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Save the world, work less

Michael Redmond
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Save the world, work less

steve@sfbg.com

Save the world, work less. That dual proposition should have universal appeal in any sane society. And those two ideas are inextricably linked by the realities of global climate change because there is a direct connection between economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions.

Simply put, every hour of work we do cooks the planet and its sensitive ecosystems a little bit more, and going home to relax and enjoy some leisure time is like taking this boiling pot of water off the burner.

Most of us burn energy getting to and from work, stocking and powering our offices, and performing the myriad tasks that translate into digits on our paychecks. The challenge of working less is a societal one, not an individual mandate: How can we allow people to work less and still meet their basic needs?

This goal of slowing down and spending less time at work — as radical as it may sound — was at the center of mainstream American political discourse for much of our history, considered by thinkers of all ideological stripes to be the natural endpoint of technological development. It was mostly forgotten here in the 1940s, strangely so, even as worker productivity increased dramatically.

But it’s worth remembering now that we understand the environmental consequences of our growth-based economic system. Our current approach isn’t good for the health of the planet and its creatures, and it’s not good for the happiness and productivity of overworked Americans, so perhaps it’s time to revisit this once-popular idea.

Last year, there was a brief burst of national media coverage around this “save the world, work less” idea, triggered by a report by the Washington DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled “Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change.”

“As productivity grows in high-income, as well as developing countries, social choices will be made as to how much of the productivity gains will be taken in the form of higher consumption levels versus fewer work hours,” author David Rosnick wrote in the introduction.

He notes that per capita work hours were reduced by 50 percent in recent decades in Europe compared to US workers who spend as much time as ever on the job, despite being a world leader in developing technologies that make us more productive. Working more means consuming more, on and off the job.

“This choice between fewer work hours versus increased consumption has significant implications for the rate of climate change,” the report said before going on to study various climate change and economic growth models.

It isn’t just global warming that working less will help address, but a whole range of related environmental problems: loss of biodiversity and natural habitat; rapid depletion of important natural resources, from fossil fuel to fresh water; and the pollution of our environment with harmful chemicals and obsolete gadgets.

Every day that the global workforce is on the job, those problems all get worse, mitigated only slightly by the handful of occupations devoted to cleaning up those messes. The Rosnick report contemplates only a slight reduction in working hours, gradually shaving a few hours off the week and offering a little more vacation time.

“The paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent. It finds that such a change in work hours would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in (i.e. warming that would be caused by 1990 levels of greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere),” the report concludes.

What I’m talking about is something more radical, a change that meets the daunting and unaddressed challenge that climate change is presenting. Let’s start the discussion in the range of a full day off to cutting our work hours in half — and eliminating half of the wasteful, exploitive, demeaning, make-work jobs that this economy-on-steroids is creating for us, and forcing us to take if we want to meet our basic needs.

Taking even a day back for ourselves and our environment will seem like crazy-talk to many readers, even though our bosses would still command more days each week than we would. But the idea that our machines and other innovations would lead us to work far less than we do now — and that this would be a natural and widely accepted and expected part of economic evolution — has a long and esteemed philosophical history.

Perhaps this forgotten goal is one worth remembering at this critical moment in our economic and environmental development.

 

HISTORY LESSON

Author and historian Chris Carlsson has been beating the “work less” drum in San Francisco since Jimmy Carter was president, when he and his fellow anti-capitalist activists decried the dawning of an age of aggressive business deregulation that continues to this day.

They responded with creative political theater and protests on the streets of the Financial District, and with the founding of a magazine called Processed World, highlighting how new information technologies were making corporations more powerful than ever without improving the lives of workers.

“What do we actually do all day and why? That’s the most basic question that you’d think we’d be talking about all the time,” Carlsson told us. “We live in an incredibly powerful and overarching propaganda society that tells you to get your joy from work.”

But Carlsson isn’t buying it, noting that huge swaths of the economy are based on exploiting people or the planet, or just creating unproductive economic churn that wastes energy for its own sake. After all, the Gross Domestic Product measures everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

“The logic of growth that underlies this society is fundamentally flawed,” Carlsson said. “It’s the logic of the cancer cell — it makes no sense.”

What makes more sense is to be smart about how we’re using our energy, to create an economy that economizes instead of just consuming everything in its path. He said that we should ask, “What work do we need to do and to what end?”

We used to ask such questions in this country. There was a time when working less was the goal of our technological development.

“Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the reduction of worktime was one of the nation’s most pressing issues,” professor Juliet B. Schor wrote in her seminal 1991 book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. “Through the Depression, hours remained a major social preoccupation. Today these debates and conflicts are long forgotten.”

Work hours were steadily reduced as these debates raged, and it was widely assumed that even greater reductions in work hours was all but inevitable. “By today, it was estimated that we could have either a 22-hour week, a six-month workyear, or a standard retirement age of 38,” Schor wrote, citing a 1958 study and testimony to Congress in 1967.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, declining work hours leveled off in the late 1940s even as worker productivity grew rapidly, increasing an average of 3 percent per year 1948-1968. Then, in the 1970s, workers in the US began to work steadily more hours each week while their European counterparts moved in the opposite direction.

“People tend to think the way things are is the way it’s always been,” Carlsson said. “Once upon a time, they thought technology would produce more leisure time, but that didn’t happen.”

Writer David Spencer took on the topic in a widely shared essay published in The Guardian UK in February entitled “Why work more? We should be working less for a better quality of life: Our society tolerates long working hours for some and zero hours for others. This doesn’t make sense.”

He cites practical benefits of working less, from reducing unemployment to increasing the productivity and happiness of workers, and cites a long and varied philosophical history supporting this forgotten goal, including opposing economists John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx.

Keynes called less work the “ultimate solution” to unemployment and he “also saw merit in using productivity gains to reduce work time and famously looked forward to a time (around 2030) when people would be required to work 15 hours a week. Working less was part of Keynes’s vision of a ‘good society,'” Spencer wrote.

“Marx importantly thought that under communism work in the ‘realm of necessity’ could be fulfilling as it would elicit and harness the creativity of workers. Whatever irksome work remained in realm of necessity could be lessened by the harnessing of technology,” Spencer wrote.

He also cited Bertrand Russell’s acclaimed 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” in which the famed mathematician reasoned that working a four-hour day would cure many societal ills. “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached,” Russell wrote.

Spencer concluded his article by writing, “Ultimately, the reduction in working time is about creating more opportunities for people to realize their potential in all manner of activities including within the work sphere. Working less, in short, is about allowing us to live more.”

 

JOBS VS. WORK

Schor’s research has shown how long working hours — and the uneven distribution of those hours among workers — has hampered our economy, hurt our environment, and undermined human happiness.

“We have an increasingly poorly functioning economy and a catastrophic environmental situation,” Schor told us in a phone interview from her office at Boston College, explaining how the increasingly dire climate change scenarios add urgency to talking about how we’re working.

Schor has studied the problem with other researchers, with some of her work forming the basis for Rosnick’s work, including the 2012 paper Schor authored with University of Alabama Professor Kyle Knight entitled “Could working less reduce pressures on the environment?” The short answer is yes.

“As humanity’s overshoot of environmental limits become increasingly manifest and its consequences become clearer, more attention is being paid to the idea of supplanting the pervasive growth paradigm of contemporary societies,” the report says.

The United States seems to be a case study for what’s wrong.

“There’s quite a bit of evidence that countries with high annual work hours have much higher carbon emissions and carbon footprints,” Schor told us, noting that the latter category also takes into account the impacts of the products and services we use. And it isn’t just the energy we expend at work, but how we live our stressed-out personal lives.

“If households have less time due to hours of work, they do things in a more carbon-intensive way,” Schor said, with her research finding those who work long hours often tend to drive cars by themselves more often (after all, carpooling or public transportation take time and planning) and eat more processed foods.

Other countries have found ways of breaking this vicious cycle. A generation ago, Schor said, the Netherlands began a policy of converting many government jobs to 80 percent hours, giving employees an extra day off each week, and encouraging many private sector employers to do the same. The result was happier employees and a stronger economy.

“The Netherlands had tremendous success with their program and they’ve ended up with the highest labor productivity in Europe, and one of the happiest populations,” Schor told us. “Working hours is a triple dividend policy change.”

By that she means that reducing per capita work hours simultaneously lowers the unemployment rate by making more jobs available, helps address global warming and other environmental challenges, and allows people to lead happier lives, with more time for family, leisure, and activities of their choosing.

Ironically, a big reason why it’s been so difficult for the climate change movement to gain traction is that we’re all spending too much time and energy on making a living to have the bandwidth needed to sustain a serious and sustained political uprising.

When I presented this article’s thesis to Bill McKibben, the author and activist whose 350.org movement is desperately trying to prevent carbon concentrations in the atmosphere from passing critical levels, he said, “If people figure out ways to work less at their jobs, I hope they’ll spend some of their time on our too-often neglected work as citizens. In particular, we need a hell of a lot of people willing to devote some time to breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry.”

world

That’s the vicious circle we now find ourselves in. There is so much work to do in addressing huge challenges such as global warming and transitioning to more sustainable economic and energy systems, but we’re working harder than ever just to meet our basic needs — usually in ways that exacerbate these challenges.

“I don’t have time for a job, I have too much work to do,” is the dilemma facing Carlsson and others who seek to devote themselves to making the world a better place for all living things.

To get our heads around the problem, we need to overcome the mistaken belief that all jobs and economic activity are good, a core tenet of Mayor Ed Lee’s economic development policies and his relentless “jobs agenda” boosterism and business tax cuts. Not only has the approach triggered the gentrification and displacement that have roiled the city’s political landscape in the last year, but it relies on a faulty and overly simplistic assumption: All jobs are good for society, regardless of their pay or impact on people and the planet.

Lee’s mantra is just the latest riff on the fabled Protestant work ethic, which US conservatives and neoliberals since the Reagan Era have used to dismantle the US welfare system, pushing the idea that it’s better for a single mother to flip our hamburgers or scrub our floors than to get the assistance she needs to stay home and take care of her own home and children.

“There is a belief that work is the best form of welfare and that those who are able to work ought to work. This particular focus on work has come at the expense of another, far more radical policy goal, that of creating ‘less work,'” Spencer wrote in his Guardian essay. “Yet…the pursuit of less work could provide a better standard of life, including a better quality of work life.”

And it may also help save us from environmental catastrophe.

 

GLOBAL TIPPING POINT

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top research body on the issue recognized by the United Nations, recently released its fifth report summarizing and analyzing the science and policies around climate change, striking a more urgent tone than in previous reports.

On April 13 at a climate conference in Berlin, the panel released a new report noting that greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than ever and urgent action is needed in the next decade to avert a serious crisis.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report, told The New York Times. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

After the panel released an earlier section of the report on March 31, it wrote in a public statement: “The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce surprises.”

The known impacts will be displaced populations in poor countries inundated by rising seas, significant changes to life-supporting ecosystems (such as less precipitation in California and other regions, creating possible fresh water shortages), food shortages from loss of agricultural land, and more extreme weather events.

What we don’t yet know, these “surprises,” could be even scarier because this is such uncharted territory. Never before have human activities had such an impact on the natural world and its delicate balances, such as in how energy circulates through the world’s oceans and what it means to disrupt half of the planet’s surface area.

Researchers have warned that we could be approaching a “global tipping point,” in which the impact of climate change affects other systems in the natural world and threatens to spiral out of control toward another mass extinction. And a new report funded partially by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Goodard Space Center combines the environmental data with growing inequities in the distribution of wealth to warn that modern society as we know it could collapse.

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” the report warned.

It cites two critical features that have triggered most major societal collapses in past, both of which are increasingly pervasive problems today: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or ‘Commoners’),” which makes it more difficult to deal with problems that arise.

Both of these problems would be addressed by doing less overall work, and distributing the work and the rewards for that work more evenly.

 

SYSTEMIC PROBLEM

Carol Zabin — research director for the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, who has studied the relation between jobs and climate change — has some doubts about the strategy of addressing global warming by reducing economic output and working less.

“Economic activity which uses energy is not immediately correlated with work hours,” she told us, noting that some labor-saving industrial processes use more energy than human-powered alternatives. And she also said that, “some leisure activities could be consumptive activities that are just as bad or worse than work.”

She does concede that there is a direct connection between energy use and climate change, and that most economic activity uses energy. Zabin also said there was a clear and measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during the Great Recession that began with the 2008 economic crash, when economic growth stalled and unemployment was high.

“When we’re in recessions and output and consumption slow, we see a reduction in impact on the climate,” Zabin said, although she added, “They’re correlated, but they’re not causal.”

Other studies have made direct connections between work and energy use, at least when averaged out across the population, studies that Rosnick cited in his study. “Recent work estimated that a 1 percent increase in annual hours per employee is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in carbon footprint,” it said, citing the 2012 Knight study.

Zabin’s main stumbling block was a political one, rooted in the assumption that American-style capitalism, based on conspicuous consumption, would continue more or less as is. “Politically, reducing economic growth is really, really unviable,” she told us, noting how that would hurt the working class.

But again, doesn’t that just assume that the pain of an economic slowdown couldn’t be more broadly shared, with the rich absorbing more of the impact than they have so far? Can’t we move to an economic system that is more sustainable and more equitable?

“It seems a little utopian when we have a problem we need to address by reducing energy use,” Zabin said before finally taking that next logical step: “If we had socialism and central planning, we could shut the whole thing down a notch.”

Instead, we have capitalism, and she said, “we have a climate problem that is probably not going to be solved anyway.”

So we have capitalism and unchecked global warming, or we can have a more sustainable system and socialism. Hmm, which one should we pick? European leaders have already started opting for the latter option, slowing down their economic output, reducing work hours, and substantially lowering the continent’s carbon footprint.

That brings us back to the basic question set forth in the Rosnick study: As productivity increases, should those gains go to increase the wages of workers or to reduce their hours? From the perspective of global warming, the answer is clearly the latter. But that question is complicated in US these days by the bosses, investors, and corporations keeping the productivity gains for themselves.

“It is worth noting that the pursuit of reduced work hours as a policy alternative would be much more difficult in an economy where inequality is high and/or growing. In the United States, for example, just under two-thirds of all income gains from 1973-2007 went to the top 1 percent of households. In that type of economy, the majority of workers would have to take an absolute reduction in their living standards in order to work less. The analysis of this paper assumes that the gains from productivity growth will be more broadly shared in the future, as they have been in the past,” the study concludes.

So it appears we have some work to do, and that starts with making a connection between Earth Day and May Day.

 

EARTH DAY TO MAY DAY

The Global Climate Convergence (www.globalclimateconvergence.org) grew out of a Jan. 18 conference in Chicago that brought together a variety of progressive, environmental, and social justice groups to work together on combating climate change. They’re planning “10 days to change course,” a burst of political organizing and activism between Earth Day and May Day, highlighting the connection between empowering workers and saving the planet.

“It provides coordinated action and collaboration across fronts of struggle and national borders to harness the transformative power we already possess as a thousand separate movements. These grassroots justice movements are sweeping the globe, rising up against the global assault on our shared economy, ecology, peace and democracy. The accelerating climate disaster, which threatens to unravel civilization as soon as 2050, intensifies all of these struggles and creates new urgency for collaboration and unified action. Earth Day to May Day 2014 (April 22 — May 1) will be the first in a series of expanding annual actions,” the group announced.

San Mateo resident Ragina Johnson, who is coordinating events in the Bay Area, told us May Day, the international workers’ rights holiday, grew out of the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the United States, so it’s appropriate to use the occasion to call for society to slow down and balance the demands of capital with the needs of the people and the planet.

“What we’re seeing now is an enormous opportunity to link up these movements,” she told us. “It has really put us on the forefront of building a new progressive left in this country that takes on these issues.”

In San Francisco, she said the tech industry is a ripe target for activism.

“Technology has many employees working 60 hours a week, and what is the technology going to? It’s going to bottom line profits instead of reducing people’s work hours,” she said.

That’s something the researchers have found as well.

“Right now, the problem is workers aren’t getting any of those productivity gains, it’s all going to capital,” Schor told us. “People don’t see the connection between the maldistribution of hours and high unemployment.”

She said the solution should involve “policies that make it easier to work shorter hours and still meet people’s basic needs, and health insurance reform is one of those.”

Yet even the suggestion that reducing work hours might be a worthy societal goal makes the head of conservatives explode. When the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about how “working a bit less” could help many people qualify for healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (“Lower 2014 income can net huge health care subsidy,” 10/12/13), the right-wing blogosphere went nuts decrying what one site called the “toxic essence of the welfare state.”

Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders parroted the criticism in her Feb. 7 column. “The CBO had determined that ‘workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.’ To many Democrats, apparently, that’s all good,” she wrote of Congressional Budget Office predictions that Obamacare could help reduce hours worked.

Not too many Democratic politicians have embraced the idea of working less, but maybe they should if we’re really going to attack climate change and other environmental challenges. Capitalism has given us great abundance, more than we need and more than we can safely sustain, so let’s talk about slowing things down.

“There’s a huge amount of work going on in society that nobody wants to do and nobody should do,” Carlsson said, imagining a world where economic desperation didn’t dictate the work we do. “Most of us would be free to do what we want to do, and most of us would do useful things.”

And what about those who would choose idleness and sloth? So what? At this point, Mother Earth would happily trade her legions of crazed workaholics for a healthy population of slackers, those content to work and consume less.

Maybe someday we’ll even look back and wonder why we ever considered greed and overwork to be virtues, rather than valuing a more healthy balance between our jobs and our personal lives, our bosses and our families, ourselves and the natural world that sustains us.

Giving thanks: On growing up with Nirvana

Steven T. Jones
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Giving thanks: On growing up with Nirvana

For all of the world-wide media attention surrounding the induction of Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight and the 20th anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain this week, there is one very simple, yet pivotally important aspect of the band that seems to be getting somewhat neglected in the frenzy of coverage.

