the setting for Patricio Guzmán’s lyrically haunting and meditative documentary, is supposedly the driest place on earth. As a result, it’s also the most ideal place to study the stars. Here, in this most Mars-like of earthly landscapes, astronomers look to the heavens in an attempt to decode the origins of the universe. Guzmán superimposes images from the world’s most powerful telescopes — effluent, gaseous nebulas, clusters of constellations rendered in 3-D brilliance — over the night sky of Atacama for an even more otherworldly effect, but it’s the film’s terrestrial preoccupations that resonate most. For decades, a small, ever dwindling group of women have scoured the cracked clay of Atacama searching for loved ones who disappeared early in Augusto Pinochet’s regime. They take their tiny, toy-like spades and sift through the dirt, finding a partial jawbone here, an entire mummified corpse there. Guzmán’s attempt through voice-over to make these “architects of memory,” both astronomers and excavators alike, a metaphor for Chile’s reluctance to deal with its past atrocities is only marginally successful. Here, it’s the images that do all the talking — if “memory has a gravitational force,” their emotional weight is as inescapable as a black hole. (1:30) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides The last time we saw rascally Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), he was fighting his most formidable enemy yet: the potentially franchise-ending Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). The first Pirates movie (2003) was a surprise critical success, earning Depp his first-ever Oscar nomination; subsequent entries, though no less moneymaking, suffered from a detectable case of sequel-itis. Overseeing this reboot of sorts is director Rob Marshall (2002’s Chicago), who keeps the World’s End notion of sending Jack to find the Fountain of Youth, but adds in a raft of new faces, including Deadwood‘s Ian McShane (as Blackbeard) and lady pirate Penélope Cruz. The story is predictably over-the-top, with the expected supernatural elements mingling with sparring both sword-driven and verbal — as well as an underlying theme about faith that’s nowhere near as fun as the film’s lesser motifs (revenge, for one). It’s basically a big swirl of silly swashbuckling, nothing more or less. And speaking of Depp, the fact that the oft-ridiculous Sparrow is still an amusing character can only be chalked up to the actor’s own brand of untouchable cool. If it was anyone else, Sparrow’d be in Austin Powers territory by now. (2:05) Balboa, Castro, Cerrito, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Priest (1:27) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Princess of Montpensier Marie (Mélanie Thierry), the titular figure in French director Bertrand Tavernier’s latest, is a young 16th century noblewoman married off to a Prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) of great wealth and property. But they’ve barely met when he’s called off to war — leaving her alone on his enormous estate, vulnerable to myriad suitors who seem to be forever throwing themselves at her nubile, neglected body. Lambert Wilson (2010’s Of Gods and Men) is touching as the older soldier appointed her protector; he comes to love her, yet is the one man upstanding enough to resist compromising her. If you’ve been jonesing for the kind of lush arthouse period epic that feels like a big fat classic novel, this engrossing saga from a 70-year-old Gallic cinema veteran in top form will scratch that itch for nearly two and a half satisfyingly tragic-romantic hours. (2:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Potiche When we first meet Catherine Deneuve’s Suzanne — the titular trophy wife (or potiche) of Francois Ozon’s new airspun comedy — she is on her morning jog, barely breaking a sweat as she huffs and puffs in her maroon Adidas tracksuit, her hair still in curlers. It’s 1977 and Suzanne’s life as a bourgeois homemaker in a small provincial French town has played out as smoothly as one of her many poly-blend skirt suits: a devoted mother to two grown children and loving wife who turns a blind eye to the philandering of husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini), Suzanne is on the fast track to comfortable irrelevance. All that changes when the workers at Robert’s umbrella factory strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, with the help of union leader and old flame Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as big as a house), negotiates a peace, and soon turns around the company’s fortunes with her new-found confidence and business savvy. But when Robert wrests back control with the help of a duped Babin, Suzanne does an Elle Woods and takes them both on in a surprise run for political office. True to the film’s light théâtre de boulevard source material, Ozon keeps things brisk and cheeky (Suzanne sings with as much ease as she spouts off Women’s Lib boilerplate) to the point where his cast’s hammy performances start blending into the cheery production design. Satire needs an edge that Potiche, for all its charm, never provides. (1:43) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

Queen to Play From first-time feature director Caroline Bottaro comes this drama about … chess. Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, here are a few more fast facts: it’s set in idyllic Corsica and features, as an American expat, Kevin Kline in his first French-speaking role. (Side note: is there a Kline comeback afoot? First No Strings Attached, then The Conspirator, and now Queen to Play. All within a few short months.) Lovely French superstar Sandrine Bonnaire plays Héléne, a hotel maid who has more or less accepted her unremarkable life — until she happens to catch a couple (one half of which is played by Jennifer Beals, cast because Bottaro is a longtime fan of 1983’s Flashdance!) playing chess. An unlikely obsession soon follows, and she asks Kline’s character, a reclusive doctor who’s on her freelance house-cleaning route, to help her up her game. None too pleased with this new friendship are Héléne’s husband and nosy neighbors, who are both suspicious of the doctor and unsure of how to treat the formerly complacent Héléne’s newfound, chess-inspired confidence. Queen to Play can get a little corny (we’re reminded over and over that the queen is “the most powerful piece”), and chess is by nature not very cinematic (slightly more fascinating than watching someone type, say). But Bonnaire’s quietly powerful performance is worth sticking around for, even when the novelty of whiskery, cardigan-wearing, French-spouting Kline wears off. (1:36) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Rio (1:32) Elmwood, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Something Borrowed (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

*Source Code A post-9/11 Groundhog Day (1993) with explosions, Inception (2010) with a heart, or Avatar (2009) taken down a notch or dozen in Chicago —whatever you choose to call it, Source Code manages to stand up on its own wobbly Philip K. Dick-inspired legs, damn the science, and take off on the wings of wish fulfillment. ‘Cause who hasn’t yearned for a do-over — and then a do-over of that do-over, etc. We could all be as lucky — or as cursed — as soldier Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who gets to tumble down that time-space rabbit hole again and again, his consciousness hitching a ride in another man’s body, while in search of the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. On the upside, he gets to meet the girl of his dreams (Michelle Monaghan) — and see her getting blown to smithereens again and again, all in the service of his country, his commander-cum-link to the outside world (Vera Farmiga), and the scientist masterminding this secret military project (Jeffrey Wright). On the downside, well, he gets to do it over and over again, like a good little test bunny in pinball purgatory. Fortunately, director Duncan Jones (2009’s Moon) makes compelling work out of the potentially ludicrous material, while his cast lends the tale a glossed yet likable humanity, the kind that was all too absent in 2010’s Inception. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

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

*Thor When it comes to superhero movies, I’m not easily impressed. Couple that with my complete disinterest in the character of Thor, and I didn’t go into his big-screen debut with any level of excitement. Turns out Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a genre standout — the best I’ve seen since 2008’s Iron Man. For those who don’t know the mythology, the film follows Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as he’s exiled from the realm of Asgard to Earth. Once there, he must reclaim his mighty hammer — along with his powers — in order to save the world and win the heart of astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Hemsworth is perfectly cast as the titular hero: he’s adept at bringing charm to a larger-than-life god. The script is a huge help, striking the ideal balance between action, drama, and humor. That’s right, Thor is seriously funny. On top of that, the effects are sensational. Sure, the 3D is once again unnecessary, but it’s admittedly kind of fun when you’re zooming through space. (2:03) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. (1:24) Shattuck. (Eddy)

Water for Elephants A young man named Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) turns his back on catastrophe and runs off to join the circus. It sounds like a fantasy, but this was never Jacob’s dream, and the circus world of Water for Elephants isn’t all death-defying feats and pretty women on horses. Or rather, the pretty woman also rides an elephant named Rosie and the casualties tend to occur outside the big top, after the rubes have gone home. Stumbling onto a train and into this world by chance, Jacob manages to charm the sadistic sociopath who runs the show, August (Christophe Waltz), and is charmed in turn by August’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a star performer and the object of August’s abusive, obsessive affections. Director Francis Lawrence’s film, an adaptation of Sarah Gruen’s 2006 novel, depicts a harsh Depression-era landscape in which troupes founder in small towns across America, waiting to be scavenged for parts — performers and animals — by other circuses passing through. Waltz’s August is a frightening man who defines a layoff as throwing workers off a moving train, and the anxiety of anticipating his moods and moves supplies most of the movie’s dramatic tension; Jacob and Marlena’s pallid love story feeds off it rather than adding its own. The film also suffers from a frame tale that feels awkward and forced, though Hal Holbrook makes heroic efforts as the elderly Jacob, surfacing on the grounds of — what else? — a modern-day circus to recount his tale of tragedy and romance. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Win Win Is Tom McCarthy the most versatile guy in Hollywood? He’s a successful character actor (in big-budget movies like 2009’s 2012; smaller-scale pictures like 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck; and the final season of The Wire). He’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (2009’s Up). And he’s the writer-director of two highly acclaimed indie dramas, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). Clearly, McCarthy must not sleep much. His latest, Win Win, is a comedy set in his hometown of New Providence, N.J. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who’s feeling the economic pinch. Betraying his own basic good-guy-ness, he takes advantage of a senile client, Leo (Burt Young), when he spots the opportunity to pull in some badly-needed extra cash. Matters complicate with the appearance of Leo’s grandson, Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a runaway from Ohio. Though Mike’s wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is suspicious of the taciturn teen, she allows Kyle to crash with the Flaherty family. As luck would have it, Kyle is a superstar wrestler — and Mike happens to coach the local high school team. Things are going well until Kyle’s greedy mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up and starts sniffing around her father’s finances. Lessons are learned, sure, and there are no big plot twists beyond typical indie-comedy turf. But the script delivers more genuine laughs than you’d expect from a movie that’s essentially about the recession. (1:46) California, Piedmont. (Eddy)

 

Big launch for Avalos, emphasizing unity and integrity

Sasha Cuttler
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John Avalos launched his mayoral campaign yesterday with a spirited event in a sunny SoMa park that drew several hundred enthusiastic supporters, ranging from elected officials such as Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Eric Mar to representatives of a wide variety of progressive and community organizations.

There was also an unlikely supporter: Sen. Leland Yee, who is also running for mayor but spoke to reporters wearing an Avalos sticker and said he was pleased that Avalos is in the race. The two men were each endorsed by the SF Bay chapter of the Sierra Club over weekend, and Yee’s campaign appears to be trying to court the second place votes from supporters of Avalos, the only solid progressive in the race.

But political sideshows aside, this was a day for Avalos and his supporters to shine, and they demonstrated a larger and more energetic event than other mayoral candidates have managed to pull together so far. And the crowd took the opportunity to emphasize Avalos’ progressive values of integrity and collaboration, in the process taking subtle swipes at the ambitions and egocentrism of other mayoral candidates.

“We are for John Avalos because John Avalos is for all of us,” was the repeated refrain in a strong speech by “progressive Christian pastor” and blogger Bruce Reyes-Chow.

Ammiano noted that it was the birthday of Harvey Milk and said that Avalos is the heir to Milk’s legacy of promoting progressive change through community organizing. “Harvey Milk knew the secret and the secret was grassroots…Without that tethering together, we never move forward,” said Ammiano, whose endorsement of Avalos could be a significant factor in the race, particularly as Bay Area Reporter writers and other LGBT entities support other candidates.

Ammiano offered a few reasons for his endorsement, joking that, “He has the best hair of all the candidates.” But even more important was the issue of integrity and trustworthiness, where Ammiano said Avalos really shines. “Trust is a significant attribute and you don’t see a lot of that [in public life]. And John is honorable,” Ammiano said.

Other speakers from labor and progressive organizations emphasized how Avalos has been fighting for progressive causes his entire adult life. “John cares about the issues we care about and he listens,” said Andrea Buffa of Global Exchange, who also worked with Avalos on campaigns against corporate dominance when she worked for Media Alliance.

“I’m here to fight for John because John fights for all of us,” was the conclusion of the fifth-grade student from San Francisco Community School, who introduced Avalos.

During his speech, Avalos said he was touched by the huge turnout and display of enthusiasm. “It’s such a joy to see you here. My heart is swollen,” he said, before introducing his family and telling a story of his father’s lifetime of union activism on behalf of Los Angeles dock workers. “I learned from him the value of hard work and devotion to something much greater than yourself,” Avalos said.

And the main cause that Avalos has devoted himself to in San Francisco has been the progressive movement, with its commitment to workers rights and social and economic justice. “We see that wealth is accumulating into fewer and fewer hands,” Avalos said, one of several core problems that he said his candidacy is committed to addressing, later adding, “I’m running for mayor to even the playing field.”

While he advocated for creating safe streets for pedestrians and cyclists, stimulating job growth, and adopting a housing policy designed to promote diversity by creating more homes for low- and middle-income San Franciscans, he devoted much of his address to addressing the core problem of wealthy special interests getting their way at City Hall.

“We cannot have the same business as usual that greases the wheels with lobbyists,” Avalos said. “I’ll put the interests of the collective above the interests of the few, day in and day out.”

Avalos cast this year’s mayoral election as pivotal to San Francisco’s future. “As a city, we are at the crossroads and only we can turn the tide,” Avalos told a crowd from which almost 400 people signed up to volunteer on his campaign, closing with a line that echoed Milk’s refrain from almost 40 years ago: “I want to recruit you to this movement.”

Summer fairs and festivals

Maria Poblet
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0
Summer fairs and festivals

ONGOING

Young At Art Festival de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 695-2441, www.youngatartsf.com. Through May 22, free. The creative achievements of our city’s youth are celebrated in this eight day event curated and hosted by the de Young Museum.

* Oakland Asian Cultural Center Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St., Oakl. (510) 637-0462, www.oacc.cc. Through May 26. Times and prices vary. Music, lectures, performances, family-friendly events in honor of Asian and Pacific American culture and traditions.

DIVAfest Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF. (415) 931-2699, www.theexit.org. Through May 28. Times and prices vary. Bastion of the alternative, EXIT Theatre showcases its 10th annual buffet of fierce women writers, performers, and directors. This year features two plays, beat poetry, musical exploration, and more.

* Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and Third St., SF. (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct. 31. Times vary, free. A series of cultural events, performances, activities, music, and children and family programs to highlight the green goodness of SoMa’s landscaped oasis.

 

May 18-June 5

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues. (415) 399-9554, www.sfiaf.org. Times and prices vary. Celebrate the arts through with this mish-mash of artistic collaborations dedicated to increasing human awareness. Artists included hail from around the world and right here in the Bay Area.

 

May 21

* A La Carte & Art Castro St. between Church and Evelyn, Mountain View. (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. With vendors selling handmade crafts, microbrewed beers, fresh foods, a farmers market, and even a fun zone for kids, there’s little you won’t find at this all-in-one fun fair.• Asian Heritage Street Celebration Larkin and McAllister, SF. www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. This year’s at the country’s largest gathering of APA’s promises a Muay Thai kickboxing ring, DJs, and the latest in Asian pop culture fanfare — as well as tasty bites to keep your strength up.

