Local

Will shutting down two businesses really ‘clean up’ the Tenderloin?

Sasha Cuttler
-
21

It was noon on the Jan. 30 when I broke the news to 24-year-old Amer Mousa that the City of San Francisco was filing a civil suit to shut down Walid Abdulrahman, his friend and owner of the Razan Deli on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin.

Two hours earlier, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr held a press conference out the front of the Azaal Market on the corner of Leavenworth and Turk streets in the Tenderloin to announce the dual lawsuits against the markets owners, Jaber A. Algahim and Walid Abdulrahman, for maintaining a public nuisance. Our efforts to get comments from Algahim and Abdulrahman were not successful, but Mousa spoke freely about the situation.

The City’s complaint says the deli is a safe haven for criminal activity and that Abdulrahman either allows it to continue unabated or is actively involved himself. It is not hard to understand the logic behind the suit; shut down problem businesses and the neighborhood will heal. But in a City with a history of going after small businesses as if they are the root cause of all criminality, the question remains about whether this is really about helping the neighborhood or about being seen to help.

Abdulrahman does not speak English well, so it was Mousa who answered the phone. When first asked about the store’s involvement in illicit activity, Mousa became flustered, confused, and denied any knowledge of drug activity within the store. “Maybe outside, in the neighborhood, but I wouldn’t risk my job like that,” he said at the time.

Both Abdulrahman and Mousa are from Jordan. Abdulrahman is a close friend of Mousa’s father, so close Mousa refers to him as “uncle.” Mousa came to the U.S. on a greencard in 2009 and has been studying to be a nurse. He met his future wife in school and they married in 2010. Every day he heads into San Francisco from Daly City to work in deli from 10pm until 6am to support his young family.

The Razan Deli is a pokey little deli open 16 hours a day that does not sell alcohol and keeps little stacked on the shelves. It caters for the homeless and street population with candy, burritos, and cheap pre-made frozen meals. Bigger items are left to liquor-selling competitors across the road whose owners refuse to say anything about what happens outside their doors, lest some doped-up gang member decide to make an example of them. When asked, they just stare at the ceiling and say they put their faith in God.

Outside, Ellis Street is quiet, at least during the day, with the exception of a woman in a wheelchair and another leaning against a wall who mumbles something about robbery and cackles to herself. Stopping at any intersection along Turk Street invariably means being approached by dealers. The greatest concentration stand just outside the Azaal Market while they chatter constantly and offer passers-by narcotics with incomprehensible street names.

The lawsuit was the result of a two-year undercover operation by the SFPD that claimed to have found evidence of a “pattern of illegal activity” at each business. The complaint and police statements claim the deli acted as a safe-haven and intermediary for drug dealing and buys stolen goods for resale. To build the case, undercover officers visited a local Walgreen’s and asked the business to donate items before trying to re-sell the product to businesses in the Tenderloin, while slipping in the fact that they were stolen goods.

Police statements say Abdulrahman bought stolen goods and helped facilitate undercover officers buying drugs from the dealers loitering outside the shop. Mousa does not deny that Abdulrahman took the bait on the two occasions he was present. “Look, we’re not angels,” he says. “When the undercover police came, they gave us razors, you know like Gillette, and my uncle bought some stolen merchandise for personal use. He didn’t buy all, he just bought some.”

If true, that would be a very different accusation than the one being made by the city in its civil suit, which has asked the court to close the business and impose an initial penalty of $25,000, additional penalties of $2,500 for “each act of unlawful business practice” and costs for the suit and investigation. In a criminal prosecution, Abdulrahman might receive up to a year in jail for receiving stolen goods of around $200 in value and a separate charge for being an accessory to the sale of a small quantity illicit substances. That is, assuming he is guilty of everything the police say he is. And they have evidence.

Yet none of that matters. Abdulrahman cannot afford an attorney; he will appear self-represented. Either he will be sent into bankruptcy or he will be run out of business. This legal fight seems lopsided, to say the least.

The City of San Francisco has a history of going after small liquor shops and markets in the Tenderloin and the Mission on a crusade to shut down criminal “safe-havens” or “magnets of drug dealing,” as Matt Dorsey, media liaison for the City Attorney’s Office, framed it during a phone conversation about the city’s tactics in choosing to bring a civil claim against Abdulrahman. “Civil cases have lower standard of evidence. Effectively we’re going to try and shut the business down. As they say, the City’s Attorney tries to take their money. The District Attorney puts people in jail,” he said.

The theory goes that shutting down such places will force the criminal element out, leave them nowhere to go and ultimately make the neighborhood a safer place. Randy Shaw, Director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) and editor of BeyondChron, has endorsed this view and has said he “cheered” the litigation.

Shaw’s hostility for the Azaal Market, alternatively known as the Barah Market, was plain. His tone indicated the market’s continued existence was a personal slight. “We sued the Maryland and the Barah markets in the 90’s and the Maryland hasn’t been a problem since,” said Shaw, a housing right attorney turned Tenderloin political power broker. Shaw said he welcomes any city efforts to try to clean up the neighborhood. But it’s hard to see how this action will make much difference, particularly given the neighborhood’s open criminality.

“I called the police more than seven or eight times, from the cell phone,” Mousa said. “What did they do? Nothing. They know who the drug dealers are. There’s just two to four drug dealers on the whole block. Most of the others just work for them. If police don’t come and do their job, what am I supposed to do? Start shooting? … If I keep calling the police I’m going to get shot. All I can do is tell them to get outside the store. Go sell your shit outside the store.”

Abdulrahman’s shop will close, that seems like the likely outcome. Once the shutters are drawn, the City Attorney and the Chief of Police will hold another press conference and claim a great victory in their fight to “clean up the neighborhood” in the name of “families and the elderly.” It will sound good on television, and read well in the papers. Everyone will clap and agree that the streets are a safer place for it, but it seems like a huge stretch of imagination to blame the Tenderloin’s problems on these two small businesses.

“I’m a full time student, I have a wife, I’m not living by myself, I cannot live by myself or with some buddies, I need to have a home. After the store closes, what’s going to happen to me? There are no jobs right now. Even if I get a full-time job, how much am I going to make?” Mousa says. “This is just going to destroy two families, two households. What’s going to happen? Nothing’s going to change. There are still going to be drug dealers outside… This neighborhood is broken. It was broken when we got here, it will be broken when we leave.”

Gascon and mayoral corruption

-
1

EDITORIAL The indictments of two executives of an airport shuttle company on charges of laundering campaign money are, in themselves, a rarity and something to celebrate: the district attorney of San Francisco is actually attempting to enforce the laws against political corruption. That’s unusual in this city, and worthy of note.

But at this point, the entire sum total of prosecutions involving the scandal-ridden campaign of Mayor Ed Lee amounts to a pair of cases against people who made what appear to be illegal contributions. As of today, the message that’s being sent is that nobody in the Lee campaign did anything wrong. And that seems a little bit curious.

Lee’s late entry into the race — after he’d promised for months not to run — and his refusal to abide by the rules of public financing forced his supporters to raise a large amount of money very quickly. There were so-called independent expenditure committees collecting donations and running parallel campaigns that, by law, should have been entirely distinct from Lee and his official effort. We’ve always been dubious about the supposed lack of coordination.

Then there were the well-documented instances of irregularities serious enough that every other candidate in the race asked for state and federal monitors to watch the election. Several eyewitnesses told local reporters that they saw volunteers for one of the supposedly independent groups filling out absentee ballots for voters, using a special template that ensured the votes would go for Lee. Some said they saw ballots being collected at a makeshift voting booth. In a video provided by the campaign of State Sen. Leland Yee, it appears that volunteers were both filling out ballots and placing them in bags — both clear violations of law.

Gascon’s announced investigations of all the allegations — but more than three months later, nothing has come of it. His office won’t confirm or deny whether investigations are ongoing or whether any further indictments may be forthcoming. But at the Chinese New Year Parade, Chinatown powerbroker and Lee ally Rose Pak announced that she had heard Gascon was investigating her.

There’s been plenty of time to collect evidence, and Gascon has a responsibility to let the public know, as quickly as possible, what’s happened to the rest of the allegations. If everyone in the Lee campaign is really innocent, and none of the independent groups supporting the mayor did anything wrong, he should say that, and present the evidence.

It doesn’t help Lee, the city, or the integrity of the voting process to have these cases drag out. Gascon needs to conclude them, expeditiously.

Justin Vivian Bond talks Occupy Wall Street, the power of language, and the politics behind the music

-
1

When Justin Vivian Bond was a little kid, v (more about that unique pronoun below) confidently wore Iced Watermelon lipstick to school and, inspired by feminist movements of the time, brandished a sign reading “Kids Lib!” Adults told the young Mx. Bond that these things were wrong, but v knew how right they felt, and represents for queer pride and radical poltics to this day. The writer, singer and activist is best known for v’s role as Kiki DuRane in Kiki and Herb, a drag cabaret show with partner Kenny Mellman. The show started in San Francisco and made it to Broadway, and was nominated for a 2007 Tony award. V’s memoir Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels was released this year (wherein Bond tells the lipstick story and a lot more about growing up gender-free). Bond is still touring and will be back in San Francisco Feb. 23, performing from v’s new album, Dendrophile. I talked with v about the upcoming concert, v’s recent performance at Occupy Wall Street, and how music can bring people together.

SFBG What can people expect at your upcoming concert?

JVB I’m going to be performing songs from Dendrophile. I did my release concert when I was in the Bay Area in the spring. So some songs from that, some others songs, and some monologues about contemporary political observations. Also– 20 years ago I married a local performer by the name of Leigh Crow, aka Elvis Herselvis, and she and her band the Whoa Nellies are going to be opening. So it’s going to be an anniversary celebration.

SFBG You performed at Occupy Wall Street. What was that like?

JVB It was really awesome. I performed for the Trans-form the Occupation rally Nov. 13. It was a lot of trans activists talking about trans issues and establishing a presence of trans people within the revolution. It was so inspiring, empowering and exciting for me to perform my song on the Peoples’ Mic. The song, New Economy, is about the current obsession with whether people have enough and who has it. It was such a great experience.

Of course, the next day the police came in and closed Zuccoti park down. In my show I joked that once the queers and the trans people started making their presence known the police they realized they’d better shut it down. They were probably having flash backs to the ACT UP and Queer Nation days!

SFBG Do you think there has been a good presence of queer and trans issues in the Occupy movement?

JVB There certainly was that day. We didn’t get to see how that manifested within the community at the park. But I do feel that there are a lot of queer and trans people involved in raising awareness about social and economic disparities within our culture, so I think that its an inevitability that the subjects are going to be part of the Occupy conversation. Because trans people are constantly being oppressed and harassed.

SFBG How do you think music can help bring that kind of political awareness?

JVB I think that music is a way of bringing people together, especially people that may not realize how much they have in common, or may not have an excuse to be in the same space. If there’s an artist who starts voicing thoughts, ideas, and political sentiments, that’s one person making a statement, and people all of a sudden find themselves in a room with like-minded people. Community is formed. That community can become a larger voice, and that’s a powerful way of affecting the culture. Historically, music and artists have been a rallying potent for great and powerful change.

SFBG What’s your most powerful political song?

JVB Probably New Economy, this song that I did at occupy Wall Street . There’s also my cover of 22nd Century, which was written by Exuma, whose a Bahamian voodoo priest and spiritual revolutionary writer. That one really seems to get people going.

 

SFBG What inspired New Economy?

JVB I wrote it when the stock market was collapsing and everybody was freaking out. People were losing their 401k plans or health insurance. As an artist, I’ve never had those things. So seeing people freaking about something I’m so used to dealing with was kind of comforting. It was like, we are all going to be on a similar level for a while and try to figure out how to solve peoples problems. The song is about our commonality. The final line is “take what you need and give a little back,” because I believe there is enough out there for everybody.

SFBG You’ve been involved with Radical Faeries, a group that celebrates queer sexuality, connection with the earth, and community. Have you been involved recently, and what does it mean to you?
 

JVB I haven’t been to a Faerie Gathering since the fall, but yes, I’m still involved. Its about community, and its about finding alternative economies, and ways of sharing and supporting each other on a very human, person-to-person level. That’s as opposed to having your reality dictated by the mass media and corporations.

SFBG Last year, you announced your official pronoun: V. You also use the honorific Mx. The move raised awareness for genderqueer and non-gender-conforming people, and also created backlash. It’s been a year now—how are you feeling about your pronoun decision?

JVB It’s been really great for me. Of course there’s frustration with people who somehow feel like they know me or my trip better than I do. But in general its been really liberating. And on a social level, I’ve met a lot of wonderful people who are going through similar experiences, that are not interested in being part of a fundamentalist or gender-fascist paradigm. So it’s nice to meet other people who feel this same way, and amazing to find out how many of those people there are out there.