There’s plenty of talk about how influential the band was on the mainstream music scene and the commercial record industry, and even more on the tragedy and tortured soul of Cobain; yet in all of the discussions, dissertations and analysis of the Nirvana phenomenon, if that’s what you want to call it, it almost feels that one key component has been left on the backburner — the fact that the band made some absolutely amazing music, and has touched multiple generations of fans with that gift.

Sure, Nirvana moved millions of units in record stores, and they knocked Michael Jackson out of the number one spot in the Billboard charts. For people like me, however, those are secondary accomplishments, footnotes in what the band meant to us. I didn’t hear about Nirvana by watching MTV or keeping track of what was hot in the Billboard 100. I was 12 years old when Nevermind came out. I was turned on to them by a friend at a sleepover in junior high school, a personal connection that I doubt is seldom done anymore in the age of the internet.

This was when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — it was late at night, and after we had been told to go to sleep. After we turned out the lights, my friend turned on a small flashlight and got out his Walkman — that’s a portable cassette tape player, for you youngsters — from underneath his bed and passed it over to me. He told me that he had heard this new song by some new band, and that I needed to hear it — but he hadn’t wanted to play it earlier out loud with his kid brother and parents around for some reason.

He told me that I would probably feel like jumping up and running around the room, and that it had this crazy energy about it.

I put on my headphones, and hit play.

I haven’t been the same person since.

When the first chords came out of the headphones, I wasn’t sure what to think — by the time the distortion, drums, and bass kicked in and had gone through about two bars, I was hooked. My friend was right, after the subdued verse, the musical anticipation was palpable from the build-up of the pre-chorus; by the time the “hello, hello, hello, how low” burst into the all-out aural assault of “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous,” I was practically jumping out of bed, mad with an energy I had never known before.

Nirvana became the soundtrack to my life, and while they opened up the doors to so much more music for me in the ensuing years, they remain my favorite band, the lynchpin for what I’ve become as an adult. I’ve been covering music professionally for almost a decade and a half now; I wouldn’t be doing so if it wasn’t for Nirvana. While I am excited that the band is getting the recognition they so rightly deserve now with the Hall of Fame induction, it is with bittersweet emotions that they are doing so, being so close to the anniversary of the death of their driving force, their heart and soul, Kurt Cobain.

There is a quote from Cobain that has been repeated often over the years, but I think it might sum up best the feelings and attitude that I took away from Nirvana and their music. As the band was starting to catapult to fame in late 1991, he was asked what the name Nirvana meant to him. He replied, “The word that has come up in every definition that I’ve read is freedom. So we kind of like to think of our music as musical freedom.”

I think that is what I and so many countless fans around the world took from Nirvana. A sense of freedom. Not just musically, but artistically, culturally, and personally. A gateway to being your own person, regardless of what those around you or what society as a whole might think of you. The blurry photo of the band in the liner notes to Nevermind features Cobain flipping the bird to the camera. I think that attitude of “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want” has transcended generations, and is part of what keeps Nirvana a force to be reckoned with.

kurt cobain

I consider myself very lucky to have seen Nirvana live in concert once; that experience, in 8th grade, at the age of 14, further cemented the impact that the band would have on my life. The raw energy and emotion of the show makes it the one to which all others that have come after have been held up to. Some have come close, none have ever matched it.

In Septembe rof 2011, I made the pilgrimage to Seattle ito visit an exhibit celebrating Nirvana’s legacy and impact on popular culture and the 20th anniversary of Nevermind at the Experience Music Project museum, “Nirvana: Taking Punk To The Masses.” It featured a treasure trove of artifacts and interactive installations; seeing the actual instruments that were used to create the music that has had such a profound effect on my life was awe-inspiring; as was gazing at hand-written lyric sheets,  original demo tapes, artwork, family photos, stage props, and more.

In an article I wrote about the experience, I noted that when my friend and I came to the end of the exhibit, we both commented that while it was an amazingly touching experience to see what was there, it somehow seemed too short, that there really should have been more to it. It was then that we looked at each other and came to what should have been an obvious realization; for all their influence and impact on our lives and the lives of millions of fans around the world, Nirvana only existed for a mere seven years. Their career, like Kurt Cobain’s life, was cut much too short. In that short time, however, they made an incredible impression on their fans, myself being one of them.

It’s hard to sum up more than 20 years worth of feelings and emotions in one simple article; I’ve done my best here for now. Kurt, Krist, and Dave: Congratulations on your induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And more importantly, thank you for the music.

Kaepernick incident report details bong hits, blackout, and alleged assault

Erica Hanna
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5
Kaepernick incident report details bong hits, blackout, and alleged assault

San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Colin Kaepernick, player Quinton Patton and Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette are being investigated for sexual assault by Miami police, according to reports earlier today by TMZ sports (and other media outlets). 

The name of the woman at the center of the allegations was redacted from the report, which was obtained by sports site Deadspin. The only descriptor available is that she is African American. 

Tuesday night, April 1, she went to visit Lockette’s apartment, she told officers. Kaepernick and Patton were there as well, and she mixed them drinks and the players all drank shots. The players told her in order to take a shot she needed to take a hit of a bong “filled with marijuana,” according to the report.

From the report:

“They sat down, talked, and watched the basketball game. She started to feel light headed and went to a bedroom to lie down. [Redacted name] took off her jacket and jewlery. Mr. Kaepernick came behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her. She advised they were kissing [mouth] and Mr. Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked. Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex. [Name redacted] advised that she was in bed naked and Mr. Patton and Mr. Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside. She told them ‘what are you doing? Where is Colin? Get out!’ They closed the door and left. She cannot remember anything after that.'”

 Next, the woman alleged, things took a turn for the worse.

“[Name redacted] woke up in a hospital bed and doesn’t remember how she got there or who transported her to the hospital. [Name redacted] advised that she has had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kaepernick in the past.”

49ers General Manager Trent Baalke told TMZ reports that the team is “gathering the pertinent facts.” The full text of the incident report is below.


 

Colin Kaepernick sexual assault incident report by FitztheReporter

Get action

Michael Redmond
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Get action

cheryl@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED Ah, the bright lights of Hollywood — so close, and yet thankfully far enough away to allow Bay Area filmmakers to develop their own identities. The SF scene thrives thanks to an abundance of prolific talent (exhibit A: have you noticed how many film festivals we have?), and continues to grow, with a raft of local programs dedicated to teaching aspiring Spielbergs — or better yet, aspiring Kuchars — the ins and outs of the biz.

San Francisco’s big art schools all have film programs. California College of the Arts offers both a BFA and an MFA in film, with an eye toward keeping students trained not just in cinema’s latest technological advancements, but its ever-changing approaches to distribution and exhibition. One look at the staff roster and it’s not hard to see why CCA’s program is so highly-acclaimed, with two-time Oscar winner Rob Epstein (1985’s The Times of Harvey Milk; 1995’s The Celluloid Closet; 2013’s Lovelace); indie-film pioneer Cheryl Dunye (1996’s The Watermelon Woman; 2001’s The Stranger Inside); and noted experimental artist Jeanne C. Finley, among others. www.cca.edu

The Art Institute of California has a Media Arts department that offers a whole slew of programs, including BS degrees in digital filmmaking and video production, digital photography, and media arts and animation, as well as an MFA in Computer Animation. The school, which offers a number of online courses, is affiliated with the for-profit Argosy University system and aims for “career-focused education.” www.artinstitutes.edu/san-francisco/

The San Francisco Art Institute has this to say about its programs: “The distinguished filmmaker Sidney Peterson initiated filmmaking courses at SFAI in 1947, and the work made during that period helped develop “underground” film. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, filmmakers at the school such as Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Stan Brakhage, and Gunvor Nelson brought forth the American avant-garde movement. Our current faculty is internationally renowned in genres including experimental film, documentary, and narrative forms.” The school has embraced new technology and offers extensive digital resources, but it also supports artists who prefer working with celluloid. 16mm and Super 8 filmmaking lives! www.sfai.edu/film

The Academy of Art University may be largely known around SF for the number of buildings it owns downtown, but it does have a School of Motion Pictures and Television that offers AA, BFA, and MFA diplomas, augmented by an extensive online program. Its executive director is Diane Baker, eternal pop-culture icon for her role in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs (“Take this thing back to Baltimore!”) Other faculty members include acclaimed choreographer Anne Bluethenthal. Students can also take classes from Guardian contributor Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, who programs the popular “Midnites for Maniacs” series at the Castro Theatre and is the school’s film history coordinator.

“I teach 11 different theory classes, including the evolution of horror, Westerns, melodramas, musicals, and ‘otherly’ world cinema, as well as a close-up on Alfred Hitchcock,” Ficks says. “But bar none, the History of Female Filmmakers class seems to create the biggest debates. Some find it sexist to emphasize gender — as artists, why can’t we transcend that concept? Except why have the majority of textbooks forgotten, ignored, or even re-written these women out of history? If the argument is that female filmmakers just aren’t good enough to be ranked alongside their male counterparts, how about watching more than one film by Alice Guy, Lois Weber, Frances Marion, Dorothy Arzner, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, or Agnes Varda? And that’s just the first six weeks of class.” www.academyart.edu

The eventual fate of the City College of San Francisco is still being decided, but for now, its cinema department offers students a mix of hands-on (classes in cinematography, editing, sound, etc.) and theory (film theory, film history, genre studies, etc.) classes. The spring 2014 course catalog included such diverse offerings as “Focus on Film Noir,” “The Documentary Tradition,” “Pre-Production Planning,” and “Digital Media Skills.” Since 2000, the department has showcased outstanding student work in the City Shorts Film Festival, which last year screened both on-campus and at the Roxie Theater. www.ccsf.edu

Tucked into the city’s foggiest corner is San Francisco State University, whose cinema department remains strongly tied to the school’s “core values of equity and social justice,” according to its website, with a special focus on experimental and documentary films. The faculty includes acclaimed filmmakers Larry Clark and Greta Snider, and students can earn a BFA, an MFA, or an MA (fun fact: like I did!) www.cinema.sfsu.edu

On the newer end of the spectrum is the eight-year-old Berkeley Digital Film Institute, which offers “weekend intensives” to smaller groups of students. Dean Patrick Kriwanek says the school teaches “LA-style,” or commercial-style, filmmaking. “Our teachers all come from the American Film Institute or have worked on features,” he says. “We’re trying to train our kids to produce the same level of work that you’d see out of UCLA or USC grad schools — excellent work that’s thoughtful.”

The school also takes the practical side of entertainment into account. “I always joke that we try to be 51 percent art school and 49 percent business school, but it’s really true,” he adds. “You really have to be a business person if you want to succeed.” www.berkeleydigital.com

On this side of the bay, at Mission and Fifth streets to be precise, there’s the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, which aims to “create filmmakers with careers in the entertainment industry.” Faculty members include Frazer Bradshaw, director of the acclaimed indie drama Everything Strange and New (2009) and screenwriter Pamela Gray (1999’s A Walk on the Moon). In addition to months-long programs, the school offers workshops like a crowd funding how-to (an essential area of expertise for any independent artist these days) and a single-day “boot camp-style” intro to digital filmmaking. www.filmschoolsf.com *

 

Brains, robots, and their evolution

Michael Redmond
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Brains, robots, and their evolution

rebecca@sfbg.com

The Bay Area is fully engaged with the technology industry, triggering political flare-ups over Google Glass, tech buses, and larger debates over how the tech industry is morphing the Bay Area’s social and economic landscape. Meanwhile, university researchers are busily putting technology to use in service of their studies, or carefully examining how technology is shaping people’s lives.

A pair of recent events in San Francisco and Berkeley illuminate how web-based technology has become deeply embedded in everyday life, helping to shape human realms as personal and unique as emotions, brain health, and behavior.

Medical researchers at the University of California San Francisco have devised a tool they hope will advance our understanding of neuroscience and brain disease. On April 8, UCSF researchers launched a new project called the Brain Health Registry, which uses the Internet to recruit volunteer research subjects who play online brain games as part of the enrollment.

Across the bay at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media, a recent symposium explored the implications of living in a world increasingly populated with robots and “smart” technologies that are designed to anticipate and respond to human behavior and dynamic environments. The April 4 event, called Robots and New Media, highlighted some thorny and intriguing questions about how robots “play a critical new role as extensions of ourselves,” according to the event description.

With discussion from cognitive neuroscientists about what happens to the human brain during interactions with robots, the talk also dived into questions about how much trust people should be willing to lend to emerging technologies.

 

BRAIN TRUST

Michael Weiner often wonders whether swimming in the San Francisco Bay can be credited with sharpening the mind. “I can tell you this: It sure makes you feel good,” said Weiner, who frequently plunges into the frigid bay waters as a member of the Dolphin Club.

For Weiner, a professor of radiology at the University of San Francisco who specializes in Alzheimer’s research, the curiosity goes beyond idle speculation. He’d like to conduct a clinical study to explore the impact that swimming in cold water has on mental functioning. But at the moment, he and a team of UCSF researchers are focused on a much bigger project.

Weiner is the founder of UCSF’s Brain Health Registry, designed to answer these brain impact questions by making it easier to do clinical studies. Realizing that the high cost of recruiting volunteers can slow down cognitive research, he’s turned to the Internet to build a database of volunteer subjects.

“The idea is to collect tens of thousands of people into a registry and then use it to select subjects for clinical trial,” he explained. To enroll, participants provide their names and other personal information, and answer questions about their patterns around sleep, mood, exercise, medications, use of alcohol, and other behaviors. They also take online cognitive tests provided by Lumosity, a brain-game company.

Their test results and personal information are then entered into the registry, which can be used to aid research in several ways. It can be analyzed to detect trends — for example, are there patterns suggesting a linkage between sleep disorders and poor cognitive functioning? It could be used to help researchers detect people with very early Alzheimer’s, Weiner noted. And UCSF researchers can contact registry volunteers to invite them in for clinical studies.

“I want 50,000 people of all ages within the San Francisco Bay Area,” Weiner said of his initial goal. By the end of 2017, the recruitment goal is 100,000. So far, 2,000 have signed up as volunteer subjects.

The Brain Health Registry could turn out to be a tool for facilitating long-term goals like finding a cure for Alzheimer’s. But having this giant database filled with sensitive personal information brings up at least one important question: What if there’s a data breach?

“I’ve been doing research for a long time, and never has there been a loss of data,” Weiner responded, vouching for the system’s ability to keep data safe. “I’m in there, my two children are in there.”

 

LIKABLE ROBOTS

Carla Diana spoke at Berkeley’s Center for New Media symposium on April 4. A designer whose work involves playing around with the expressive elements of technology, she helped create a robot called Simon with a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She said the purpose of designing Simon was “to study how we can interact with the machine in the most natural way possible.”

Simon is cute and looks like a doll. With an all-white head and torso designed by Meka Robotics, a San Francisco-based robotics company that was recently acquired by Google, Simon has expressive droopy eyes outfitted with cameras, light-up ears that flop up and down, and mechanical hands that grip things.

He (it?) is programmed to track people as they interact with him, understand spoken sentences, and respond with expressive sound and movement that mimics human social behavior. Diana said the robot was designed with diminutive features on purpose, as a way of conveying that he has a lot to learn.

Diana is a fellow at Smart Design, where she oversees the Smart Interaction Lab. Her work isn’t just about making machines — it’s also about studying how people interact with smart technologies, and thinking carefully about things like how the “personality” of a machine can excite people, motivate them, or push their buttons, so to speak, by designing for a sensory experience.

Asked during the question-and-answer period about the ethical implications of designing machines meant to reach people on an emotional level, Diana acknowledged that this is precisely what smart technology designers are up to.

“It’s the responsibility of the designer to realize that we are doing that,” she replied. “We are creating entities that have the ability to manipulate humans’ emotions. And that’s that.”

 

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

Mireille Hildebrandt, a lawyer, researcher, philosopher, and professor who flew in from the Netherlands to speak at the symposium, offered a big-picture view of what it means for people to interact with “smart” technologies or robotic machines, and she threw out questions about the overarching implications.

“We’re moving toward something called ubiquitous computing,” she explained. “The environment starts to adapt to your assumed, preferred preferences.”

Common examples of this adaptable technology abound on the Internet: Targeted advertising is based on individuals’ unique preferences. Google search tries to guess what you’re looking for before you finish typing.

What happens when this kind of “smart,” predictive tech goes beyond the computer screen? In some cases, that’s already happening: Think facial recognition technology that can scan an environment to detect a specific person. A less creepy example is smart appliances such as thermostats or robotic vacuum cleaners.

Bringing it up a notch, Hildebrant asked the audience to imagine that everyone had a personal robot. “What if your robot does some A/B design, testing your moods, susceptibility to spending, voting, and other behaviors?” she asked. “What if your robot is online with its peers, sharing your behaviors to improve the user experience? … However smart they are, they aren’t human. They have no consciousness, let alone self-consciousness.”

In a robotic environment, she said, “You can be calculated. When I, as a robot, act like this, then [a person’s] behavior will likely be like that. … We would have to realize that they are continuously anticipating us.”

To live in this kind of souped-up environment brings up big questions, Hildebrant said: “Who’s in control? What’s the business model? And how will it affect our privacy?”

Federal criminal indictment of PG&E doesn’t go far enough

Sasha Cuttler
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Federal criminal indictment of PG&E doesn’t go far enough

  A federal grand jury in San Francisco yesterday issued a criminal indictment against Pacific Gas & Electric for negligence in the 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people and destroyed an entire neighborhood. That’s significant and serious, but it also falls far short of what this rapacious company and its conniving executives — none of whom face personal criminal charges — should be facing.

The indictment and media reports on it omit key details of what happened leading up this tragic and entirely preventable explosion, buying into the fiction that there is a meaningful difference between PG&E Co., the regulated utility, and PG&E Corp., the wealthy and powerful Wall Street corporation. This is a stark example of how corporations are given all the rights of individuals, but accept few of the responsibilities, with the complicity of the political and economic systems.