Freestone Fermentation Festival Salmon Creek School, 1935 Bohemian Hwy, Sonoma. (707) 479-3557, www.freestonefermentationfestival.com. Noon-5pm, $12. Learn about the magical wonders of fermentation with hands-on and mouth-on demonstrations, exhibits, and tasty live food nibbles.

Uncorked! San Francisco Wine Festival Ghirardelli Square, SF. (415) 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, $45-50 for tasting tickets, free for other activities. Uncorked! brings you the real California wine experience with tastings, cooking demonstrations, and even a wine 101 class for those who are feeling not quite wine-refined.

 

May 20-29

SF Sex Worker Film and Art Festival Various venues, SF. (415) 751-1659, www.sexworkerfest.com. Times and prices vary. Webcam workshops, empowering film screenings, shared dialogues on plant healing to sex work in the age of HIV: this fest has everything to offer sex workers and the people who love ’em.

 

May 22

Lagunitas Beer Circus Lagunitas Brewing Co., 1280 N McDowell, Petaluma. (303) 447-0816, www.craftbeer.com. Noon-6pm, $40. All the wonders of a live circus — snake charmers, plate spinners, and sword swallowers — doing their thing inside of a brewery!

 

May 21-22

* Maker Faire San Mateo County Event Center, 2495 South Delaware, San Mateo. www.makerfaire.com. Sat, 10am- 8pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, $5-25. Make Magazine’s annual showcase of all things DIY is a tribute to human craftiness. This is where the making minds meet.• Castroville Artichoke Festival Castroville, Calif. (831) 633-0485, www.artichokefestival.org. Sat., 10am- 6pm; Sun., 11 am- 4:30 p.m., free. Pay homage to the only vegetable with a heart: the artichoke. This fest does just that, with music, parades, and camping.

 

May 28-29 

San Francisco Carnaval Harrison between 16th and 22nd St., SF. 10am-6pm, free. The theme of this year’s showcase of Latin and Caribbean culture is “Live Your Fantasy” — bound to bring dreams alive on the streets of the Mission.

 

June 3-12

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Various venues, Healdsburg. (707) 433-463, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.org. Times and prices vary. Bask in the lounge-lit glow of all things jazz-related at this celebration in Sonoma’s wine county.

 

June 3-July 3 

SF Ethnic Dance Festival Zellerbach Hall, Berk. and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. www.worldartswest.org. Times and prices vary. A powerful display of world dance and music taking to the stage over the course of five weekends.

 

June 4

* Berkeley World Music Festival Telegraph, Berk. www.berkeleyworldmusicfestival.org. Noon-9pm, free. Fourteen world music artists serenade the streets and stores of Telegraph Avenue and al fresco admirers in People’s Park.

Huicha Music Festival Gundlach Bundschu Winery, 2000 Denmark St., Sonoma. (707) 938-5277, www.gunbun.com/hmfevent. 2-11pm, $55. Indie music in the fields of a wine country: Fruit Bats, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Sonny and the Sunsets, and more.

 

June 4-5

Union Street Eco-Urban Festival Union from Gough to Steiner and parts of Octavia, SF. (800) 310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. Festival goers will have traffic-free access to Cow Hollow merchants and restaurant booths. The eco-urban theme highlights progressive, green-minded advocates and products.

The Great San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center, Building A., SF. (415) 383-7837, home.earthlink.net/~sfxtl/index.html. Sat., 10am-6pm; Sun., 10am-4pm, $6. Gems and all they have to offer: beauty, fashion, and mysterious healing powers.

 

June 5

* Israel in the Gardens Yerba Buena Gardens, SF. (415) 512-6420, www.sfjcf.org. 11am-5pm, free. One full day of food, music, film, family activities, and ceremonies celebrating the Bay Area’s Jewish community and Israel’s 63rd birthday.

 

June 10-12

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds, 1350 Bennett Valley, Santa Rosa. www.harmonyfestival.com. 10am-10pm, $45 one day, $120 for three day passes. This is where your love for tea, The Flaming Lips, goddess culture, techno, eco-living, spirituality, and getting drunk with your fellow hippies come together in one wild weekend.

Queer Women of Color Film Festival Brava Theater. 2789 24th St., SF. (415) 752-0868, www.qwocmap.org. Times vary, free. A panel discussion called “Thinkers and Trouble Makers,” bisects three days of screenings from up-and-coming filmmakers with stories all their own.

 

June 11-12

* Live Oak Park Fair 1301 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 227-7110, www.liveoakparkfair.com. 10am-6pm, free. This festival’s 41st year brings the latest handmade treasures from Berkeley’s vibrant arts and crafts community. With food, face-paint, and entertainment, this fair is perfect for a weekend activity with the family.

 

June 11-19 

San Mateo County Fair San Mateo County Fairgrounds. 2495 S. Delaware, San Mateo. www.sanmateocountyfair.com. June 11, 14, 18, and 19, 11am-10pm; all other days, noon-10pm, $10 for adults. It features competitive exhibits from farmers, foodies, and even technological developers — but let’s face it, we’re going to see the pig races.

 

June 12

* Haight Ashbury Street Fair Haight between Stanyan and Ashbury, SF. www.haightashburystreetfair.org. 11am-5:30pm, free. Make your way down to the grooviest corner in history and celebrate the long-standing diversity and color of the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, featuring the annual battle of the bands.

 

June 16-26

Frameline Film Festival Various venues, SF. www.frameline.org. Times and prices vary. This unique LGBT film festival comes back for its 35th year showcasing queer documentaries, shorts, and features.

 

June 17-19 Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds. 14400 CA-128, Boonville. (916) 777-5550, www.snwmf.com. Fri, 6pm-midnight; Sat, 11am-midnight; Sun, 11am-10pm, $60 for Friday and Sunday day pass; $70 for Saturday day pass, $150 three day pass. Featuring Rebulution, Toots and the Maytals, and Jah Love Sound System, this fest comes with a message of peace, unity, and love through music.

 

June 18 

Summer SAILstice Encinal Yacht Club, 1251 Pacific Marina, Alameda. (415) 412-6961, www.summersailstice.com. 8am-8pm, free. Boat building, sailboat rides, sailing seminars, informational booths, music, a kid zone, and of course, wind, sun, and water.

Pinot Days Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, SF. (415) 382-8663, www.pinotdays.com. 1-5pm, $50. Break out your corkscrews and head over to this unique event. With 220 artisan winemakers pouring up tastes of their one-of-a-kind vino, you better make sure you’ve got a DD for the ride home.

 

June 18-19

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, SF. (800) 310-6563, www.northbeachchamber.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, free. Make your way down to the spaghetti capital of SF and enjoy food, music, arts and crafts booths, and the traditional blessing of the animals.

Marin Art Festival Marin Civic Center, San Rafael. (415) 388-0151, www.marinartfestival.com. 10am-6pm, $10. A city center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright plays host to this idyllic art festival. Strolling through pavilions, sampling wines, eating grilled oysters, and viewing the work of hundreds of creative types.

 

June 20-Aug 21

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove. Sloat and 19th Ave., SF. (415) 252-6252, www.sterngrove.org. Sundays 2pm, free. This free outdoor concert series is a must-do for San Francisco summers. This year’s lineup includes Neko Case, the SF Symphony, Sharon Jones, and much more.

 

June 25-26

San Francisco Pride Celebration Civic Center Plaza, SF; Parade starts at Market and Beale. (415) 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Parade starts at 10:30am, free. Gays, trannies, queers, and the rest of the rainbow waits all year for this grand-scale celebration of diversity, love, and being fabulous.• San Francisco Free Folk Festival Presidio Middle School. 450 30th Ave., SF. (415) 661-2217, www.sffolkfest.org. Noon-10pm, free. Folk-y times for the whole family — not just music but crafts, dance workshops, crafts, and food vendors too.

 

June 29-July 3

International Queer Tango Festival La Pista. 768 Brannan, SF. www.queertango.freehosting.net. Times vary, $10-35. Spice up your Pride (and Frameline film fest) week with some queer positive tango lessons in culturally diverse, welcoming groups of same sex couples.

 

June 30-July 3

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas-Sierra Fairgrounds, Quincy. www.highsierramusic.com. Gates open at 8am Thursday. $205 weekend pass, $90 parking fee. Yonder Mountain String Band, My Morning Jacket, and most importantly, Ween. Bring out your sleeping bags for this four day mountaintop grassroots festival.

 

July 2

Vans Warped Tour Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.vanswarpedtour.com. 11am, $46-72. Skating, pop punk, hardcore, screamo, and a whole lot of emo fun.

 

July 2-3

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, SF, 1-800-310-6563, www.fillmorejazzfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. Thousands of people get jazzed-up every year for this musical feast in a historically soulful neighborhood.

 

July 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July waterfront celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero and Beach, SF. (415) 709-5500, www.pier39.com. Noon-9:30pm, free. Ring in the USA’s birthday on the water, with a day full of music and end up at in the city’s front row when the fireworks take to the sky.

 

July 9-10

Renegade Craft Fair Fort Mason Festival Pavilion. Buchanan and Marina, SF. (312) 496-3215, www.renegadecraft.com. 11am-7pm, free. Put a bird on it at this craft fair for the particularly indie at heart.

 

July 14-24

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various Bay Area venues. (415) 627-9141, www.midsummermozart.org. Prices vary. You won’t be hearing any Beethoven or Schubert at this midsummer series — the name of the day is Mr. Mozart alone.

 

July 16-17

Connoisseur’s Marketplace Santa Cruz between Camino and Johnson, Menlo Park. (650) 325-2818, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Let the artisans do what they do best — you’ll polish off the fruits of their labor at this outdoor expo of artisan food, wine, and craft.

 

July 21-Aug 8

SF Jewish Film Festival Various Bay Area venues. www.sfjff.org. Times and prices vary. A three week smorgasbord of world premiere Jewish films at theaters in SF, Berkeley, the Peninsula, and Marin County.

 

July 22-Aug 13

Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival Menlo School, 50 Valparaiso, Atherton. (650) 330-2030, www.musicatmenlo.org. Classical chamber music at its best: this year’s theme “Through Brahms,” will take you on a journey through Johannes’ most notable works.

 

July 23-Sept 25

 SF Shakespeare Festival Various Bay Area venues. www.sfshakes.org. Various times, free. Picnic with Princess Innogen and her crew with dropping a dime at this year’s production of Cymbeline. It’s by that playwriter guy… what’s his name again?

 

July 30

Oakland A’s Beer Festival Eastside Club at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl. www.oakland.athletics.mlb.com. 4:05-6:05pm, free with game ticket. Booze your way through the Oakland A’s vs. Minnesota Twins game while the coliseum is filled with brewskies from over 30 microbreweries, there for the chugging in your souvenir A’s beer mug.

 

July 30-31

 Berkeley Kite Festival Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker, Berk. www.highlinekites.com. 10am-5pm, free. A joyous selection of Berkeley’s coolest kites, all in one easy location.

 

July 31

Up Your Alley Dore between Folsom and Howard, SF. www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, $7-10 suggested donation. Whether you are into BDSM, leather, paddles, nipple clamps, hardcore — or don’t know what any of the above means, this Dore Alley stroll is surprisingly friendly and cute once you get past all the whips!

 

Aug 1-7

SF Chefs Various venues, SF. www.sfchefs2011.com. Times and prices vary. Those that love to taste test will rejoice during this foodie’s paradise of culinary stars sharing their latest bites. Best of all, the goal for 2011’s event is tons of taste with zero waste.

 

Aug 7

SF Theater Festival Fort Mason Center. Buchanan and Marina, SF. www.sftheaterfestival.org. 11am-5pm, free. Think you can face about 100 live theater acts in one day? Set a personal record at this indoor and outdoor celebration of thespians.

 

Aug 13

San Rafael Food and Wine Festival Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission, San Rafael. 1-800-310-6563, www.sresproductions.com. Noon-6pm, $25 food and wine tasting, $15 food tasting only. A sampler’s paradise, this festival features an array of tastes from the Bay’s best wineries and restaurants.

 

Aug 13-14

* Nihonmachi Street Fair Post and Webster, SF. www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Founded by Asian Pacific American youths, this Japantown tradition is a yearly tribute to the difficult history and prevailing spirit of Asian American culture in this SF neighborhood.

 

Aug 20-21

Oakland Art and Soul Festival Entrances at 14th St. and Broadway, 16th St. and San Pablo, Oakl. (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. $15. A musical entertainment tribute to downtown Oakland’s art and soul, this festival features nationally-known R&B, jazz, gospel, and rock artists.

 

Aug 20-22

* SF Street Food Festival Folsom St from Twenty Sixth to Twenty Second, SF. www.sfstreetfoodfest.com. 11am-7pm, free. All of the city’s best food, available without having to go indoors — or sit down. 2011 brings a bigger and better Street Food Fest, perfect for SF’s burgeoning addiction to pavement meals.

 

Aug 29-Sept 5

Burning Man Black Rock City, Nev. (415) TO-FLAME, www.burningman.com. $320. This year’s theme, “Rites of Passage,” is set to explore transitional spaces and feelings. Gather with the best of the burned-out at one of the world’s weirdest, most renowned parties.

 

Sep 10-11

* Autumn Moon Festival Street Fair Grant between California and Broadway, SF. (415) 982-6306, www.moonfestival.org. 11am-6pm, free. A time to celebrate the summer harvest and the end of summer full-moon, rejoice in bounty with the moon goddess.

 

Sept 17-18

SF International Dragon Boat Festival California and Avenue D, Treasure Island. www.sfdragonboat.com. 10am-5pm, free. The country’s largest dragon boat festival sees beautiful man-powered boats take to the water in 300 and 500 meter competitive races.

 

Sept 23-25

SF Greek Food Festival Annunciation Cathedral. 245 Valencia, SF. www.sfgreekfoodfestival.org. Fri.-Sat., 11am-10pm; Sun., noon-9pm, free with advance ticket. Get your baba ghanoush on during this late summer festival, complete with traditional Greek dancing, music, and wine.

 

Sept 25

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between 7th and 12th St., SF. www.folsomstreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. The urban Burning Man equivalent for leather enthusiasts, going to this expansive SoMa celebration of kink and fetish culture is the surest way to see a penis in public (you dirty dog!).

 

Sept 30-Oct 2

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.strictlybluegrass.com. 11am-7pm, free. Pack some whiskey and shoulder your banjo: this free three day festival draws record-breaking crowds — and top names in a variety of twangy genres — each year.

 

Items with asterisks note family-fun activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Summer movie madness!

Maria Poblet
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0
Summer movie madness!

cheryl@sfbg.com

‘Tis the season for big, loud, making-zillions-opening-weekend-then-dropping-off-into-oblivion fare. Summer 2010 was one of the shittiest in years (Iron Man 2, we hardly knew ye). Summer 2011 has the usual array of superhero sequels and remakes, but there are a few seemingly bright spots on the blockbuster schedule. And if giant robots aren’t your thing, there’s plenty more in store beyond the multiplex. All release dates are subject to change.