SFBG I know some writers don’t like using gender-neutral pronouns (some commonly-used pronouns that don’t signify a particular gender include ze and they.) But as a writer who has used the incorrect pronoun for somebody in the past, then edited the piece, I feel– it’s not that hard to respect how people identify!

JVB I’ve been shocked to find out how heavily invested some writers are are in what they’re used to. For people that make their living using words, I’m almost shocked at how inflexible they can be. As for me, I love language and the power of it. The conversation that the pronoun provokes has been a great conversation to have with so many people. There have been times when people have done that same thing with me, then they fix it online and apologize, so that’s a nice thing.

SFBG Well thank you, and we’re excited for your concert.

JVB It’s going to be really fine show. It’s going to be a celebration, and I’m looking forward to it.

Localized Appreesh: Churches

Tony Robles
-
1
Localized Appreesh: Churches

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.
 
There’s a whole lot of religious imagery going on within new local guitar-and-drums superduo Churches. Most vivid, beyond the obvious, is the guilty, desperate strain in mesmerizing first single, “Save Me,” and its jittery remixes. The track and remixes (available on Bandcamp) are both pleading and sensual, evoking the classic good/evil ecstasy of sacred customs.

Musically, the band – made up of Caleb Nichols (Grand Lake, Port O’Brien) and Pat Spurgeon (Rogue Wave) – arouses memories of ’90s bedroom angst; “Save Me,” recorded at Tiny Telephone, utilizes this vibe and mixes it with distorted pop, repetitive calls, and lightly-employed synth. Second single “Feel Alright,” released today, follows the garage trail deeper, occasionally evoking an early Nirvana-lite.

What better way to showcase an auspicious local act than with a slot during Noise Pop? Churches plays Bottom of the Hill this week with Fresh & Onlys. But first, they gave us the rundown on a new life as Churches.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AH9XkyhkQE

Year and location of origin: September 2011. San Francisco and Oakland. Tiny Telephone and Harlan Street.

Band name origin: I came up with the name while on tour with WATERS (I was playing bass with them). I remember that Van and Niko and I were talking about what my next music thing should be and we came up with the idea for Churches, which is the English translation of my middle name, Kirke, but plural.

Band motto: Aequalis opus aequalis stipendium.

Description of sound in 10 words or less: Re-experience teen angst through distortion and chorus plus loud drums.

Instrumentation: Guitar, Singing, Drums + (a little) Bass and Moog.

Most recent release:  “Feel Alright”  – a self-released single, out today, Feb. 21.

Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Lots of great venues, lots of great musicians and studios.

Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Living here can be expensive. Being a musician can be expensive. Many musicians are poor. So, the math is against some of us.

First album ever purchased: Michael Jackson Dangerous.

Most recent album purchased/borrowed from the Web: Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory.

Favorite local eatery and dish: Super Duper on Market and Castro.  Best burger in the WORLD.

Noise Pop: Churches
With Fresh and Onlys, Talkdemonic, Disappears
Wed/22, 8 p.m., $12
Bottom of the Hill
www.bottomofthehill.com

This old house

-
1
This old house

HAIRY EYEBALL Aside from its prime Cow Hollow location, the modest single floor, above-garage residence at 3020 Laguna Street is a largely unremarkable piece of real estate. Over its 150-year existence it has served as a home to people now forgotten, any relations of its last known occupants having cut all ties to this particular place. What’s left is the building itself, which, judging from its dingy stucco exterior and the tidy beaver dam of exposed lath covering what had been a bay window, looks as if it has an imminent appointment with the wrecking ball.

The house is indeed slated for demolition due to structural instability. But the lath-work exterior is in fact one of nine installations built in, on, and outside the house for Highlight Gallery’s inaugural site-specific project “3020 Laguna Street in Exitum.”

3020 Laguna in 2009:

Real estate developer and Highlight Gallery founder-director Amir Mortazavi, along with co-curator David Kasprzak gave each participating artist the stipulation that, aside from fasteners, they could only use materials sourced from the house itself. The resulting pieces turn the space inside out, making visible the domicile’s history as well as its bones, while also bringing in new bodies to reside — however temporarily — within its walls. In short, 3020 Laguna Street in Exitum returns something of the “home” to this house in its final days.

Starting from the outside, Randy Colosky’s “Quantum Entanglement of the Carpenters Union Local,” a clean line cut into the building’s stucco exterior with two rotary saw blades protruding from either end, is a visual chicken-egg puzzle. The blades appear as if they were cutting their way out or had been simply left there mid-job.

Upon entering a narrow hallway, one is immediately drawn into the front room on the right where Chris Fraser’s “Outline” — the aforementioned beaver dam — can be properly experienced. Fraser stripped the exterior wall to its studs and lath, producing a Venetian blind-style grating that turns the brightly whitewashed walls into a canvas for shadow and sunlight to play off.

When I visited the site late on a sunny afternoon, visitors understandably congregated near “Outline.” It is a serene, almost patio-like space in which the outside world, still so near, is transformed into flickering bands of movement. Afternoon shadows create moiré patterns of interference on the walls.

The other focal point was Andy Vogt’s “Drawn Out,” perhaps the most technically involved and architecturally ambitious installation aside from Fraser’s. Vogt cut a diagonal path into the floorboards between the kitchen entrance and what had been a window, excavating it as a single piece. He then decreased the height of the floor joists below the cut and put the floor back in place, creating a ramp to nowhere that draws the eye from the kitchen down to the where the wall had been to a patch of scrubby bamboo that has taken root in the crevice between the house and the neighbors’.

Not all the interventions are as heavy on reconstruction as Fraser’s and Vogt’s. For “Nothing to No Thing” Jesse Schlesinger camped out in what was the bedroom for 28 days, from new moon to new moon, using elements from the room—mainly a baseboard and door trim — to create a bed frame and stools, and invited visitors to join him for tea and coffee. Aside from the furniture itself, the only traces of these visits are the used tea leaves and coffee filters, a guest log, and, in a decidedly homey touch, the height of each guest recorded on the doorframe.

Christine M. Peterson’s “Shift (Plane),” which transforms a large storage area off of the kitchen by detaching and radially shifting the facade of closet doors that covered one wall, and Yulia Pinkusevich’s “Data Mass Projection,” a basement installation created out of telephone and data wires found throughout the house that have been stripped and hung to resemble a light spectrometer, are formally pleasing yet don’t quite reveal the space anew.

If this project can said to be haunted, it is by the ghost of Gordon Matta-Clark, the 1970s New York-based artist and architect best known for those works in which he dissected existing buildings, often slicing into and opening them up, or engaged with marginal and neglected urban spaces he termed “nonsites.”

I’m not sure if 3020 Laguna, or if any piece of marketable property in our 7×7 real estate bubble, would qualify as the latter. Matta-Clark was working at a time when New York City developers were throwing money into large corporate construction projects that sought to bulldoze and build over much of the Big Apple’s infrastructural rot and many Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. His pieces at both urban and suburban sites were informed by — and drew attention to — this shifting architectural landscape. Despite the elegiac overtures of some the pieces, the stakes at 3020 in Exitum feel smaller even if the project is engaging as a series of formal experiments in spatial perception.

3020 LAGUNA STREET IN EXITUM

3020 Laguna, SF

Sat/18 and Sat/25, 2 p.m.-7 p.m.

(415) 529-1221

www.highlightgallery.com/project

 

Conversation on Golden Gate Park concerts continues

-
11

“I call for this hearing each year,” said District 1 Supervisor Eric Mar. The focus of the hearing was large events in Golden Gate Park, and each year, hundreds of San Franciscans have something to say about it.

At the Land Use Committee meeting Feb. 13, the room was packed with concert industry representatives, local artists, police officers, a couple dozen members of the Carpenters In Action from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 22, and neighbors. Lots and lots of neighbors.

Many of the Richmond and Sunset residents who spoke are furious with the many large concerts that take place in Golden Gate Park throughout the year, including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Alice’s Summerthing, Outside Lands, and Power to the Peaceful.

They spoke of unbearable noise, impossible parking, and crime spilling over from the event crowds. One man said that during Outside Lands, his house shakes so much that he feels “trapped inside an acoustic guitar for three days straight.”

The Recreation and Parks Department has implemented several measures addressing these ongoing concerns since the first annual hearing on this topic in 2009. Dana Ketchum and Nick Kinsey represented the department at the hearing, speaking in detail of tightened permitting measures, increased outreach to the community about upcoming events, and a hotline set up so neighbors can call in noise complaints more efficiently during large concerts and performances.

Ketchum said that noise complaints have resulted more than once in Rec and Parks representatives threatening to pull the plug on amplified sound in the park if partiers don’t turn it down. One neighbor called the hotline, “more useless than yesterday’s spit.”

Proponents of the events, too, were passionate.

Local hip hop artist Tom Shimura, aka Lyrics Born spoke on the importance of the events to the San Francisco music scene. Shimura praised how the Outside Lands lineup is 20 percent local artists.

“These festivals launch careers and create Bay Area success stories,” said Shimura.

“I just wanted to say that I’m a big fan,” said Supervisor Mar.

Many supporters cited a recently released San Francisco State University Study, which finds that Outside Lands generates “more than $60 million for the San Francisco economy,” and even claims the festival creates “683 full-time equivalent jobs” in the city.

Some Richmond residents demanded that all the festivals be cancelled, and, barring that, that they be issued the personal cell phone numbers of the Rec and Parks staff.

“It’s clear everyone supports these events,” said Supervisor Mar at the hearing’s conclusion.

“It’s a matter of collaboration.”

In the now

-
2
In the now

DANCE On the opening night of its eighth year, the three-weekend “Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now” deserved its name. The quality of the choreography and the confident performances more than confirmed that BCF is a celebration of excellent contemporary African American choreography. Four out of the five works starred as fine world premieres by local artists. They were stylistically about as diverse as you would want, but this was an evening to rejoice. The Feb. 10 audience at Oakland’s Laney College more than agreed.

Reginald Ray-Savage’s Savage Jazz Dance Company looked better than it has in a long time. For Friday, February 10 he reached for an idiosyncratic collage of scores. Except for the finale, there seemed to be little jazz; still, the selections made sense, starting with a passage of pizzicato violins that played as Lavante Cervantes ceremoniously walked across the stage. But almost immediately, that calm exploded into intense, relentlessly shifting encounters among six dancers.

Though tightly choreographed individually, the passages followed each other without internal logic. Transitions were sublimated into the commitment and clarity of individual moments — fierce turns, huge extensions, and traveling leaps. Every phrase had to stand on its own.

One of Ray-Savage’s gifts is setting in relief individual talents: Melissa Schumann’s tearing into space, Jarrod Mayo’s floating elevations and whiplash turns. Two duets showcased the magisterial Alison Hurley. With Evan Kharazzi, Hurley assertively reversed dance’s traditional male-female relationships; her dramatic-lyrical encounter with Mayo brought out a quasi-maternal quality. Friday‘s only misstep was to bring on Suman Wilson at the very end. Why, if at all, only then?

With a largely changed cast and on a different stage, Robert Moses’ 2008 Approaching Thought looked like new. The current crop of dancers performed the whirlwind choreography clearly and assertively. To see Katherine Wells and Crystaldawn Bell — both of them reed-thin, long-limbed and fierce — next to each other was breathtaking. I still don’t know what the title means, but Moses must have had something in mind along the lines of contrarian relationships, since he built the work around duets.

Approaching is packed with movement ideas — unisons that splinter, duets that evaporate; a hip-hop gesture here, a ballet turn there. People send each other packing, and they embrace. Norma Fong was a one-woman threat to anything in her way; no wonder she sent a cowering Wells into the wings.

Susana Arenas Pedroso’s new version of Yemaya, Ocean Mother, with live music, including her as the lead singer, evoked the give and take of the ocean with mesmerizing intensity. Supported by seven fellow dancers, Regina Tolbert’s Yemaya rolled her shoulders and swayed her skirts, gathering and releasing energy. Playful one moment and ferocious the next, she kept joining a larger whole but also metamorphosed out of it.

Kendra Kimbrough Barnes showed an excerpt of In the meantime. Performed by six women, of divergent physical make-ups and approaches to dance, the work appeared to be the next step in what Barnes has explored in earlier pieces: the internal and external life of African American woman, and by extension other wives, mothers, matriarchs, and burden-carriers. She has a special ability to combine text that speaks softly about momentous issues and pair it with choreography that expands on the language. The complete work will premiere this fall.

The enthusiastically received Ndozi: Ancient Truths Revealed paired Congolese drummer Kazi Malonga and longtime Dimensions Dancer Theater performer Latanya d. Tigner in a coming-of-age story. The overly long opening, with blackouts and too-somber lighting, was awkward as it introduced us to either a dream or the resurrection of a young girl who has to find herself. But to watch Tigner, guided by Malonga, being initiated into the all-male drum ensemble was seeing transformation in action. Tigner was magnificent as she first found her feet and then her rhythm.