The 12-count indictment focused on violation of the Pipeline Safety Act, which requires companies to maintain their potentially dangerous pipelines, including keeping detailed records and doing safety inspections that would detect flaws like the faulty weld that caused the San Bruno explosion on Sept. 9, 2010 – work the company negligently failed to perform.

But PG&E’s wanton disregard for public safety, combined with the greed and shameless self-interest of then-CEO Peter Darbee and other executives, goes far deeper than that. A report by the California Public Utilities Commission released in January 2012 found that $100 million in ratepayer funds that had been earmarked for pipeline maintenance and replacement, including this section in San Bruno, was instead diverted to executive bonuses and shareholder profits.

“PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes,” the audit said, noting that the company was flush with cash at the time and there was no good reason to neglect this required maintenance.

And in 2010, those questionable corporate purposes included spending more than $45 million to write and promote Prop. 16, a June 2010 ballot measure that would have required approval by two-thirds of voters whenever cities wanted to start community choice aggregation programs such as San Francisco’s proposed CleanPowerSF. California voters rejected that outrageous ruse by more than a 2-1 margin – so Mayor Ed Lee and his appointees were forced to kill CleanPowerSF on their own last year.

PG&E maintains the explosion was just an accident.

“San Bruno was a tragic accident. We’ve taken accountability and are deeply sorry. We have worked hard to do the right thing for victims, their families and the community, and we will continue to do so,” PG&E CEO Tony Early, who was hired after the explosion, said in a prepared statement. “We want all of our customers and their families to know that nothing will distract us from our mission of transforming this 100-plus-year-old system into the safest and most reliable natural gas system in the country.”

But this “tragic accident” was foreseeable and preventable, particularly if PG&E was spending our ratepayer money on the system maintenance it was allocated for, instead of trying to fool us with a deceptive and myopic political campaign. Those were decisions made by real people, including Darbee and others, decisions that killed innocent people – and they should be held accountable. Neither this indictment nor a previous civil settlement go far enough.

PG&E’s employee union, IBEW Local 1245, continues to act as an apologist for the company executives, issuing a statement that in part says, “The federal indictment filed April 1st against the company says that PG&E willfully failed to identify and evaluate threats to its transmission pipelines. We know of nothing that would rise to the level of willful. It is possible there are things we don’t know. But based on what we do know, the company failures that led to the San Bruno explosion were not willful.”

Meanwhile, even some PG&E shareholders are siding with the company’s federal prosecution while bringing a shareholder lawsuit seeking to recover some of the diverted funds. Their high-powered attorney, Joe Cotchett, issued a statement today that said, “We welcome yesterday’s indictment by the federal grand jury of PG&E on criminal charges that it violated federal pipeline regulations. It is clear the federal government agrees with us that PG&E chose profits over safety. The indictment comes as no surprise, as it closely mirrors the detailed complaint we filed months ago against PG&E’s officers and directors, after our own extensive investigation.  The indictment states that PG&E ignored and failed to properly identify potential threats to gas pipelines, failed to gather relevant data, maintained flawed records, and as a result, was unable to accurately assess the dangers related to its lines that could have prevented the explosion. On behalf of the shareholders of PG&E, we intend to amend our complaint to add some additional facts stated in the indictment.”

“Our complaint alleges that PG&E’s executives dropped the ball and failed to implement safety measures despite numerous red flags raised by Company insiders with risk management responsibilities. We allege PG&E has already incurred charges of about $1.83 billion related to the San Bruno accident and natural gas matters. In its annual report, PG&E admitted that this criminal investigation could expose the Company to even greater losses. Our complaint also alleges that PG&E’s Board sponsored reviews of its risk management practices revealing that PG&E was in ‘crisis’ mode prior to the accident, and that, in 2007, PG&E’s newly-hired Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations determined that the Company’s Enterprise Risk Management program ‘seems unactionable because almost everything is broken.’”

This is the company that Mayor Lee praises as a “great company that gets it,” supporting its continued monopoly control of San Francisco’s energy system and subverting a city proposal to provide renewable energy to city residents, even as the threats posed by global warming increase, as this week’s report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns.

This is a sick system, and something needs to change.

SF’s culture of corruption

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EDITORIAL The extent of the charges in the criminal complaint against Sen. Leland Yee, political consultant Keith Jackson, and others are shocking and sensational: international arms trafficking, drug dealing, money laundering, cavorting with organized crime figures, murder for hire. But the basic allegation that Yee and Jackson practiced a corrupt, transactional kind of politics wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew how they operated.

What’s worse, they were simply a more extreme — and now, thanks to FBI wiretaps and undercover agents, a better documented — example of the political corruption that is endemic to San Francisco and some other high-stakes American cities. The city of St. Francis gets sold out to the highest bidders everyday, by politicians who value wealthy constituents over the vast majority of us who are just trying to get by — and over the interests of city finances and governance.

Part of the problem is inherent in our money-driven political system, in which politicians are constantly hustling for cash from people who want things from them. Politicians deny they take actions with political contributions in mind, but well-heeled capital and labor interests don’t spend millions of dollars on contributions out of the goodness of their hearts. These are business transactions.

We wholeheartedly support the call Senate President Darrell Steinberg made for fundamental political reform during the March 28 vote to suspend Yee and two of his allegedly corrupt colleagues. These cases aren’t aberrations, they are indicative of how power get wielded when it’s based on wealth. That’s the reality that has gotten even uglier since the Citizens United decision equated money with political speech and upped the ante for would-be public servants.

But much of the problem is particular to San Francisco, where cozy relationships between politicians and corporate interests are often feted in plain view. Former Mayor Willie Brown — a lawyer and unregistered lobbyist who won’t reveal his huge corporate client list despite having an influential weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle — helped install his longtime City Hall functionary Ed Lee into Room 200 to guard against anyone asking too much of the rich and powerful. Yee and Lee represented rival Chinatown economic factions, both wanting to use the power of the Mayor’s Office for their interests.

In his March 22 column, Brown once again repeated a joke he’s used before, that the “e” in email stands for “evidence,” which is really only funny in a sick political culture that celebrates slick rule-breakers. And it was from Brown that Lee learned it was acceptable to brazenly give tax breaks and regulatory passes to the tech companies that his top fundraiser, venture capitalist Ron Conway, are invested in.

Megadeveloper Lennar Urban used its wealth and political connections to take control of San Francisco’s biggest tracts of undeveloped and underdeveloped land, including Hunters and Candlestick points and Treasure Island, paying off community groups and hiring Jackson and other political henchmen to get the job done.

In fact, the FBI complaint says Jackson was working on behalf of that project when he approached accused Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow for support, leading to their alleged involvement in a string of wild criminal conspiracies. Meanwhile, Chow was getting public commendations from San Francisco-based politicians including Lee, Yee, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Fiona Ma, and even Tom Ammiano. Chow courted political legitimacy the same way politicians seek cash, and mainstream media outlets were happy to play along.

Throughout his political career, Yee has carried water for Pacific Gas & Electric, perhaps the most corrupting contributor to political campaigns in the city’s history. PG&E’s influence at City Hall had thankfully waned in recent years as a result of overreach and deadly criminal negligence, until Lee and his appointees last year killed CleanPowerSF (see “Challenge Mayor Lee and his lies,” 9/17/13) on a pretext so thin it could only be gift to PG&E.

In many ways, San Francisco hasn’t changed. It’s still the old Barbary Coast, ruled by capitalist thugs and corrupt politicians, only with glossy modern spin created by armies of well-paid political consultants. But we all deserve better.

Yee and Jackson should go to prison if there’s even a slice of truth to the allegations against them. And maybe they’ll cut deals and take other political figures down with them, giving us more of a peek behind the curtain of political power. But it’s up to all of us to break the close ties between economic and political power and begin to restore the democratic power of everyday people.

Film Listings: April 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, Sam Stander, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Breathe In In Drake Doremus’s lyrical tale of a man in midlife crisis, Guy Pearce plays Keith Reynolds, a high school music teacher living in upstate New York with his wife, Megan (Amy Ryan), and teenage daughter, Lauren (Mackenzie David). Quietly harboring his discontent, Keith spends solitary moments wistfully sifting through glory-days photographs of his former band and memories of the undomesticated life he and Megan led two decades ago in New York City, which the two revisit in a low-toned call-and-response that doesn’t need to erupt into a blistering argument to clarify their incompatible positions. The melancholy calm is disrupted by the arrival of a British exchange student named Sophie (Felicity Jones, who also starred in Doremus’s 2011 film, Like Crazy). Evading a scene of loss and heartbreak at home, 18-year-old Sophie has come to spend a semester at Lauren’s high school, a juxtaposition that presents us with two wildly distinct species of teenager. Lauren is a brittle, popular party girl whom we watch making poor choices with a predatory classmate; Sophie is a soulful, reserved young woman whose prodigious talent at the piano first jars Keith out of his malaise into an uncomfortable awareness. A scene before Sophie’s arrival in which the family plays Jenga and Keith pulls out the wrong piece, toppling the tower, perhaps presses its ominous visual message too hard. Meanwhile, similarities to 2012’s Nobody Walks underscore the argument that this subject matter is an old, tired tale. But for the most part, the intimacy that develops between Keith and Sophie is constructed with delicate restraint, and Doremus and writing partner Ben York Jones have crafted a textured portrait of a man trying to repossess the past. (1:37) Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Marvel’s most wholesome hero returns in this latest film in the Avengers series, and while it doesn’t deviate from the expected formula (it’s not a spoiler to say that yes, the world is saved yet again), it manages to incorporate a surprisingly timely plot about the dangers of government surveillance. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), hunkiest 95-year-old ever, is still figuring out his place in the 21st century after his post-World War II deep freeze. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has him running random rescue missions with the help of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), but SHIELD is working on a top-secret project that will allow it to predict crimes before they occur. It isn’t long before Cap’s distrust of the weapon — he may be old-fashioned, but he ain’t stupid — uncovers a sinister plot led by a familiar enemy, with Steve’s former BFF Bucky doing its bidding as the science-experiment-turned-assassin Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, and series regular Colbie Smulders are fine in supporting roles, and Johansson finally gets more to do than punch and pose, but the likable Evans ably carries the movie — he may not have the charisma of Robert Downey Jr., but he brings wit and depth to a role that would otherwise be defined mainly by biceps and CG-heavy fights. Oh, and you know the drill by now: superfans will want to stick around for two additional scenes tucked into the end credits. (2:16) (Eddy)

Frankie & Alice Halle Berry plays a go-go dancer with dissociative identity disorder. (1:42)

Goodbye World The end begins with a text — “Goodbye world,” sent to every cell phone. Once the computer virus-spawned anarchy really gets rolling (internet and power outages, violence and chaos), a group with nerdy-tech past connections descends on the survivalist-chic homestead of responsible James (Adrian Grenier) and “zany” Lily (Kerry Bishé): uptight Becky (Caroline Dhavernas) and unhappy Nick (Ben McKenzie); Lev (Scott Mescudi, aka musician Kid Cudi), who may have accidentally unleashed the virus; Laura (Gaby Hoffman), haunted by a recent political scandal; and ex-con Benji (Marc Webber) with his nubile tagalong (Remy Nozik). Most of these folks — even the ones married to each other — are frenemies at best, and their relationships disintegrate as civilization crumbles from afar. Physical menace enters this Big Chill-off-the-grid reunion when surly National Guardsmen emerge from the woods, but the main dramas take place ‘twixt the members of the angsty ensemble — all of whom are actually in desperate need of a fresh start. Among a cast composed mostly of TV veterans, Hoffman (last seen scene-stealing on Girls) is the standout performer, not to mention the MVP of this particular apocalypse. (1:41) Four Star. (Eddy)

Island of Lemurs: Madagascar Morgan Freeman narrates this 3D IMAX look at lemurs. (:39)

It Felt Like Love Set on the outer edges of Brooklyn and Queens, writer-director Eliza Hittman’s debut feature tracks the summertime wanderings and missteps of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti), whose days mainly consist of trailing in the wake of her more sexually experienced and perpetually coupled-off best friend, Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni). The camera repeatedly finds Lila in voyeur mode, as Chiara and her boyfriend, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco), negotiate their physical relationship and redefine the limits of PDA, unfazed by Lila’s silent, watchful presence. It’s clear she wants some part of this, though her motivations are a murky compound of envy, loneliness, and longing for a sense of place among her peers. A brief encounter with an older boy, Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein), whom Chiara knows — more of a sighting, really — provides the tiniest of openings, and Lila forces her way through it with an awkward insistence that is uncomfortable and sometimes painful to witness. Lila lacks Chiara’s fluid verbal and physical vernacular, and her attempts at mimicry in the cause of attracting Sammy’s attention only underline how unready and out of her depth she is. As Lila pushes into his seedy, sleazy world — a typical night is spent getting wasted and watching porn with his friends — their encounters don’t look like they feel like love, though Piersanti poignantly signals her character’s physical desire in the face of Sammy’s bemused ambivalence. Hittman unflinchingly leads her hapless protagonist through scenes that hover uneasily between dark comedy and menace without ever quite landing, and this uncertainty generates an emotional force that isn’t dispelled by the drifting, episodic plot. (1:22) Roxie. (Rapoport)

Jinn Horror movie based on the mythical creature from Arabic folklore. (1:37)

The Missing Picture Rithy Panh’s latest film about the homeland he fled as a teenager is atypically, directly autobiographical, and most unusually crafted. He re-creates his once comfortable Phnom Penh family’s grim fate after Pol Pot and company seized control of Cambodia in 1975 — as all fell prey to the starvation, forced labor, and other privations suffered by perceived “enemies” of the new regime — not by any conventional means but via elaborate dioramas of handmade clay figures depicted in prison camp life (and death). There’s also ample surviving propagandic footage of the Khmer Rouge trumpeting its “model society” that was in reality little more than an experiment in mass execution and torture. The result is a unique and powerful take on one of the 20th century’s worst crimes against humanity. (1:36) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Nymphomaniac, Volume II The second half of Lars von Trier’s anecdotal epic begins with Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) recalling the quasi-religious experience of her spontaneous first orgasm at age 12. Then she continues to tell bookish good Samaritan Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) — who reveals he’s an asexual 60-something virgin — the story of her sexually compulsive life to date. Despite finding domestic stability at last with Jerome (Shia LeBeouf), she proves to have no talent for motherhood, and hits a tormenting period of frigidity eventually relieved only by the brutal ministrations of sadist K (Jamie Bell, burying Billy Elliott for good). She finds a suitable professional outlet for her peculiarly antisocial personality, working as a sometimes ruthless debt collector under the tutelage of L (Willem Dafoe), and he in turn encourages her to develop her own protégé in the form of needy teenager P (Mia Goth). If Vol. I raised the question “Will all this have a point?,” Vol. II provides the answer, and it’s (as expected) “Not really.” Still, there’s no room for boredom in the filmmaker’s most playfully arbitrary, entertaining, and least misanthropic (very relatively speaking) effort since his last four-hour-plus project 20 years ago, TV miniseries The Kingdom. Never mind that von Trier (in one of many moments when he uses Joe or Seligman as his mouthpiece) protests against the tyranny of political correctitude that renders a word like “Negro” unsayable — you’re still free to feel offended when his camera spends more time ogling two African men’s variably erect dicks in one brief scene that it does all the white actors’ cocks combined. But then there’s considerably more graphic content all around in this windup, which ends on a predictable note of cheap, melodramatic irony. But that’s part of the charm of the whole enterprise: Reeling heedlessly from the pedantic to the shocking to the trivial, like a spoiled child it manages to be kinda cute even when it’s deliberately pissing you off. (2:10) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

On My Way Not for nothing too does the title On My Way evoke Going Places (1974): director Emmanuelle Bercot is less interested in exploring Catherine Deneuve’s at-times-chilled hauteur than roughing up, grounding, and blowing fresh country air through that still intimidatingly gorgeous image. Deneuve’s Bettie lost her way long ago — the former beauty queen, who never rose beyond her Miss Brittany status, is in a state of stagnation, working at her seafood restaurant, having affairs with married men, living with her mother, and still sleeping in her girlhood room. One workday mid-lunch hour, she gets in her car and drives, ignoring all her ordinary responsibilities and disappearing down the wormhole of dive bars and back roads. She seems destined to drift until her enraged, equally lost daughter Muriel (Camille) calls in a favor: give her son Charly (Nemo Schiffman) a ride to his paternal grandfather’s. It’s chance to reconnect and correct course, even after Bettie’s money is spent, her restaurant appears doomed, and the adorable, infuriating Charly acts out. The way is clear, however: what could have been a musty, predictable affair, in the style of so many boomer tales in the movie houses these days, is given a crucial infusion of humanity and life, as Bercot keeps an affectionate eye trained on the unglamorous everyday attractions of a French backwater and Deneuve works that ineffable charm that draws all eyes to her onscreen. Her Bettie may have kicked her cigarette habit long ago, but she’s still smokin’ — in every way. (1:53) Clay. (Chun)

The Raid 2 See “Brawl Opera.” (2:19) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki, Shattuck.