Superheroes! As always, there are plenty of superdudes (and ancillary dudettes) to choose from. Thor is already out, but anticipation is high for X-Men: First Class (June 3) — a prequel potentially poised to breathe new life into the series after 2006’s meh X-Men: The Last Stand; and The Green Lantern (June 17), which stars Ryan Reynolds and will probably confuse people who thought it came out in January (that was The Green Hornet). There’s also Transformers: Megan Fox Has Been Replaced — er, Dark of the Moon (July 1), and endgame Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (July 15). (Harry’s a superhero by now, even with the glasses.) Though the wizard king will prob make the most dough, look for Captain America: The First Avenger (July 22) to bring the most noise. Red Skull in the house!

Manmeat! Ah, but the boy’s club doesn’t end there! The Hangover Part II (May 26) reunites the stars of the 2009 comedy hit for a sure-to-be-memorable trip to Thailand (the cast list includes a “drug-dealing monkey”). J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 (June 10) looks like a more menacing version of producer Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (May 20) tests my theory that every movie should, in some way, feature Blackbeard as a character. But the most intriguing title in this pile is obviously Cowboys & Aliens (July 29): Han Solo and James Bond gunslinging amid interplanetary rabble-rousers in the Wild West? Could this be something resembling an original idea? Hooray for Hollywood?

Indie intrigue! So you’d rather eat a wadded-up copy of Us Weekly than go to the Metreon. Fear not — summer 2011 also means the release of dozens of movies with budgets smaller than what it cost to make one pant leg of the Green Lantern suit. Just a few: from fake trailer to real cinema is the cult-hit-in-the-making Hobo With a Shotgun (May 27); master filmmaker Terrence Malick releases his latest, the Brad Pitt-starring The Tree of Life (June 3); and quirky Norwegian import The Troll Hunter (June 17) and documentarian Errol Morris’ Tabloid (July 15) open after local debuts at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Keepin’ it repertory! Rep houses are also ideal summer hangouts for movie fans who don’t need everything that passes through their retinas to be in RealD. The Castro kicks off the season with an Elizabeth Taylor series (May 27-June 1). Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives offers up tributes to director Arthur Penn (June 10-29) and local heroes George and Mike Kuchar (June 10-25), plus an extensive “Japanese Divas” program (June 17-Aug. 20). Closure rumors be damned (let’s hope!) — the Red Vic has an online calendar posted through early July, featuring everything from Wim Wenders to Woody Allen to the Muppets. The Roxie’s summer slate includes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s newly restored 1973 World on a Wire (July 29), also a recent SFIFF selection.

Summer fests! Speaking of festivals — if you want ’em, the Bay Area’s got ’em. The big two are Frameline (June 16-26), now in its 35th year of showcasing LGBT films, and the 31st San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 21-Aug. 8), but stay tuned to the Guardian for updates on mini-fests, super-specialized niche fests, outdoor film series, and more. Example: the Four Star is currently traveling through 36 chambers of Asian Movie Madness, encompassing everything from Jet Li’s fists to magic swords, monsters, and erotica (series runs every Thursday through July 28). Happy movie-going, and yes, that is me carrying a boat-sized bucket of popcorn into Shark Night 3D (Sept. 2). 

 

Film Listings

Maria Poblet
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0

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

OPENING

American: The Bill Hicks Story The late comedian gets his due in this documentary about his life and career. (1:41) Sundance Kabuki.

*L’Amour Fou See “The Long Goodbye.” (1:43) Embarcadero.

The First Grader After a government announcement offering free elementary school educations to all Kenyans, an elderly man, Maruge (Oliver Litondo), shuffles to the nearest rural classroom in search of reading lessons. Though school officials (and parents, miffed that the man would take a child’s place in the already overcrowded system) protest, open-minded head teacher Jane (Naomie Harris) allows him to stay and study. Maruge’s freedom-fighter past, which cost him his family at the brutal hands of the British, is an important part of this true story, which otherwise would’ve felt a bit too heavy on the heartwarming tip. (His classmates, actual students at the school used for filming, are pretty unavoidably adorable.) As directed by Justin Chadwick (2008’s The Other Boleyn Girl ), Harris and Litondo turn in passionate performances, but the film unfolds like a heavy-handed TV movie. The facts of this story are inspiring enough — the film shouldn’t have to try so hard. (1:43) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Jack’s back. (2:05) Balboa, Presidio.

*13 Assassins See “Bastard Samurai.” (2:06) Embarcadero.

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. (1:24) Lumiere. (Eddy)

ONGOING

The Beaver It’s been more than 15 years since Jodie Foster sat in the director’s chair; she’s back with The Beaver, which tells the unique story of Walter Black (Mel Gibson), a clinically depressed man who struggles through his suicidal desires with the help of a beaver puppet. Walter uses the puppet — which he also voices — as a way of connecting with his family and the outside world. The film examines both the comedic aspects and the devastating reality of mental illness, and the script walks the line between dark and light — it’s the first feature from Kyle Killen, who created the critically adored but short-lived TV series Lone Star. The Beaver gets points for ambition, but it’s ultimately too all over the place to come together in the end. The moments of humanity are undercut by scenes of Walter and his wife Meredith (Foster) having sex with the puppet in the bed — intentionally funny, but jarring nonetheless. Still, Foster’s direction is solid and, for all its faults, The Beaver is a great reminder of Gibson’s legitimate talent. (1:31) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

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

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

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

The Conspirator It may not be your standard legal drama, but The Conspirator is a lot more enjoyable when you think of it as an extended episode of Law & Order. The film chronicles the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the lone woman charged in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It’s a fascinating story, especially for those who don’t know much of the history past John Wilkes Booth. But while the subject matter is compelling, the execution is hit-or-miss. Wright is sympathetic as Surratt, but the usually great James McAvoy is somewhat forgettable in the pivotal role of Frederick Aiken, Surratt’s conflicted lawyer. It’s hard to say what it is that’s missing from The Conspirator: the cast — which also includes Evan Rachel Wood and Tom Wilkinson — is great, and this is a story that’s long overdue to be told. Still, something is lacking. Could it be the presence of everyone’s favorite detective, the late Lennie Briscoe? (2:02) Four Star, Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

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

*Everything Must Go Just skirting the edge of sentimentality and banality, Everything Must Go aims to do justice by its source material: Raymond Carver’s rueful, characteristically spare short story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” from the 1988 collection Where I’m Calling From. And it mostly succeeds with some restraint from its director-writer Dan Rush, who mainly helmed commercials in the past. Everything Must Go gropes toward a cinematic search for meaning for the Willy Lomans on both sides of the camera — it’s been a while since Will Ferrell attempted to stretch beyond selling a joke, albeit often extended ones about masculinity, and go further as an actor than 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. The focus here turns to the despairing, voyeuristic whiskey drinker of Carver’s highly-charged short story, fills in the blanks that the writer always carefully threaded into his work, and essentially pushes him down a crevasse into the worst day of his life: Ferrell’s Nick has been fired and his wife has left him, changing the locks, putting a hold on all his bank accounts, and depositing his worldly possessions on the lawn of their house. Nick’s car has been reclaimed, his neighbors are miffed that he’s sleeping on his lawn, the cops are doing drive-bys, and he’s fallen off the wagon. His only reprieve, says his sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), is to pretend to hold a yard sale; his only help, a neighborhood boy Kenny who’s searching for a father figure (Christopher Jordan Wallace, who played his dad Notorious B.I.G. as a child in 2009’s Notorious) and the new neighbor across the street (Rebecca Hall). Though Rush expands the characters way beyond the narrow, brilliant scope of Carver’s original narrative, the urge to stay with those fallible people — as well as the details of their life and the way suburban detritus defines them, even as those possessions are forcibly stripped away — remains. It makes for an interesting animal of a dramedy, though in Everything Must Go‘s search for bright spots and moments of hope, it’s nowhere near as raw, uncompromising, and tautly loaded as Carver’s work can be. (1:36) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Fast Five There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in Fast Five, in addition to a much demolition derby-style crunch — instances that stretch credulity and simultaneously trigger a chuckle at the OTT fantasy of the entire enterprise. Two unarmed men chained to the ceiling kick their way out of a torture cell, jump favela rooftops to freedom with nary a bullet wound in sight, and, in the movie’s smash-’em-up tour de force, use a bank vault as a hulking pair of not-so-fuzzy dice to pulverize an unsuspecting Rio de Janeiro. Not for nothing is rapper Ludacris attached to this franchise — his name says it all (why not go further than his simple closing track, director Justin Lin, now designated the keeper of Fast flame, and have him providing the rap-eratic score/running commentary throughout?) In this installment, shady hero Dominic (Vin Diesel) needs busting out of jail — check, thanks to undercover-cop-turned-pal Brian (Paul Walker) and Dominic’s sis Mia (Jordana Brewster). Time to go on the lam in Brazil and to bring bossa nova culture down to level of thieving L.A. gearheads, as the gearhead threesome assemble their dream team of thieves to undertake a last big heist that will set ’em up for life. Still, despite the predictable pseudo-twists — can’t we all see the bromance-bonding between testosteroni boys Diesel and Dwayne Johnson coming from miles of blacktop away? — there’s enough genre fun, stunt driving marvels, and action choreography here (Lin, who made his name in ambitious indies like 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, has developed a knack for harnessing/shooting the seeming chaos) — to please fans looking for a bigger, louder kick. (1:41) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Forks Over Knives Lee Fulkerson steps up as the latest filmmaker-turned-guinea-pig to appear in his own documentary about nutrition. As he makes progress on his 12-week plan to adopt a “whole foods, plant-based diet” (and curb his Red Bull addiction), he meets with other former junk food junkies, as well as health professionals who’ve made it their mission to prevent or even reverse diseases strictly through dietary changes. Along the way, Forks Over Knives dishes out scientific factoids both enlightening and alarming about the way people (mostly us fatty Americans, though the film investigates a groundbreaking cancer study in China) have steadily gotten unhealthier as a direct result of what they are (or in some cases, are not) eating. Fulkerson isn’t as entertaining as Morgan Spurlock (and it’s unlikely his movie will have the mainstream appeal of 2004’s Super Size Me), but the staunchly pro-vegan Forks Over Knives certainly offers some interesting, ahem, food for thought. (1:36) Bridge. (Eddy)

*Hanna The title character of Hanna falls perfectly into the lately very popular Hit-Girl mold. Add a dash of The Boys from Brazil-style genetic engineering — Hanna has the unfair advantage, you see, when it comes to squashing other kids on the soccer field or maiming thugs with her bare hands — and you have an ethereal killing/survival machine, played with impassive confidence by Atonement (2007) shit-starter Saoirse Ronan. She’s been fine-tuned by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), a spy who went out into the cold and off the grid, disappearing into the wilds of Scandinavia where he home-schooled his charge with an encyclopedia and brutal self-defense and hunting tests. Atonement director Joe Wright plays with a snowy palette associated with innocence, purity, and death — this could be any time or place, though far from the touch of modern childhood stresses: that other Hannah (Montana), consumerism, suburban blight, and academic competition. The 16-year-old Hanna, however, isn’t immune from that desire to succeed. Her game mission: go from a feral, lonely existence into the modern world, run for her life, and avenge the death of her mother by killing Erik’s CIA handler, Marissa (Cate Blanchett). The nagging doubt: was she born free, or Bourne to be a killer? Much like the illustrated Brothers Grimm storybook that she studies, Hanna is caught in an evil death trap of fairytale allegories. One wonders if the super-soldier apple didn’t fall far from the tree, since evil stepmonster Marissa oversaw the program that produced Hanna — the older woman and the young girl have the same cold-blooded talent for destruction and the same steely determination. Yet there’s hope for the young ‘un. After learning that even her beloved father hid some basic truths from her, this natural-born killer seems less likely to go along with the predetermined ending, happy or no, further along in her storybook life. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Hesher Young teen TJ (Devin Brochu) has lost his mom, and her shockingly sudden passing has sent his entire family into a tailspin. His father (Rainn Wilson) can barely rouse himself from his heavily medicated stupor, while his lonely grandmother (Piper Laurie) is left to care for the wrecked men folk as best she can. All TJ can do is to try to desperately hang onto the smashed car that has been sold to the used car salesman and then the junkyard. So it almost seems like a dream when he catches the attention of an aloof, threatening metalhead named Hesher (a typecast-squashing, perfectly on-point Joseph Gordon-Levitt), squatting in an empty suburban model home. Hesher threatens to kill him, then moves in, becoming his so-called “friend” and brand-new, unwanted shadow. What’s a grieving family lost in its own tragic inertia supposed to do with a home invasion staged by an angry, malevolent spirit? Coming to terms with Hesher’s presence becomes a lot like going through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: there’s the denial that he’s taken over the living-room TV and rejiggered the cable to get a free porn channel, the anger that he’s set fire to your enemy’s hot rod and left you at the scene of the crime, and lastly the acceptance that there’s no good, right, or unmessy way to say goodbye. Director Spencer Susser (with co-writer David Michod of 2010’s Animal Kingdom) modeled the character of Hesher after late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and that fact, along with the film’s independent-minded spirit, is probably one of the reasons why Metallica allowed more than one of their songs to be used in the film. Hesher itself also likely had something to do with it: if the intrigue with heavy-metal-parking-lot culture doesn’t do donuts in your cul-de-sac, then the sobering story might. (1:45) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*Incendies When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. (2:10) Lumiere. (Harvey)

Jumping the Broom (1:48) 1000 Van Ness.