For the next two weekends, BCF will be at Dance Mission Theater with new programs, including special performances of Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh.

 

BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL: HERE AND NOW 2012

Fri/17-Sat/18 and Feb. 24-25, 8 p.m.; Sun/19, 4 p.m.; Feb. 26, 7 p.m., $10-$25

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF www.bcfhereandnow.com

Our Weekly Picks: February 15-21

Andrew Lam
-
0

WEDNESDAY 15

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour

Do Danish hipsters listen to American funk music? Apparently the Asteroids Galaxy Tour is keen to show its repertoire goes beyond the catchy pop you’ve likely heard on an Apple iPod ad (“Around the Bend”) or a Heineken commercial (“The Golden Age”). Asteroids, the brainchild of vocalist Mette Lindberg and producer Lars Iversen, gained popularity with their nostalgia-inducing sound on 2009 release Fruit (Small Giants). Lindberg and Iversen push that retro-funkiness even further in newest release Out of Frequency (B.A.R. Music), employing more horns and electronic organ sounds to add some oomph to Lindberg’s sweet tones. It’s as if technicolor was suddenly brought into this high-definition world. (Kevin Lee)

With Vacationer

8 p.m., $10–$15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com


THURSDAY 16

El pasado es un animal grotesco

Acclaimed Argentine director Mariano Pensotti found the roots of this play in a heap of random photographs salvaged from a defunct photo lab. The narrative impulse came from Balzac. The title he borrowed from an Of Montreal song. The result is an ingenious, giddy “mega fiction” that follows the tortuous careers of four 20somethings in Buenos Aires over a single decade, 1999 to 2009, with its intervening economic meltdown and a million other matters expected and unimagined — the detritus of an unwieldy but irresistible urge to meaning. Pensotti makes his San Francisco debut with this low-tech yet wildly ambitious theatrical production. (Robert Avila)

Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm, $20–$25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

BUMP Records on Mark Bradford

Jam the playlist on the website for the Bay Area Video Coalition’s BUMP Records youth-run label and you’ll get a sampling of catchy R&B and hip-hop songs, polished sound from young people who produce and perform their own work, learning about the importance of having a voice in society along the way. But they’re not just radio-ready, these kids. At this SF MOMA event of creative souls established and on-the-rise, BUMP artists will reinterpret hair stylist cum artist Mark Bradford’s character exploration of a Teddy Pendergrass-Pinnochio character, Pinnochio is on Fire. To warm up the crowd, artist Reneke Djikstra will talk about the spirit behind her luminous portrait work. (Caitlin Donohue)

6 p.m.-9:45 p.m., free with $18 museum admission

SF MOMA

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org


FRIDAY 17

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dionysus: A Greek Comedy Rock Epic

trixxie carr and Ben Randle put the libation in liberation with the return of their Great Recession–era musical about a lil grape-stained deity named Tiny Dionysus (carr) who, after getting booted off Mount Olympus, comes to San Francisco, where a group of unemployed artists call on him for help weathering the general storm. Randle directs playwright, faux queen, and chanteuse carr and a cast of five as classical Greek and classic rock converge, along with puppetry, drag, and original carr tunes, until no one is sure who is what is where is when — is why it’s so liberating. (Avila)

Fri/17-Sun/19, 8p.m., $20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.counterpulse.org

 

The FP

Ever since Snake Plissken played a sadistic life or death version of HORSE in 1996’s Escape from L.A., one question above all has been on the mind of serious filmmakers: what formerly non-threatening competition will inevitably become a bloodsport in our twisted future dystopia? With their directorial debut, The FP, the Trost Brothers have perhaps answered the question once and for all: Dance Dance Revolution (or at least something very similar to avoid trademark violations.) Make sure to strap on your most hardcore head band for the SF IndieFest’s 21+ DDR afterparty at 518 Valencia, where you can scout recruits for your video gang. The film opens theatrically March 16. (Ryan Prendiville)

7:15 p.m., $11

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

 

Tanya Bello and Alyce Finwall

If Tanya Bello and Alyce Finwall have anything in common besides their friendship and a performance history on the East Coast, it’s fierceness and a take-no-prisoners approach to dance. When the petite Bello’s is on stage, it’s difficult to watch anybody else. If she brings anything like that kind of intensity to her new “Sol y Sombra” for her not even two-year-old Project B company, we should be in for a treat. In one of their early SF performances Finwall Dance Theater’s quartet of women in “Wide Time” just about bounced off the walls. Yet despite its wildness, the work also was tightly controlled. Turns out that Finwall has choreographed for over 10 years. In this program she will premiere the duet “Angel”. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/17-Sat/18, 8 p.m., $10–$20

The Garage

975 Howard, SF

www.975howard.com

 

Trainwreck Riders

Trainwreck Riders: a collision of country twang and good old rock’n’roll interspersed with hints of bluegrass and notes of garage punk. Their songs feel nostalgic, even upon first listen, and tend to focus on heartbreak. Yet they sing the blues in a way that makes you want to jam out instead of tear up. Yeah, these guys aren’t your run-of-the-mill indie act; but there is something quintessentially indie about them. Maybe it’s their preference for flannel. Or that Peter Frauenfelder’s voice bears a striking resemblance to Isaac Brock’s. Clearly, they’re from San Francisco. Ghost Yards, the band’s fourth full-length release, drops this spring. (Mia Sullivan)

With the Blank Tapes, and the Human Condition

9 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com


SATURDAY 18

Bonobo

Bonobo, aka Britain’s Simon Green, has long reigned as one of the masters of the post-party, chillout tracks that deters drinking headaches in both lounge and living room. With his 2010 release Black Sands (Ninja Tune), Green opted for a more lush, jazzy, and spontaneous sound that edged slightly away from downtempo and toward the dancefloor. Ninja Tune has just released a remix CD of Black Sands that uses Green’s tracks and vocals from Andreya Triana as rich source material. Green could stick in a slow burning rework to begin the set, such as with Letherette’s sublime version of “All In Forms,” then turn up the energy a notch with a track like Machinedrum’s percussive-heavy production on “Eyesdown.” (Lee)

9 p.m.

Mezzanine

444 Jessie

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com


SUNDAY 19

Girl Walk // All Day and Cheryl Dance Party

Partly a 71-minute long music video centered around Girl Talk’s latest mashup album All Day, Girl Walk // All Day is also an ecstatic musical feature following young one dancer as she bursts out of the confines of ballet class and dances her way across New York City. Financed through Kickstarter and filmed largely on the sly in public and not so public (Bloomingdales) spaces, GW//AD involves over 100 dancers, and takes a fanciful poke at the tendency of people to ignore the exceptional, even when it breaks, two steps, or tumbles into their daily life. This screening — followed by a set from CHERYL (NY) — will be suitably projected over the dance floor. (Prendiville)

7 p.m. $10

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

 

Prime Cuts Film Festival Extravaganza!

The Scary Cow indie film co-op is one of those magical organizations that provide creative people with the network and resources to engage in collaborative creativity. The co-op’s mission is, simply, to cultivate a San Francisco film community equipped to make better films by connecting people who want to make films, and actually making them. (Genius?) Scary Cow has helped fund local films since 2007 and is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a screening of 13 shorts the co-op deems its “prime cuts.” Chosen shorts span the genres — from mockumentary to horror/comedy to sci-fi rock musical —and range from three to 24 minutes in length. (Sullivan)

4 p.m., $15–$40

Castro Theater

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.scarycow.com


MONDAY 20

Chucho Valdes and the Afro-Cuban Messengers

Perhaps the eminent Cuban pianist of his time, Jesus “Chucho” Valdes has spent four decades wowing audiences as performer, composer, and arranger. A co-founder of the legendary Latin American jazz-rock band Irakere, Valdes has won four Grammy awards, including one for his most recent album, Chucho’s Steps (Four Quarters). In Steps, Valdes pays homage to several renowned musicians, including John Coltrane, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Joe Zawinul. His current band references Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, which produced driving, bebop sounds and served as a platform for younger jazz musicians to showcase their skills. (Lee)

7:30 p.m., $35–$75

Herbst Theatre

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 621-6600

www.sfjazz.org

 

TUESDAY 21

Doug Stanhope

While his style of comedy has been called abrasive and caustic, Doug Stanhope simply tells it like it is on a variety of cultural and societal subjects, all with hilarious results. Since he won the San Francisco International Comedy Competition in 1995, he has earned a well deserved, wild reputation for his routines and shows, captured most recently on his live DVD/CD Oslo: Burning The Bridge To Nowhere (Roadrunner 2011). Last September Stanhope performed in a maximum security prison in Iceland, telling fans that if they committed a heinous enough crime to be sent there, they could see him for free — thankfully you’ve got an easier option tonight. (Sean McCourt)

8 p.m. $23.50

Cobb’s Comedy Club

915 Columbus, SF

(415) 928-4320

www.cobbscomedyclub.com

 

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

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

The Real Americans Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Opens Fri/17, 8pm. Runs Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 18. Dan Hoyle revives his hit solo show about small-town America.

Scorched American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-85. Previews Thurs/16-Sat/18 and Tues/21, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm). Opens Feb 22, 7pm. Runs Tues-Sat, 8pm (Feb 28, show at 7pm); Wed, Sat-Sun, 2pm (no matinee Feb 22). Through March 11. Oscar nominee David Strathairn stars in ACT’s performance of Wajdi Mouawad’s haunting drama.

Three’s Company Live! Finn’s Funhouse, 814 Grove, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Opens Fri/17, 7 and 9pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 7 and 9pm. Through March 3. Cat Fights and Shoulder Pads Productions (best production company name ever?) brings the classic sitcom to the stage.

Tontlawald Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Previews Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 5pm. Opens Feb 23, 7:30pm. Runs Thurs, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through March 11. Cutting Ball Theater presents this world premiere ensemble piece, using text by resident playwright Eugenie Chan, a capella harmonies, and movement to re-tell an ancient Estonian tale.

BAY AREA

Mesmeric Revelation Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; (510) 558-1381, www.centralworks.org. Previews Thurs/16-Fri/17, 8pm. Opens Sat/18, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 18. Central Works opens its season of world premieres with Aaron Henne’s Edgar Allen Poe-inspired drama.

ONGOING

*Blue/Orange Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; (415) 474-8800, www.lhtsf.org. $43-53. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). Through March 18. Lorraine Hansberry Theater offers an uneven but worthwhile production of British playwright Joe Penhall’s sardonic comedy of ideas and institutional racism, an intriguingly frustrating three-hander about a young doctor (a bright Dan Clegg) at a psychiatric teaching hospital who begins a battle royal with his suave and pompous supervising physician (a comically nimble Julian Lopez-Morillas) over the release of a questionably-sane black patient. Originally brought in by police for creating a disturbance, Christopher (the excellent Carl Lumbly) still exhibits signs of psychosis and his ability to care for himself seems doubtful to the young doctor treating him. The older physician appeals to the patient’s general competence, hospital procedures, the shortage of beds, and the exigencies of career advancement in countering the younger doctor’s insistence on keeping the patient beyond the mandatory 28-day period required by law. For his part, Christopher, nervous and rather manic, is at first desperately eager to be released back to his poor London neighborhood. Competing interviews with the two doctors complicate his perspective and ours repeatedly, however, as a heated debate about medicine, institutionalization, cultural antecedents to mental “illness,” career arcs, and a “cure for black psychosis,” leave everyone’s sanity in doubt. Although our attention can be distracted by a too-pervading sound design and less than perfect British accents, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe directs a strong and engaging cast in a politically resonant not to say increasingly maddening play. (Avila)

Cabaret Young Performers Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldc C, Room 300, Marina at Laguna, SF; (415) 381-1638, cabaretsf.wordpress.com. $25-45. Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 7pm. Shakespeare at Stinson and Independent Cabaret Productions perform the Kander and Ebb classic in an intimate setting.

52 Man Pick Up Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, Wed/15, and Feb 27, 8pm. Through March 3. Desiree Butch performs her solo show about a deck of cards’ worth of sexual encounters.

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, MainStage, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 18. Geoff Hoyle’s hit solo show returns.

Glengarry Glen Ross Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.brownpapertickets.com. $26-40. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 24. David Mamet’s cutthroat comedy, courtesy of the Actors Theatre of San Francisco.