Rob the Mob Based on a stranger-than-fiction actual case, this rambunctious crime comedy stars Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda as Tommy and Rosie, a coupla crazy kids in early 1990s Queens — crazy in love, both before and after their strung-out robbery antics win them both a stint in the pen. When Tommy gets out 18 months later, he finds Rosie has managed to stay clean, even getting a legit job as a debt collector for positive-thinking nut and regular employer of strays Dave (a delightful Griffin Dunne). She wants Tommy to do likewise, but the high visibility trial of mob kingpin John Gotti gives him an idea: With the mafia trying to keep an especially low profile at present, why not go around sticking up the neighborhood “social clubs” where wise guys hang out, laden with gold chains and greenbacks but (it’s a rule) unarmed? Whatta they gonna do, call the police? This plan is so reckless it just might work, and indeed it does, for a while. But these endearingly stupid lovebirds can’t be counted on to stay under the radar, magnetizing attention from the press (Ray Romano as a newspaper columnist), the FBI, and of course the “organization” — particularly one “family” led by Big Al (Andy Garcia). Written by Jonathan Fernandez, this first narrative feature from director Raymond DeFitta since his terrific 2009 sleeper hit City Island is less like that screwball fare and more like a scaled down, economically downscaled American Hustle (2013), another brashly comedic period piece inspired by tabloid-worthy fact. Inspiration doesn’t fully hold up to the end, but the film has verve and style to spare, and the performances (also including notable turns from Cathy Moriarty, Frank Whaley, Burt Young, Michael Rispoli, Yul Vazquez and others) are sterling. (1:42) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Unknown Known After winning an Oscar for 2003’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamera, Errol Morris revisits the extended-interview documentary format with another Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The film delves into Rumsfeld’s lengthy political career — from Congress to the Nixon, Ford, and George W. Bush administrations — drawing insights from the man himself and his extensive archive of memos (“there have to be millions”) on Vietnam, 9/11, Osama bin Laden, the “chain of command,” torture, the Iraq War, etc., as well as archival footage that suggests the glib Rumsfeld’s preferred spin on certain events is not always factually accurate (see: Saddam Hussein and WMDs). Morris participates from behind the camera, lobbing questions that we can hear and therefore gauge Rumsfeld’s immediate reaction to them. (The man is 100 percent unafraid of prolonging an awkward pause.) A gorgeous Danny Elfman score soothes some of the anger you’ll feel digesting Rumsfeld’s rhetoric, but you still may find yourself wanting to shriek at the screen. In other words, another Morris success. (1:42) Elmwood, Presidio. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq Writer-director Nancy Buirski’s documentary follows the short, brilliant career of a young dancer named Tanaquil Le Clercq, who came up in the New York City ballet world of the 1940s and ’50s. Le Clercq was discovered by George Balanchine, married him (as three other dancers had done before her), sparked a paradigm shift in the ballet world regarding what was considered the quintessential dancer’s body, had numerous ballets set on her by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and then, at the peak of her career, at age 27, was stricken by polio and left paralyzed in both legs. The film takes its time moving toward this catastrophe, recounting Le Clercq’s early adult life through interviews with her contemporaries and tracking her professional progress through gorgeous archival footage of her performances. Equally moving archival material are the letters from a longtime correspondence between Le Clercq and Robbins that documented two very different periods of her life: the first, when Robbins was choreographing ballets for her, including Afternoon of a Faun, and professing his love; the second, after her paralysis, when she wrote him a series of poignant communications describing her impressions of her illness and her new, circumscribed world. The film has some trouble holding on to its center — as in life, Balanchine proves a magnetic force, and Afternoon of a Faun feels inexorably drawn to his professional and personal details. We don’t get enough of Le Clercq, which you could say is the tragedy of her story — nobody did. But the letters do provide a sense of someone resourceful and responsive to life’s richness and joys, someone who would get past this crisis and find a way to reshape her life. (1:31) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

American Hustle David O. Russell’s American Hustle is like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct. He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses; she’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward and gave herself a bombshell makeover. The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go. She’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of Mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians, hustling a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) in the process. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting here is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity. (2:17) Metreon. (Harvey)

Bad Words Settling a grudge score whose precise origin remains unclear until late in the game, world-class misanthrope Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) is celebrating his 40th birthday by competing in a national spelling bee. Yes, spelling bees are generally for children, and so is this one. But Guy has found a legal loophole permitting his participation, and the general hate wending his way from contest staff (Allison Janney, Philip Baker Hall) — let alone the tiger-mom-and-dad parents ready to form a lynch mob — is just icing on the cake where he’s concerned. What’s more, as some sort of majorly underachieving near-genius, he’s in fact well equipped to whup the bejesus out of overachieving eight-year-olds when it comes to saying the right letters out loud. The only people on his side, sorta, are the online journalist (Kathryn Hahn) reporting on his perverse quest, and the insidiously cute Indian American competitor (Rohan Chand) who wants to be besties, or perhaps just to psych him out. (Note: The tyke’s admitted favorite word is “subjugate.”) Written by Andrew Dodge, this comedy in the tradition (a little too obviously) of 2003’s Bad Santa and such provides the always enjoyable Bateman with not only a tailor-made lead role, but a directorial debut as well. He does just fine by both. Yet as nicely crafted and frequently-pretty-funny Bad Words is, at core it’s a rather petty movie — small, derivative, and cynically mean-spirited without the courage of genuine biliousness. It’s at once not-half-bad, and not half as badass as it pretends to be. (1:29) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Boys of Abu Ghraib First-time feature director-writer Luke Moran stars as Jack, an all-American lad who signs on for an Army stint in the wake of 9/11, and finds himself posted to the titular Iraqi prison turned U.S. military detainee camp 20 miles outside Baghdad. Despite the occasional bombing, however, life is mostly underutilized tedium for he and his fellow grunts. With nothing else to do, Jack volunteers for MP duty as a guard in the cell blocks — where his initial shock at the torture and abuse of prisoners is exacerbated by his friendship with the well educated, friendly, convincingly innocent captive Ghazi (Omid Abtahi). Shot at an abandoned New Mexico penitentiary, this drama is effective as far as it goes in exploring one fictive soldier’s rocky road under the influence of stress, isolation, and boredom. But as it ultimately encompasses the real-life international Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004 — in which leaked photos revealed widespread humiliation and abuse of prisoners for no evident purpose save enlistees’ loutish amusement — Boys falls well short in illuminating just how that kind of systemic breakdown can occur amongst seemingly normal, disciplined military personnel. Moran and company do raise the issue, but it turns out to be a weightier, more disturbing issue than this modestly ambitious feature is equipped to handle. (1:42) Metreon. (Harvey)

Cesar Chavez “You always have a choice,” Cesar Chavez (Michael Peña) tells his bullied son when advising him to turn the other cheek. Likewise, actor-turned-director Diego Luna had a choice when it came to tackling his first English-language film; he could have selected a less complicated, sprawling story. So he gets props for that simple act — especially at a time when workers’ rights and union power have been so dramatically eroded — and for his attempts to impact some complicated nuance to Chavez’s fully evident heroism. Painting his moving pictures in dusty earth tones and burnt sunlight with the help of cinematographer Enrique Chediak, Luna vaults straight into Chavez’s work with the grape pickers that would come to join the United Farm Workers — with just a brief voiceover about Chavez’s roots as the native-born son of a farm owner turned worker, post-Depression. Uprooting wife Helen (America Ferrera) and his family and moving to Delano as a sign of activist commitment, Chavez is seemingly quickly drawn into the 1965 strike by the Mexican workers’ sometime rivals: Filipino pickers (see the recent CAAMFest short documentary Delano Manongs for some of their side of the story). From there, the focus hones in on Chavez, speaking out against violence and “chicken shit macho ideals,” hunger striking, and activating unions overseas, though Luna does give voice to cohorts like Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson), growers like Bogdanovitch (John Malkovich), and the many nameless strikers — some of whom lost their lives during the astonishingly lengthy, taxing five-year strike. Luna’s win would be a blue-collar epic on par with 1979’s Norma Rae, and on some levels, he succeeds; scanning the faces of the weathered, hopeful extras in crowd scenes, you can’t help but feel the solidarity. The people have the power, as a poet once put it, and tellingly, his choice of Peña, stolidly opaque when charismatic warmth is called for, might be the key weakness here. One suspects the director or his frequent costar Gael García Bernal would make a more riveting Chavez. (1:38) Metreon. (Chun)

Divergent Based on the blockbuster dystopian-future YA novel by Veronica Roth (the first in a trilogy), Divergent is set in a future city-state version of Chicago in which society is divided into five character-based, color-coded factions: Erudite, Amity, Candor, Abnegation, and Dauntless. Like her peers, Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley), the film’s Abnegation-born teenage heroine, must choose a permanent faction — with the help of a standardized aptitude test that forgoes penciling in bubbles in favor of virtual reality psychic manipulation. When the test fails to triangulate her sole innate personality trait, she learns that she belongs to a secret, endangered sixth category: Divergent, an astonishing set of people who are not only capable of, say, acts of selflessness but can also produce intelligent thought, or manifest bravery in the face of danger. Forced to hide her aberrant nature in a society whose leaders (Kate Winslet) are prone to statements like “The future belongs to those who know where they belong,” and seemingly bored among Abnegation’s hive of gray cardigan-wearing worker bees, Beatrice chooses Dauntless, a dashing gang of black-clad, alterna-rock music video extras who jump on and off moving trains and live in a warehouse-chic compound whose dining hall recalls the patio at Zeitgeist. Fittingly, a surly, tattooed young man named Four (Theo James) leads Beatrice, now Tris, and her fellow initiates through a harsh proving regimen that, if they fail, will cast them into an impoverished underclass. Director Neil Burger (2006’s The Illusionist, 2011’s Limitless) and the behemoth marketing force behind Divergent are clearly hoping to stir up the kind of madness stoked by the Twilight and Hunger Games series, but while there are bones a-plenty to pick with those franchises, Divergent may have them beat for pure daffiness of premise and diameter of plot holes — and that’s after screenwriters Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor’s major suturing of the source material’s lacunae. The daffiness doesn’t translate into imaginative world-building, and while a couple of scenes convey the visceral thrills of life in Dauntless, the tension between Tris and Four is awkwardly ratcheted up, and the film’s shift into a mode of crisis is equally jolting without generating much heat. (2:20) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ernest & Celestine Belgian animators Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier are best known for the stop-motion shorts series (and priceless 2009 subsequent feature) A Town Called Panic, an anarchic, absurdist, and hilarious creation suitable for all ages. Their latest (co-directed with Benjamin Renner) is … not like that at all. Instead, it’s a sweet, generally guileless children’s cartoon that takes its gentle, watercolor-type visual style from late writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s same-named books. Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) is an orphaned girl mouse that befriends gruff bear Ernest (the excellent Lambert Wilson), though their improbable kinship invites social disapproval and scrapes with the law. There are some clever satirical touches, but mostly this is a softhearted charmer that will primarily appeal to younger kids. Adults will find it pleasant enough — but don’t expect any Panic-style craziness. (1:20) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Frozen (1:48) Metreon.

The Grand Budapest Hotel Is this the first Wes Anderson movie to feature a shootout? It’s definitely the first Anderson flick to include a severed head. That’s not to say The Grand Budapest Hotel, “inspired by” the works of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, represents too much of a shift for the director — his intricate approach to art direction is still very much in place, as are the deadpan line deliveries and a cast stuffed with Anderson regulars. But there’s a slightly more serious vibe here, a welcome change from 2012’s tooth-achingly twee Moonrise Kingdom. Thank Ralph Fiennes’ performance as liberally perfumed concierge extraordinaire M. Gustave, which mixes a shot of melancholy into the whimsy, and newcomer Tony Revolori as Zero, his loyal lobby boy, who provides gravitas despite only being a teenager. (Being played by F. Murray Abraham as an older adult probably helps in that department.) Hotel‘s early 20th century Europe setting proves an ideal canvas for Anderson’s love of detail — the titular creation rivals Stanley Kubrick’s rendering of the Overlook Hotel — and his supporting cast, as always, looks to be enjoying the hell out of being a part of Anderson’s universe, with Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Adrien Brody having particularly oversized fun. Is this the best Wes Anderson movie since 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums? Yes. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy)

Gravity “Life in space is impossible,” begins Gravity, the latest from Alfonso Cuarón (2006’s Children of Men). Egghead Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is well aware of her precarious situation after a mangled satellite slams into her ship, then proceeds to demolition-derby everything (including the International Space Station) in its path. It’s not long before she’s utterly, terrifyingly alone, and forced to unearth near-superhuman reserves of physical and mental strength to survive. Bullock’s performance would be enough to recommend Gravity, but there’s more to praise, like the film’s tense pacing, spare-yet-layered script (Cuarón co-wrote with his son, Jonás), and spectacular 3D photography — not to mention George Clooney’s warm supporting turn as a career astronaut who loves country music almost as much as he loves telling stories about his misadventures. (1:31) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Great Beauty The latest from Paolo Sorrentino (2008’s Il Divo) arrives as a high-profile contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, already annointed a masterpiece in some quarters, and duly announcing itself as such in nearly every grandiose, aesthetically engorged moment. Yes, it seems to say, you are in the presence of this auteur’s masterpiece. But it’s somebody else’s, too. The problem isn’t just that Fellini got there first, but that there’s room for doubt whether Sorrentino’s homage actually builds on or simply imitates its model. La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) are themselves swaying, jerry-built monuments, exhileratingly messy and debatably profound. But nothing quite like them had been seen before, and they did define a time of cultural upheaval — when traditional ways of life were being plowed under by a loud, moneyed, heedless modernity that for a while chose Rome as its global capital. Sorrentino announces his intention to out-Fellini Fellini in an opening sequence so strenuously flamboyant it’s like a never-ending pirouette performed by a prima dancer with a hernia. There’s statuary, a women’s choral ensemble, an on-screen audience applauding the director’s baffled muse Toni Servillo, standing in for Marcello Mastroianni — all this and more in manic tracking shots and frantic intercutting, as if sheer speed alone could supply contemporary relevancy. Eventually The Great Beauty calms down a bit, but still its reason for being remains vague behind the heavy curtain of “style.” (2:22) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Jodorowsky’s Dune A Chilean émigré to Paris, Alejandro Jodorowsky had avant-garde interests that led him from theater and comic book art to film, making his feature debut with 1968’s Fando y Lis. Undaunted by its poor reception, he created El Topo (1970), a blood-soaked mix of spaghetti western, mysticism, and Buñuellian parabolic grotesquerie that became the very first “midnight movie.” After that success, he was given nearly a million dollars to “do what he wanted” with 1973’s similarly out-there The Holy Mountain, which became a big hit in Europe. French producer Michel Seydoux asked Jodorowsky what he’d like to do next. Dune, he said. In many ways it seemed a perfect match of director and material. Yet Dune would be an enormous undertaking in terms of scale, expense, and technical challenges. What moneymen in their right mind would entrust this flamboyant genius/nut job with it? They wouldn’t, as it turned out. So doc Jodorowsky’s Dune is the story of “the greatest film never made,” one that’s brain-exploding enough in description alone. But there’s more than description to go on here, since in 1975 the director and his collaborators created a beautifully detailed volume of storyboards and other preproduction minutiae they hoped would lure Hollywood studios aboard this space phantasmagoria. From this goldmine of material, as well as input from the surviving participants, Pavich is able to reconstruct not just the film’s making and unmaking, but to an extent the film itself — there are animated storyboard sequences here that offer just a partial yet still breathtaking glimpse of what might have been. (1:30) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Lego Movie (1:41) Metroen, 1000 Van Ness.

The Lunchbox Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is a self-possessed housewife and a great cook, whose husband confuses her for another piece of furniture. She tries to arouse his affections with elaborate lunches she makes and sends through the city’s lunchbox delivery service. Like marriage in India, lunchbox delivery has a failure rate of zero, which is what makes aberrations seem like magical occurrences. So when widow Saajan (Irrfan Khan) receives her adoring food, he humbly receives the magical lunches like a revival of the senses. Once Ila realizes her lunchbox is feeding the wrong man she writes a note and Saajan replies — tersely, like a man who hasn’t held a conversation in a decade — and the impossible circumstances lend their exchanges a romance that challenges her emotional fidelity and his retreat from society. She confides her husband is cheating. He confides his sympathy for men of lower castes. It’s a May/December affair if it’s an affair at all — but the chemistry we expect the actors to have in the same room is what fuels our urge to see it; that’s a rare and haunting dynamic. Newcomer Kaur is perfect as Ila, a beauty unmarked by her rigorous distaff; her soft features and exhausted expression lend a richness to the troubles she can’t share with her similarly stoic mother (Lillete Dubey). Everyone is sacrificing something and poverty seeps into every crack, every life, without exception — their inner lives are their richness. (1:44) Embarcadero. (Vizcarrondo)

Mistaken for Strangers Tom Berninger, brother to the National vocalist Matt Berninger, is the maker of this doc — ostensibly about the band but a really about brotherly love, competition, and creation. It spins off a somewhat genius conceit of brother vs. brother, since the combo is composed of two sets of siblings: twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner on guitars and Scott and Bryan Devendorf on bass and drums respectively. The obvious question — what of singer Matt and his missing broheim? Turns out little bro Tom is one of those rock fans — of metal and not, it seems, the National — more interested in living the life and drinking the brewskis than making the music. So when Matt reaches out to Tom, adrift in their hometown of Cincinnati, to work as a roadie for the outfit, it’s a handout, sure, but also a way for the two to spend time together and bond. A not-quite-realized moviemaker who’s tried to make his own Z-budget scary flicks but never seems to finish much, Tom decides to document, and in the process gently poke fun at, the band (aka his authority-figures-slash-employers), which turns out to be much more interesting than gathering their deli platters and Toblerone. The National’s aesthetic isn’t quite his cup of tea: they prefer to wrap themselves in slinky black suits like Nick Cave’s pickup band, and the soft-spoken Matt tends to perpetually stroll about with a glass of white wine or bubbly in hand when he isn’t bursting into fourth-wall-busting high jinks on stage. Proud of his sib yet also intimidated by the National’s fame and not a little envious of the photo shoots, the Obama meetings, and the like, Tom is all about having fun. But it’s not a case of us vs. them, Tom vs. Matt, he discovers; it’s a matter of connecting with family and oneself. In a Michael Moore-ian sense, the sweet-tempered Mistaken for Strangers is as much, if not more so, about the filmmaker and the journey to make the movie than the supposed subject. (1:15) Roxie. (Chun)