Last Night Married for three years and together “since college,” New York City yuppies Michael (Sam Worthington) and Joanna (Keira Knightley) have a comfortable, loving relationship, though it’s unclear how much passion remains. Still, it doesn’t take much for Joanna to bristle jealously when she meets Michael’s co-worker and frequent business-trip companion, Laura (Eva Mendes). As Michael and Laura flirt their way to an overnight meeting in Philly, Joanna runs into an old flame (Guillaume Canet); before long, it becomes a cross-cutting race to see who’ll cheat first. Writer-director Massy Tadjedin isn’t spinning a new story here — and though the film offers a sleek look at contemporary marriage, Last Night takes itself a tad too seriously, purporting to showcase realistic problems and emotions amid a cast beamed directly from Planet Gorgeous Movie Star. Beautiful people: they’re just like us? (1:30) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Limitless An open letter to the makers of Limitless: please fire your marketing team because they are making your movie look terrible. The story of a deadbeat writer (Bradley Cooper) who acquires an unregulated drug that allows him to take advantage of 100 percent of his previously under-utilized brain, Limitless is silly, improbable and features a number of distracting comic-book-esque stylistic tics. But consumed with the comic book in mind, Limitless is also unpredictable, thrilling, and darkly funny. The aforementioned style, which includes many instances of the infinite regression effect that you get when you point two mirrors at each other, and a heavy blur to distort depth-of-field, only solidifies the film’s cartoonish intentions. Cooper learns foreign languages in hours, impresses women with his keen attention to detail, and sets his sights on Wall Street, a move that gets him noticed by businessman Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro in a glorified cameo) as well as some rather nasty drug dealers and hired guns looking to cash in on the drug. Limitless is regrettably titled and masquerades in TV spots as a Wall Street series spin-off, but in truth it sports the speedy pacing and tongue-in-cheek humor required of a good popcorn flick. (1:37) 1000 Van Ness. (Galvin)

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

*Nostalgia for the Light Chile’s Atacama Desert, the setting for Patricio Guzmán’s lyrically haunting and meditative documentary, is supposedly the driest place on earth. As a result, it’s also the most ideal place to study the stars. Here, in this most Mars-like of earthly landscapes, astronomers look to the heavens in an attempt to decode the origins of the universe. Guzmán superimposes images from the world’s most powerful telescopes — effluent, gaseous nebulas, clusters of constellations rendered in 3-D brilliance — over the night sky of Atacama for an even more otherworldly effect, but it’s the film’s terrestrial preoccupations that resonate most. For decades, a small, ever dwindling group of women have scoured the cracked clay of Atacama searching for loved ones who disappeared early in Augusto Pinochet’s regime. They take their tiny, toy-like spades and sift through the dirt, finding a partial jawbone here, an entire mummified corpse there. Guzmán’s attempt through voice-over to make these “architects of memory,” both astronomers and excavators alike, a metaphor for Chile’s reluctance to deal with its past atrocities is only marginally successful. Here, it’s the images that do all the talking — if “memory has a gravitational force,” their emotional weight is as inescapable as a black hole. (1:30) Lumiere. (Devereaux)

Priest (1:27) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Princess of Montpensier Marie (Mélanie Thierry), the titular figure in French director Bertrand Tavernier’s latest, is a young 16th century noblewoman married off to a Prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) of great wealth and property. But they’ve barely met when he’s called off to war — leaving her alone on his enormous estate, vulnerable to myriad suitors who seem to be forever throwing themselves at her nubile, neglected body. Lambert Wilson (2010’s Of Gods and Men) is touching as the older soldier appointed her protector; he comes to love her, yet is the one man upstanding enough to resist compromising her. If you’ve been jonesing for the kind of lush arthouse period epic that feels like a big fat classic novel, this engrossing saga from a 70-year-old Gallic cinema veteran in top form will scratch that itch for nearly two and a half satisfyingly tragic-romantic hours. (2:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Potiche When we first meet Catherine Deneuve’s Suzanne — the titular trophy wife (or potiche) of Francois Ozon’s new airspun comedy — she is on her morning jog, barely breaking a sweat as she huffs and puffs in her maroon Adidas tracksuit, her hair still in curlers. It’s 1977 and Suzanne’s life as a bourgeois homemaker in a small provincial French town has played out as smoothly as one of her many poly-blend skirt suits: a devoted mother to two grown children and loving wife who turns a blind eye to the philandering of husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini), Suzanne is on the fast track to comfortable irrelevance. All that changes when the workers at Robert’s umbrella factory strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, with the help of union leader and old flame Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as big as a house), negotiates a peace, and soon turns around the company’s fortunes with her new-found confidence and business savvy. But when Robert wrests back control with the help of a duped Babin, Suzanne does an Elle Woods and takes them both on in a surprise run for political office. True to the film’s light théâtre de boulevard source material, Ozon keeps things brisk and cheeky (Suzanne sings with as much ease as she spouts off Women’s Lib boilerplate) to the point where his cast’s hammy performances start blending into the cheery production design. Satire needs an edge that Potiche, for all its charm, never provides. (1:43) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Sussman)

Queen to Play From first-time feature director Caroline Bottaro comes this drama about … chess. Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, here are a few more fast facts: it’s set in idyllic Corsica and features, as an American expat, Kevin Kline in his first French-speaking role. (Side note: is there a Kline comeback afoot? First No Strings Attached, then The Conspirator, and now Queen to Play. All within a few short months.) Lovely French superstar Sandrine Bonnaire plays Héléne, a hotel maid who has more or less accepted her unremarkable life — until she happens to catch a couple (one half of which is played by Jennifer Beals, cast because Bottaro is a longtime fan of 1983’s Flashdance!) playing chess. An unlikely obsession soon follows, and she asks Kline’s character, a reclusive doctor who’s on her freelance house-cleaning route, to help her up her game. None too pleased with this new friendship are Héléne’s husband and nosy neighbors, who are both suspicious of the doctor and unsure of how to treat the formerly complacent Héléne’s newfound, chess-inspired confidence. Queen to Play can get a little corny (we’re reminded over and over that the queen is “the most powerful piece”), and chess is by nature not very cinematic (slightly more fascinating than watching someone type, say). But Bonnaire’s quietly powerful performance is worth sticking around for, even when the novelty of whiskery, cardigan-wearing, French-spouting Kline wears off. (1:36) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Rio (1:32) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Something Borrowed (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

*Source Code A post-9/11 Groundhog Day (1993) with explosions, Inception (2010) with a heart, or Avatar (2009) taken down a notch or dozen in Chicago —whatever you choose to call it, Source Code manages to stand up on its own wobbly Philip K. Dick-inspired legs, damn the science, and take off on the wings of wish fulfillment. ‘Cause who hasn’t yearned for a do-over — and then a do-over of that do-over, etc. We could all be as lucky — or as cursed — as soldier Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who gets to tumble down that time-space rabbit hole again and again, his consciousness hitching a ride in another man’s body, while in search of the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. On the upside, he gets to meet the girl of his dreams (Michelle Monaghan) — and see her getting blown to smithereens again and again, all in the service of his country, his commander-cum-link to the outside world (Vera Farmiga), and the scientist masterminding this secret military project (Jeffrey Wright). On the downside, well, he gets to do it over and over again, like a good little test bunny in pinball purgatory. Fortunately, director Duncan Jones (2009’s Moon) makes compelling work out of the potentially ludicrous material, while his cast lends the tale a glossed yet likable humanity, the kind that was all too absent in 2010’s Inception. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

There Be Dragons (2:00) SF Center.

These Amazing Shadows If you love movies, it’ll be hard to resist These Amazing Shadows (subtitled “A story about the National Film Registry and the power of the movies”) — it’s chock full o’ clips from films that’ve been deemed worthy of inclusion in the National Film Registry’s elite ranks. This includes, of course, the likes of 1942’s Casablanca and 1939’s Gone With the Wind, but also more recent cultural touchstones like 1985’s Back to the Future and a number of experimental, short, and silent works, and even a few cult films too. Along the way film scholars and makers (including locals Barry Jenkins, Rick Prelinger, and Mick LaSalle) chime in on their favorite films and stress why preserving film is important. There’s a healthy dose of film history, as well, with mentions of groundbreaking director Lois Weber (one of early cinema’s most prolific artists, despite her gender) and a discussion of why racially questionable films like 1915’s The Birth of a Nation — a film that Boyz n the Hood (1991) director John Singleton recommended for Registry inclusion — are historically important despite their content. Dedicated film buffs won’t discover any surprises, and there’s not much discussion of queer film (unless John Waters talking about 1939’s The Wizard of Oz counts?), nor any mention of the current shift from film to digital formats (of course preserving old films is important, but will the Registry also start considering digital-only films for inclusion?) But perhaps these are topics for another film, not this nostalgia-heavy warm fuzzy that’ll affect anyone who remembers the magic of seeing a personally significant film — join the mob if it’s 1977’s Star Wars — for the first time. (1:28) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Thor When it comes to superhero movies, I’m not easily impressed. Couple that with my complete disinterest in the character of Thor, and I didn’t go into his big-screen debut with any level of excitement. Turns out Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a genre standout — the best I’ve seen since 2008’s Iron Man. For those who don’t know the mythology, the film follows Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as he’s exiled from the realm of Asgard to Earth. Once there, he must reclaim his mighty hammer — along with his powers — in order to save the world and win the heart of astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Hemsworth is perfectly cast as the titular hero: he’s adept at bringing charm to a larger-than-life god. The script is a huge help, striking the ideal balance between action, drama, and humor. That’s right, Thor is seriously funny. On top of that, the effects are sensational. Sure, the 3D is once again unnecessary, but it’s admittedly kind of fun when you’re zooming through space. (2:03) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

True Legend Just because True Legend is as canned and derivative as a Five Venom Fist sucker punch or a lousy Kung Fu episode, doesn’t mean there are moments of enjoyment to be culled from the spectacle in this, the first Chinese martial arts flick on 3-D. In fact, it’s easy to read True Legend as Matrix series action choreographer Yuen Woo Ping ripping himself off by returning to the tipsy territory of one of his early films (the influential 1978 Jackie Chan comedy Drunken Master), calling in favors, and updating it with the international crowd-pleasing elements pulled from the many movies he’s worked on, from Iron Monkey (1993) to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) to the Kill Bill flicks (2003 and 2004). Our hero, Su Can (Vincent Zhao/Man Cheuk Chiu), is the good-hearted Qing dynasty general who just wants to settle down humbly and peacefully with wife Ying (Xuan Zhou of 2000’s Suzhou River) and open his own wushu school. He hands off a power position to his foster brother (and his wife’s blood sibling), Yuan (Andy On), and retreats to the country. Alas, bro comes calling with vengeance on his mind and destroys Su Can’s happy family, sending Ying into the winemaking biz and transforming the injured Su Can into a long-haired madman (picture a more innocuous Chinese Charles Manson intent on bashing the gods of wushu). This sets us up for some majestic Crouching Tiger-like nature scenes, a climactic bout with foreign fighters in line with nationalistic sentiments of recent Chinese martial arts offerings a la 2010’s Ip Man 2, and and some rather poorly explicated yet humorous scenes of a dreadlocked, now alcoholic and homeless Su Can discovering a new martial art — Zui Quan (the Drunken Fist) — while resembling a shaggy, ragged, breakdancing B-boy. The latter just might inspire the sooty-faced crust punk in each of us to take up MMA. While kicking considerable old-school cred — along with brief guest turns by Michelle Yeoh, Jay Chou, Gordon Liu, and David Carradine — True Legend is about as messy, shambolic, and up for entertaining action as a urine-soaked panhandler with a soiled yet solid iron fist. (1:56) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Water for Elephants A young man named Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) turns his back on catastrophe and runs off to join the circus. It sounds like a fantasy, but this was never Jacob’s dream, and the circus world of Water for Elephants isn’t all death-defying feats and pretty women on horses. Or rather, the pretty woman also rides an elephant named Rosie and the casualties tend to occur outside the big top, after the rubes have gone home. Stumbling onto a train and into this world by chance, Jacob manages to charm the sadistic sociopath who runs the show, August (Christophe Waltz), and is charmed in turn by August’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a star performer and the object of August’s abusive, obsessive affections. Director Francis Lawrence’s film, an adaptation of Sarah Gruen’s 2006 novel, depicts a harsh Depression-era landscape in which troupes founder in small towns across America, waiting to be scavenged for parts — performers and animals — by other circuses passing through. Waltz’s August is a frightening man who defines a layoff as throwing workers off a moving train, and the anxiety of anticipating his moods and moves supplies most of the movie’s dramatic tension; Jacob and Marlena’s pallid love story feeds off it rather than adding its own. The film also suffers from a frame tale that feels awkward and forced, though Hal Holbrook makes heroic efforts as the elderly Jacob, surfacing on the grounds of — what else? — a modern-day circus to recount his tale of tragedy and romance. (2:00) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Win Win Is Tom McCarthy the most versatile guy in Hollywood? He’s a successful character actor (in big-budget movies like 2009’s 2012; smaller-scale pictures like 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck; and the final season of The Wire). He’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (2009’s Up). And he’s the writer-director of two highly acclaimed indie dramas, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). Clearly, McCarthy must not sleep much. His latest, Win Win, is a comedy set in his hometown of New Providence, N.J. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who’s feeling the economic pinch. Betraying his own basic good-guy-ness, he takes advantage of a senile client, Leo (Burt Young), when he spots the opportunity to pull in some badly-needed extra cash. Matters complicate with the appearance of Leo’s grandson, Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a runaway from Ohio. Though Mike’s wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is suspicious of the taciturn teen, she allows Kyle to crash with the Flaherty family. As luck would have it, Kyle is a superstar wrestler — and Mike happens to coach the local high school team. Things are going well until Kyle’s greedy mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up and starts sniffing around her father’s finances. Lessons are learned, sure, and there are no big plot twists beyond typical indie-comedy turf. But the script delivers more genuine laughs than you’d expect from a movie that’s essentially about the recession. (1:46) Four Star, Opera Plaza, Presidio. (Eddy)

 

Cycling race

Maria Poblet
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2
Cycling race

caitlin@sfbg.com

In contrast to the alley cat fixie fiends and placid Venice Beach cruisers, some of Los Angeles’ most ardent bicyclists were going unnoticed and underserved by bike advocacy groups. Working class Latinos are often the only ones on two wheels in several of the city’s most disadvantaged communities — but you weren’t going to catch them at Critical Mass or grabbing a seat at L.A. County Bike Coalition meetings.

The organizers of the community group Ciudad de Luces recognized that these riders, often stuck commuting on the L.A.’s most dangerous roads with substandard safety gear and rickety bikes, needed a voice in the development of the city’s biking infrastructure, and were being missed by the biking movement’s traditional outreach tactics.

The organization started distributing bike lights and Day-Glo visibility vests at day laborer centers; started a weekly bike repair workshop at one of the sites in response to popular demand from workers; and, in 2010, convinced the city to install 73 much-needed bike racks throughout the low income Pico-Union neighborhood. Ciudad de Luces coined a term to describe the community it works with: the invisible riders.

Biking is not a white middle class privilege, but many times the popular face of bike activism is perceived as such. In the case of Ciudad de Luce’s struggle for recognition, that meant the minority communities that do ride aren’t given necessary resources to keep them safe and secure. And according to Jenna Burton of the Oakland community bike group Red, Bike and Green, it also harms cycling’s popularity among some prospective riders.

“If you see something that is predominantly white, it’s automatically not going to be as appealing to the black community,” she said in a phone interview with the Guardian. Burton moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast, and was taken by the strong biking culture. Looking for community, she assumed there had to be some kind of African American bicycle meet-up. (“The Bay Area has everything, right?”) She was surprised to find that one didn’t exist.

Burton realized that blacks were underrepresented in the biking community. When she asked acquaintances about their reluctance to pedal through their daily lives, she found that many were intimidated by the ubiquity of bikes in the area. “It can be really intimidating to get out there for the first time. The culture is so strong here, it seems hardcore to people who are curious about biking.”

“There needed to be a targeted effort toward the black community.” Burton’s solution: create an organization that spoke directly to African Americans about why they should bike. She developed a Black Panthers-style three-point plan to break it down. Black people on average make less money and biking is cheap; black people are subject to chronic health problems and biking makes people stronger; black people are often the subjects of environmental racism and biking is a way to speak out against carcinogenic injustice. To spread the word, the group would hold social rides so riders could see that black bike riders really did exist.

Nick James didn’t own a bike, but when Burton told him about Red, Bike and Green, he was compelled to buy one. Already an activist for HIV/AIDS, education, youth, and health causes, James said in an e-mail interview with the Guardian that he believed Burton had hit upon a way to pull all those social issues together — through an experience that would not only be positive, but fun. Now he uses his bike to get to work and run everyday errands.

“Any space where African Americans can get out stress, laugh, communicate, or heal, I’m there,” he said. “Red, Bike and Green is a space where exercise, socializing, and activism flows seamlessly.”