Higher Theater at Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Howard, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-65. Wed/15-Sat/18, 8pm (also Wed/15 and Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. American Conservatory Theater premieres artistic director Carey Perloff’s ambitious but choppy play about renowned architect Michael Friedman (an affably egotistical Andrew Polk) and brilliant but still up-and-coming Elena Constantine (a restlessly clever yet vulnerable René Augesen), lovers who find themselves competing for the same commission to design a memorial at the site of a bus bombing on the Sea of Galilee. The spunky widow (Concetta Tomei) of a wealthy American Jewish businessman is funding the memorial, and supervising the competition with the help of a handsome young Israeli, Jacob (Alexander Crowther), grieving for his father. The jet-set lovers only gradually realize they’re competitors (Michael very late in the game, which seems a bit too clueless). Meanwhile, Michael attends to the strained relationship with his grown-up but too-long-neglected gay son (Ben Kahre), a convert to “born-again Judaism” in contrast to his father’s attenuated affiliations; and shiksa Elena finds inspiration for a radical design in the grief-stricken (but soon smitten) Jacob, kneading the burnt sand at the shore of a lake “filled with Jewish tears.” In a play dealing with land and memory, reconciliation, chauvinism, and short-sightedness, the absence of any mention of Palestinian “tears” in the same water (or Palestinians at all) seems a conspicuous absence. The dialogue, meanwhile, while often witty, can be labored in its mingling of airy architectural notions with earthier matters. Mark Rucker’s direction gives scope to an admirably tailored performance from Augesen (the small stage offers a rewarding chance to watch the ACT veteran work up close) but not enough attention goes to the supposed sexual tension between Elena and Michael, which, despite sporadically randy dialogue and some awkward blocking on a mattress, is effectively nil. (Avila)

Jesus in India Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-55. Wed/15-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2:30pm); Sun/19, 2:30pm. Lloyd Suh’s American Hwangap is still one of Magic’s strongest premieres in recent years; his latest makes a disappointing contrast. There’s again an absent father (or two) and a sense of dislocation, but Suh’s “Jesus in India” does little or nothing with them. Director Daniella Topol assembles a bright cast headed by musically adept charmer Damon Daunno — on Michael Locher’s colorful, all-encompassing street mosaic set (comprised of floor-to-wall stickers, spray-paint, and mandalas around a central thicket of abandoned bicycle wheels) — but it all serves an insipid chronicle of the deity’s wayward teen years. (Avila)

*Little Brother Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $25-32. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Feb 25. Custom Made Theatre Co. performs Josh Costello’s adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s San Francisco-set thriller.

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5 and 8:30pm. Extended through Feb 25. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

Olivia’s Kitchen Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.generationtheatre.com. $20-40. Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 3pm. GenerationTheatre offers this “remix” of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Private Parts SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20. Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 25. Graham Gremore performs his autobiographical solo comedy.

*True West Boxcar Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; (415) 967-2227, www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through April 7. The first installment of Boxcar Theatre’s four-play Sam Shepard repertory project, True West ushers in the ambitious run with a bang. This tale of two brothers who gradually assume the role of the other is one of Shepard’s most enduring plays, rich with humorous interludes, veering sharply into dangerous terrain at the drop of a toaster. In time-honored, True West tradition, the lead roles of Austin, the unassuming younger brother, and Lee, his violent older sibling, are being alternated between Nick A. Olivero and Brian Trybom, and in a new twist, the role of the mother is being played by two different actresses as well (Adrienne Krug and Katya Rivera). The evening I saw it, Olivero was playing Austin, a writer banging away at his first screenplay, and Trybom was Lee, a troubled, alcoholic drifter who usurps his brother’s Hollywood shot, and trashes their mother’s home while trying to honor his as yet unwritten “contract”. The chemistry between the two actors was a perfect blend of menace and fraternity, and the extreme wreckage they make of both the set (designed by both actors), and their ever-tenuous relationship, was truly inspired. (Gluckstern)

*Vice Palace: The Last Cockettes Musical Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; (415) 377-4202, www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 3. Hot on the high heels of a 22-month run of Pearls Over Shanghai, the Thrillpeddlers are continuing their Theatre of the Ridiculous revival with a tits-up, balls-out production of the Cockettes’ last musical, Vice Palace. Loosely based on the terrifyingly grim “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, part of the thrill of Palace is the way that it weds the campy drag-glamour of Pearls Over Shanghai with the Thrillpeddlers’ signature Grand Guignol aesthetic. From an opening number set on a plague-stricken street (“There’s Blood on Your Face”) to a charming little cabaret about Caligula, staged with live assassinations, an undercurrent of darkness runs like blood beneath the shameless slapstick of the thinly-plotted revue. As plague-obsessed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her right-hand “gal” Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz) try to distract a group of stir-crazy socialites from the dangers outside the villa walls, the entertainments range from silly to salacious: a suggestively-sung song about camel’s humps, the wistful ballad “Just a Lonely Little Turd,” a truly unexpected Rite of Spring-style dance number entitled “Flesh Ballet.” Sumptuously costumed by Kara Emry, cleverly lit by Nicholas Torre, accompanied by songwriter/lyricist (and original Cockette) Scrumbly Koldewyn, and anchored by a core of Thrillpeddler regulars, Palace is one nice vice. (Gluckstern)

*Vigilance Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; (415) 335-6087, secondwind.8m.com. $20-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 25. Ian Walker (The Tender King) directs a sharp revival of his own lucid, involving 2000 domestic drama about three households brought to the brink by the arrival of a menacing working-class loner. Seamlessly staged in a single pair of rooms (designed by Fred Sharkey) representing all three suburban middle-class homes — as well as downstage on the street where dream-home lottery winner Duncan (an imposing Steven Westdahl) throws his beer cans and leers at the wives and children — Vigilance begins with three friends meeting under the pretext of a poker game. Host Virgil (played with gruff charm by a commanding Mike Newman) is a 30-something husband, father, and guy’s guy whose Montana-grown libertarian machismo compensates for the agro of a stormy marriage and rocky finances. He talks the suggestible, nebbishy Bert (a slyly humorous Ben Ortega) and the equally nerdy but independent-minded Dick (a nicely layered Stephen Muterspaugh) into forming a “committee” to deal with the troublesome Duncan. Walker’s well-honed dialogue brings out the false notes in the supposed pre-Duncan harmony right away, and the play strikes best at the buried politics of marriage and friendship. (Avila)

Waiting for Godot Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa, SF; (415) 336-3522, www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm. The fuchsia papier-mâché tree and swirling grey-on-white floor pattern (courtesy of scenic designer Richard Colman) lend a psychedelic accent to the famously barren landscape inhabited by Vladimir (Keith Burkland) and Estragon (Jack Halton) in this production of the Samuel Beckett play by newcomers Tides Theatre. The best moments here broadcast the brooding beauty of the avant-garde classic, with its purposely vague but readily familiar world of viciousness, servility, trauma, want, fear, grudging compassion, and the daring, fragile humor that can look it all squarely in the eye. (Avila)

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 24. Brian Copeland returns with a new solo show about his struggles with depression.

BAY AREA

Arms and the Man Lesher Center for the Arts, Margaret Lesher Theater, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-7469, www.centerrep.org. $38-43. Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2:30pm. Through Feb 25. Center REPertory Company presents George Bernard Shaw’s classic romantic comedy.

*Body Awareness Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $30-48. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 11. In Annie Baker’s new comedy, receiving a top-notch Bay Area premiere at Aurora Theatre, peppy psychology prof Phyllis (Amy Resnick) hosts “Body Awareness Week” at her small Vermont college, while back home partner Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen) talks to her 21-year-old son Jared (Patrick Russell) about the porn pay-per-view bill he’s racked up. Phyllis contends that Joyce’s introverted, somewhat explosive virgin son (who in addition to bouts of violent anger soothes himself compulsively with an electric security toothbrush) has Asperger’s Syndrome — a diagnosis that Jared, a budding not too say obsessive lexicographer, hotly contests. That same week, the couple hosts a guest artist, Frank (Howard Swain), a breezy man’s man whose career stands squarely on a series of photographs of nude women and girls. The young man seeks sexual advice from the older one, much to Phyllis’s disgust and Joyce’s relief, while also tempting Joyce with the notion of posing for a nude portrait and “reclaiming her body image,” in a well-used phrase. An already delicate balance thus goes right off kilter as, between the poles of Phyllis and Frank, Joyce and Jared chase competing notions and definitions of themselves and the world. In the volatile tension between perspectives, power trips, and extreme personalities, playwright Baker initially pushes a comic form toward an unsettling edge, only to retreat in the end for safer ground and a family-friendly resolution. While that feels like a lost opportunity, Body Awareness is still a stimulating and solidly entertaining evening, brought to life by a warm and dexterous ensemble under fine, lively direction by Joy Carlin. (Avila)

Counter Attack! Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 444-4755, ext. 114, www.stagebridge.org. $18-25. Wed-Thurs, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through March 4. Stagebridge presents the world premiere of Joan Holden’s waitress-centric play.

A Doctor in Spire of Himself Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Opens Wed/15, 8pm. Runs Tues and Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs and Sat, 2pm; no matinees Thurs/16, Feb 25, March 1, 8, and 15; no show March 23); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through March 25. Berkeley Rep performs a contemporary update of the Molière comedy.

Ghost Light Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Wed/15 and Sun/19, 7pm (also Sun/19, 2pm); Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm (also Thurs/16 and Sat/18, 2pm). Berkeley Rep performs Tony Taccone’s world-premiere play about George Moscone’s assassination, directed by the late San Francisco mayor’s son, Jonathan Moscone.

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through March 25. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

A Steady Rain Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, SF; (415) 388-5208, www.marintheatre.org. $34-55. Tues and Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs/16, 1pm; Feb 25, 2pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Feb 26. Marin Theatre Company performs Keith Huff’s neo-noir drama.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Extended run: Sun/19, Feb 26, March 11, and 18, 11am. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Tanya Bello’s Project. B. and Alyce Finwall Dance Theater Garage, 975 Howard, SF; www.975howard.com. Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm. $15. New work by choregraphers Bello and Finwall.

“Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now 2012” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.bcfhereandnow.com. Fri/17-Sat/18 and Feb 24-25, 8pm; Sun/19, 4pm; Feb 26, 7pm. $10-25. Celebrate African and African American dance and culture at this multi-part festival, with works by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes, and more.

Company C Contemporary Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787. Fri/17, 8pm; Sat/18, 6:30pm (gala benefit); and Sun/19, 3pm. $23-175. The company opens its 10th anniversary season.

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tues, 8pm. Ongoing through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

“The Eric Show” Milk Bar, 1840 Haight, SF; www.milksf.com. Tues, 8pm (ongoing). $5. Local comedians perform with host Eric Barry.

“Forever Tango” Marines Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, SF; www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. Wed/15-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. $45-75. Dancing With the Stars’ Anna Trebunskaya stars in this tango extravaganza.

“Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dionysus: A Greek Comedy Rock Epic” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri/17-Sun/19, 8pm. $20. Trixxie Carr and Ben Randle’s San Francisco-set multimedia performance returns.

Holly Johnston/Ledges and Bones ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org. Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 7pm. $17-37. The contemporary dance company world-premieres Want.

“The Past is a Grotesque Animal” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm. $5-25. Argentine writer-director Mariano Pensotti presents the Bay Area premiere of his acclaimed drama.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

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

INDIEFEST

The 14th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs through Feb 23 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF. For tickets (most films $11) and schedule info, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much "Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue" — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Nicolas Cage returns as the flaming-skull’d, motorcycle-riding anti-hero. This time in 3D! (1:36) Shattuck.

*Granito: How to Nail a Dictator Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is acclaimed documentarian Pamela Yates’ follow-up to her 1983 doc about the Guatemalan civil war, When the Mountains Tremble. "How does each of us weave our responsibilities into the fabric of history?" Yates wonders in her introspective voice-over. When a human-rights lawyer working to charge Guatemalan military leaders with genocide asks Yates for her Mountains outtakes, the filmmaker scours her archives, digging for evidence and eventually becoming deeply involved in the case. Granito is a legal thriller, but it’s also a personal journey, for Yates and, most potently, survivors still traumatized by Guatemala’s years of repression and violence. San Francisco lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, featured in the film as the lead lawyer in the 2006 genocide case when it was presented to the Spanish National Court, will be in attendance at this screening. (1:43) Balboa. (Eddy)

Love Billed as "the ultimate romantic comedy," this import — starring Shu Qi and a host of other Chinese and Taiwanese megastars — proves Valentine’s Day isn’t merely a stateside obsession. (2:07) Metreon.