Mr. Peabody and Sherman Mr. P. (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a Nobel Prize-winning genius dog, Sherman (Max Charles) his adopted human son. When the latter attends his first day of school, his extremely precocious knowledge of history attracts jealous interest from bratty classmate Penny (Ariel Winter), with the eventual result that all three end up being transported in Peabody’s WABAC time machine to various fabled moments — involving Marie Antoinette, King Tut, the Trojan Horse, etc. — where Penny invariably gets them in deep trouble. Rob Minkoff’s first all-animation feature since The Lion King 20 years ago is spun off from the same-named segments in Jay Ward’s TV Rocky and Bullwinkle Show some decades earlier. It’s a very busy (sometimes to the brink of clutter), often witty, imaginatively constructed, visually impressive, and for the most part highly enjoyable comic adventure. The only minuses are some perfunctory “It’s about family”-type sentimentality — and scenarist Craig Wright’s determination to draw from history the “lesson” that nearly all women are pains in the ass who create problems they must then be rescued from. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

Muppets Most Wanted Building on the success of The Muppets, Jim Henson’s beloved creations return to capitalize on their revitalized (and Disney-owned) fame. This follow-up from Muppets director James Tobin — technically, it’s the seventh sequel to the original 1979 Muppet Movie, as Dr. Bunsen Honeydew points out in one of the film’s many meta moments — improves upon the 2011 film, which had its charms but suffered by concentrating too much on the Jason Segal-Amy Adams romance, not to mention annoying new kid Walter. Here, human co-stars Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey, and others (there are more cameos than you can count) are relegated to supporting roles, with the central conflict revolving around the Muppets’ inability to notice that Constantine, “the world’s most dangerous frog,” has infiltrated their group, sending Kermit to Siberian prison in his place. Constantine and his accomplice (Gervais, whose character’s last name is “Badguy”) use the Muppets’ world tour as a front for their jewel-heist operation; meanwhile, his infatuated warden (Fey) forces Kermit to direct the annual gulag musical. Not helping matters are a bumbling Interpol agent (Ty Burrell) and his CIA counterpart (Sam the American Eagle, natch). Really, all that’s needed is a simple plot, catchy songs, and plenty of room to let the Muppets do their thing — Miss Piggy and Animal are particularly enjoyable here; Walter’s still around, but he’s way more tolerable now that he’s gotten past his “man or muppet” angst — and the film delivers. All the knowing winks to the grown-up fans in the audience are just an appreciated bonus. (1:46) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

Need for Speed Speed kills, in quite a different way than it might in Breaking Bad, in Aaron Paul’s big-screen Need for Speed. “Big” nonetheless signals “B” here, in this stunt-filled challenge to the Fast and the Furious franchise, though there’s no shame in that — the drive-in is paved with standouts and stinkers alike. Tobey (Paul) is an ace driver who’s in danger of losing his auto shop, also the hangout for his pals (Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, Ramon Rodriguez) and young sidekick Pete (Harrison Gilbertson), when archrival Dino (Dominic Cooper) arrives with a historic Mustang in need of restoration. Tragedy strikes, and Tobey must hook up with that fateful auto once more to win a mysterious winner-takes-all race, staged by eccentric, rich racing-fiend Monarch (Michael Keaton). Along for the ride are the (big) eyes and ears for the Mustang’s new owner — gearhead Julia (Imogen Poots). All beside the point, since the racing stunts, including a showy helicopter canyon save, are the real stars of Speed, while the touchstone for stuntman-turned-director Scott Waugh — considering the car and the final SF and Northern California race settings — is, of course, Bullitt (1968), which is given an overt nod in the opening drive-in scene. The overall larky effect, however, tends toward Smokey and the Bandit (1977), especially with Keaton’s camp efforts at Wolfman Jack verbiage-slanging roaring in the background. And despite the efforts of the multicultural gallery of wisecracking side guys, this script-challenged popcorn-er tends to blur what little chemistry these characters have with each other, skip the residual car culture insights of the more specific, more urban Fast series, and leave character development, in particular Tobey’s, in the dust in its haste to get from point A to B. (2:10) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Noah Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic begins with a brief recap of prior Genesis events — creation is detailed a bit more in clever fashion later on — leading up to mankind’s messing up such that God wants to wipe the slate clean and start over. That means getting Noah (Russell Crowe), wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their three sons and one adopted daughter (Emma Watson) to build an ark that can save them and two of every animal species from the imminent slate-wiping Great Flood. (The rest of humanity, having sinned too much, can just feed the fishes.) They get some help from fallen angels turned into Ray Harryhausen-type giant rock creatures voiced by Nick Nolte and others. There’s an admirable brute force and some startling imagery to this uneven, somber, Iceland-shot tale “inspired” by the Good Book (which, needless to say, has endured more than its share of revisions over the centuries). Purists may quibble over some choices, including the device of turning minor Biblical figure Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) into a royal-stowaway villain, and political conservatives have already squawked a bit over Aronofsky’s not-so-subtle message of eco-consciousness, with Noah being bade to “replenish the Earth” that man has hitherto rendered barren. But for the most part this is a respectable, forceful interpretation that should stir useful discussion amongst believers and non believers alike. Its biggest problem is that after the impressively harrowing flood itself, we’re trapped on the ark dealing with the lesser crises of a pregnancy, a discontented middle son (Logan Lerman), and that stowaway’s plotting — ponderous intrigues that might have been leavened if the director had allowed us to hang out with the animals a little, rather than sedating the whole menagerie for the entire voyage. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Non-Stop You don’t want to get between Liam Neeson and his human shield duties. The Taken franchise has restyled the once-gentle acting giant into the type of weather-beaten, all-business action hero that Harrison Ford once had a lock on. Throw in a bit of the flying-while-addled antihero high jinks last seen in Flight (2012) and that pressured, packed-sardine anxiety that we all suffer during long-distance air travel, and we have a somewhat ludicrous but nonetheless entertaining hybrid that may have you believing that those salty snacks and the seat-kicking kids are the least of your troubles. Neeson’s Bill Marks signals the level of his freestyle alcoholism by giving his booze a stir with a toothbrush shortly before putting on his big-boy air marshal pants and boarding his fateful flight. Marks is soon contacted by a psycho who promises, via text, to kill one person at a time on the flight unless $150 million is deposited into a bank account that — surprise — is under the bad-good air marshal’s name. The twists and turns — and questions of who to trust, whether it’s Marks’ vaguely likeable seatmate (Julianne Moore) or his business class flight attendant (Michelle Dockery) — keep the audience on edge and busily guessing, though director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn’t quite dispel all the questions that arise as the diabolical scheme plays out and ultimately taxes believability. The fun is all in the getting there, even if the denouement on the tarmac deflates. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Nymphomaniac: Volume I Found battered and unconscious in a back alley, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is taken in by good Samaritan Seligman (Stellan Skarsgaard), to whom she explains “It’s all my fault — I’m just a bad human being.” But he doesn’t believe there are such things. She seeks to enlighten him by narrating the story of her life so far, from carnally curious childhood to sexually voracious adulthood. Stacy Martin plays her younger self through a guided tour of excesses variously involving Christian Slater and Connie Nielsen as her parents; a buncha guys fucked on a train, on a teenage dare; Uma Thurman as one histrionically scorned woman; and Shai LaBeouf as a first love who’s a cipher either because he’s written that way, or because this particular actor can’t make sense out of him. For all its intended provocation, including some graphic but unsurprisingly (coming from this director) unerotic XXX action, von Trier’s latest is actually less offensive than much of his prior output: He’s regained his sense of humor here, and annoying as its “Look at me, I’m an unpredictable artist” crap can be (notably all the stuff about fly-fishing, cake forks, numerology, etc. that seems randomly drawn from some Great Big Book of Useless Trivia), the film’s episodic progress is divertingly colorful enough. But is Joe going to turn out to be more than a two-dimensional authorial device from a director who’s never exactly sussed women (or liked people in general)? Will Nymphomaniac arrive at some pointed whole greater than the sum of its naughty bits? The answer to both is probably “Nah.” But we won’t know for sure until the two-hour second half arrives (April 4) of a movie that, in fairness, was never really intended to be split up like this. (1:50) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Particle Fever “We are hearing nature talk to us,” a physicist remarks in awe near the end of Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s intriguing doc about the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Earlier, another scientist says, “I’ve never heard of a moment like this in [science] history, where an entire field is hinging on a single event.” The event, of course, is the launch of the Large Hardon Collider, the enormous machine that enabled the discovery. Though some interest in physics is probably necessary to enjoy Particle Fever, extensive knowledge of quarks and such is not, since the film uses elegant animation to refresh the basics for anyone whose eyes glazed over during high-school science. But though he offers plenty of context, Levinson wisely focuses his film on a handful of genial eggheads who are involved in the project, either hands-on at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), or watching from afar as the mighty LHC comes to life. Their excitement brings a welcome warmth to the proceedings — and their “fever” becomes contagious. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

RoboCop Truly, there was no need to remake 1987’s RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s smart, biting sci-fi classic that deploys heaps of stealth satire beneath its ultraviolent imagery. But the inevitable do-over is here, and while it doesn’t improve on what came before, it’s not a total lost cause, either. Thank Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, whose thrilling Elite Squad films touch on similar themes of corruption (within police, political, and media realms), and some inspired casting, including Samuel L. Jackson as the uber-conservative host of a futuristic talk show. Though the suit that restores life to fallen Detroit cop Alex Murphy is, naturally, a CG wonder, the guy inside the armor — played by The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman — is less dynamic. In fact, none of the characters, even those portrayed by actors far more lively than Kinnaman (Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley), are developed beyond the bare minimum required to serve RoboCop‘s plot, a mixed-message glob of dirty cops, money-grubbing corporations, the military-industrial complex, and a few too many “Is he a man…or a machine?” moments. But in its favor: Though it’s PG-13 (boo), it’s also shot in 2D (yay). (1:50) Metreon. (Eddy)

Sabotage Puzzle over the bad Photoshop job on the Sabotage poster. The hard-to-make-out Arnold Schwarzenegger in the foreground could be just about any weathered, sinewy body — telling, in gory action effort that wears its grit like a big black sleeve tattoo on its bicep and reads like an attempt at governator reinvention. Yet this blood-drenched twister, front-loaded with acting talent and directed by David Ayer (2012’s End of Watch), can’t quite make up its mind where it stands. Is it a truth-to-life cop drama about a particularly thuggy DEA team, an old-fashioned murder mystery-meets-heist-exercise, or just another crowd-pleasing Pumping Arnie flick? Schwarzenegger is Breacher, the leader of a team of undercover DEA agents who like to caper on the far reaches of bad lieutenant behavior: wild-eyed coke snorting (a scene-chomping Mireille Enos); sorry facial hair (Sam Worthington, as out of his element as the bead at the end of his goatee); unfortunate cornrows (Joe Manganiello); trash-talking (Josh Holloway); and acting like a suspiciously colorless man of color (Terrence Howard). We know these are bad apples from the start — the question is just how bad they are. Also, how fast can the vanilla homicide cops (Olivia Williams, Harold Perrineau) lock them down, as team members are handily, eh, dismembered and begin to turn on each other and Schwarzenegger gets in at least one semi-zinger concerning an opponent with 48 percent body fat? Still, the sutured-on archetypal-Arnie climax comes as a bit of a shock in its broad-stroke comic-book violence, as the superstar pulls rank, sabotages any residual pretense to realism, and dons a cowboy hat to tell his legions of shooting victims, “I’m different!” Get to the choppers, indeed. (1:49) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

300: Rise of An Empire We pick up the 300 franchise right where director Zack Snyder left off in 2006, with this prequel-sequel, which spins off an as-yet-unreleased Frank Miller graphic novel. In the hands of director Noam Murro, with Snyder still in the house as writer, 300: Rise of an Empire contorts itself, flipping back and forth in time, in an attempt to explain the making of Persian evil prince stereotype Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) —all purring androgyny, fashionable piercings, and Iran-baiting, Bush-era malevolence — before following through on avenging 300‘s romantically outnumbered, chesty Spartans. As told by the angry, mourning Spartan Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey of Game of Thrones), the whole mess apparently began during the Battle of Marathon, when Athenian General Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) killed Xerxes’s royal father with a well-aimed miracle arrow. That act ushers in Xerxes’s transformation into a “God King” bent on vengeance, aided and encouraged by his equally vengeful, elegantly mega-goth naval commander Artemisia (Eva Green), a Greek-hating Greek who likes to up the perversity quotient by making out with decapitated heads. In case you didn’t get it: know that vengeance is a prime mover for almost all the parties (except perhaps high-minded hottie Themistokles). Very loosely tethered to history and supplied with plenty of shirtless Greeks, taut thighs, wildly splintering ships, and even proto-suicide bombers, Rise skews toward a more naturalistic, less digitally waxy look than 300, as dust motes and fire sparks perpetually telegraph depth of field, shrieking, “See your 3D dollars hard at work!” Also working hard and making all that wrath look diabolically effortless is Green, who as the pitch-black counterpart to Gorga, turns out to be the real hero of the franchise, saving it from being yet another by-the-book sword-and-sandal war-game exercise populated by wholesome-looking, buff, blond jock-soldiers. Green’s feline line readings and languid camp attitude have a way of cutting through the sausage fest of the Greek pec-ing order, even during the Battle of, seriously, Salamis. (1:43) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Veronica Mars Since the cult fave TV show Veronica Mars went off the air in 2007, fans of the series, about a smart, cynical teenager who solves mysteries and battles her high school’s 1 percenters — a sort of adolescent noir minus the ex nihilo patois of Rian Johnson’s 2005 Brick — have had their hopes raised and dashed several times regarding the possibility of a big-screen coda. While that sort of scenario usually involves a few of the five stages of grief, this one has a twist happy ending: a full-length film, directed by show creator Rob Thomas and cowritten by Thomas and show producer-writer Diane Ruggiero (with a budget aided by a crowdfunding campaign), that doesn’t suck. It’s been a decade since graduation, and Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) has put a continent between herself and her creepy, class war–torn hometown of Neptune, Calif. — leaving behind her P.I. vocation and a track record of exposing lies, corruption, and the dark side of the human soul in favor of a Columbia law degree and a career of covering up same. But when Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), her brooding, troubled ex, gets charged with the murder of his pop star girlfriend and asks Veronica for help, she can’t resist the pull of what she admits is a pathological impulse. Plus, it’s her 10-year reunion. And indeed, pretty much anyone who had a character arc during the show’s three seasons makes an appearance — plus (naturally) James Franco, Dax Shepard (Bell’s husband), and (oddly) Ira Glass. It could have been a cameo fusillade, but the writing here is as smart, tight, funny, and involving as it was on the TV series, and Thomas and Ruggiero for the most part manage to thread everyone in, taking pressure off a murder mystery that falls a little flat, updating the story to reflect current states of web surveillance and pop cultural mayhem, and keeping the focus on the joy of seeing Veronica back where she belongs. (1:43) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Le Week-End Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi first collaborated two decades ago on The Buddha of Suburbia, when the latter was still in the business of being Britain’s brashest multiculti hipster voice. But in the last 10 years they’ve made a habit of slowing down to sketching portraits of older lives — and providing great roles for the nation’s bottomless well of remarkable veteran actors. Here Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent play a pair of English academics trying to re-create their long-ago honeymoon’s magic on an anniversary weekend in Paris. They love each other, but their relationship is thorny and complicated in ways that time has done nothing to smooth over. This beautifully observed duet goes way beyond the usual adorable-old-coot terrain of such stories on screen; it has charm and humor, but these are unpredictable, fully rounded characters, not comforting caricatures. Briefly turning this into a seriocomedy three-way is Most Valuable Berserker Jeff Goldblum as an old friend encountered by chance. It’s not his story, but damned if he doesn’t just about steal the movie anyway. (1:33) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki announced that Oscar nominee The Wind Rises would be his final film before retiring — though he later amended that declaration, as he’s fond of doing, so who knows. At any rate, it’d be a shame if this was the Japanese animation master’s final film before retirement; not only does it lack the whimsy of his signature efforts (2001’s Spirited Away, 1997’s Princess Mononoke), it’s been overshadowed by controversy — not entirely surprising, since it’s about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed war planes (built by slave labor) in World War II-era Japan. Surprisingly, a pacifist message is established early on; as a young boy, his mother tells him, “Fighting is never justified,” and in a dream, Italian engineer Giovanni Caproni assures him “Airplanes are not tools for war.” But that statement doesn’t last long; Caproni visits Jiro in his dreams as his career takes him from Japan to Germany, where he warns the owlish young designer that “aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction.” You don’t say. A melodramatic romantic subplot injects itself into all the plane-talk on occasion, but — despite all that political hullabaloo — The Wind Rises is more tedious than anything else. (2:06) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy) *

 

Crime and politics

Michael Redmond
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10
Crime and politics

steve@sfbg.com

San Franciscans awoke March 26 to the surprising news that state Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF) had been arrested on federal corruption charges as part of early morning police raids targeting an organized crime syndicate based in Chinatown, along with reputed gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow and two dozen others.

Yee had a reputation for sometimes trading votes for campaign contributions, a perception that had only gained strength in recent months as he launched his first statewide campaign, running to lead the Secretary of State’s Office, casting key votes for landlords and big industries that he refused to explain to local activists.

So in a year when two other Democratic Senators have also been stung by federal corruption and bribery probes, the televised image of Yee in handcuffs wasn’t beyond the realm of possibilities. It was surprising, but not shocking.

Yet by the mid-afternoon when the 137-page federal criminal complaint was unsealed and journalists started reading through what undercover FBI agents had discovered during their five-year criminal investigation, it read more like a sensational organized crime and espionage novel than a court document, a real page-turner that just got more wild and incredible as it went on.

timelineYeeWhat began with the FBI investigating a murder and leadership transition in the San Francisco branch of the ancient Chinese organized crime syndicate known as the Triad, led by an undercover FBI agent who had infiltrated the group, evolved into a widening investigation accusing Yee of arranging an illegal arms trafficking deal with a Muslim rebel group in the Philippines in exchange for $100,000 funneled into his campaign, on top of smaller favors that Yee allegedly did in exchange for envelopes with $10,000 in cash.