Core volunteers publicized early rides through word of mouth, often handing out flyers to other black bicyclists that they passed in the streets. They found partners in the East Bay’s burgeoning minority biking advocacy network: Cycles of Change, an umbrella organization that includes the LGBT and minority-run Bikery and Changing Gears Bicycle Shop, and P.O.K.E.R. (People of Kolor Everyday Ridin’).

On Saturday, April 23, Red, Bike and Green held its first ride of 2011. Seventy people rode a route that took them through many of Oakland’s black residential neighborhoods — a tactic that organizers employ, as Burton puts it, to make other black people aware that they can rock some handlebars “to build community in our community.”

Since last year, the rides have attracted cyclists from age seven to 65, families, and strangers who can spend the ride connecting and networking. People have used the rides to announce impending garden harvest surpluses, Oscar Grant protests, and job openings.

As Bay Area bike lanes grow smarter and more numerous, and as gas prices soar and environmental issues become more troublesome, it’s pretty much a done deal that more people are going to be riding bikes. And yes, bike movement, that’s something to ring those bells over. But we have to turn the gears democratically: to really improve access to cycling, the needs of all communities have to be taken into account — and that means getting creative with outreach strategies.

Red, Bike and Green uses bikes to carve out a space for its riders — not only in the velo advocacy movement, but in the social fabric of the Bay Area. Burton is confident that the sight of so many black people rolling by will introduce a thought into the heads of spectators — a thought that really shouldn’t need to be introduced but does anyway: “This is our community, there needs to be space made for us too.”

 

HOC farmers market bans live chicken sales

Sasha Cuttler
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15
HOC farmers market bans live chicken sales

Feathers will cease to fly over alleged cruelty practices at the Heart of the City Farmers Market that we reported in February. The outdoor Civic Center market has announced it will no longer offer live poultry for sale as of May 27, a practice that had been grounds for a lawsuit and two years of fervent protesting from animal rights groups.

Raymond Young’s Poultry, a popular vendor, has been selling live chickens by the hundreds for nearly two decades at the HOC market every Wednesday and Sunday. In January, animal rights activist group LGBT Compassion filed a lawsuit alleging cruelty and civil rights violation against Young and the HOC after months of protesting and several attempts to get city agencies involved.

While the poultry stall remained popular with its largely Chinese clientele in spite of an ever-present throng of protesters, the practices caught the attention of Animal Care and Control and the Department of Public Health. Young had received hundreds of citations from ACC and warnings from the DPH, but they were essentially void due to an exemption in California law pertaining to poultry.

HOC market managers would not comment for this story, nor would Raymond Young. While the lawsuit is still pending, the announcement was perceived as a victory to the activist group.

“It sent a message to the city and to the public that animal cruelty and public health offenses is not acceptable and should not be endorsed or subsidized by the city,” said Andrew Zollman, founder of LGBT Compassion. “Having the market finally recognize that something like that should change is great.”

Zollman and fellow protestor Alex Felsinger filed the lawsuit with San Francisco attorney Matt Gonzalez. Zollman said that they had continued to protest in the months since filing the suit. Along with ACC, they said that Young had repeatedly violated animal cruelty laws and health codes even after the level of scrutiny on his stall had increased.

The ACC, which had cited Young hundreds of times for practices such as unsanitary conditions, lack of water, and improper handling of the chickens, viewed the decision by the market to ban sales as good news.

“Animals are food for a lot of people, but as Proposition 2 in California exhibited, people do care about the treatment of them,” said Rebecca Katz, director of the ACC, referring to the Prevention of Farm Cruelty Act of 2008. “If the vendors had been able to treat the animals appropriately, I don’t think it would have become this issue. This was profitable; he still could have made good money and done it properly.”

Bullfeathers Quail, the other live bird vendor at the market, had received significantly less attention from protesters and city agencies because it sold far fewer birds – about 350 per week – and had not been accused of nearly as many violations. Nonetheless, the vendor will also be banned.

Zollman said they will continue to protest the stall up until May 27, mainly because they fear the vendors will operate with a higher level of disregard since they have “nothing to lose.” Although they have received caustic criticism from groups who believe their protests are an attack on Chinese culture, they will plan to shift their attention north to Chinatown to live markets operating there.

“We are hoping that what we have learned and what city agencies have learned will pave the way,” said Zollman.

This place

Andrew Lam
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0
This place

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Begun in part as a series of maps accompanying public lectures, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95) is a remarkable act of gathering, one that presents myriad versions and visions of San Francisco and its surrounding areas that can inform a reader’s experience.

Infinite City was recently selected by the Northern California Independent Booksellers as one of its 2011 winners. Duality is a fundamental aspect of the book’s breadth and depth and sense of sharply critical appreciation — structurally, Solnit pairs distinct maps with corresponding chapter-length essays. In keeping with that characteristic, and also with the book’s group spirit (though admittedly on a much smaller and less intensive scale), I asked different Guardian contributors to share appraisals of one, or in most cases two, of the 22 sections. The result provides just a hint of what can be found within Infinite City. (Johnny Ray Huston)

MAP 3. “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo“

The map for this chapter tracks the San Francisco life of Eadweard (sic) Muybridge, alongside landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bay Area masterpiece Vertigo. In “The Eyes of the Gods,” Solnit, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for her 2003 Muybridge bio River of Shadows, writes of the 19th century artist’s breakthrough high-speed photography, “It was as though the ice of frozen photographic time had broken free into a river of images.”

Many such rivers flowed all over this fair city when Vertigo premiered at the Stage Door Theatre at 420 Mason St. on May 9, 1958. Alas, only 10 of the more than 60 single-screen venues extant that year, all demarcated on Shizue Seigel’s fine map, are still functioning. Solnit rightly describes the shift to watching films on various digital delivery mechanisms as leaving contemporary culture with a “curious imagistic poverty.” As she concisely describes watching Milk and Once Upon a Time in the West on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, we’re reminded that there is no comparison between enjoying cinema in such a grand setting and staring at a laptop. The great 20th century memoirist and observer Quentin Crisp wrote, “We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to a church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are as deeply suspicious as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast that they never go to church.”

That applies to you too, Netflix subscribers! The Roxie, Castro, Red Vic, Clay, and a small number of other houses of worship are still in business, so what are you waiting for? (Ben Terrall)

MAP 4. “Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust”

In “The Sinews of War are Boundless Money and the Brains of War Are in the Bay Area,” Solnit argues that antiwar, green, and left Bay Area hotspots are well known and don’t need to be charted again — unlike military contractors and assorted other forces of reaction in the region.

Solnit notes that many military bases that used to operate in the Bay Area are closed, “but the research, development, and profiteering continue as a dense tangle of civilian and military work, technological innovation, economic muscle, and political maneuvering for both economic and ideological purposes.”

Among the hard-right compounds providing counterevidence for that demonstration chestnut “the people united will never be defeated”: Lawrence Livermore National Labs (birthplace of Star Wars — the Reagan era money pit, not the George Lucas movie); Lockheed Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor; the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s reactionary think tank; and Northrop Grumman, missile component designer. It’s useful to have so many of them in one place, if queasy-making.

On the lower left of the map sits Sandow Birk’s beautifully warped code of arms, which features the Cicero quote (Nervi belli pecunia infinita) that Solnit cites in her chapter title, under a half eagle/half dove, a rifle-toting soldier, and a scythe-clutching skeleton. It should be on the door of every U.S. military recruiting center. (Terrall)

MAP 6. “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habits and Queer Public Spaces”

“How thoroughly the lexical landscape of gay history is invested with [a] paradigm of emergence,” notes poet Aaron Shurin in “Full Spectrum,” the chapter accompanying Infinite City‘s sixth map. Like one of the dazzlingly-named butterfly species rendered by Mona Caron on the map, Shurin flits gracefully between memoir and historiography as he tracks San Francisco’s ongoing evolution as a locus for queer emergence.

From North Beach to Polk Gulch, from Folsom to Castro, LGBT folk — be they American painted ladies, Satyr angel wings, or Mission blues — have continually migrated to and within the city to shed their cocoons and show their true colors. Local faux-queen Fauxnique traced this metamorphosis at the 2003 Miss Trannyshack Pageant when she climatically emerged as a regal butterfly to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (apropos to Shurin’s royalty motif, she won the crown). So too did the late Age of Aquarius painter Chuck Arnett, who often nestled butterfly imagery into his portraits of SoMa’s leather demimonde, and whose murals once adorned some of the many now-extinct bars also denoted by Ben Pease’s cartography. Only more than half a dozen of these “wildlife sanctuaries,” in Shurin’s parlance, have survived, with the Eagle Tavern’s announced closure marking another loss of habitat. Queers, though, are if anything adaptive, and my hope is that the future fluttering tribes of San Francisco will keep alighting on new ground to unfurl their wings. (Matt Sussman)

MAP 7. “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body”

“Food is part of the Bay Area you hear about nowadays, exquisite upscale food at famous restaurants and gourmet markets. But it’s so boring we couldn’t stay focused on it in this map.” These refreshing, if rarely uttered words come two-thirds of the way through the chapter that accompanies the “Poison/Palate” map, Rebecca Solnit’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Gourmet.”

The phony Tuscany of Napa and the once-orchard-filled, now-EPA-Superfund-site-speckled Silicon Valley are wisely singled out for derision, a convenient duality in both geography and culture and the perfect framework on which to hang a critique of the local culinary community’s smug, myopic self-indulgence, by raising the not-so-elite-specters in Bay Area food history (the It’s It, the Popsicle, the Hangtown Fry, the Rice-a-Roni), and reintroducing the politics of food into the conversation, in the form of the chemical tonnage used to produce wine grapes, food giveaways at community gardens, Diet for a Small Planet, and Black Panther breakfast programs for school-kids. The sprawling topic is almost given too short a shrift, threatening to leap its mutant-mermaid-bedecked map.

Better is the 18th chapter, “How to Get From Ethiopia to Ocean Beach.” Solnit begins by loosely charting the ingredients that go into your cuppa joe: the water from Hetch Hetchy, the milk from West Marin, the coffee that courses through the port of Oakland, and, impishly, the leavings that flow toward the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant. All that’s missing from the equation is the sugar that I need to make the darkest, brandy-and-cherry-tinged brew palatable. SF’s cafe culture is also deservedly lionized — though some might want to hurl china due to the exclusions on the accompanying map: why, for instance, call out Blue Danube Coffee House and not the grungier, more Chinese-populated Java Source? (Kimberly Chun)

MAP 8. “Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II”

Though author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro opens this chapter, subtitled “High Tide, Low Ebb,” with an eloquent invocation of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — penned in Sausalito, by the way — it was the slight mention of Lowell Fulson’s “San Francisco Blues” that most resonated with me. “Ohh, San Francisco,” the lyric goes, “Please make room for me.” The facts presented in “Shipyards and Sounds” record The City’s answer as a genteel and progressive “No nigger.”

Beginning at the start of WWII, when Southern blacks migrated to the Bay Area to build ships in Hunters Point, Jelly-Schapiro points out that the main areas of wartime shipbuilding (Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City) are “places that today remain centers of black population and of black poverty.” Indicating, to me, that little has changed since the 1940s in some significant ways. Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it. Jelly-Schapiro did.

Jelly-Schapiro also shows how terms like “redevelopment” displaced black Fillmore District residents to housing projects they’d been banned from during the war and land-grab euphemisms like “urban renewal” decimated black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Electoral laws mandating that the SF Board of Supervisors be elected by citywide contests and not by district allowed a city that desegregated its schools and transit system in the 1860s to remain progressive and very, very white.

Jelly-Schapiro’s conclusion contains a critique of Bay Area celebrations when “Negro president” Barack Obama was elected in 2008. What he won’t say is covered in Shizue Seigel’s map. A sidebar shows the dwindling soul of a city, while the headers cover the founding of the Black Panthers and Sylvester’s solo debut at Bimbo’s. (D. Scot Miller)

MAP 9. “Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone”

After the damned disheartening facts presented in the previous chapter, it’s both merciful and hopeful that “Little Pieces of Many Wars” — though just as rage-inducing — establishes some kind of equilibrium.

Gent Sturgeon’s incredible Rorschach-inspired artwork opens a thoroughly-researched piece on Fillmore Street and its many incarnations. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s abolitionist work and her eucalyptus trees — which still stand on the corners of Bush and Octavia streets — are a starting point for a leisurely stroll with Solnit, who runs the voodoo down, “The war between the states left its traces here,” she says, “as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war of racism, and the various forms of freelance violence.”

She remembers San Francisco as an abolitionist headquarters, and Fillmore Street as the first place Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” Recalling the Fillmore’s rich heritage of jazz, poetry, and art, Solnit takes it even further, adding, “The wealthy sometimes claim to bring civilization to rough neighborhoods, but the Upper Fillmore neighborhood that was so culturally rich when it was the property of poor people in the 1950s is smoothed over in significance now.”

The tragedy of Japanese internment, and the cross-cultural exchange that was demolished by it and redevelopment loom like white sheets over the city to this day. But Solnit closes with an optimistic sense of resurgence, even though Nickie’s has gone Irish.

Ben Pease’s cartography shows the cross-currents of culture of yesterday’s Fillmore Street, but not much else. That’s not a complaint, really. (Miller)

 MAP 13. “The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe”

Two 2009 shootings on 24th Street pop out, in blood red, on the map accompanying Adriana Camarena’s “The Geography of the Unseen,” in much the same way that the spate of shooting deaths the previous year marked my brief time spent living in the Mission. In ’08, I lived in a Victorian flat at Treat and 23rd, distinguished by the fact that it was a favorite hang for the teenaged homies — its steps were slightly tucked back off the street, ideal when it came to hiding out, smoking dope, and snacking out — until my landlords installed a fence, ostensibly to keep the steps free of spit.

We were on the same block as an appliance-loaded junkyard; the last stop of an ancient Mission industrial railroad; and the Parque Niños Unidos, with its swampy, grassy corner, so often cordoned off to keep the tots from wading in the mud, its circling ice cream carts and its de facto refreshment stand, El Gallo Giro taco truck; and the community garden, where the feral kittens tumbled and hid and fresh produce was given away free every Sunday afternoon.