Margaret Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is an Upper West Side teen living with her successful actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron, wife to writer-director Kenneth Lonergan) — dad (Lonergan) lives in Santa Monica with his new spouse — and going through normal teenage stuff. Her propensity for drama, however, is kicked into high gear when she witnesses (and inadvertently causes) the traffic death of a stranger. Initially fibbing a bit to protect both herself and the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) involved, she later has second thoughts, increasingly pursuing a path toward "justice" that variably affects others including the dead woman’s friend (Jeannie Berlin), mom’s new suitor (Jean Reno), teachers at Lisa’s private school Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), etc. Lonergan is a fine playwright and uneven sometime scenarist who made a terrific screen directorial debut with 2000’s You Can Count On Me (which also featured Ruffalo, Broderick and Smith-Cameron). He appears to have intended Margaret as a pulse-taking of privileged Manhattanites’ comingled rage, panic, confusion, and guilt after 9-11. But if that’s the case, then this convoluted story provides a garbled metaphor at best. It might best be taken as a messy, intermittently potent study of how someone might become the kind of person who’ll spend the rest of their lives barging into other people’s affairs, creating a mess, assuming the moral high ground in a stubborn attempt to "fix" it, then making everything worse while denying any personal responsibility. Certainly that’s the person Lisa appears to be turning into, though it’s unclear whether Lonergan intends her to be seen that way. Indeed, despite some sharply written confrontations and good performances, it’s unclear what Lonergan intended here at all — and since he’s been famously fiddling with Margaret‘s (still-problematic) editing since late 2005, one might guess he never really figured that out himself. (2:30) SF Film Society Cinema. (Harvey)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David "Date Rape" Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the speech rhythms, down to the "sou ka" affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) California, Presidio. (Chun)

Thin Ice One of Greg Kinnear’s specialties is the lovable loser — the guy who’s clearly an absolute scoundrel, but you can’t outright hate him, because you sense that he used to be a decent fellow once upon a time. In Thin Ice, his insurance-agent character, Mickey, is very much in this vein: visibly weary, yet still handsome; not entirely soulless, but also not above exploiting an old man for financial gain. In some ways, Thin Ice recalls last year’s Win Win in its suggestion that crime is an increasingly tempting path out of sagging middle-class desperation. One suspects that Thin Ice director and co-writer Jill Sprecher also wouldn’t mind comparisons to 1996’s Fargo, another quirky noir set in the snowy Midwest. But Thin Ice is no Fargo, or even as good as Win Win, despite showy supporting turns by Alan Arkin, Bob Balaban, and Billy Crudup. Its undoing is an abrupt final act that thinks it’s far more clever than it actually is. (1:54) Shattuck. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term "romantic comedy" in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of "comedy" are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) Presidio. (Rapoport)

*The Viral Factor Dreamy Taiwanese megastar Jay Chou — last seen playing second banana (as if) to Seth Rogen in 2011’s The Green Hornet — reclaims center stage in Hong Kong director Dante Lam’s latest blockbuster action flick. Chou plays Jon, a supercop tasked with protecting a scientist in possession of a new and deadly smallpox strain, highly sought-after by villains who lust after its possibilities as a chemical weapon. Unbeknownst to Jon, his long-lost older brother, Yeung (dreamy HK megastar Nicholas Tse) is up to his neck on the wrong side of the law; when clean-cut bro meets hipster-mullet-and-tattoo’d bro, screeching car chases and epic fist- and gunfights soon melt away in favor of begrudging family bonding. That doesn’t mean all of the other bad guys (corrupt cops, Jon’s evil ex-partner, an arms dealer, etc.) go soft, of course — The Viral Factor very seldom stops for a breath during its chockablock two hours, what with all the bullets, grenades, and rocket launchers busting up half the globe (Kuala Lumpur gets the worst of it). The fact that Jon has one of those only-in-the-movies ticking-clock head injuries (two weeks to live! Better make it count!) ups The Viral Factor‘s already sky-high stakes; big-name salaries aside, it’s pretty clear most of the film’s $200 million budget went into special effects of the go-boom variety. Can’t argue with that. After a brief SF run a few weeks back, the film returns as a double-feature with Donnie Yen, Louis Koo, Sandra Ng, Kelly Chen, and Raymond Wong ensemble rom-com All’s Well, Ends Well 2012. (2:00) Four Star. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — "he" has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor "transform," and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

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

Big Miracle Three gray whales trapped beneath the Beaufort Sea ice near the tiny town of Barrow, Alaska become an international cause célèbre through the uneasily combined efforts of an Anchorage reporter (John Krasinski), a Greenpeace activist (Drew Barrymore), a group of chainsaw-toting Inupiaq fishermen, a Greenpeace-hating oilman (Ted Danson), a Reagan-administration aide (Vinessa Shaw), a U.S. Army colonel (Dermot Mulroney), a pair of Minnesotan entrepreneurs (James LeGros and Rob Riggle) with a homemade deicing machine, and the crew of a Soviet icebreaking ship. The magical pixie dust of Hollywood has been sprinkled liberally over events that did indeed take place in 1988, but the media frenzy that blossoms out of one little local newscast is entirely believable. Everyone loves a good whale story, and this one is a tearjerker — though the kind that parents can bring their kids to without worrying overly much about subsequent weeks of deep-sea-set nightmares and having to explain terms like "critically endangered Western North Pacific gray whale" if they don’t want to. The film makes clear that the weak-on-the-environment Reagan administration and Danson’s oilman stand to gain some powerfully good PR from this feat, with potentially devastating ecological results down the line, and Barrymore’s character gets to recite a quick litany of impending oceanic catastrophes. But this kind of talk is characterized as less useful than a nice, quick, visceral pull on the heartstrings, and while offering us the pleasurable sight of whales breaching in open water, the film avoids panning out too much farther, which may be why the miracle looks so big. (2:03) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Carnage Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) have arrived in the apartment of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) to discuss proper follow-up to a playground incident in which one of their children went ballistic on another. But this grownup discussion about conduct between children quickly degenerates into a four-way living room sandbox melee, as the couples reveal snobbish disdain toward one another’s presumed values and the cracks in each marriage are duly bared. Roman Polanski’s unnecessary screen translation of Yasmina Reza’s play remains awkwardly rooted to the stage, where its contrivances would have seemed less obvious, or at least apt for the medium. There’s some fun to be had watching these actors play variously self-involved, accusatory Manhattanites who enact a very lite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? amid way too much single-malt Scotch ingestion. But the text gets crudely farcical after a while, and its critiques of the characters’ shallow materialism, bad parenting, knee-jerk liberal empathy, privileged class indifference, etc. would resonate more if those faults weren’t so cartoonishly drawn. In the end, Carnage‘s high-profile talent obliterates rather than illuminates the material — it’s like aiming a bazooka at a napkin. (1:20) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma ("hubris" is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max "son of John" Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s "self-shot" structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the "common people" when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

A Dangerous Method Cool and chatty (unsurprisingly, given its subject matter and the fact that it’s based on a play and a novel), David Cronenberg’s latest begins in 1904 Zurich as a shrieking patient (Keira Knightley) is escorted into the care of psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Dr. Jung, an admirer of Sigmund Freud, tests the "talking cure" on the woman, who turns out to be the fiercely intelligent and conveniently beautiful Sabina Spielrein. An attraction, both intellectual and sexual, soon develops, no matter that Jung is Sabina’s doctor, or that he happens to be married to a prim wife whose family wealth keeps him in boats and lake houses. Meanwhile, Jung and Freud (an excellent Viggo Mortensen) begin corresponding, eventually meeting and forming a friendship that’s tested first when Sabina comes between them, and later when Jung expresses a growing interest in fringe pursuits like parapsychology. The scenes between Freud and Jung are A Dangerous Method‘s most intriguing — save those brief few involving Vincent Cassel as a doctor-turned-patient who advises Jung to "never repress anything" — but the film is mostly concerned with Jung’s various Sabina-related dramas. Pity that this is a tightly-wound Fassbender’s least dynamic performance of the year, and that Knightley, way over the top in Sabina’s hysterical scenes, telegraphs "casting mistake" from the get-go. (1:39) Lumiere. (Eddy)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed "not enough" for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) California, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The meeting of Stieg Larsson’s first "Millennium" book and David Fincher promised fireworks, as he’s a director who can be equally vivid and exacting with just the elements key to the series: procedural detail, obsession, violence, tweaked genre conventions, mind games, haunted protagonists, and expansive story arcs. But perhaps because this possible franchise launch had to be rushed into production to ride the Larsson wave, what should have been a terrific matchup turns out to be just a good one — superior in some stylistic departments (notably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing score), but overall neither an improvement nor a disappointment in comparison to the uninspired but effective 2009 Swedish film version. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the muckraking Stockholm journalist whose public disgrace after a failed expose of a suspect corporate tycoon makes him the perfect candidate for an unexpected assignment: staying sequestered in the wealthy, warring Vanger clan’s island home to secretly investigate a teenage girl’s disappearance and presumed murder 40 years ago. His testy helpmate is the singular Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), antisocial hacker, researcher, and ex-mental patient par excellence. Nearly three hours long, the compressed, slightly altered (get over it) storyline nonetheless feels rushed at times; Fincher manages the rare feat of making mostly internet research exciting in filmic terms, yet oddly the book’s more shocking episodes of sex and/or mayhem don’t have the memorable impact one might expect from him. The leads are fine, as is the big support cast of recognizable faces (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, etc.) But the knockout suspense, atmosphere, and urgency one hoped for isn’t present in this intelligent, not entirely satisfying treatment. On the other hand, maybe those who’ve already read the books and seen the prior films have already had so much exposure to this material that a revelatory experience is no longer possible. (2:38) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Grey Suicidally depressed after losing his spouse, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has to get pro-active about living in a hurry when his plane crashes en route to a oil company site in remotest Alaska. One of a handful of survivors, Ottway is the only one with an idea of the survival skills needed to survive in this subzero wilderness, including knowledge of wolf behavior — which is fortunate, given that the (rapidly dwindling) group of eight men has landed smack in the middle of a pack’s den. Less fortunate is that these hairy, humongous predators are pretty fearless about attacking perceived intruders on their chosen terrain. Director and co-writer Joe Carnahan (2010’s The A-Team, 2006’s Smokin’ Aces) labors to give this thriller some depth via quiet character-based scenes for Neeson and the other actors (including Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts and Dermot Mulroney) in addition to the expected bloodshed. The intended gravitas doesn’t quite take, leaving The Grey and its imposing widescreen scenery (actually British Columbia) in a competent but unmemorable middle ground between serious, primal, life-or-death drama and a monster movie in wolf’s clothing. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

*Haywire Female empowerment gets its kung-fu-grip thighs around the beet-red throat of all the old action-heroes. Despite a deflated second half — and director Steven Soderbergh’s determinedly cool-headed yet ultimately exciting-quelling approach to Bourne-free action scenes — Haywire is fully capable of seizing and demanding everyone’s attention, particularly that of the feminists in the darkened theater who have given up looking for an action star that might best Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft. Former pro mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, who plays it as studiedly intense and charismatic as crossover grapplers Lee, Norris, and Seagal before her, is that woman, with convincingly formidable neck and shoulder muscles to distract from her curves. Her Mallory Kane is one of the few women in Haywire‘s pared-down, stylized mise-en-scene — the lone female in a world of men out to get her, starting with the opening diner scene of a watchful Mallory confronted by a man (Channing Tatum) playing at being her boyfriend, fed up with her shit, and preparing to pack her into the car — a scenario that doubtless many rebel girls can relate to until it explodes into an ultraviolent, floor-thrashing fight scene. Turns out Mallory is an ex-Marine and Blackwater-style mercenary, ready to get out of the firm and out of a relationship with her boss, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), when she learns, the bruising way, that she’s been set up. The diner scene sets the tone for rest of Haywire, an otherwise straightforward (albeit flashback-loaded) feminist whodunit of sorts, limned with subtextual currents of sexualized violence and unfolding over a series of encounters with men who could be suitors — or killers. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

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

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Four Star, Shattuck. (Chun)

*I Am Bruce Lee Not to be confused with Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000), this Spike TV co-production is nonetheless a similarly praise-filled portrait of the groundbreaking, charismatic action star. Warrior’s Journey‘s main coup was revealing long-thought-lost footage from 1978’s The Game of Death, one of only five feature films starring Lee (two of which were posthumous, including 1973 smash Enter the Dragon). I Am Bruce Lee tilts more toward exploring Lee’s lasting legacy — an extended debate over whether or not he invented what we now call "mixed martial arts" definitely plays to the doc’s Spike TV interests — but also contains the expected biography, with an emphasis on Lee’s unique approaches to martial arts and philosophy, as well as input from suspects usual (Lee’s widow and daughter, top Lee student Dan Inosanto, etc.), understandable (boxer Manny Pacquiao, martial arts champ Cung Lee), and fanboy (Mickey Rourke, Ed O’Neill). Screening in a very limited run, I Am Bruce Lee is a flashy, entertaining primer for beginning students of Lee (lesson one: he was basically the coolest guy who ever lived); longtime fans may not learn anything new, but will no doubt find much to enjoy anyway. (1:34) Four Star. (Eddy)

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

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (1:34) 1000 Van Ness.