It was even worse for local political consultant Keith Jackson, a key Yee fundraiser who was also on contract with Lennar Urban for its Bayview-Hunters Point development projects, with the undercover FBI agents allegedly drawing Jackson into big cocaine deals, money laundering, bribery, and even a murder-for-hire plot. If the complaint is to be believed, Jackson seemed willing to do just about anything to enrich himself and raise money for Yee.

Meanwhile, the public image that Chow has been cultivating for himself since his 2003 release from federal prison — that of a reformed career gangster turned Chinatown civic leader, someone praised by local politicians for inspiring fellow ex-convicts to turn their lives around — was replaced the complaint’s description of a powerful “Dragonhead” overseeing a vast criminal enterprise involved in drugs, guns, prostitution, protection rackets, moving stolen booze and cigarettes, and money laundering.

“I think the whole city is in shock at the moment,” Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who represents Chinatown and ran against Yee in the 2011 mayor’s race, told the Guardian that afternoon. “Today’s widespread law enforcement actions are incredibly disturbing. The detail and scale of the criminal activities are shocking.”

In the days that followed, Yee withdrew his candidacy for Secretary of State and was suspended by his colleagues in the California Senate. But where this wild tale of crime and corruption goes next — and who else gets implicated as these powerful and well-connected defendants look to cut deals to avoid the lengthy prison sentences they all face — is anyone’s guess.

 

THE CRIMINAL

Chow, 54, was raised a criminal, telling the History Channel’s “Gangland” that he stabbed someone in Hong Kong at the age of nine before moving to San Francisco in 1977 and getting involved in the Hop Sing Boys gang and Chinatown’s criminal underworld.

He survived the Golden Dragon Massacre, a shooting between rival Chinatown gangs that left five dead, but he was arrested in 1978 for a robbery and sent to prison for the first time, released in 1985. The next year, he was sent back to prison for attempted murder and more gang mayhem, released in 1989.

“I did time with Charles Manson, a good friend of mine. Kimball, a serial killer. I did time with a bunch of amazing people. Each person you talk to you learn something from. Ain’t no stupid people inside the prison, you can say that,” Chow told Gangland.

In 1991, a gangster named Peter Chong was sent from Hong Kong to San Francisco to extend the reach of the Wo Hop To Triad. He enlisted Chow as his right-hand man, and together they extended the reach of the Wo Hop To across the Western United States, trying to create an all encompassing gang named the Tien HaWui, “The Whole Earth Association.”

Chow was arrested again in 1995 on a variety of racketeering and other criminal charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison. But he later testified against Chong and got his sentence reduced, and he was released from federal prison in 2003.

After his release, Chow publicly claimed to go legit, working on book and movie deals about his life, as well as building connections in the political world. Chow posed for photos with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and other local political figures.

But the latest criminal complaint said that even as Chow pretended to be moving on, he continued to make incriminating statements to the undercover agents “confirming his knowledge of and involvement in criminal activity.”

 

THE COMPLAINT

The criminal complaint alleges that “Chow is currently the Dragonhead, or leader, of the San Francisco-based Chee Kung Tong organization,” which it described as a criminal syndicate connected to Hung Mun, a criminal dynasty that began in 17th century China, “also referred to as a Chinese secret society and the Chinese Freemasons.”

It says Chow was sworn in as CKT head in August 2006, soon after the still-unsolved murder of CKT head Allen Leung. Chow’s swearing-in was reported in local Chinese media sources, so SFPD and FBI conducted surveillance there and launched an investigation.

The FBI says it began infiltrating CKT five years ago, including an undercover FBI agent dubbed UCE 4599, who in May 2010 was introduced to Chow, who “then introduced UCE 4599 to many of the target subjects.” UCE 4599 told Chow he was a member of La Cosa Nostra, the Italian mob.

In March 2012 he was inducted into CKT as a “Consultant,” the complaint alleges. It says that Jackson — a former San Francisco school board member and political consultant — had also be inducted into CKT as a “Consultant,” participating in various criminal conspiracies.

The gang members are accused of laundering money made from “illegal activities, specifically illegal gambling, bookmaking, sports betting, drugs, and outdoor marijuana grows.” They allegedly laundered $2.3 million between March 2011 and December 2013 for UCE 4599, with members collecting a 10 percent fee for doing so.

The complaint says Jackson “has a long-time relationship with Senator Yee,” and “has been involved in raising funds for” Yee’s run for mayor “and for Senator Yee’s current campaign in the California Secretary of State election.” And much of the complaint details deeds allegedly committed by Jackson and Yee.

In fact, the second person named in the complaint, right after Chow, is Yee, “aka California State Senator Leland Yee, aka Uncle Leland.”

As the complaint alleges, “Senator Yee and Keith Jackson were involved in a scheme to defraud the citizens of California of their rights to honest services, and Senator Yee, [Daly City resident Dr. Wilson] Lim, and Keith Jackson were involved in a conspiracy to traffic firearms.”

 

THE POLITICIAN

Yee and Jackson met UCE 4599 through Chow, and then Jackson allegedly solicited him to make donations to Yee’s 2011 San Francisco mayoral campaign “in excess of the $500 individual donation limit. UCE 4599 declined to make any donations to Senator Yee, but introduced Keith Jackson and Senator Yee to a purported business associate, UCE 4773, another undercover FBI agent,” who made a $5,000 donation to Yee’s mayoral campaign.

Yee had $70,000 in debt after that mayor’s race and worked with Jackson on ways to pay off that debt. “This included soliciting UCE 4773 for additional donations and in the course of doing so, Senator Yee and Keith Jackson agreed that Senator Yee would perform certain official acts in exchange for donations from UCE 4773.”

Yee allegedly agreed to “make a telephone call to a manager with the California Department of Public Health in support of a contract under consideration with UCE 4773’s purported client, and would provide an official letter of support for the client, in exchange for a $10,000 donation.”

Meanwhile, it says Jackson and Yee continued raising money for his Secretary of State race by soliciting donations from UCE 4599 and UCE 4180, another undercover agent. “They agreed that in exchange for donations from UCE 4599 and UCE 4180, Senator Yee would perform certain officials acts requested by UCE 4599 and UCE 4180.”

That included Yee issuing an “official state Senate proclamation honoring the CKT in exchange for a $6,800 campaign donation, the maximum individual donation allowed by law.” Yee allegedly did so, and it was presented by one of his staff members at the CKT anniversary celebration on March 29, 2013.

Yee and Jackson are also accused of introducing a donor to unidentified state legislators working on pending medical marijuana legislation, the donor being another undercover agent who claimed to be a medical marijuana businessman from Arizona looking to expand into California, “and in payment for that introduction, UCE 4180 delivered $11,000 cash to Senator Yee and Keith Jackson on June 22, 2013.”

In September, after making another introduction, Yee and Jackson allegedly received another $10,000 cash donation for their services. Then Jackson allegedly had an idea for getting even more money.

“Jackson told UCE 4599 that Senator Yee, had a contact who deals in arms trafficking.” Jackson then allegedly requested UCE 4599 make another donation “to facilitate a meeting with the arms dealer with the intent of UCE 4599 to purportedly purchase a large number of weapons to be imported through the Port of Newark, New Jersey.”

That deal for up to $2.5 million in weapons involved automatic weapon and shoulder-fired missiles, the complaint said, and “Senator Yee discussed certain details of the specific types of weapons UCE 4599 was interested in buying and importing.”

The complaint says that Yee expressed discomfort with how openly UCE 4180 discussed overt “pay to play” links between cash donations and official actions. “I’m just trying to run for Secretary of State. I hope I don’t get indicted,” Yee allegedly told two undercover FBI agents during a walk on June 20, 2013, urging them to be less explicit about connecting official favor with campaign donations.

“Despite complaining about UCE 4180’s tendency to speak frankly and tie payment to performance, and threatening to cut off contact with UCE 4180, Senator Yee and Keith Jackson continued to deal with UCE 4180 and never walked away from quid pro quo requests make by UCE 4180,” the complaint said. “In fact, Senator Yee provided the introductions sought by UCE 4180 and accepted cash payments which UCE 4180 expressly tied to the making of the introductions.”

Yee’s attorney, Paul DeMeester, told reporters they will contest the charges: “We will always in every case enter not guilty pleas, then the case takes on a life of its own.”

 

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

 

 

 

Bloodshed in Bernal Heights

Michael Redmond
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34
Bloodshed in Bernal Heights

rebecca@sfbg.com

On Friday morning, March 21, the day that Alejandro Nieto was shot and killed by San Francisco Police Department officers, he went to the gym with his friend Byron Pedroza. It was something they did often, Pedroza said; the two of them had signed up for gym memberships together. “He’d be like, ‘B, get up. Let’s go work out.'”

Nieto and Pedroza had met at El Toro nightclub, where Nieto worked as a security guard for nearly two years. The club, which attracts Latino clientele and hosts live performances on Mondays, has tight security: There are several guards equipped with Tasers.

“He was the type of person who’d help me a lot,” Pedroza said. “Thanks to him, I went to college,” enrolling at City College of San Francisco.

Nieto was a semester away from completing his degree in administration of justice. He was studying on scholarship, in pursuit of his goal to become a youth probation officer. Nieto drove a ’95 Chevy Caprice — an old police car, Pedroza said — and they fixed it up together.

Ramiro Del Rio, Nieto’s co-worker at El Toro, described him as punctual and considerate. He’d seen Nieto in stressful situations before, when dealing with drunk and rowdy bar patrons. “He was very calm,” Del Rio said of Nieto. “He would always want to talk to the person without using aggressive force.”

Nieto favored juice and soda instead of alcohol, he said, but after he started working out, “it was straight water.” Also, “He was Buddhist.”

 

HIS WORK TASER

Nieto had been scheduled to work that night, March 21. Instead, he was killed in Bernal Heights Park from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by rounds fired by at least four officers. It’s unknown exactly how many bullet wounds Nieto sustained; friends said they believed at least 14 rounds had been fired.

As of March 31, the San Francisco Medical Examiner still had not released autopsy results. The officers involved had been placed on paid leave. Nieto’s community remained stunned by his sudden death, staging a march through the Mission the following weekend to protest what they viewed as an unjust use of deadly force.

According to a transcript from a 911 call placed minutes before the shooting, which Police Chief Greg Suhr read aloud during a March 25 public meeting at Leonard Flynn Elementary School held to discuss the incident, officers opened fire within three and a half minutes of arriving at Bernal Heights Park.

Police were responding to calls reporting a man “with a gun on his hip. A black handgun,” according to the call record, which Suhr read aloud. Police did not reveal the identity of the caller, but noted that the caller was not a police officer.

A neighbor who declined to be named told the Bay Guardian that shortly before the shooting, two men walking down the pedestrian pathway on the park’s north slope alerted a jogger of a man ahead with a gun on his hip. The jogger, who came within 50 feet of the man, reported noticing that he was “pacing back and forth” and “air boxing.”

The person who phoned 911 also initially reported seeing a man pacing back and forth. But minutes later, the anonymous caller reported to 911 dispatchers, “He is eating chips … but resting his hand on the gun.”

In reality, there was no gun — it was Nieto’s Taser, carried in a holster. Friends who spoke at a March 24 vigil said they believed Nieto had headed up there to eat a burrito while looking out at the city from the top of the hill, a place he often went to clear his head.

A sergeant from the Ingleside station and other police officers arrived at the scene minutes after receiving reports of a man with a gun, Suhr said at the public meeting. Police faced Nieto from a distance of about 75 feet, up a hill.

“When the officers asked him to show his hands, he drew the Taser from the holster,” Suhr said. Nieto then told police to show their hands, and pointed the Taser at the officers, Suhr told a large crowd in attendance. Due to the distance, the chief said, the officers did not see the yellow markings that would have alerted them that it was a Taser and not a gun.

“These particular Tasers, as soon as they’re drawn, they emit a dot, a red dot,” Suhr said. “When the officers saw the laser sight on them, tracking, they believed it to be a firearm, and they fired at Mr. Nieto.” Believing he had a gun, Suhr said, police “fired in defense of their own lives.” In a later interview, he confirmed that officers would not have used lethal force had they known Nieto possessed a Taser instead of a firearm.

Both Pedroza and Del Rio said Nieto had shown them his new Taser, and said it emits a red dot only when one pushes a button to turn it on. According to a Taser operating manual, the stun gun has a range of 15 feet.

Asked how many 911 calls were placed, Suhr said he did not have that information. When the Bay Guardian contacted the Department of Emergency Management to request audio from 911 calls, it was denied on the grounds that “it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.”

 

COMMUNITY OUTRAGE

For several hours following Suhr’s explanation, friends and community members took turns at the microphone to vent outrage, frustration, and sadness over Nieto’s death. Many referenced an overarching trend of police violence directed against black and Latino youth.

Some voiced skepticism of the police account. Benjamin Bac Sierra — an English instructor at City College and friend of Nieto’s, who had once driven down Mission Street with him during a low rider parade, shouting “si se puede!” to cheering onlookers — told the Guardian, “In my heart, I do not believe that he pointed his Taser at the officers.”

At the gym, on the morning of the day Nieto died, Pedroza said, “I could tell he had a lot on his mind.” Nieto had told him it had to do with a woman he’d been seeing, a mother of three. “He was in love with her,” Pedroza said.

Yet Nieto’s relationship with Yajaira Barrera Estrada had created a conflict between him and Arthur Vega, Barrera Estrada’s three children’s father, whom Nieto had once been friends with. Public records list Vega as Barrera Estrada’s husband, and show the two living at separate addresses. It had culminated in a physical confrontation outside Barrera’s home several weeks earlier, during which Nieto allegedly stunned Vega with his Taser. Vega’s account, as described in a court filing requesting a temporary restraining order, suggests this was unprovoked; Pedroza said Nieto had believed Vega was going to harm him and might have a gun. Vega could not be reached for comment.

After that incident, Pedroza described Nieto as seeming worried and easily distracted. Pedroza believed that in the weeks leading up to the shooting, the conflict had caused Nieto to fear for his life.

Court records show that Barrera Estrada had also filed a request for a temporary restraining order against Nieto stemming from that incident, which was partially granted pending an April 11 hearing. When we reached Barrera Estrada by phone, she declined to discuss it, saying only: “Alex was an excellent person. I don’t know why the media is writing bad things about him. I don’t know why the police shot him. He was an excellent person with me.”

At the meeting, Suhr noted that Nieto was prohibited from owning a firearm due to a history of mental illness. Del Rio said he hadn’t seen evidence of this in Nieto’s behavior at the nightclub, where he spent five or six nights a week. “He never seemed crazy or mentally ill when he was working.” According to state records, Nieto obtained registration to work as a guard/patrolperson in June of 2007, which required completion of a 40-hour course.

As the crowd listened at the town hall meeting, Nieto’s father, Refugio, told Sup. David Campos that police had arrived at his home in the afternoon the day after the shooting, then questioned him about his son prior to revealing that he had been killed. Then police confiscated his car, Refugio Nieto told Campos, saying it was needed for an investigation. Then, according to Pedroza, police also went to Barrera Estrada’s residence, notified her of his death, and searched the premises.

Just before sunset on March 24, about 150 friends and community supporters gathered for a vigil in memory of Nieto. They lit candles, sang, burned incense, and conducted Buddhist chants in honor of his spiritual practice.

Sup. John Avalos said he’d known Nieto through Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth. “What we saw in Alejandro was that he had a really big heart,” Avalos said. He added, “Blood’s been shed, in this case, by people we’re supposed to trust. But … we have a lot of difficulty trusting our police, because from time to time, these things happen.”

Massage therapists hope for a happy ending

Michael Redmond
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Massage therapists hope for a happy ending

The California Massage Therapy Council, a statewide body that licenses massage practitioners, may expire at the end of this year unless extended by the California Legislature. Some anti-prostitution crusaders say reverting to local control will make it easier to shut down covert brothels, but the practitioners fear a return to the bad old days, when stigmas and stereotypes overcomplicated their lives.

On one side of the debate are the massage therapists, who say that the council protects them from unfair discrimination, replaces a patchwork of local ordinances, and provides a greater level of respectability to their profession. However, an array of city officials, police departments, and powerful groups such as the League of California Cities argue that the CAMTC makes it easier for illicit massage parlors to get away with prostitution and human trafficking.

“I receive complaints from neighbors all the time about certain establishments,” said Sup. Katy Tang about her supervisorial district in San Francisco’s Sunset District. “We can inspect, but we have no ability to enforce any of our regulations. If there are any penalties, we can’t enforce them.”

Tang’s frustration stems from Senate Bill 731, legislation that was signed into law in 2008. That bill created the CAMTC, a nonprofit organization that has the authority to certify massage practitioners and therapists in California. Prior to the creation of this body, each city and county enacted its own certification procedures, leading to a messy patchwork of rules all over the state.

Before the CAMTC, “there were 550 different kinds of regulations from city to city,” said Ahmos Netanel, CEO of the organization. “Within a radius of one mile, you can have a situation where different cities have their own standards. One city may require no training, and another right next door may require 1,000 hours.”

A massage provider working in California pre-2009 not only had to be savvy with the medley of laws, but also needed to purchase expensive licenses for each city he or she planned to practice in. The CAMTC creates a universal—though voluntary—system, where licensed practitioners can travel and work freely around the state.

The contentious part of the law comes from the protection that it offers to licensed practitioners. Any establishment that employs all CAMTC-certified massage providers is exempt from city ordinances that target massage businesses. Law enforcement agencies claim that these restrictions impede their ability to crack down on illegal parlors, but the massage therapists say that they are necessary to fight off discriminatory laws.

Some of these unfair regulations targeted entire establishments, such as zoning rules that forced all massage businesses into run-down or dangerous parts of town, with the assumption that they were brothels. Massage providers argued that this was neither fair nor safe for, say, a 75-year-old woman seeking out massage for arthritis, or a soon-to-be mom trying to obtain a pre-natal massage.