The Parque likely was the last thing 18-year-old poet Jorge Hurtado saw when he was shot and killed on our corner at 1 a.m. that year. I remember waking up that night to what sounded like a cannon boom, only the first of a slew that sweltering, ominous summer — Mark Guardado, president of the SF chapter of the Hells Angels, was killed a little over a week later, down Treat, in front of Dirty Thieves. The tension was thick and gooey in the air — who was next? The beauty of Shizue Seigel’s Mission map lies in how intimate it is, how it’s threaded around the shaggy-dog snatches of yarns Camarena catches among the day laborers waiting at Cesar Chavez and Bayshore, from the long litany of splintered families, time spent in the refuge of gangs at 24th and Shotwell, and then, in Frank Pena’s case, lives cut sadly short farther up 24th at Potrero. The included stories, rarely straying beyond the tellers’ voices and the facts they choose to reveal, stay with you — even if her sources’ internal lives remain, as the chapter’s subtitle goes, “the Geography of the Unseen.” (Chun)


NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS 2011 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS

 

FICTION

 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)

Nonfiction

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach (W.W. Norton and Company, 336 pages, $15.95)

Honorable Mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (University of California, 760 pages, $34.95)

 

POETRY

Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon, 96 pages, $16)

Food Writing

My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South, Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher, and Shelley Lindgren (W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pages, $35)

Children’s Picture Book

The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood and Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 32 pages, $12.95)

Honorable mention: Zero, Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids, 32 pages, $17.95)

 

TEEN LIT

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson (Dial, 288 pages, $17.99)

Honorable mention: The Mockingbirds, Daisy Whitney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 352 pages, $16.99)

 

REGIONAL TITLE

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California, 167 pages, $24.95)

Honorable mention: A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)

 

Busy week for immigration reform advocates

Mary Magee
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12
Busy week for immigration reform advocates

On Tuesday, April 26, the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee holds a hearing on AB 1081, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools (TRUST) Act. The TRUST Act seeks to allow local governments to opt out of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) controversial “Secure Communities” program and to set standards for jurisdictions that chose to participate in S-Comm.

Also on Tuesday, Congressmember Luis Gutierrez kicks off his “Change Takes Courage” immigrant rights tour in seven California cities. Gutierrez lands in San Francisco Wednesday, April 27, and the Bay Area immigrant community and LGBT leaders will host him on the steps of City Hall, as Gutierrez asks President Obama to stop the record number of deportations of immigrant families and students that have already occurred under the Obama administration.

Joining Ammiano in Sacramento on Tuesday as co-sponsors of the TRUST Act are Assemblymembers Gil Cedillo (D-LA) and Bill Monning (D- Carmel) and Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF). Endorsers include 80 organizations, local governments and elected officials, including the Santa Clara and Santa Cruz County Boards, San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey and retired Sacramento Police Chief Arturo Venegas, and civil rights and faith groups, including the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, the California Labor Federation, the San Bernardino Catholic Diocese and Equality California.

SF Sheriff Michael Hennessey blew the whistle on S-Comm last May, but was unable to stop the feds from activating the program in San Francisco last June. And the most recent batch of S-Comm statistics show that San Francisco, once famed as a sanctuary city, now ranks in the top 38 counties nationwide that deport “non-criminal aliens,” which is ICE-speak for immigrants whose primary misstep is that they are in the country without the requisite paperwork.

Ammiano’s Trust Act hearing comes just days after Congressmember Zoe Lofgren (D- San Jose) called for an investigation into the conduct of ICE officials around advising local municipalities whether they are required to participate in ICE’s S-Comm program.

“You can’t have a government department essentially lying to local government and to members of Congress. This is not OK,” Lofgren said April 22, following the disclosure of hundreds of ICE documents that allegedly show that the agency has been giving intentionally contradictory and misleading information about S-Comm to local officials.

“From then-Attorney General Brown on down, it’s painfully clear ICE deceived Californians about S-Comm,” said Angela Chan, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. “That’s unacceptable behavior for a government agency in a democracy.”

Advocates hope that Ammiano’s TRUST Act will restore balance and accountability to the nation’s otherwise broken immigration system. They charge that S-Comm’s misleading focus, over-broad reach and lack of transparency have eroded trust between police and immigrant communities, making victims and witnesses to crimes reluctant to come forward.

The TRUST Act would make S-Comm an “opt-in” program so local governments can tailor their participation based on local needs.

The bill would also set safeguards for municipalities that do elect to participate in S-Comm to guard against racial profiling and would ensure that children and domestic violence survivors are not swept up by S-Comm.

The TRUST act also upholds the right to a day in court by only reporting for deportation individuals convicted – not merely accused – of crimes.

Tuesday’s hearing will be followed by Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s Wednesday appearance in San Francisco, which the African Advocacy Network, Asian Law Caucus, Central American Resource Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action, People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights, Out4Immigration, San Francisco Interfaith Coalition on Immigration, and Dolores Street Community Services sponsored.

Sups David Campos, John Avalos, and David Chiu will join Gutierrez and their message to President Obama is laid out in the following press statement:

“We need administrative relief to uphold the values of opportunity, justice, and human rights for all to move our country forward. With the stroke of a pen, President Obama could put a halt to the rapidly increasing deportations that are taking place. We need to stop deporting parents and ripping apart all families, including same-sex partners. We need to stop deporting students who would have been eligible for the DREAM ACT. Last year, the U.S. deported an estimated 400,000 immigrants, the highest number of deportations per year in the history of our nation. We must allow our counties to opt out of  “S-Comm” (Secure Communities), which is making our communities less secure, and we support Congressman Gutierrez in these courageous requests. Immigrants are part of the fabric of our communities, and we need to fix our immigration system so everyone who lives here can continue to live as a full member of society without constant fear of safety, security, and livelihood being jeopardized at any moment.”

 
 

Endangered Eagle may still have hope

Andrew Lam
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4
Endangered Eagle may still have hope

news@sfbg.com

An important community institution never truly dies. It remains in the hearts and minds of everyone it has touched — a fact that that patrons who have lived and loved (sometimes literally) in the Eagle Tavern understand. But that doesn’t mean they’re ready to loosen their talons and let go.

With the help of San Francisco’s supervisors, some seriously committed community energy — and maybe even a Dallas cowboy who likes his leather — they may not have to.

For the past week, patrons of one of San Francisco’s oldest and boldest gay leather bars have been rallying to save their stomping ground from uncertain fate. It started when they found that rumors swirling since early in the year were true: the Eagle was slated to close at the end of April and faced a May 1 eviction.

Since then, defenders of the 12th Street space have scraped together emergency meetings and impromptu marches, a surprise leather night at the Skylark Bar (owned by a believed-to-be buyer), and a demonstration on the steps of City Hall. Letters were sent to the Board of Supervisors, petitions signed, and pink tent campouts planned as vigils.

Through it all, the message carrying most clearly was that the Eagle Tavern is far more than a swingin’ hot spot. “It’s our history and it’s our culture,” said organizer Kyle DeVries at a rally on the steps of City Hall last Tuesday. “And we’re proud of what we’ve given to this city.”

That “what” includes more than $1 million raised through the years at popular Sunday beer busts supporting everything from breast cancer research to AIDS awareness. But it also includes providing a safe haven and sense of belonging for San Francisco’s queer community for more than three decades.

And now, patrons have learned they will eek out another month. Thanks to the huge outpouring of support from Eagle denizens, and political pressure from three San Francisco supervisors, the end-of-April plan to fly the coop has been delayed at least until the end of May, Eagle manager Ron Hennis said.

But since the issue first exploded April 11, efforts to save the sacred space haven’t slowed down. At press time, supporters were planning an April 19 “Tuesday roost” at the Eagle in hopes of pumping energy and cash back into the tavern on a night known to be quiet.

Sup. Scott Wiener, along with Sups. David Campos and Jane Kim, sent a letter to the San Francisco Police Department that reviews liquor license sales in connection with the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. The letter reviewed the Eagle’s importance in SF’s queer community and stated that its authors are “adamantly opposed to any sale that would result in the Eagle’s destruction.”

The supervisors urged the SFPD to “closely scrutinize, consistent with applicable legal standards, any requested liquor license transfer relating to the Eagle to ensure that any such transfer will not harm the LGBT community by putting an end to the Eagle.”

So far, these efforts have been promising for Eagle patrons. In a phone interview, Wiener told us that Skylark owner Steve Englebrecht has pulled out of negotiations to buy the place. But the situation remains complex.

Eagle manager Ron Hennis explained that current owners John Gardiner and Joe Banks decided to sell the Eagle a year ago to focus on their other SoMa leather bar, Hole in the Wall Saloon, which has been plagued with high-cost property battles of its own.

Gardiner and Banks didn’t respond to our e-mails. But Hennis said they intended to sell the business — which includes the Eagle name, equipment, and liquor license — to people they felt would maintain the existing spirit of the bar: Hennis, Eagle entertainment coordinator Doug Hilsinger, and Lila Thirkield, owner of the Lexington Club.

Hennis and Hilsinger told us a contract was signed and the deal had progressed through an initial set of inspections and into escrow when the property’s owner, John Nikitopoulos, refused to negotiate a new lease with the prospective owners.

Despite successful conversations up to that point, Gardiner and Banks “turned off and didn’t say why,” Hennis said.

Further complicating the matter, Gardiner and Banks’ lease ran out and Nikitopoulos hasn’t renewed it. He’s been renting the property month-to-month and is reportedly raising the monthly price tag, which has remained the same for the past 10 years.

Hennis said the owners were still paying rent when they were threatened with eviction — which would mean a death sentence for the Eagle unless they could sell the business to a party Nikitopoulos would be willing to negotiate a lease with.

In the midst of the stalemate, Nikitopoulos offered to buy the business (and most important, the liquor license) from Gardiner and Banks, who refused saying they’d already agreed to sell to Hennis and his partners. Nikitopoulos then approached Hennis, suggesting Hennis purchase the business as planned and then sell him the liquor license. When Hennis also turned down the landlord’s offer — without the liquor license, Hennis wouldn’t actually own the bar — he disappeared from the conversations.

At the April 12 demonstration, mayoral candidate Bevan Dufty called for the stakeholders involved to recognize that in a city that “values history — indeed, is defined by history,” the lease on the Eagle is “more than just a business transaction.

“The owner of this building needs to come to the table and talk about this,” he urged.

But Nikitopoulos, a resident of Santa Rosa who inherited the property from his father, hasn’t responded to Hennis, reporters, or even to calls from Sup. Wiener. He was, however, reportedly in communication with Englebrecht when the Skylark owner swept in to purchase the space and liquor license — but not the name or the leather culture.

Though Englebrecht withdrew, supporters worry Nikitopoulos could potentially negotiate a lease with a different tenant — leaving the bar a casualty of SoMa’s continued gentrification.

Longtime Eagle patron Mike Talley, who has lived in SoMa for more than two decades, fears the Eagle would fit perfectly into a familiar story of luxury lofts, astronomical rent increases, and — inevitably — mass evictions. He explained that what the Chronicle’s late columnist Herb Caen called the Miracle Mile — a strip of SoMa gay and leather bars that once numbered in the dozens — now consists of just a few properties “hanging in there.”

Mark Kliem, a.k.a Sister Zsa Zsa Glamour of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, echoed Talley’s concern, saying, “The rest of the entire world is family-friendly. Why can’t we have this one little half-mile area to call queer space?”

It’s worth noting that the Eagle is by no means exclusively gay. It is famous for its Thursday-night rock shows where, according to an Eagle DJ, “a melting pot of hipsters, stoners, and rockers mixed with the leather crowd.”

“Everyone was cool,” he said. “Everyone was welcome.”

Still, the bar has become an icon of San Francisco’s queer community.

Kim, who represents the district, presented the Eagle with a letter of commendation recognizing its 30 outstanding years as a “venue, cultural institution, safe haven, and home for the LGBT community” at the April 12 meeting.

“You can’t threaten something as important as this institution,” Campos added.

Wiener, Kim, and California Sen. Mark Leno also praised the Eagle at Sunday’s regularly scheduled beer bust. Leno lauded the efforts of local drag queen/community organizer Anna Conda, and referred to the week’s events as “Stonewall West.”

If anything, the week of demonstrations has drawn San Francisco’s queer community closer. And there is hope that the crowd can stay together in the spot they claimed for themselves. One white-horse possibility is Mark Frazier, owner of a Dallas bar also named the Eagle — and also home to a leather crowd.

Seth Munter of Herth Realty in San Francisco said Frazier has been eyeing the SF Eagle for more than a year, and that he is “interested and able to participate in continuing the Eagle as it has been, either with partners or on his own.”

Reached by phone in Dallas, Frazier told us he’s dreamt of the business since before his own Eagle took flight in 1995. “I think the San Francisco Eagle has a lot of history and a core base of support,” he said. “Any time you go into a business with so much support, it’s going to be successful.”

Frazier stressed that like the SF original, his Eagle has raised substantial sums for charity. Though he acknowledged that the bottom line of all businesses is to make money, “the successful ones continue to give back to the community — and not only monetarily.”

So far, Frazier said he has “exchanged e-mails with the powers that be” and that he is confident the Eagle’s troubles stem from a “communication gap” he could help fix.

Hennis expressed hope about the possibility of working with Frazier in addition to pursuing other options like historical preservation.

Demonstrators have penned more than 100 hand-written letters to the Historic Preservation Commission urging it to assign the Eagle landmark status. Commissioner Alan Martinez said such a process could cost thousands of dollars and would not “grant the right to dictate businesses or tenants.”

Still, he announced publicly that giving the building historic status is not “about turning the city into a museum — it’s about our history.”

Though landmark status protects the physical property, it would also provide legitimacy, an instantaneous way to tell the building’s story and bind the community together. And no matter what happens with the sale of the Eagle, that’s one possibility that flies.

 

Eating green, gay crow

Andrew Lam
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10

Well it looks like our St. Patrick’s Day coverage included more disreprencies than just last week’s nomenclature kerfuffle. As Rob Blackwell, president of the Lesbian and Gay Band Association informed us via email yesterday, the Key West, Queens, and San Francisco St. Paddy’s promenades are not, as we reported in the March 8 “March to the rainbow” article, the only shamrock shuffles in this country that welcome the participation of the LGBT community. In fact, writes Blackwell: 

This year and every year, several member organizations from the Lesbian and Gay Band Association march in similar events across the United States.

For the past 27 years, the Mile High Freedom Band has been participating in the Denver St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The band’s participation is one of the highlights of their annual calendar and a long-standing tradition in Colorado.

In Kansas City, the Mid America Freedom Band participates in the annual Brookside St. Patrick’s Day Parade. And while not included in their hometown parade, the Freedom Trail Band of Boston has marched on several past occasions in the Cambridge St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

While we are proud of the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band and their participation in your local St. Patrick’s Day Parade, your omission of these other important contributions lessens the important work our organization is doing to propagate music, visibility and pride in our national community.

So consider us corrected. In a good way – we’re all for truthiness in the Guardian, but addendums that prove social justice is high-stepping along quicker than we thought really twirl our green bowties. 

 

Business groups defend unsolicited Yellow Pages distribution

Sasha Cuttler
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20
Business groups defend unsolicited Yellow Pages distribution

A smorgasbord of groups including the SF Chamber of Commerce, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and LGBT publishers announced their opposition to the proposed ordinance to stop distributing the print Yellow Pages to everyone who doesn’t specifically request not to receive them.

A press release by the Yellow Pages Association claims that the coalition is “concerned that the move would put hundreds of San Francisco residents out of work, limit small businesses’ marketing, and hurt the city’s fragile economic future.”

However, many of the small businesses the Guardian spoke with in its previous article on the subject repeatedly said the same thing— that the print edition no longer serves as a helpful advertising source.

It basically becomes a battle of opt-out v. opt-in. The YPA and the groups that announced their opposition choose the opt-out system because the Yellow Pages can go on printing and wasting as usual, without consumers doing much about it. The opt-in system eliminates the waste problem while allowing groups, perhaps the ones mentioned above the option to advertise and market in that medium.