Man on a Ledge Sam Worthington plays escaped convict Nick Cassidy, a former cop wrongly accused of stealing a very big diamond from a ruthless real estate mogul (Ed Harris) against the backdrop of 2008’s financial disasters. Having cleared the penitentiary walls, many a man might have headed for the nearest border, but Nick’s fervent desire to prove his innocence leads him to climb out the window of a 21st-floor Manhattan hotel room and spend most of the rest of the movie pacing a tiny strip of concrete and chatting with hung over NYPD crisis negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), who’s also nursing some PTSD after a suicide negotiation gone bad. After a while, the establishing shots panning up 21 floors or across the city grid to Nick’s exterior perch begin to feel extraneous — we know there’s a man on a ledge; it says so on our ticket stub. More involving is the balancing act Nick performs while he’s up there — keeping the eyes of the city glued on him while guiding the suspensefully amateur efforts of his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to pull off an unidentified caper in a nearby high-rise. Ed Burns, Anthony Mackie, and Kyra Sedgwick costar. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

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

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol No world landmark (the Kremlin, the Burj Khalifia) is too iconic and/or freaking tall for uber-adrenalized Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon "Comic Relief" Pegg) to infiltrate, climb, assume false identities in, use as a home base for unleashing futuristic spy technology that seems almost plausible (with the help of lots of iPads), race a BMW through, etc. One kind of gets the sense that Cruise and company sat down with a piece of paper and were like, "What stunts haven’t we done before, and how many of them can I do with my shirt off?" Celebrated animation director Brad Bird (2004’s The Incredibles) is right at home with Ghost Protocol as his first live-action effort — the film’s plot (set in the present day, it involves a positively vintage blend of Russians and nukes) and even its unmemorable villain take a back seat to Cruise’s secret-agent shenanigans, most of which take the form of a crazy plan that must be altered at the last minute, resulting in an even crazier plan, which must be implemented despite the sudden appearance of yet another ludicrously daunting obstacle, like, say, a howling sandstorm. For maximum big dumb fun, make sure you catch the IMAX version. A warning, though: any time the movie screeches to a halt to explore emotions or attempt characterization … zzz. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is "well-rounded" in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and "magical" Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s deconstructed Turkish police procedural offers little action but plenty of atmosphere. The search for a corpse by a group of men — a prosecutor, a commissar, a doctor, and their two main suspects— through the desolate, wind-scoured hills of rural Anatolia, is in fact something of a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Ceylan’s real investigation is philosophical, zeroing in on the way in which each of these men constructs his own truth out of the re-telling and mis-telling of past events. And the drudgery of this protracted investigation, much of it depicted in real-time, provides plenty of opportunities for all of the players to tell their stories or to simply ruminate, often bitterly, about their own lives. There is palpable loneliness that courses through all the chatter, formally mirrored by Ceylan’s penchant long-takes of isolated figures swallowed by the countryside or the darkness of night. But despite the endless landscape that surrounds them, there is no exit for these small men. (2:37) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sussman)

*Pariah A teenage girl stands stock-still in a dark nightclub, gazing with desire and fear at the half-naked female dancers on the stage. Later, riding home on the bus, she slowly removes the layers of butch that held her together in the club, stripping down to some version of the person her parents need to see when she walks in the door. Nearly wordlessly, the opening scenes of Dee Rees’s Pariah poignantly depict the embattled internal life of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old African American girl living in Brooklyn with her family and struggling both to be seen as she is and to determine what that might look like. The battles are being waged externally, too, between Alike’s adoring father (Charles Parnell), living in willful ignorance, and angry, rigid mother (Kim Wayans), desperately enforcing a feminine dress code and steering Alike away from openly butch friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Rees’ script beautifully conveys a household of landmines and chasms, which widen as husband and wife and daughter struggle and fail to communicate, asking the wrong questions, fearfully skirting the truth about Alike’s sexuality and her parents’ crumbling marriage. And the world outside proves full of romantic pitfalls and the tensions of longtime friendship and peer pressure. The poems in which the talented Alike takes solace and makes her way toward a more truthful existence are beautiful, but at a certain point the lyricism overtakes the film, forcing an ending that is tidy but less than satisfying. (1:26) Lumiere. (Rapoport)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — "Bourne" there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from "bad guy" Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

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

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the "movie stars who can also act" variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D (2:16) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at "the Circus" to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

"2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated" Lumiere, Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and "weird" hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

W.E. Madonna’s first directorial feature, 2008’s Filth and Wisdom, was so atrocious, and the early word on this second effort so vitriolic, that there’s a temptation to give W.E. too much credit simply for not being a disgrace. Co-written by Madge and Alek Keshishian, it’s about two women in gilded cages. One is Wallis Simpson (the impressive Andrea Riseborough), a married American socialite who scandalized the world by divorcing her husband and running about with Edward, Prince of Wales (James D’Arcy), who had to abdicate the English throne in order to marry her in 1936. The other is fictive Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a childless Manhattan socialite in the late 1990s who’s neglected by her probably-unfaithful husband (Richard Coyle). Over-eagerly intertwined despite their trite-at-best overlaps (the main one being Wally’s obsession with Wallis), these two strands hold attention for a while. But eventually they grow turgid. We’re presumably meant to be carried away by their True Love, but the film doesn’t succeed in making Wallis and Edward seem more than two petulant, shallow snobs who were fortunate to find each other, but didn’t necessarily make one another better or more interesting people. (It also alternately denies and glosses over the couple’s fascist-friendly politics, which became an embarrassment as England fought Germany in World War II.) Meanwhile, Wally is a mopey blank too easily belittled by her spouse, and too handily rescued by a Prince Charming, or rather "Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard" (Oscar Isaac) working at Sotheby’s during an auction of the late royal couple’s estate. As is so often the case with Madonna, she seems to be saying something here, but precisely what is murky and probably not worth sussing
out. Likewise, the attention to showy surface aesthetics — in particular Arianne Phillips’ justifiably Oscar-nominated costumes — is fastidious, revealing, and to an extent satisfying in itself. Somewhat ambitious and in several ways quite well crafted, the handsomely appointed W.E. isn’t bad (surely it wouldn’t have attracted such hostility if directed by anyone else), but the flaws that finally suffocate it reach right down to its conceptual gist. There is, however, one lovely moment toward the end: Riseborough’s Wallis, a well-preserved septuagenarian, dancing an incongruous yet supremely self-assured twist on request for her bedridden husband. (1:59) Bridge. (Harvey)

The Woman in Black Daniel Radcliffe (a.k.a. Harry Potter) plays a grieving young widower in an old-fashioned ghost story, set in the era of spirit hands and other visitations from beyond the veil. But while Victorian séances were generally aimed at the dearly departed, the titular visitant (Liz White), who haunts the isolated estate of Eel Marsh House and its environs, is a vindictive, mean-spirited creature, avenging the long-ago loss of her child by wreaking havoc and heartbreak among the families of the nearby village, among them a local landowner (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer). Radcliffe’s character, a lawyer named Arthur Kipps, has been tasked with settling the affairs of the mansion’s recently deceased owner, an assignment that requires sifting through mounds of dusty, crumpled ephemera in one of the creakiest, squeakiest buildings ever constructed. Set at the end of a narrow spit of land that disappears into the surrounding wetlands when the tide is high, Eel Marsh House is a charming place to be marooned after dark. But no amount of horrified screams from the audience will keep Kipps from his duties, though it’s hard to make much headway amid the unrelenting creepiness. Nearly every moment brings a fresh inexplicable thumping noise from an upper floor; a new room full of dead-eyed dolls that Kipps has no business wandering into; another freakishly screaming face next to his as he gazes out the window. The house is a richly textured set piece; the horror is of the sort that makes you jump and then laugh, both at the filmmakers, for springing the same tricks on you over and over, and at yourself, for falling prey to them every time. (1:36) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Soojin Chang. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 15

Radical Directing Lecture Series: Shari Frilot San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 771-7020, www.sfai.edu. 7:30 p.m., free. Shari Frilot is the curator of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Program. In this lecture, she will discuss the cinematic works that are being created at the crossroads where art, film, and new media technology meet.

THURSDAY 16

“Coloring Outside the Lines: Black Cartoonists As Social Commentators” panel discussion City College of San Francisco John Adams Campus, 1835 Hayes, SF. (415) 239-3580, www.ccsf.edu. 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m., free. Cartoonists are like modern jesters — they poke fun and offer criticism, but we can’t help but love them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in funnies that deal with race in our society. Join curator Kheven LaGrone and guests in a discussion of how black cartoonists have brought in a wide range of perspectives to racial issues and social prejudices.

“Project Censored with Mickey Huff” book release event Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, SF. (415) 282-9246, www.mtbs.com. 7 p.m., free. Mainstream media seems to air more stories about cats running onto soccer pitches and M.I.A.’s middle finger than relevant news. Author Mickey Huff presents the top 25 underreported news stories you may have missed, and delves in to censorship issues in the relentless fight against Big Media.

“Beyond Cage-Free” panel discussion Port Commission Hearing Room, Ferry Building, 1 Embarcadero, SF. (415) 291-3276, www.cuesa.org. 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation. The cage-free label promises eggs from unpenned hens, but can belie farm environments that are much more tragic than the happy picture on cartons would lead us to believe. Join the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture in a panel discussion with Lexicon of Sustainability founder Douglas Gayeton, Ferry Plaza farmers, and local ranch owners.

San Francisco Childhood: Memories of a Great City Seen Through the Eyes of Its Children author discussion Green Arcade, 1680 Market, SF. (415) 431-6800, www.thegreenarcade.com. 7 p.m., free. This city has always been a hoot. Editor and author John van der Zee has put together writings dedicated to the magic of San Francisco by figures like Joe DiMaggio, Jerry Garcia, Margaret Cho, and Carol Channing. Come hear about how the city felt to them, and reflect on whether it’s the same for you today.

FRIDAY 17

SF Beer Olympics Impala, 501 Broadway, SF. (415) 982-5299, www.impalasf.com. 8:30 p.m., $10. To start the night, compete in a game of flip cup, beer pong, and relays with strangers, friends, and soon-to-be friends. Afterwards, Olympic champions and losers are welcome to meander upstairs for free admission to the Impala night club.

A night with photographer Robert Altman Wix Lounge, 3169 22nd St, SF. (415) 329-4609, www.wixloungesf.com. 7-10 p.m., free. Robert Altman not only survived the 1960’s but photographed some of the best parts of it. He will be talking about his work for Rolling Stone and his experiences photographing icons like Mick Jagger and Bill Graham. Come hang out with this all-around cool dude.

SATURDAY 18

“A Love Supreme” Harlem Renaissance art celebration First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St, Oakl. (510) 893-6129, www.uuoakland.org. 6 p.m.-9 p.m., donations accepted. The Harlem Renaissance brought on an explosion of culture and redefined music, art, and literature in American history. Join local queer poets of color in a delicious potluck dinner and music-poetry session to celebrate how cultural richness and literary splendor have not stopped growing.

The Dark Wave book release party Fecal Face Dot Gallery, 2277 Mission, SF. (415) 500-2166, www.ffdg.net. 6-9 p.m., free. You may know Jay Howell from his zine Punks Git Cut! where he sketched out an assortment of naked people, dogs, and boners. Howell is now bringing his majestic artwork as the backdrop of his new book — a literary tale of a black metal band’s disenchanted lead singer.

SUNDAY 19

Art Beat Bazaar music, poetry, and pop-up indie-mart Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. (519) 841-2082, www.starryploughpub.com. 3-7 p.m., free. This is the first of the monthly community event Art Beat Foundation will be hosting as a way to showcase local musicians, spoken word artists, comedians, and visual artists. Let folk-rock band Upstairs Downstairs be the musical soundtrack to your trip to the quirky pop-up store, where you will find handmade treasures by artists like Cori Crooks and Brownie 510

Yiddish sing-along with Sharon Bernstein Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1200, www.jccsf.org. 5-6:30 p.m., free. This musical event is one part of KlezCalifornia’s Yiddish Culture Festival, a three-day event for anyone who is interested in Yiddish literature, interactions between musical cultures, klezmer music, and/or Eastern European Jewish history. Lyric books will be provided.

MONDAY 20

Open mic night with Les Gottesman and Bill Crossman Bird and Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery, SF. (415) 586-3733, www.birdbeckett.com. 7 p.m., free. Les Gottesman and Bill Crossman are poets, activists, and professors who are coming to share their latest and favorite works in this literary night. Gottesman’s words are said to be goosebump-invoking and Crossman’s smooth piano skills are not to be missed.

TUESDAY 21

“Laissez les bons temps rouler” Mardis Gras party Jazz Heritage Center, 1320 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-5299, www.thefillmoredistrict.com. 5 p.m., $5 for wristbands. Make it a merry Fat Tuesday this year by going out to the Fillmore District for a neighborhood party of stilt walkers, jugglers, and face painters. 10 Fillmore Street venues will have live music and Mardi Gras-themed drinks and treats for under 10 dollars.

“Youthquake: High Style in the Swinging Sixties” American Decorative Arts forum and exhibit Koret Auditorium at de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.deyoung.famsf.org. 7 p.m., $15. Long hair and bellbottoms marked the fashion and music scene during the 1960’s, and a similarly defiant idiosyncrasy took over home décor. Join Mitchell Owens of Architectural Digest in a lecture on the bold and innovative interior style moves that were made during the exuberance of the youthquake.

“Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF. (415) 552-1770, www.feastofwords.somarts.org. 7-9 p.m., $10 in advance; $5 with a potluck dish; $12 at door. Writers are often thought of as caffeine junkies who survive off of coffee and cigarettes. But hey, we eat just like any other Joe Schmo. At this literary event, foodies and writers unite to share (both food and literature) and learn about local cultures and flavors.

Is SF’s DA investigating Rose Pak?

Zelda Bronstein
-
18
Is SF’s DA investigating Rose Pak?

Well, Ms. Pak thinks he is. At the Chinese New Year parade, where she wields the mic at the reviewing stand and typically makes nasty comments about local politicians, she was relatively muted this year –– except when D.A. George Gascon rode by. “I read in the blogs that you’re still investigating me,” she shouted. “What the hell did I do? I just elected the first Chinese American mayor. You will find nothing, except that I swear a lot.”

Gascon has for more than four months been investigating irregularities in the Ed Lee campaign, including charges of illegal campaign contributions and voter fraud. Gascon’s office issued a press release Feb. 14 announcing the indictments of Go Lorries and two of its senior employees. The airport shuttle outfit allegedly laundered campaign money by asking its employees each to donate the maxium $500 to Lee’s campaign and then paying them back from company funds. From the release:

The defendants are accused of making an unlawful $11,500 campaign contribution from GO Lorrie’s to the Ed Lee campaign by passing it through GO Lorrie’s drivers and staff. … “Campaign finance and disclosure laws help to ensure fairness and transparency in our elections,” said District Attorney George Gascón, “and my office takes the violation of these laws very seriously.  After a thorough investigation, we have found clear evidence to charge Go Lorrie’s and two of its employees with making illegal campaign contributions.”

Nobody from the Lee campaign has been charged with anything.

So what about the other apparent violations? Is that still under investigation? Is Rose Pak a target? I asked Stephanie Ong Stillman, Gascon’s spokesperson, and she told me that she can’t confirm or deny that there’s any further investigations under way or that any specific individual is under investigation.

So I’m glad to see the Go Lorries indictment, which marks a rare instance of somebody taking campaign laws seriously. But there’s a lot more here, and I hope Gascon doesn’t think that nailing one company that everyone will insist acted on its own with no support from or connection to a pretty darn sleazy campaign will end the controversy.

 

 

Localized Appreesh: Bhi Bhiman

Tony Robles
-
1

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Bhi Bhiman manages a joke when he coolly plucks bluesy guitar while singing about kimchi on “Kimchee Line” off his new album Bhiman (“it’s cabbage time”). It’s just not the food you’d expect to hear name-checked in a folky 1920s blues-style standard. (Though on another track, “Ballerina,” he does mention beans.) Despite this wry wink, his songs have an inherent sadness to them, which only makes more intriguing that irreverent style of telling socially conscious stories with lyrics you just wouldn’t quite imagine there in another time period. It’s the contemporary take on the classic style.

He has been referred to as the “Sri Lankan Woody Guthrie,” but that sort of makes me cringe, for a number of reasons. Though it’s true they both sing stories of the downtrodden (check “Guttersnipe” below). But Bhiman is a musician who needn’t be reduced to borderline comparisons based partially on ancestry. He’s got a style his own, and was born in St. Louis. This week, the SF-based musician celebrates the release of Bhiman with a show Sat/18 at Bottom of the Hill.

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

Year and location of origin: Born 1982, St. Louis, USA, Earth.

Motto: Badabing Badaboom.

Description of sound in 10 words or less: Socially aware country blues and soul.

Instrumentation: Acoustic guitar, vocals.

Most recent release: BHIMAN (BooCoo) – released Jan. 24, 2012.

Best part about life as a Bay Area musician: Diversity of culture

Worst part about life as a Bay Area musician: Cost of living

First album ever purchased: Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.

Most recent album purchased/borrowed from the Web: Booker T Jones, The Road From Memphis.

Favorite local eatery and dish: There’s a new Korean place called Manna that is really good and reasonably priced (incredibly important). I get the soft tofu soup with pork.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUxknehMG6E

Bhi Bhiman
With Vandella and Misisipi Mike & Cree Rider opening
Sat/18, 8:30pm, $12
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

A sad Valentine’s Day message: “Nathaniel died”

-
7

A sad Valentine’s Day message: “Nathaniel died”

The email came from Doug Giebel from his hometown of Big Sandy, Montana.

“Nathaniel died shortly after midnight. Valentine’s Day. Montana Time.

“His condition badly worsened yesterday. Was in much pain, so it is the kindest thing that could have happened.”

Nathaniel, as his friends and former students called him, was Nathaniel Blumberg, a great journalist and a great journalism professor who inspired six generations of students at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln as a professor and at the University of Montana in Missoula as the Dean of the School  of Journalism and wherever he taught and lectured.

He was my first journalism professor when I took his class my freshman year at Nebraska in the fall of 1953.  And he was the first person to make it clear to me that there were serious problems with the mainstream media and that a paper like the Guardian could and would be a viable alternative to the local daily monopoly. “Bruce,” he would say to me later, “think what you can do in San Francisco with a paper that is truly an alternative to the Examiner and Chronicle” His classes and his 1954 book, “One Party Press?”  a critical study of the 1952 presidential election and the first significant assessment of press performance during a presidential election,  foreshadowed the founding of the Guardian in 1966 and the flowering of the alternative press from then on in virtually every city in the country.

Nathaniel, who was retired and living on Flathead Lake, had a stroke last Wednesday.

He was about to step into the shower when it happened, according to Giebel. Ninety minutes later a friend found him and, after an argument, convinced him he needed to be hospitalized. He was helicoptered to the Kalispell Regional Medical Center. The word that Nathaniel was down shot around the state and beyond to all who knew him and the hospital was inundated with messages and people coming to see him.

I asked Giebel about the obituary and he said that Nathaniel’s two daughters and two of his former students, Printer Bowler and Wilbur Wood, would be working up a full obituary and send it to me for posting. Stay tuned.

Nathaniel always insisted on meeting  deadlines.  I think he would have liked making it to Valentine’s Day, 2012.

P.S. Late on Valentine’s Day,  Wood called me from his hometown in Roundup, Montana.   Nathaniel had sent Wood, a talented editor of the campus paper,  to San Francisco to work on the Guardian in 1967. He was our city editor and did some of our best reporting in the late 1960s.  Wood  was still on the  job four decades later  and informed me that Nathaniel had written his own obituary and that he would send it along.for posting. I will put it up  tomorrow (Wednesday, the day after  Valentine’s Day.) Nathaniel would have been pleased. He always urged his students to never forget their paper and to always contact the editor immediately whenever they had a good story. B3

 

 

b3

Something to celebrate: 4 local standouts from SF Beer Week’s opening pours

Andrew Lam
-
0

The first drinkers to make it into the SF Beer Week opening celebration on Friday, January 10 had the run of the taps, and with over 50 breweries pouring two to six beers apiece in this year’s more spacious Concourse Exhibition Center venue, that counted for a lot. Yet, for some reason, the two guys at the head of the line were still speed walking. Maybe it was a preemptive strike against beer gut. 

Sorry gents, but it’s a losing battle. Calorie counting was a loser’s game on Friday, but for anyone interested in the best and brightest of San Francisco suds, it was a can’t-miss situation. Here were some of the standouts — all local SF brews:

Almanac: SF’s fledgling Almanac brewery poured my first beers of the Week, and subsequently walked with my heart. The gypsy brewer (so named because it still doesn’t have its own facilities) makes small batch beers with fruit from featured Northern California farms — after the batch is made, it may never come back. It was pouring three of its fruit-based beers on Friday: the Belgian golden strong blackberry, farmhouse pale ale plum, and the winter wit orange and ginger. This week, the upstart is pairing with some of the city’s foodie flocking points to create some incredible limited edition products made with its beers: Dynamo Doughnuts,Humphrey Slocombe, and Wing Wings. Plus tonight (Mon/13), the brewery will be pairing up with Speakeasy and Pacific Brewing Laboratories to provide drinks during the hog butchering lesson and feast at the Beast and the Hare for all you carnivores. 

SF Beer Week at the Concourse Exhibition Center. It really was a sausage fest. 

Pacific Brewing Laboratories: “It’s been so amazing,” said Pacific Brewing Laboratories‘ Patrick Horn. Horn — who Guardian readers will remember from his local snack-beer pairings in last fall’s Beer Issue — was talking about his nanobrewery’s recent transition into non-nano — a.k.a, the SoMa outfit’s appearance in stores and bars around the city. Horn says the only trouble his outfit has been having is keeping up with the demand for its Squid Ink and Nautilus saison, which as it happens were the two brews he was pouring on Friday. 

Shmaltz: I was partial, as always, to the SF-born Shmaltz‘s Albino Python, with its notes of ginger, sweet orange peel, and crushed fennell. Another recent happening: the brewery’s developed a new recipe for its Genesis dry hopped session ale, which it hardly ever does. Once a cross between an amber and a pale ale, Shmaltz employee Leah Harmatz says the new recipe was created so that it would be “more crisp.” I had to agree. Shmaltz’s mega carny food beer dinner on Wed/15 is probably going to be the most decadently weird night of Beer Week — set at Elk Lodge No. 3, attendees will enjoy their comestibles with performances by sideshow wackos as a garnish. 

Southern Pacific Brewing: This brand-new brewery‘s recently opened brewery-pub-restaurant in the Mission has to be one of the neighborhood’s most exciting new spaces — vast and airy, the multilevel seating is going to be a place to beat in the Indian summer months when everyone wants to kick back with their favorite uber-local microbrew. On Friday, it was pouring its extra India pale ale and black ale, only two of a wide array of beers it makes on-site in their warehouse building. 

Meet the new supervisor

-
10
Meet the new supervisor

Christina Olague, the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, faces a difficult balancing act. She was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, whom she supported as co-chair of the controversial “Run Ed Run” campaign, to fill the vacancy in District 5, an ultra-progressive district whose voters rejected Lee in favor of John Avalos by a 2-1 margin.

So now Olague faces the challenge of keeping her district happy while staying on good terms with the Mayor’s Office, all while running in her first campaign for elected office against what could be a large field of challengers scrutinizing her every vote and statement.

Olague has strong progressive activist credentials, from working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition to protect low-income renters during the last dot-com boom to her more recent community organizing for the Senior Action Network. She co-chaired the 2003 campaign that established the city’s minimum wage and has been actively involved in such progressive organizations as the Milk Club, Transit Riders Union, and the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization.

“One of the reasons many of us are so supportive of Christina is she is grounded in the issues of low-income San Franciscans,” said Gabriel Haaland, who works with SEIU Local 1021 and accompanied Olague to a recent interview at the Guardian office.

She also served two terms on the Planning Commission — appointed by Board of Supervisors then-President Matt Gonzalez in 2004 and reappointed by then-President Aaron Peskin in 2008 — where she was known for doing her homework on complicated land use issues and usually landing on the progressive side of divided votes.

“Coming from the Planning Commission, she can do a lot of good,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a supporter who has worked with Olague for 15 years. “We lost a lot of collective memory on land use issues,” he said, citing the expertise of Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin. “We do need that on the board. There is so much at stake in land use.”

Olague disappointed many progressives by co-chairing Progress for All, which was created by Chinatown power broker Rose Pak to push the deceptive “Run Ed Run” campaign that was widely criticized for its secrecy and other ethical violations. At the time, Olague told us she appreciated how Lee was willing to consider community input and she thought it was important for progressives to support him to maintain that open door policy.

In announcing his appointment of Olague, Lee said, “This is not about counting votes, it’s about what’s best for San Francisco and her district.” Olague also sounded that post-partisan theme, telling the crowd at her swearing-in, “I think this is an incredible time for our city and a time when we are coming together and moving past old political pigeonholes.”

With some big projects coming to the board and the working class being rapidly driven out of the city, progressives are hoping Olague will be a committed ally. There’s some concern, though, about her connections to Progress For All campaign’s secretive political consultant, Enrique Pearce.

Pearce has become a bit of a pariah in progressive circles for his shady campaign tactics on behalf of powerful players. In 2010, his Left Coast Communications got caught running an independent expenditure campaign partly funded by Willie Brown out of Pearce’s office, even though Sup. Jane Kim was both its beneficiary and his client — and that level of coordination is illegal. Last year, Pearce was hired by Pak to create the “Run Ed Run” campaign and write the hagiographic book, The Ed Lee Story, which also seemed to have some connections with Lee’s campaign. The Ethics Commission hasn’t fined Pearce for either incident, and he didn’t return a Guardian call for comment.

Olague told us not to worry. “He’s a friend…and I think it’s an exaggerated concern,” she said, confirming but minimizing his role so far. Yet she hired one of Pearce’s former employees, Jen Low, as one of her board aide. Olague’s other aides are Chris Durazo from South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) and Dominica Henderson, formerly of the SF Housing Authority.