Other laws targeted the therapists themselves. Stacey DeGooyer, a certified massage therapist in the Bay Area, remembers times when practicing massage meant mandatory STD testing and reminders from police to not wear undergarments as exterior clothing.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is for my profession?'” DeGooyer said, decrying being subjected to “archaic prostitution laws.” Most massage providers aren’t looking to be on par with physicians, but they also don’t want to be on par with prostitutes.

Currently, San Francisco has its own certification program that is regulated by the Department of Public Health. To practice massage in the city, the provider must have a license from either the city or the CAMTC. However, only those who have the state CAMTC license can legally call themselves a “licensed massage” therapist or practitioner.

Tang has been one of the most outspoken critics of the CAMTC in San Francisco, urging the Legislature to let the body sunset at the end of the year.

“I wouldn’t say that I’m against [the CAMTC], but there are structural flaws in how it was designed,” Tang said. “It was created for good reasons, since there were so many jurisdictions and they wanted to standardize it and create a cohesive process. But there are jurisdictions like San Francisco where we have our own robust process.”

The number of massage establishments have surged since the adoption of the CAMTC, which critics use as evidence for a growing number of illicit parlors. But Netanel said his group’s worked to prevent prostitutes from getting licensed in the first place. Out of over 63,000 applicants, Netanel said, the group has never certified a single person who has been convicted of illicit activities. It also utilizes an online complaint form to report questionable behavior, and respond to all complaints within 24 hours.

“Even with those who criticize [the CAMTC], we share the same goals,” Netanel said. “We want a safe, healthy, and reliable certification process, so consumers can trust their therapists. Even more, we want to put an end to illegal massage parlors so they are no longer categorized with honest providers.” (Brian McMahon)

HOT MAIL

Last week’s Bay Guardian featured a cover story on homelessness in San Francisco (“San Francisco’s untouchables”), including communications between local residents and the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, which we obtained in a public records request. So we thought we’d share a few message from the more than 100 we received.

“I don’t know where to begin,” one resident wrote. “I feel between mad, disgusted, and frustrated. This homeless encampment keeps growing. … The city has put up wire fencing only to be cut through by the homeless. … It is within 100 yards of my $1.2M condo.”

Another said: “Something is deeply wrong with San Francisco policy. Cultivating the Bohemian San Francisco style is nice but … it is as if we were in a deteriorated undeveloped country. We live in downtown San Francisco, not in the favelas, which is what it feels like.”

Still another complainant wrote: “Bags distributors are installed in the parks in order to help dog lovers clean up after their dogs, which is completely normal, but nothing is done for all the human beings who stroll, do drugs, eat, sleep, urinate, defecate and so on, on the sidewalks.”

Sometimes these complaints result in HOT visits to homeless encampments. But the emails suggest that while the HOT does approach homeless folks to try and persuade them to access services or go to a shelter, the service workers don’t always have full services to direct them to if the homeless individuals agree to do so.

Psychiatric social worker Jason Albertson, who is part of the HOT, explained this dilemma in an email sent in mid-January. His email noted that the HOT had encountered some homeless people in the vicinity of Harriet Alley and Manolo Draves Park, in response to a neighbor’s urging.

They’re “primarily in transit, meaning that they camp in different places each night and are not regulars,” he explained. “So far, nobody has wanted to enter into shelter or discuss other access to treatment or services.” But even if they had, he said, there wouldn’t be too many options for moving forward with recovery.

“At this time, our case management support is limited with identified clients waiting,” he wrote. “So capacity for full service is limited.” (Rebecca Bowe)

WHITHER GOOGLE BUSES

As the Board of Supervisors prepared for an April 1 hearing to consider an environmental appeal of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s program for regulating Google buses and other private shuttles to the Silicon Valley, which charges them one dollar per stop, both sides marshaled their troops.

The pro-business Bay Area Council released a poll of San Franciscans claiming that most of us love tech, we’re totally cool with the Google buses, and we care more about job creation than the cost of living. The group wrote: “Despite what it may look like from recent media coverage, a majority of voters have a positive opinion of the shuttle buses and support allowing buses to use Muni stops.”

SF.citi, an alliance of San Francisco tech companies, touted the poll as it sent out an email blast that reads like a call to arms: “Divisive shuttle opponents are now suing the City to challenge this pilot program before it has the chance to get off the ground. We need YOU to tell the Board of Supervisors in person that you want them reject this lawsuit and let the pilot program go forward.”

Progressive activists countered in a similar tone: “Please join us to support the appeal and to tell the city to hold Big Tech accountable for the actual impact they have on our communities and neighborhoods.”

The hearing was scheduled after Guardian press time, so check www.sfbg.com/politics to find out what happened. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Alerts: April 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 2

 

Anti-eviction march

24th and Mission BART Station, SF. evictionfreesf.org. 11:30am, free. Eviction Free San Francisco will lead “a spirited lunchtime march and picket” to the Mission offices of Vanguard Properties, in response to an Ellis Act eviction that has been filed against longtime tenant Benito Santiago, a Duboce Triangle resident who was born and raised in San Francisco.

THURSDAY 3

 

Public meeting on tech shuttle plan

City Hall, 1 Dr Carlton B Goodlett, SF. 3pm, free. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a controversial pilot program that will allow private shuttles, such as Google buses, to use Muni bus stops for a fee of $1 per stop per day. The program, approved by the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency in January, has been appealed on the grounds that it should undergo a full environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act. The Board will vote on whether the appeal should move forward.

 

FRIDAY 4

 

IMPACT

Laney College, 900 Fallon, Oakl. www.destinyarts.org. 7:30pm, $20. This is the opening night of IMPACT, a full-length work featuring a cast of 42 talented youth ages 9 to 18 performing a combination of hip-hop, modern and aerial dance, theater, spoken word, rap and song. This group has chosen to take a stand around issues that have powerful impact on themselves, their communities and their world: Environmental destruction, unhealthy food and water, negative attitudes about their bodies, and violence of all kinds.

 

 

Talk: Robots and new media

Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley. 2594 Hearst, Berk. robotsandnewmedia.com. 9am-5pm, free. The Center for New Media at UC Berkeley will host this daylong symposium to explore “a new range of more social, personal, expressive, nurturing, and emotional robotic platforms and applications.” Featuring talks by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus of UC Berkeley, Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs, UC Berkeley robotics professor Ken Goldberg and more.

 

SATURDAY 5

 

SF LGBT Center’s Annual Soiree

City View at Metreon, 135 4th St, SF. tinyurl.com/lgbtsoiree. 6:30-8pm VIP reception; party admission 8pm-midnight; $150 or $95 respectively. Come out in support of San Francisco’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Community Center, which offers free services like career counseling, job fairs, social activities, mentorships, youth meals, daycare and a space for LGBT people to organize and secure equal rights. With a hosted bar, gourmet morsels, silent auction, music, dancing and live entertainment it promises to be a fancy affair.

SUNDAY 6

Ending Solitary Confinement Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall, 1924 Bonita, Berk. www.bfuu.org. 2pm, $5-10 suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds. Laura Magnani of the American Friends Service Committee will be speaking on Solitary Confinement in California prisons, and what we can do to work to abolish it or promote its more limited use. She will be joined by Marie Levin, sister of a prisoner who has organized and participated in prisoner hunger strikes in the past few years.

Cap and frown

Michael Redmond
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1
Cap and frown

joe@sfbg.com

Just in time for baseball season, Giants hats may be allowed back into San Francisco public schools. A new Board of Education resolution may change the school district dress code to allow hats to be worn indoors in classrooms, a resolution that is also sparking conversations about cultural sensitivity.

The resolution, which the board will likely vote on April 8, would eliminate a San Francisco Unified School District no-hats policy, allowing schools to set their own dress codes individually as long as they’ve considered community input.

Some schools currently allow hats in schools in violation of district policy, but others have no-hat rules due to long standing conflation of hats with gang clothing, Board of Education Commissioner Matt Haney, who authored the resolution, told us.

“Our students should not be treated as a threat or a gang member because they wear hats,” Haney said. “If the message we send to them is that the way they dress in their communities is somehow a threat, we should not be sending that message as a school system.”

Hats seem like an unlikely starting point for a discussion about race and social justice, but Haney connects freedom of dress to the story of Trayvon Martin, whose tragic slaying many connected to negative assumptions due to wearing a hoodie, sparking a national “Million Hoodie Movement for Justice.”

Haney said allowing hats in classrooms is one step of many ensuring students know they’re accepted, and not viewed as a threat.

“When I went to a middle school to visit, they asked ‘why we can’t wear hats?’ I said it’s because people may think they’re in gangs,” Haney told the Guardian. “They looked at me like they had never heard anything so crazy or disrespectful in their lives.”

In a world where some people view those dressed in a simple hoodie as a reason to fear a teenager, the change in dress code rules could be seen as rebellious. But not everyone is a fan.

“I’m both ways on it,” Jackie Cohen, co-founder of the student tutoring program 100 Percent College Prep Institute, told the Guardian. “They should be able to express themselves as young people, but I don’t think they’re ready for the consequences that come with it.”

The institute offers many workshops to youth in the Bayview, but one offered last October taught kids to be what Cohen calls a “social chameleon.” The class taught code switching, when Cohen as how people change behavior based on social surroundings.

It’s a concept that youth of color in her neighborhood grapple with every day. Do they wear a hoodie to a job interview? A hat in the classroom? How much slang should be used in any given conversation? How does the media portray them?

boysmeet

Teenage (and younger) members of 100 Percent College Prep Institute learn about code switching from adult peers in a workshop held in October. Photo courtesy of Jackie Cohen.

San Franciscans were treated to a glaring moment of code-switching violation at last year’s NFC championship, when the 49ers were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks, whose cornerback Richard Sherman dissed 49ers player Michael Crabtree loudly in a TV interview, shouting, “Well, I’m the best corner in the game! When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get! Don’t you ever talk about me.”

The moment drew fire from football fans and commentators nationally; many called Sherman a thug due to his aggressive speech. In interviews later, Sherman equated the “thug” label with a racial epithet.

The message? Men of color have to act and dress within certain boundaries, and young persons especially can have trouble navigating those social boundaries, just or not. Young people of color’s clothing and speech styles can often be an impediment to breaching white-dominated power structures, Cohen said.

“If you put that resolution on the table, [Haney] should expand that to teach the other side,” she told us. “The code switching class should be part of that resolution.”

Haney, for his part, agrees that families should have a say in how their children dress at school.

“I think it’s a fair point,” he said. “The resolution doesn’t say schools must allow hats, it says it should be up to the school community and can be up to the school staff.”

But in a way, the resolution is pushing back against the need for code switching, and even mentions that the school district should recognize different forms of dress as a part of a community’s culture.

The resolution states: “A District-wide, positive, relationship-based culture is best supported by contemporary, culturally relevant Dress and Appearance standards with consistent application.”

And in San Francisco, as other big cities with pride in their sports team, saying hats are “culturally relevant dress” is an understatement.

Len Kori is a 26-year-old design major at California State University East Bay. But first and foremost, he is a San Francisco native, born and raised — he went to Thurgood Marshall High School, one of the schools affected by the resolution on hats.

He remembers the ban on hats well, which makes sense since Kori owns more than 200 of them, most bearing that unbeatable abbreviation: SF.

lenhat

Kori stands amidst some of his hat collection. Photo courtesy of Len Kori.

“You’d be surprised how deep the philosophy of collecting caps goes, as far as why people collect what they collect,” he told us. “My collection is solely based on who I am, and how important for me it is to acknowledge my roots,” Kori told the Guardian.

Hats defined his identity as a San Franciscan since he was a youngster, and as an adult he channeled his passions into designing hats himself.

One has the peninsula of the city dead center on the front of the cap, half the city aqua blue and the other half a gold dusky land mass. It reads “Bay Era,” a play off of the name of the popular New Era hats. Reflecting a love of city sports, some of his designs hearken back to San Francisco’s original baseball team, the Seals, sporting the original 1903 team colors of blue and white.

He’s happy to see the hat ban lifted because he feels “it’s important for kids to be able to express themselves.” Hats expressing city pride have long been a part of urban San Francisco culture, he said, but they are especially important now.

With so many displaced in the city’s housing crisis, there are too few of his former schoolmates around anymore. It makes the need to declare his love of San Francisco through hats especially poignant.

“It’s just really sad to see so many of my friends who have gone and left elsewhere,” Kori said. “I take pride in my city.”

Port of Oakland rejects deceptive contract bid by Black Muslim security firm

Sasha Cuttler
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11
Port of Oakland rejects deceptive contract bid by Black Muslim security firm

Editor’s Note: This report, which appears in today’s Oakland Tribune, is part of the continuing efforts of the Chauncey Bailey Project, a joint investigation by various media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) into the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

By Thomas Peele and Matt O’Brien, Bay Area News Group

OAKLAND — Admitting they nearly entered into a deal with a questionable security company now under investigation, Port of Oakland commissioners on yesterday [Thu/27] Thursday vowed to revamp their contracting process.

“We came very close to approving a bad contract,” Commissioner Michael Colbruno said. “The whole procurement process” should be reviewed.

The commissioners voted 6-0 to back out of a contract with BMT International Security Services, which had submitted bogus references and credentials to win a $450,000 deal to patrol two shoreline parks.

The port has extended its existing contract with ABC Security to guard a 42-acre shoreline through the end of the year. Colbruno added that the port needs to have a better screening process.

Commission President Cestra Butner agreed.

“This commission will take our lumps if we did anything wrong,” he said. “We want to make sure we get things right. … I don’t want anything slipped under the rug.”

BMT, which is linked to Oakland’s defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery, had been in final negotiations with the port when this newspaper reported that its proposal contained references to work at other government agencies that had no record of ever doing business with it. The firm also appears to have inflated the credentials of its managers.

The company is now being investigated by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the state Department of Consumer Affairs. A former Oakland police officer also said in court papers that he believes the company stole a security company license number from him that he let lapse in 2008 when he retired.

BMT told the port that it had worked for BART, the San Joaquin County Housing Authority and the Riverside Transit Agency, but those agencies had no record of hiring the company. The firm also lost contracts with Alameda County and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles when staff at those agencies discovered the Oakland company submitted apparently false insurance certification.

At least one Bay Area government noticed before awarding a contract that something appeared wrong with BMT’s credentials.

In 2011, the Vallejo City Council rejected a BMT proposal after city staff reported that the listed references were not calling back and one claimed to not know the company. BMT unsuccessfully appealed and some of its employees spoke out at a public meeting.

BMT sought another Vallejo contract in 2012 but again failed to win it. BMT owner Rory Parker sued the North Bay city in December, claiming she and her company experienced disparate treatment “because of their race, which is Black, and because of their religion, which is of the Islamic faith.”

The firm is run out of a Black Muslim temple in West Oakland whose minister, Dahood Sharieff Bey, was an associate of Your Black Muslim Bakery and a disciple of its founder, Yusuf Bey. Yusuf Bey touted his business enterprise as empowering African Americans, but prosecutors have described it as a wide-ranging criminal organization involved in violent crimes, real estate fraud and identity theft.

The bakery collapsed in 2007 when its members, led by Yusuf Bey IV, killed three men, including Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. Bey IV is now serving a life prison term without parole. Prosecutors and police have linked five unsolved homicides to the bakery.

Dahood Bey, the minister who identified himself at a recent Oakland council meeting as “Mr. Pasha,” was tried for torture in 2010 but pleaded guilty to lesser charges when the jury could not reach a verdict. His co-defendant in that case, Basheer Fard Muhammad, has been the public face of BMT at port and other government meetings, urging officials to give it contracts.

BMT owner Rory Parker is Dahood Bey’s mother. The company also claimed in its port proposal to have a retired, Harvard-educated FBI agent serving as its chief financial officer and that its guards include former Secret Service agents.

Law enforcement records show San Francisco police officers arrested Muhammad in Oakland on Feb. 25 on suspicion of receiving stolen property, which was described as a “refrigerated sandwich table.” He was jailed for two days and released after the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute him. San Francisco police spokesman Sgt. Eric O’Neal has refused to release details about the case despite repeated requests.

BMT is also seeking a contract to work for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but transit officials there would not disclose any information about the bid until they finish evaluating all the proposals in May.

– See more at: http://www.chaunceybaileyproject.org/2014/03/28/port-of-oakland-unanimously-rejects-black-muslim-security-firms-bid-to-guard-shoreline-parks/#sthash.u7PagzEY.dpuf

 

 

 

Complaint against Yee includes firearms trafficking and envelopes full of cash

Sasha Cuttler
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54
Complaint against Yee includes firearms trafficking and envelopes full of cash

The federal criminal charges filed today against Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF), local political consultant Keith Jackson, reputed Chinatown organized crime boss Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, and 23 other defendants allege a vast criminal conspiracy that was penetrated by undercover FBI agents, who say they then gave Yee envelopes full of cash in exchange for official favors.

Among the many bizarre aspects of this blockbuster case, Yee stands accused of taking part in a conspiracy to illegally smuggle firearms into the country, and using those deals to help secure campaign contributions for his current campaign for Secretary of State, while he was sponsoring a trio of gun control bills that were signed into law last year.

Yee, who reportedly faces 16 years in prison for two felony counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms, was arrested this morning during a series of early morning police raids, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment this afternoon, and was freed after posting a $500,000 unsecured bond.

Chow had a long criminal history as the admitted head of the Hop Sing gang in SF’s Chinatown, serving prison time. “Chow’s criminal history includes a guilty plea in federal court for racketeering, involving murder for hire, conspiracy to distribute heroin, arson, and conspiracy to collect extensions of credit,” the complaint notes. (You can read the full complaint here.)