The release also cited concerns such as limiting the distribution of directories to “target demographics” (i.e. minorities), the cost on the publishers for those who decide to have home deliveries, and the potential court battle over constitutionality, as the YPA may argue that the print edition is protected under the First Amendment.

One has to wonder how distributing costs will be more if the opt-in option is passed, with ultimately less phone books piling up on in apartment foyers and overflowing recycling bins. Phone books, it appears, that neither consumers, nor businesses, are using.

If the print Yellow Pages is as effective as the YPA wants the public to believe then having an opt-in system shouldn’t be a problem for it, as a lot of businesses and consumers will choose to opt-in and be happy with advertising and utilizing the phone book to those who actually get something out of it, and the opt-in system will also benefit those who are looking to never receive an unsolicited phone book again.

 

 

March to the rainbow

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
March to the rainbow

culture@sfbg.com

IRISH Whether you live in Dallas or settle in SoMa, March is the month when Americans throw out their stale V-Day candy hearts and bring out the greens. Not the ones you smoke, silly, we’re talking St. Patrick’s Day here. Along with the rest of the country, San Franciscans will bite into green bagels, take a swig of something Irish, and head down to the St. Patrick’s Day parade (ours is early this year, Saturday, March 12) to join in the Celtic revelry. But — typical — there’s something about our Irish celebrations that set SF apart — our St. Patrick’s Day parade is one of few in the country to welcome the LGBT community to the party.

While it’s easy to forget over here at the end of the rainbow, most St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the U.S.A. have a strict no-gays policy when it comes to who is allowed to march — which is sad and ironic considering that Irish Americans once faced the same discrimination that their parade associations now seem to be condoning when it comes to gay Americans.

Three cities in the country allow gay groups to participate in their St. Paddy’s parades: Queens, N.Y., SF, and Key West, Fla. (editor’s note: not exactly true, as it turns out — check out our correction for the other bergs around the country to welcome the queer community into the St. Paddy’s fold) The Queens parade was created as an all-inclusive alternative to the New York City parade, which still does not allow LGBT groups to participate despite years of protests — after Irish pride, these demonstrations may be NYC’s second highest profile St. Paddy’s Day tradition. This year the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has refused to participate in the Big Apple’s march on account of the parade’s regrettable policy. She’s not the only one: Boston’s mayor has refused to march in his city’s parade for the past few years.

But here in the country’s queer mecca, we can shake our heads in smug, gay disapproval at the St. Patty’s wars of the rest of the country. SF has a history of hoisting our rainbow shamrock high: this city’s parade is all-inclusive, which the president of SF’s Irish Societies (the organization behind the parade and concurrent Civic Center Plaza festival), Dermot Philpot is glad about.

“We include everybody, and we look for them to be in the parade,” Philpot told us in a recent phone interview. “When we include LGBT groups and individuals in our parade, it shows that [the SF Irish community] is part of a larger community.” Although there are no nominally gay groups marching in the parade, unlike in years past, Philpot says he hopes “[the LGBT community] feels included and that they will be there.”

The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band is one LGBT group that has high-stepped for Irish pride, making its most recent St. Patrick’s Day parade appearance in 2000. Doug Litwin, who is the secretary for the band’s board of directors, says the band had been participating in the parade even before he and his clarinet joined the group in 1985. Although marching on St. Paddy’s Day is a subject of contention for queer groups in other parts of the country, for the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band the parade is about as run-of-the-mill as any. “The bottom line is in San Francisco it’s just not that big of a deal to be openly gay anymore,” says Litwin. “Our band was declared the official band of San Francisco by two different mayors. Some of these parade organizers practically beg us to march.”

Openly gay senator Mark Leno is another familiar face on parade day. Leno is unable to attend the event this year because of an out-of-town speaking engagement, but says he’s been included in the parade as far back as 1998, when he was first elected to office. “I’ve always been proud of the fact that San Francisco’s parade is inclusive. And as long as I have been in office, I’ve always felt welcome in the parade.” Only once has he ever gotten negative reactions from the parade crowds. As Leno recalls, that year he had opted to ride through the parade in a Jaguar. “I heard booing and hissing right as I got up to Second Street.” At issue: red-blooded parade watchers were upset that Leno hadn’t chosen an American car for his cruise through the crowds.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE

Sat/12, 11:30 a.m., free

Begins at Market and Second streets, SF

(415) 203-1027

www.uissf.org

Radio radio!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Radio radio!

arts@sfbg.com

Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio, as the Ramones once quizzed us, ever so long ago? If not that “Video Killed the Radio Star”-era iteration, a leather-clad punky nostalgia for Murray the K and Alan Freed, then do you remember college rock when it became the name of a musical genre in the early 1990s?

I’m trying to make out its faint strains now: a sound nominally dubbed rock, but as wildly eclectic and widely roaming as the winds blowing me over the Bay Bridge on this blustery, rain-streaked afternoon. I’m not imagining it. New, shaken-and-stirred PJ Harvey nudging family-band throwback the Cowsills. Nawlins jazzbos Kid Ory and Jimmy Noone rubbing sonic elbows with winsome Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. Brit electropoppers Fenech-Soler bursting beside Chilean melody-makers Lhasa. The ancient Popul Vuh tangling with the bright-eyed art-rock I Was a King. It’s an average playlist for KALX 90.7 FM, the last-standing free-form sound in San Francisco proper — though it hails from across the bay in Berkeley.

But what about SF’s own, KUSF? A former college radio DJ and assistant music director at the University of Hawaii’s KTUH and the University of Iowa’s KRUI, I’m one of those souls who’s searching for it far too late, even though I benefited from my time in college radio, garnering a major-league musical education simply flipping through the dog-eared LPs and listening to other jocks’ shows. Like so many music fans, I got lost — searching for the signal and repelled by commercial radio’s predictable computerized playlists, cheesy commercials, and blowhard DJs — and found NPR.

Today, I’m testing the signals within — the health of music on SF terra firma radio — by driving around the city, cruising City Hall, bumping through SoMa, and dodging bikes in the Mission. KALX’s signal is strong on the noncommercial side of the dial, alongside the lover’s rock streaming from long-standing KPOO 89.5 and the Strokes-y bounce bounding from San Jose modern rock upstart KSJO 92.3, whose tagline promises, “This is the alternative.” But KSJO’s distinct lack of a DJ voice and seamless emphasis on monochromatic Killers-and-Kings-of-Chemical-Romance tracks quickly bores, slotting it below its rival, Live 105.

Dang. I wind my way up Market to Twin Peaks. Waves of white noise begin to invade a Tim Hardin track. KALX’s signal fades as the billowing, smoky-looking fog rolls majestically down upscale Forest Hill to the middle-class Sunset. But I can hear it — with occasional static — on 19th Avenue, and later, in the Presidio and Richmond.

Throughout, KUSF’s old frequency, 90.3, comes through loud and clear — though now with the sound of KDFC’s light-classical and its penchant for swelling, feel-good woodwinds. The music is so innocuous that to rag on it feels as petty and mean as kicking a docile pup. But I get my share of instrumental wallpaper while fuming on corporate phone trees. It’s infuriating to realize that it supplanted KUSF, the last bastion of free-form radio in SF proper. Where is the free-form rock radio? This is the city that successfully birthed the format in the 1970s, with the freewheeling, bohemia-bred KSAN, and continued the upstart tradition with pirate stations such as SF Liberation Radio. Doesn’t San Francisco deserve its own WFMU or KCRW?

 

FEWER INDEPENDENTS, MORE CONSOLIDATION

Online radio — including forces like Emeryville’s Pandora and San Diego’s Slacker Radio — provides one alternative. This is true for listeners who use the TiVo-like Radio Shark tuner-recorder to rig their car (still the primo place to tune in) to listen to online stations all over the country. The just-launched cloud-based DVR Dar.fm also widens the online option.

Nevertheless, online access isn’t a substitute for free radio air waves. “We get the wrong impression that everyone is wired, and everyone’s online, and no one listens to terrestrial radio,” says radio activist and KFJC DJ Jennifer Waits. “Why then are these companies buying stations for millions of dollars?”

Waits and KALX general manager Sandra Wasson both point to the consolidation that’s overtaken commercial radio since deregulation with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — a trend that has now crept onto the noncommercial end of the dial.

As competition for limited bandwidth accelerates (in San Francisco, this situation is compounded by a hilly topography with limited low-power station coverage) and classical radio stations like KDFC are pushed off the commercial frequencies, universities are being approached by radio brokers. One such entity, Public Radio Capital, was part of the secretive $3.75 million deal to sell KUSF’s transmitter and frequency. Similar moves are occurring throughout the U.S., according to Waits. She cites the case of KTXT, the college radio station at Texas Tech, as akin to KUSF’s situation, while noting Rice and Vanderbilt universities are also exploring station sales.

“The noncommercial band is following in the footsteps of the commercial band in the way of consolidation,” Wasson says, from her paper-crammed but spartan office at KALX, after a tour of the station’s 90,000-strong record library. Wire, Ringo Death Starr, and Mountain emanate from the on-air DJ booth, as students prep the day’s newscast and a volunteer readies a public-affairs show. “Buying and selling noncommercial radio seems to me very much like what used to happen and still does in commercial radio: one company owns a lot stations in a lot of different markets and does different kinds of programming in different markets. Deregulation changed it so that 10-watt stations weren’t protected anymore. There were impacts on commercial and noncommercial sides.”

Lack of foresight leads cash-strapped schools to leap for the quick payout. “Once a school sells a station, it’s unlikely it will be able to buy one back,” says Waits. “Licenses don’t come up for sale and there are limited frequencies. They have an amazing resource and they’re making a decision that isn’t thought-through.”

 

DREAMING IN STEREO

There are still people willing to put imagination — and money — behind their radio dreams. But free-form has come to sound risky after the rise of KSAN and FM radio and the subsequent streamlining and mainstreaming of the format.

Author and journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who once oversaw a KUSF show devoted to KSAN jocks, cites the LGBT-friendly, dance-music-focused KNGY 92.7 as a recent example of investors willing to try out a “restricted” format. “They were a good solid city station that sounded quite loose,” he explains. “But even there they weren’t able to sell much advertising because they were limited to the demographic in San Francisco and they couldn’t make enough to pay their debts.”

Nonetheless, Fong-Torres continues to be approached by radio lovers eager to start a great music station. “I’ve told them what I’m telling you,” he says. “It’s really difficult to acquire a stick in these parts, to grab whatever best signals there are.” This is especially true with USC/KDFC rumored to be on a quest for frequencies south of SF.

“There are some dreamers out there who think about it,” muses Fong-Torres. “A single person who’s willing to bankroll a station just out of the goodness of his or her heart and let people spread good music — someone like Paul Allen, who did KEXP in Seattle.”

 

THE FIGHT TO SAVE KUSF

The University of San Francisco has touted the sale of KUSF’s frequency and the station’s proposed shift to online radio as a teaching opportunity. But the real lesson may be a reminder of the value of the city’s assets — and how easily they can be taken away. “We’re learning how unbelievably sacred bandwidth is on the FM dial,” says Irwin Swirnoff, who was a musical director at the station.

Swirnoff and the Save KUSF campaign hope USF will give the community an opportunity to buy the university’s transmitter, much as Southern Vermont College’s WBTN 1370 AM was purchased by a local nonprofit.

For Swirnoff and many others, listener-generated playlists can’t substitute for the human touch. “DJs get to tell a story through music,” he explains. “They’re able to reach a range of emotions and [speak to] the factors that are in the city at that moment, its nature and politics. Through music, they can create a moving dialogue and story.”

Swirnoff also points to the DJ’s personally selective role during a time of corporate media saturation and tremendous musical production. “In the digital age, the amount of music out in the world can be totally overwhelming,” he says. “A good station can take in all those releases and give you the best garage rock, the best Persian dance music, everything. One DJ can be a curator of 100 years of music and can find a way to bring the listener to a unique place.”

Local music and voices aren’t getting heard on computer-programmed, voice-tracked commercial stations despite inroads of satellite radio into local news. In a world where marketing seems to reign supreme, is there a stronger SF radio brand than the almost 50-year-old KUSF when it comes to sponsoring shows and breaking new bands for the discriminating SF music fan? “People in the San Francisco music community who are in bands and are club owners know college radio is still a vital piece in promoting bands and clubs,” says Waits. “There are small shows that are only getting promotion over college radio.”

“It was a great year for San Francisco music, and we [KUSF] got to blast it the most,” Swirnoff continued. “It’s really sad that right now you can’t turn on terrestrial radio and hear Grass Widow, Sic Alps, or Thee Oh Sees, when it’s some of the best music being made in the city right now.”

 

PIRATE CAT-ASTROPHE — AND THE DRIVE TO KEEP RADIO ALIVE

Aside from KUSF, the only place where you could hear, for instance, minimal Scandinavian electronics and sweater funk regularly on the radio was Pirate Cat. The pirate station was the latest in a long, unruly queue, from Radio Libre to KPBJ, that — as rhapsodized about in Sue Carpenter’s 2004 memoir, 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio — have taken to the air with low-power FM transmitters.

After being shut down by the FCC and fined $10,000 in 2009, Pirate Cat is in limbo, further adrift thanks to a dispute about who owns the station. Daniel “Monkey” Roberts’ sale of Pirate Cat Café in the Mission left loyal volunteers wondering who should even receive their $30-a-month contributions. Roberts shut down the Pirate Cat site and stream on Feb. 20. Since then, some Pirate Cat volunteers have been attempting to launch their own online stream under the moniker PCR Collective Radio.

“We would definitely start our own station,” says Aaron Lazenby, Pirate Cat’s skweee DJ and a Radio Free Santa Cruz vet. “The question now is how to resolve the use of Pirate Cat so we don’t lose momentum and lose our community. We all love it too much to let it fizzle out like that.”

Some people are even willing to take the ride into DIY low-power terrestrial radio. I stumbled over the Bay Area’s latest on a wet, windy Oakland evening at Clarke Commons’ craftsman-y abode. The door was flung open and a colorful, quilt-covered fort/listening station greeted me in the living room. In the dining space, a “magical handcrafted closet studio station” provided ground zero for the micro-micro K-Okay Radio — essentially a computer sporting cute kitchen-style curtains and playing digitized sounds.

A brown, blue, and russet petal-shingled installation looked down on K-Okay’s guests as they took their turn at the mic. And if you were in a several-block radius of the neat-as-a-pin house-under-construction and tuned your boombox to 88.1 FM, you could have caught some indescribably strange sounds and yarns concerning home and migration. I drove away warmed by the friendly mumble of sound art.

Who would have imagined radio as an art installation? Yet it’s just another positive use for a medium that has functioned in myriad helpful ways, whether as a life link for Haitians after the 2010 earthquake or (as on a recent Radio Valencia show) a rock gossip line concerning the Bruise Cruise Fest. As Waits puts it, radio is “about allowing yourself to be taken on a musical journey rather than doing the driving yourself online.” Today it sounds like we need the drive to keep that spirit alive.