Debra Walker, a progressive activist who served on the Building Inspection Commission and has worked with Olague for decades, said she’s a reliable ally: “She’s from the progressive community and I have no equivocation about that.”

Olague makes no apologies for her alliances, saying that she is both independent and progressive and that she should be judged by her actions as a supervisor. “People will have to decide who I am based on how I vote,” she said, later adding, “I support the mayor and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

 

OLAGUE’S PRIORITIES

Olague was born in Merced in 1961 to a Mexican immigrant father who fixed farming equipment and a stay-at-home mother. She went to high school in Fresno and moved to the Bay Area in 1982. She attended San Francisco State University but had to drop out to help support her family, working at various stock brokerage firms in the Financial District. She later got a degree in liberal studies from California Institute of Integral Studies.

In 1992, Olague’s mother was in serious car accident that left her a quadriplegic, so Olague spent the next seven years caring for her. After her mother died, Olague left the financial services industry and became a community organizer for the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, battling the forces of gentrification and then-Mayor Brown and becoming an active player in the ascendant progressive movement.

But Olague never abided progressive orthodoxy. She backed Mark Leno over the more progressive Harry Britt in their 2002 Assembly race and backed Leno again in 2007 when he ran for state Senate against Carole Migden. She also voted for the Home Depot project on Bayshore Boulevard despite a progressive campaign against the project.

Olague worked with then-Sup. Chris Daly to win more community benefits and other concessions from developers of the Trinity Plaza and Rincon Tower projects, but now she is critical of Daly’s confrontational tactics. “Daly’s style isn’t what I agree with anymore,” Olague said, criticizing the deals that were cut on those projects to approve them with larger than required community benefits packages. “I think we romanticized what we got.”

So how does Olague plan to approach big development proposals, and is she willing to practice the brinksmanship that many progressives believe is necessary to win concessions? While she says her approach will be more conciliatory than Daly’s, she says the answer is still yes. “You push back, you make demands, and if you don’t think it’s going to benefit the city holistically, you just fucking say no,” Olague said.

Walker said Olague has proven she can stand up to pressure. “I think she’ll do as well as she did on the Planning Commission. She served as president and there is an enormous amount of pressure that is applied behind the scenes,” Walker said. “She’s already stood up to mayoral pressure on some issues.”

Yet even some of Olague’s strongest supporters say her dual — and perhaps dueling — loyalties to the Mayor’s Office and her progressive district are likely to be tested this year.

“It’ll be challenging for her to navigate,” Radulovich said. “The Mayor’s Office is going to say I want you to do X and Y, and it won’t always be progressive stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.”

But he said Olague’s land use expertise and progressive background will likely count for more than any bitter pills that she’s asked to swallow. “Sometimes, as a policy maker, you have to push the envelope and say we can get more,” he said. “It helps if you’re willing to say no to things and set boundaries.”

When we asked Olague to lay out her philosophy on dealing with land-use issues, she said that her approach will vary: “I have a very gray approach, project by project and neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Only a couple weeks into her new role, Olague said that she’s still getting a lay of the land: “I’m in information gathering mode, meeting with neighborhood groups to try to figure out what their issues are.”

But Olague said she understands that part of her job is making decisions that will disappoint some groups. For example, after Mayor Lee pledged to install bike lanes on Fell and Oak streets to connect the Panhandle to The Wiggle and lessen the danger to bicyclists, he recently stalled the project after motorists opposed the idea.

“I’m a transit-first person, for sure. I don’t even drive,” Olague said of her approach to that issue, which she has now begun to work on. “We’ll try to craft a solution, but then at some point you have to fall on one side or the other.”

 

THE “JOBS” FOCUS

One issue on which Olague’s core loyalities are likely to be tested is on the so-called “jobs” issue, which both Lee and Olague call their top priority. “Jobs and economic revitalization are very important,” she told us.

Progressives have begun to push back on Lee for valuing private sector job creation over all other priorities, such as workers’ rights, environmental safeguards, and public services. That came to a head on Jan. 26 at the Rules Committee hearing on Lee’s proposed charter amendment to delay legislation that might cost private sector jobs and require extra hearings before the Small Business Commission. Progressives and labor leaders slammed the proposal as unfair, divisive, unnecessary, and reminiscent of right-wing political tactics.

But when we interviewed Olague the next day, she was reluctant to criticize the measure on the record, even though it seemed so dead-on-arrival at the Board of Supervisors that Mayor Lee voluntarily withdrew it the next week.

Olague told us job creation is important, but she said it can’t squeeze out other priorities, such as protecting affordable rental housing.

“We always have to look at how the community will benefit from things. So if we want to incentivize for businesses, how do we also make it work for neighborhoods and for people so that we don’t end up with where we were in the Mission District in the ’90s?” she said.

Olague also said that she didn’t share Lee’s focus on jobs in the technology sector. “There’s a lot of talk of technology, and that’s fine and I’m not against that, and we can see how it works in the city. But at the same time, I’m concerned about folks who aren’t interested necessarily in working in technology. We need other types of jobs, so I think we shouldn’t let go of the small scale manufacturing idea.”

Wiener wants a sunshine audit

Zelda Bronstein
-
44
Wiener wants a sunshine audit

Sup. Scott Wiener is calling for an audit of the costs of complying with the city’s Sunshine Ordinance — a move that could lead to some great ideas for better public access to records or to a dangerous attack on one of the city’s most important local laws.

I first learned about Wiener’s proposal from the Petrelis Files, which posted Wiener’s letter asking the ciyt’s budget analyst to determine how much each city department spends annually complying with the law, including staff time. That could turn out to be a fairly big number, the sort of thing that will make Matier and Ross and lead to headlines about a few crazy sunshine activists costing the taxpayers millions.

There will be a lot less discussion about the cost to the city and the taxpayers of government secrecy, which Wiener agrees is substantial but can’t be quantified.

Wiener told me he thinks the Sunshine Ordinance is important — “its value goes without saying.” He also said the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is “poorly run and inefficient.” Wiener, who has been the subject of a sunshine complaint that wound up with the Task Force finding him in violation of the law, said city employees often have to spend hours and hours waiting at Task Force meetings. “They’re collecting overtime and sitting there waiting for their case to be called for five, six, seven hours,” he said. “Then it’s my understanding that sometimes the case doesn’t even get called.”

I called Rick Knee, who has been on the Task Force for many years, and he told me he agreed that there were probably some inefficiencies. But he said that in the past year, there’s been a huge backlog of complaints.

“Maybe that’s because of increased public awareness of the Task Force and the ordinance,” he said. “But I think there’s also an increase in sunshine problems.” Why? Well, for one thing, the Ethics Commission — which has enforcement power — almost never acts on Task Force findings. “The word has gotten out at City Hall that you can violate the sunshine law and skate,” Knee told me.

As for city employees having to wait around all day? “What about the people whose rights have been violated? They have to wait, too, and they aren’t even getting paid.”

No matter what Wiener’s survey finds, it’s pretty clear that the Task Force has saved both the city and the public money by resolving a lot of cases outside of court. Without the Task Force, the only recourse sunshine complainants have is to sue — which costs everyone involved a lot more than a few hours in a hearing room.

I’m not going to argue that the Task Force always operates with maximum efficiency or that there aren’t ways to make the hearings easier on both complainants and respondents. But there’s a much easier solution for everyone involved:

Make it easier to get public records in the first place.

I’ve been reporting on San Francisco City Hall for a long, long time, and I can tell you that, more often than not, it’s difficult and frustrating to get access to even basic records that ought to be handed over instantly. Why waste all of our time? Why not just make every document created by any city employee immediately available in an online database? Easy to do, cheap to do — and simple to check a box that would keep those very, very few records that truly ought to be confidential out of the public eye.

Wiener agreed there was merit to that suggestion, and I hope his audit looks beyond the dollars and cents of city workers complying with a city law and looks at the reason we have all these problems. The best way to save money on sunshine fights is not to force the public to fight to get access to information.

 

Loveless?

-
2
Loveless?

SUPER EGO The last time I tried to make out with a cute boy who wasn’t my husband, he actually said, “OK, I’m going to stand over there now. But you’re a great dancer.” Smooth save, Cornelius J. McRejector. I mean, if I had any pride left to be wounded do you think I’d be standing here wearing pink Baby Phat bedazzled cutoff jeans, a sequined visor that reads “Party Bottom,” possum-brown Keds, and some totally offensive, insensitively appropriated Native American item, possibly a dreamcatcher nose ring? I don’t need you! I’m busy re-embracing irony.

Anyway, that whole tackiness is over, and the point is this: dancing. If it seems there are more wild Valentine’s themed parties than ever this year (check out our roundup in this issue), there are also, well, more parties in general, including choice ones such as below. Just like Lana del Ray’s top lip, there’s always enough nightlife to go around. So don’t let some piddly fear of rejection lock you in the closet with zombie Mitt Romney. Be the great dancer you are.

 

LIGHT ASYLUM

Wide-ranging party players Marco de la Vega, Gary Riviera, and Brian Furstman have launched the new Future Perfect weekly at Monarch with the intent to obliterate whatever few genre boundaries remain in dance music — no central feel, “just good, forward thinking, contemporary” music, de la Vega told me. That’s a tough trick: without a definable flavor for a crowd to hold onto, you need to sustain a wholly unique energy (drink specials help!) or rely on big guest names to draw people back. Future Perfect seems to be succeeding at both strategies. The party’s already hosted Cold Cave, Jokers of the Scene, and Nguzunguzu; the latest big name is beguilingly dark live duo Light Asylum, anchored by singer Shannon Funchess’ throaty vocals. Considering Light Asylum’s justifiable reputation as one of the most riveting live acts around, this party’s energy will keep building.

Thu/9, 9 p.m., $10–$15. Monarch, 101 Sixth St., SF. www.monarchsf.com

 

BACK2BACK SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY

SF’s cosmic jam legends Jeno and Garth brought down club Mighty’s roof when they played at their original party Wicked’s 20th anniversary last year. Now they’re celebrating the lucky seventh of the party that sees them both on decks at the same time, finishing each others’ musical sentences. Poetry for your feet, child, and not to be missed for anyone interested in DJ sets that color outside the lines. (I’m so excited, I’m mixing my metaphors.)

Fri/10, 8 p.m.-4 a.m., free before 11 p.m., $7 after. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

 

NON STOP BHANGRA

Rad dance sounds from India seemed in danger of fading from the SF club scene recently. The lively Bollyhood Cafe in the Mission closed. (The space was taken over by expanding Senegalese restaurant-nightclub Bissap Baobab, so all is not lost worldwise). Forward-thinking global bass collective Surya Dub had faded from local DJ decks, although member Kush Arora continued to release ass-kicking riddim tracks at a furious pace. And when I heard long-running monthly dance extravaganza Non Stop Bhangra was looking for a new home I totally got a Punjab sad. Luckily, Non Stop has now landed on second Saturdays at Public Works — last month’s launch included the return of the Surya Dub crew, even. Whirl away with the expert Dholrhythms dance crew to DJ Jimmy Love’s bhangra bangers and a truly diverse Bay Area crowd, now going afterhours. This month, DJ Rekha of NYCs raucous Basement Bhangra guests. (Check out my interview with her — full of some amazing tunes — here.)

Sat/11 and second Saturdays, 9 p.m.-3 a.m., $10 advance, $15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.nonstopbhangra.com

OPEL 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY, PART ONE

A part of our nightlife so huge, its decade celebration had to be split in two. Opel usually blows up the underground with tech house and drum and bass glory — founding member Syd Gris is responsible for the massive Lovevolution festival. But this above-board extravaganza at Mezzanine boasts Opel stalwart DJs Meat Katie, Dylan Rhymes, Syd, and Melyss downstairs, and a “looking back” room upstairs with longtime spinners Kramer, Ethan Miller, Dutch, and Spesh.

Sat/11, 9 p.m.-4 a.m., $20 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

DROOG

Some tasty undergroundish events have been popping up at 46 Minna lately — raising a few eyebrows, since 46 Minna is otherwise known to the mainstream bottle-service crowd as Harlot. A recent chat with one of my favorite DJs, Adnan Sharif of the Forward SF house collective, cleared up the mystery: the Harlot peeps want to draw a more adventurous crowd to their lovely space on non-weekend days. Rebranding’s fine with me, especially if it brings a four-hour set by Droog, the LA trio of expert house deconstructionists who fill their funky mindtrips with all kinds of electronic Easter eggs. This is the launch of Forward SF’s weekly Forward Sundays Sessions (with a fresh fruit buffet!). Adnan himself is opening up.

Sun/12, $10–$20, 6 p.m.-midnight. 46 Minna, SF. www.forwardsf.com

1...104105106...294Page 105 of 294

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