Our Weekly Picks: March 9-15

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 9

FILM

San Francisco Ocean Film Festival

Featuring more than 50 fascinating films about the ocean and its importance in nature, along with the role it plays in our society, the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival features programs ranging from documentaries on marine life and environmental science to surfing videos and panel discussions on International Marine Protected Areas. Highlights for this year’s fete include a program dedicated to sharks (and the ongoing debate over the sale of shark fins) and a chance to meet the filmmakers who work among the denizens of the deep at a special opening night benefit fundraiser. (Sean McCourt)

Wed/9–Sun/13

Tonight, 6:30–9:30 p.m., $60 (most festival programs $5–$12)

Theatre 39 and Aquarium of the Bay

Pier 39, SF

(415) 561-6251

www.oceanfilmfest.org

 

MUSIC

Damien Jurado

Despite a start with Sub Pop in the late 1990s and a steady stream of beautiful, literate albums ever since, Damien Jurado has always flown a bit further under the radar than some of his contemporaries. The Seattle-based singer-songwriter recalls echoes of Nick Drake’s sparsely intimate folk and combines it with modern arrangements full of strings, pianos, and clanking percussion, all of which is perfectly displayed on his 2010 LP, Saint Bartlett. The higher registers and slight twang that creep up in Jurado’s voice help bring his character-driven songs to life with a hushed, fragile clarity that can make you want to hang on his every word. (Landon Moblad)

With Viva Voce and Campfire OK

9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

MUSIC

Castanets

Spawned from the quirky, vintage-clad loins of the early-aughts freak-folk movement, Castanets is sort of like psychedelic country without too much acid trippy-ness. Portland, Ore., (by way of San Diego) bandleader Raymond Raposa works with a merry-go-round of accompanists; his latest release, Texas Rose, the Beasts, and the Thaw, is just shy of 39 minutes — though a review posted on label Asthmatic Kitty’s website insists it is “Pink Floyd gone epic.” The review also notes, in case you were worried, that Texas Rose is “not a hippie record.” Even squares can have a ball. (Jen Verzosa)

With Holy Sons and Dolorean

9 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

 

PERFORMANCE

The Islanders

Ever want the words you read to leap off the page and come to life? Word for Word Performing Arts Company makes it happen, and in this book-loving city they are truly at home. Known for staging performances of top-notch literary fiction, Word for Word presents The Islanders, a story about the bonds of friendship as two women reunite for a trip to Ireland, by best-selling author Andrew Sean Greer and directed by Sheila Balter. If you’re feeling fancy, come for Friday’s performance, which includes a champagne reception with the artists and a post-show conversation between Andrew Sean Greer and Daniel Handler (the face of the mysterious Lemony Snicket). (Julie Potter)

Wed/9–Fri/11, 8 p.m.;

Sat/12, 3 and 7 p.m., $15–$40

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

(415) 626-0453

www.zspace.org

 

THURSDAY 10

FILM

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

On its opening night, the 2011 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival premieres “Youth Producing Change,” a collection of short films by teenagers from across the globe who’ve candidly captured their day-to-day experiences. As they document their realities on film, they give a face to important human rights and social issues: child labor, LGBT acceptance, the struggles associated with seeking political asylum, environmental contamination, land and water rights, refugee life, and ethnic persecution. Several of the young artists will be on hand to discuss their experiences. (Verzosa)

March 10–31

Tonight, 7 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

 

MUSIC

Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death and Cave Singers

Though the Murder City Devils haven’t released a new record in almost 10 years and only play the occasional reunion show now and then (and are sorely missed by fans!), most of the band members have gone on to form other outstanding groups,. Two of these come to town tonight on the heels of recent excellent releases. Singer Spencer Moody appears with Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive To Death, whose Some Of Us Are In This Together came out in January, while Derek Fudesco brings the Cave Singers, whose No Witch was released last month. (McCourt)

With Lia Ices

8 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

PERFORMANCE

Atlacualto (The Ceasing of Water)

José Navarrete and Violeta Luna, SF artists originally from Mexico City, summon the figures of the Aztec god and goddess of water for their multimedia performance, Atlacualto (The Ceasing of Water), which sheds light on the serious ecological issues of water rights and shortages. Highlighting the roles of water as sacred and as a commodity, Navarrete and Luna shift between striking ritualistic tableaus and humorous yet compelling scenes including an overzealous street vendor. The work combines contemporary dance, performance art, new music, visual art installation and video, stirring thought about this life-sustaining substance in the modern world. Water anyone? (Potter)

Thurs/10–Sat/12, 8 p.m., $25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

FRIDAY 11

DANCE

13th Floor Dance Theater

If you like weird, Jenny McAllister is your woman. I mean, would you want to make a piece about the fun of being hit by lightening several times? Even the extreme weather nuts run for cover when Zeus starts throwing his thunderbolts. But then McAllister is not exactly your workaday choreographer: she has shared her skewed — and at times hilariously funny — perspective on weddings, Christmas, and everything that creeps, crawls, and walks. McAllister was half of Huckabay McAllister Dance for 15 years; last summer she started her own company, the 13th Floor Dance Theater. The current program, a collaboration with writer Kim Green and visual designer Michael Oesch, presents two works: Lighting Strikes Anonymous and Under the (Periodic) Table. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/11–Thurs/13, 8 p.m., $15–$18

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org

 

EVENT

Star Trek Convention

Bay Area Trekkers (Don’t call them “Trekkies!”) should set their coordinates for San Francisco this weekend as an official Star Trek convention takes over the Airport Hyatt. Joining them will be two of the most esteemed names in the Trek universe — Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) and Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) — make appearances, chatting on stage about their careers and meeting with fans. Other notables set to participate include Rene Auberjonois (Odo), Bobby Clarke (the Gorn), and Grace Lee Whitney (Yoeman Janice Rand). Fans also will be able to peruse a galaxy of vendors and participate in seminars, workshops, and parties. Live long and prosper! (McCourt)

Fri/11–Sun/13, times and prices vary (general admission, $20–$40)

Hyatt Regency

San Francisco International Airport

1333 Bayshore, Burlingame

www.creationent.com

 

MUSIC

Pogo

Electronic music has an obvious relationship with technology, but South African Nick Bertke, a.k.a. Pogo, is indebted to one specific medium, YouTube. Pogo first gained attention with a video-based on Alice in Wonderland, which mined the 1951 Disney classic for new sounds, chords, and lyrics to create hypnotically familiar original music. The formula led to further sanctioned work from studios including Pixar. But if that all sounds a little too twee princess, Pogo’s selections surprise, taking musical inspiration from films as wide-ranging as The Terminator (1984) and The Apartment (1960). As previewed in “Gardyn,” a video recorded in his mum’s flower patch, Pogo hopes to extend the project to sample the world. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Lynx

9 p.m., $16

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

SATURDAY 12

MUSIC

Red Fang

Rock and roll! Hoochie coo! Truck on out and spread the news: Three bands, spawned from two cities of skinny-jeaned, tatted-up, new-boho meccas. One stage. My guess is Portland, Ore.’s, Danava, with its harmonized fuzz and searing synth, will flow seamlessly from the shreddy, Dixie-prone assault of Lecherous Gaze, an Oakland band boasting members of the now-defunct Annihilation Time and boldly claiming to embody “the future of rock and roll.” With tones of Black Flag, Thin Lizzy, and Queens of the Stone Age, can we up the rock ante any further? Yep: headliners Red Fang, also hailing from Portlandia, culminate a rawk-ous, piss-beer soaked night. Lordy mama, light my fuse. (Kat Renz)

With Danava and Lecherous Gaze

10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

DANCE

“Dance Repertory 2011 Showcase”

As a professional dancer and educator, Donnette Heath became painfully aware of the gap between student dancer-choreographers and the professional world. So for the last 11 years, her dRep company has offered young artists performance opportunities through the yearly Vision Series Dance Festival. Participants are chosen on a first-come, first-served basis, and the festival has attracted participants from Northern California high schools, private studios, and colleges from as far as Modesto. What was initially a modest event has become an intriguing showcase for those interested in what the next generation is up to. Now Heath is taking the next step by putting four of these high-caliber student groups — chosen by adjudication — on the same stage with professionals such as Kunst-Stoff. (Felciano)

8 p.m., $15–$20

Cowell Theater

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 345-7575

www.fortmason.org

 

MUSIC

Slough Feg

Cultivating a vaudevillian approach that knows no equal or analog in the world of metal, Slough Feg is a San Francisco treasure. Though the strength of its recent album Animal Spirits has seen the band’s profile rise toward a more deserved apex, you can still catch the quartet in the close confines of the Hemlock Tavern, where the inimitable Mike Scalzi — the Lord Weird Slough Feg Himself — will be within spitting distance. The promised presence of incendiary Washingtonian NWOBHM troupe Christian Mistress and Portland, Ore., doom merchants Witch Mountain just adds to the already burgeoning excitement. (Ben Richardson)

With Christian Mistress and Witch Mountain

9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

 

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Messages to the next police chief

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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2

While researching Tasers in the wake of last week’s police commission hearing, I came upon an online series published while the city of San Jose was considering candidates for police chief. Created by Silicon Valley De-Bug as part of an effort with San Jose’s Coalition for Justice and Accountability, the project featured the messages of people who wished to share their personal stories with the next top cop. Each week leading up to the selection of the new chief, the group posted another “Message to the Next Police Chief.”

One video featured Art Calderon, whose 68-year old father was beaten by San Jose police, addressing how officers could improve their relationship with the Latino community. A young homeless person weighed in on their interactions with the police. Another contributor wrote that he was bipolar and wanted the next chief to train officers to be sensitive to people with mental-health issues, since he was slammed against a squad car once while delusional.

Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley De-Bug, told the Guardian that the project also included surveying 3,000 community members in three different languages, and organizing seven community forums to generate input from communities of color on what qualities and characteristics they hoped to see in the next chief. When the former chief retired, “We knew for sure that we were standing at this really historic moment,” Jayadev said. “We wanted to get as much community input as possible.” The coalition was motivated to improve relations between police and communities of color in San Jose amid a history of fatal officer-involved shootings, accidental deaths following deployment of Tasers, and disturbing accounts of excessive use of force, particularly against young people of color.

The group focused their questions on three “hot-button issues,” Jayadev said, including use of force, racial profiling, and concern surrounding police cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Based on a review of the survey responses, the coalition generated a list of six tenets they hoped would guide the selection process for the new police chief.

San Jose Police Chief Chris Moore, who was sworn in last week, wasn’t DeBug’s first choice, Jayadev said. However, Moore has met with the Coalition for Justice and Accountability and plans to sit down with them a second time. Although the community lacked decision-making power, Jayadev noted, thanks to De-Bug’s project “there’s going to be clarity on what the community wants.”

Meanwhile, San Francisco is undergoing its own process of selecting a new police chief, and the San Francisco Police Commission is expected to submit the names of up to three applicants to Mayor Ed Lee by March 15. The process is overshadowed by the mayor’s race, since a newly elected mayor could opt to initiate a new candidate search if he or she isn’t satisfied with Lee’s pick.

That uncertainty hasn’t discouraged the 75 hopefuls who reportedly submitted applications. Police Commission Secretary Lt. Tim Falvey told the Guardian that the number of candidates under consideration was recently whittled down to 25, but he declined to say how many candidates were to be interviewed by commissioners. Nor would he say when the interviews were taking place, or where they were being held.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Commission held three community meetings in February to garner community input on the selection of the next chief, with three commissioners present at each forum. Asked if there were any notes, recordings, or other documentation of those meetings available, Falvey said nothing like that was required since they weren’t official commission meetings. “I don’t know if [commissioners] just took mental notes, or maybe they took notes for themselves, but that’s not something I have here,” he said.

Falvey said the turnout ranged from 25 to 45 people at the three meetings, which were held at the United Irish Cultural Center on 45th Avenue, the Southeast Community Facility in the Bayview, and the San Francisco LGBT Center in the Castro. “A lot of people wanted a track record in community policing,” Falvey noted when asked what points came up repeatedly during the community forums. Another common issue was improved relations with the nightlife and entertainment industry, he said.

At the end of the day, the choice lies with the police commissioners — four of whom were appointees of former Mayor Gavin Newsom — and of course, Mayor Lee.

Falvey said that candidates had expressed concern that they did not want their names publicized, and that every effort was being made to keep the applicants’ identities secret until Mayor Lee makes his final announcement.

What do San Francisco community members want in a new police chief? And in the end, how much will their opinions matter?

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 2

Day of Action for public education

Protest Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget cuts to public higher education with a picnic, musical performance, teach-in, and rally. Check the website for a complete schedule of events and to sign up if you would like to perform or teach a class.

12 p.m.–12 a.m., free

UC Berkeley Memorial Glade

ca.defendpubliceducation.org

Facebook: Day for action for public education

 

FRIDAY 4

Danny Glover on health and wealth

Actor and humanitarian Danny Glover comes to the Bayview to talk about community health and prosperity, discussing ways to bring about positive changes in the community. Glover will also discuss his collaboration with the Bayview Rotary Club to provide scholarships to benefit Bayview-Hunter’s Point college-bound youth.

5 p.m., $40–$50

San Francisco City College

Alex L. Pitcher Jr. Community Room

1800 Oakdale, SF

www.sfbayviewrotary.org

 

SATURDAY 5

International Women’s Day

Join the Reggae Gyals at a benefit for the Family Violence Law Center of Alameda County, featuring live performances by Queen Makedah , Sistah Beauty, Djs and dance crews, a spoken word competition, and much more.

10 p.m.–2 a.m., $10

Pier 23 Cafe

The Embarcadero, SF

www.reggaegyals.com

 

SUNDAY 6

Discussion with Tony Serra and Paulette Frankl

Join KPFA and author/illustrator Paulette Frankl for a discussion of her book Lust for Justice: The Radical Life and Law of Tony Serra. Frankl spent 12 years following Serra from courtroom to courtroom as he defended the likes of Black Panther Huey Newton, the Hell’s Angels, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and more to bring you this definitive account of an antiestablishment hero and legal legend.

7:30 p.m., $12–$15

Berkeley Hillside Club

2286 Cedar, Berk.

(800) 838-3006

www.kpfa.org/events

www.brownpapertickets.org

 

MONDAY 7

Russia’s foremost LGBT activist

To bring to light the violence and government oppression faced by the Russian LGBT community and to promote Moscow’s Pride Parade, Nikolai Alekseev will talk about the efforts of major Russian religious and political parties to quell the Pride Parade, the European Court ruling that the Russian government committed crimes to its LGBT community, and more.

5:30–7:30 p.m., free

San Francisco LGBT Center

1800 Market, SF

www.gayliberation.net

 

TUESDAY 8

Mothers march to end poverty

Mothers in cities will gathering all over the world today to demand the end of poverty, war, oversees occupations, the criminalization of communities of color, and other global issues. San Francisco’s march — inclusive to all — begins at the 16th Street BART Station and stops at major corporate banks along the way. See the website for updates on the route.

4:30 p.m., free

16th and Mission BART Station, SF

www.globalwomenstrike.net

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

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