Chow publicly claimed to go legit after being released from federal prison in 2006, and he has cultivated many high-profile business and political connections in San Francisco. But the 137-page criminal complaint that was unsealed today alleges that “Chow is currently the Dragonhead, or leader, of the San Francisco-based Chee Kung Tong organization,” which it describerd as a criminal syndicate connected to Hung Mun, a criminal dynasty that began in 17th century China, “also referred to as a Chinese secret society and the Chinese Freemasons.”

It says Chow was sworn in as CKT head in August 2006 after being released from federal prison, soon after the still-unsolved murder of CKT head Allen Ngai Leung. Chow’s swearing-in was reported in local Chinese media sources, so SFPD and FBI conducted surveillance there and launched an investigation.

CKT is allegedly part of Triad, an international Chinese organized crime group with ties to China and Hong Kong, and in San Francisco it is said to be comprised of Chow’s Hop Sing, a street gang with 200-300 members, and the Wah Ching gang headed by George Nieh, who was charged with a variety of crimes today.

“Nieh said he was in charge of the Wah Ching gang and Chow was in charge of the Hop Sing gang. Nieh said they used to be enemies, but banded together instead,” the complaint says, relating what they allegedly told FBI informants who had infiltrated the organization.

The FBI says it began infiltrating CKT five years ago, including an undercover FBI agent dubbed UCE 4599, who in May 2010 was introduced to Chow, who “then introduced UCE 4599 to many of the target subjects.”

Chow allegedly told UCE 4599 that he oversees all of CKT criminal enterprises, but doesn’t actively run them anymore, acting as a arbiter, or as a judge when one CKT member kills another. Nieh allegedly heads the criminal activities division and reports to Chow.

They are accused of laundering money made from “illegal activities, specifically illegal gambling, bookmaking, sports betting, drugs, and outdoor marijuana grows.” They allegedly laundered $2.3 million between March 2011 and December 2013 for UCE 4599, with members collecting a 10 percent fee for doing so.

UCE 4599 told Chow he was a member of La Cosa Nostra, an Italian mob, and in March 2012 he was inducted into CKT as a “Consultant,” the complaint alleges. It says that Jackson — a former San Francisco school board member and political consultant who has worked for Lennar Urban and Singer Associates — had also be inducted into CKT as a “Consultant,” participating in various criminal conspiracies.

The complaint says Jackson “has a long-time relationship with Senator Yee,” and “has been involved in raising funds for” Yee’s run for mayor “and for Senator Yee’s current campaign in the California Secretary of State election.” And much of the complaint details deeds allegedly committed by Jackson and Yee.

In fact, the second person named in the complaint, right after Chow, is Yee, “aka California State Senator Leland Yee, aka Uncle Leland.”

“Senator Yee and Keith Jackson were involved in a scheme to defraud the citizens of California of their rights to honest services, and Senator Yee, [Daly City resident Dr. Wilson] Lim, and Keith Jackson were involved in a conspiracy to traffic firearms,” the complaint alleges.

Yee and Jackson met UCE 4599 through Chow, and then Jackson allegedly solicited him to make donations to Yee’s 2011 San Francisco mayoral campaign “in excess of the $500 individual donation limit. UCE 4599 declined to make any donations to Senator Yee, but introduced Keith Jackson and Senator Yee to a purported business associate, UCE 4773, another undercover FBI agent,” who made a $5,000 donation to Yee’s mayoral campaign.

Yee had $70,000 in debt after that mayor’s race and worked with Jackson on ways to pay off that debt. “This included soliciting UCE 4773 for additional donations and in the course of doing so, Senator Yee and Keith Jackson agreed that Senator Yee would perform certain official acts in exchange for donations from UCE 4773.”

Yee allegedly agreed to “make a telephone call to a manager with the California Department of Public Health in support of a contract under consideration with UCE 4773’s purported client, and would provide an official letter of support for the client, in exchange for a $10,000 donation. Senator Yee made the call on October 18, 2012 and provided the letter on or about January 13, 2013,” and Jackson allegedly took the cash donation from the agent.

Meanwhile, it says Jackson and Yee continued raising money for his Secretary of State race by soliciting donations from UCE 4599 and UCE 4180, another undercover agent. “They agreed that in exchange for donations from UCE 4599 and UCE 4180, Senator Yee would perform certain officials acts requested by UCE 4599 and UCE 4180.”

That included Yee issuing an “official state Senate proclamation honoring the CKT in exchange for a $6,800 campaign donation, the maximum individual donation allowed by law.” Yee allegedly did so, and it was presented by one of his staff members at the CKT anniversary celebration on March 29, 2013.

Yee and Jackson are also accused of introducing a donor to state legislators working on pending medical marijuana legislation, the donor being another undercover agent who claimed to be a medical marijuana businessman from Arizona looking to expand into California, “and in payment for that introduction, UCE 4180 delivered $11,000 cash to Senator Yee and Keith Jackson on June 22, 2013.”

In September, after making another introduction, Yee and Jackson allegedly received another $10,000 cash donation for their services.

In August of last year, in an effort to raise more money, “Jackson told UCE 4599 that Senator Yee, had a contact who deals in arms trafficking.” Jackson then allegedly requested UCE 4599 make another donation “to facilitate a meeting with the arms dealer with the intent of UCE 4599 to purportedly purchase a large number of weapons to be imported through the Port of Newark, New Jersey…Senator Yee discussed certain details of the specific types of weapons UCE 4599 was interested in buying and importing.”

The complaint, a declaration by FBI Agent Emmanuel Pascua, does indicate that both Chow and Yee sometimes tried to declare their legitimacy to the FBI agents.

“It should be noted that throughout this investigation, Chow has made several exculpatory statements about how he strives to become legitimate and no longer participates in criminal activity,” it says.

For example, Chow has been working on book and movie deals about his life, and he would regularly make statements attempting to distance himself from CKT’s alleged criminal activities, as well as building connections in the political world. Chow posed for photos with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and other local political figures.  

“Chow has also been portrayed in many Chinese newspapers as being involved in community affairs and has been photographed posing with local politicians and other community leaders. For example, in August of 2006, Chow was photographed hold a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for community service of the CKT,” it reads.

But the complaint also said that Chow continued to make incriminating statements to the undercover agents “confirming his knowledge of and involvement in criminal activity.”

The complaint says that Yee also made many exculpatory statements and expressed discomfort with how openly UCE 4180 discussed overt “pay to play” links between cash donations and official actions.

“Despite complaining about UCE 4180’s tendency to speak frankly and tie payment to performance, and threatening to cut off contact with UCE 4180, Senator Yee and Keith Jackson continued to deal with UCE 4180 and never walked away from quid pro quo requests make by UCE 4180. In fact, Senator Yee provided the introductions sought by UCE 4180 and accepted cash payments which UCE 4180 expressly tied to the making of the introductions.”

Yee’s attorney, Paul DeMeester, told reporters they will contest the charges: “We will always in every case enter not guilty pleas, then the case takes on a life of its own.”

Officials in San Francisco and Sacramento are still reeling from the allegations. “I think the whole city is in shock at the moment,” Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who represents Chinatown and ran against Yee in the 2011 mayor’s race, told us. “Today’s widespread law enforcement actions are incredibly disturbing. The detail and scale of the criminal activities are shocking.”

California Senate President Darrell Steinberg told reporters today that he has asked for Yee’s resignation and that he plans to introduce a resolution Friday to suspend Yee and two other Democrats chargeed with political corruption, Rod Wright and Ron Calderon.

Sen. Mark Leno (D-SF), who took part in that briefing, told the Guardian, “I’m frustrated and angered on behalf of my constituents that my Senate colleagues and I are there each day to create positive changes and all of these situations are distracting…It reflects badly on a great institution.”

Guardian reporter Joe Rodriguez Fitzgerald, who contributed to this report, has been covering this case from the federal courthouse today, and we’ll have more on this unfolding story in the coming days and the next issue of the Guardian. 

Yee had a reputation for political corruption even before the federal indictment

Sasha Cuttler
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Yee had a reputation for political corruption even before the federal indictment

Long before Sen. Leland Yee’s surprise arrest and arraignment on federal corruption charges today, Yee already had a reputation for, at best, political pandering and influence peddling; or at worst, corruption, a label for Yee long used in private conversations among figures in the local political establishment.

It was usually assumed to be the kind of low-level, quasi-legal corruption that is endemic to the political system: voting against one’s values and constituent interests in order to curry favor and financial contributions from wealthy special interests. In Yee’s case, his recent voting record seems to indicate that he was cultivating support from landlords and the pharmaceutical, banking, oil, and chemical industries for his current campaign for the Secretary of State’s Office.

But today’s indictment — which is expected to be released at any minute, and which we’ll detail in a separate post — seems to go much further, the culmination of a four-year FBI investigation tying Yee to notorious Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, who was also arrested today. They and 24 others arrested in the case today are now being arraigned in federal court.  

The Bay Guardian has covered Yee throughout his 26-year political career, and we wrote a comprehensive profile of this controversial figure when he ran for mayor in 2011. More recently, in September, we wrote about some of his suspicious votes and refusal to offer credible explanations for them to activists he’s worked with before.

After that article, confidential sources contacted us urging us to investigate a series of strange votes Yee had cast in the last year, and we’ve been holding off on publishing that until Yee would sit down to talk to us about them. But each time we scheduled an interview with him, starting in November, he would cancel them at the last minute.

Maybe he was aware of the federal criminal investigation, or perhaps he had just decided that he not longer needed to cooperate with the Guardian as he sought statewide office, but he became increasingly hostile to our inquiries. Last month, when Yee saw San Francisco Media Co. (which owns the Guardian) CEO Todd Vogt having dinner with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu in a local restaurant, Vogt said Yee angrily accused the Guardian of being motivated by an anti-Asian bias in our inquiries and criticism, an incident that Vogt described to us as bizarre.

Guardian calls to staffers in Yee’s office, today and in recent weeks, haven’t been returned.

Yee has been a champion of sunshine (last week, the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal gave him a James Madison Freedom of Information Award for defending the California Public Records Act) and gun control, last year getting three such bills signed into law. SB 755 expands the list of crimes that would disqualify and individual from owning a gun, SB 374 prohibited semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines, and SB 53 made background checks a requisite step in purchasing ammunition.

But he’s disappointed liberal and progressive constituencies — renters, environmentalists, seniors, students, the LGBT community — in San Francisco and beyond with most of his other votes, some of which ended up killing important legislation.

Yee voted against SB 405, which would have extended San Francisco’s plastic bag ban statewide. He also said no to regulating gasoline price manipulation by voting against SB 441, siding with the Big Oil over his constituents. And then he sided with Big Pharma in voting against SB 809, which would have taxed prescription drugs to help fund a state program designed to reduce their abuse, partially by creating a database to track prescriptions.

In addition to the Pharma-loving, ocean-shunning, oil-chugging votes Yee has cast, he has also turned a cold shoulder towards the elderly (by voting against SB 205, a bill that would make prescription font larger or, as the elderly would like to say, “readable”), the LGBTQ community (by voting against SB 761, which protects employees that use Paid Family Leave), students (by abstaining from a vote on AB 233, which would allow debt collectors to garnish the wages of college students with outstanding student loans), and tenants (by voting against the SB 510, the Mobile Home Park Conversion bill, and SB 603, which protects tenants from greedy landlords).

This year, as San Francisco’s other legislative representatives — Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblymembers Tom Ammiano and Phil Ting — announced efforts to reform the Ellis Act to address the escalating eviction epidemic in San Francisco, Yee has pointedly refused to support or even take a position on the effort.

In 2013, Yee sided with the Republican Party nine times on key votes, earning the scorn of many of his Democratic Party colleagues. Yee even voted for SCR 59, which would have created highway signs honored former Sen. Pete Knight, the late conservative Republican who authored Prop. 22 in 2000, strengthening California’s stand against same-sex marriage at the time.

Since we ran our “The real Leland Yee” article on Aug. 30, 2011, Yee has voted on 88 “key” pieces of legislation, according to the non-partisan, non-profit educational organization Project Vote Smart, and his final recorded vote has been “Yea” 80 times. He has abstained from voting six times, and has voted “Nay” just twice.

One of those votes came in response to a bill that was deemed “unnecessary” by Gov. Jerry Brown, but the other bill, SB 376, would have prohibited the harvesting and sale of shark fins in California.

In 2013, his voting record more closely aligns with Sen. Mark Wyland, a Republican from Carlsbad, than it does with any other Democrat on the Senate, finishing just ahead of Sen. Ron Calderon, the Southern California Democrat who was also indicted by the federal government on corruption charges last month after allegedly accepting bribes from an undercover FBI agent.

Throughout his legislative career, Yee has regularly supported Pacific Gas & Electric’s stranglehold on San Francisco’s energy market and benefitted from the company’s corrupting largesse. None of this may have crossed the line into actual criminal conduct — but for those familiar with Yee and his transactional approach to politics and governance, today’s indictment isn’t a huge surprise. 

This Week’s Picks: March 26 – April 1, 2014

Michael Redmond
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WEDNESDAY 26

Carcass

For nearly 30 years now, British metal titans Carcass have been a pioneer in the grindcore and melodic death metal genres, from their musical style and sound to lyrical content and artwork. After releasing a slew of records now considered classics, including 1993’s landmark Heartwork (Earache) the band eventually called it quits for 10 years before reforming in 2007. With original members Jeff Walker and Bill Steer still bashing out vocals, guitar, and bass, the foursome released Surgical Steel (Nuclear Blast) last year, their first new record in a decade and a half. The Black Dahlia Murder, Repulsion, Gorguts, and Noisem also appear tonight, as part of the Decibel Magazine Tour. (Sean McCourt)

6:30pm, $28.50-$30

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

Linda Perhacs

In 1970, a dental hygienist living in LA’s Topanga Valley cut a record called Parallelograms. This album, Linda Perhac’s debut, went on virtually unlistened-to for the next 35 years. Dug up by diligent audiophiles, the record was passed around, becoming a cult-classic gem of hippie-era folk. One of these newfound fans was indie musician Devandra Banhart, who coaxed Perhacs into the studio with him in 2003. Seven years later, she would play her first live show…ever. Now Perhacs has been sampled by Daft Punk, covered by Opeth, and adored by many more fans than anyone could have predicted. This year, the 44-years-in-the-making follow up to Parallelograms has finally been released on Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty label, and Perhacs is hitting the road, finally getting the recognition her deeply resonant and ethereally beautiful songwriting deserves. (Haley Zaremba)

9pm, $20

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

 

THURSDAY 27

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

Last year, just three months before the Dap-Kings’ fifth studio album was slated for release, frontwoman Sharon Jones was diagnosed with stage two pancreatic cancer. But Jones is a fighter. A former bank security guard, corrections officer, and starving artist, Jones is no delicate flower. Now, after surgery and chemo, Jones and company are back on the road to support the rip-roaring Give the People What They Want, the most unintentionally aptly titled album ever. For those who have never seen Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings over the course of the band’s 12-year career, know this: they are inhuman. Their musicianship is impeccable, their energy unstoppable, their groove makes it impossible to stand still. And then there’s Jones. She didn’t achieve commercial success until middle age, and she dances like she’s been storing up her energy and radiance for her entire life. As she’s proven through her career and in her battle with cancer, she is a force of nature — wild, unflappable, and unbeatable. (Zaremba)

With Valerie June

8pm, $35

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-3000

www.thefillmore.com

 

Madonna Look-Alike Night

“Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free.” Cat Club is honoring our favorite material girl this Thursday night. While you can’t truly re-live the Reagan years without Madonna’s top hits, SoMa’s favorite cat-themed nightclub is hosting a special rendition of its weekly “Class of 1984” dance party, and this tribute goes way beyond the music. Strap on your Boy Toy belts, cone bras, and fingerless leather gloves for the Madonna Look-Alike Contest. (The $6 cover charge is waived for all those in costume before 11pm, and the contest begins at 11:30pm.) Madonna’s most iconic songs and music videos along with many other New Wave and pop one-hit wonders will be playing all night long. Gyrate the night away in your favorite queen of pop fashion, whether it’s the corseted wedding gown and lace veil of “Like A Virgin,” the Marilyn Monroe-inspired silhouette from “Express Yourself,” or the boyish bad girl look à la “Papa Don’t Preach.” Make Madge proud! (Laura B. Childs)

9pm, $6

Cat Club

1190 Folsom, SF

(415) 703-8965

www.sfcatclub.com

 

FRIDAY 28

Mamma Mia!

Disco is back and very much alive! One of Broadway’s most acclaimed musicals makes its way to SHN Orpheum Theatre tonight through April 6. Mamma Mia! is one of those feel-good shows for everyone, whether you’re a newcomer or a cult-following veteran. With a soundtrack by immortal Swedish pop titans ABBA, exuberant disco costumes, and slapstick comedy, the musical follows a young girl’s quest to find her father on the eve of her wedding. The audience is the winner during this 150-minute performance. Expect to sing along to chart-topping hits such as “Super Trouper,” “Take A Chance on Me,” and others — you’ll leave the show with a smile across your face and (careful) “Dancing Queen” in your head for days. (Childs)

8pm, $40-$160

SHN Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

(888) 746-1799

www.shnsf.com

 

Johnny Guitar, the Musical

Calling all railroad tramps! There are no other Westerns quite like Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Johnny Guitar. Starring Joan Crawford (as a brazen saloon owner), Mercedes McCambridge (as a feisty local who hates her; conveniently, the actors hated each other in real life, too), and Sterling Hayden (as the titular outlaw), Johnny Guitar also features a bank robber named “the Dancin’ Kid,” unintentionally(?) hilarious dialogue, and a helluva theme song performed by Peggy Lee. Campy and action-packed, it’s perfect fodder for a musical; first adapted in 2004, the Off-Broadway hit makes its Bay Area premiere at the Masquers Playhouse. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through April 26

Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm (no show Sun/30), $22

Masquers Playhouse

105 Park Place, Point Richmond

www.masquers.org

 

Work MORE! #6

Under the guiding hand of founder and creative director Mica Sigourney, Work MORE! aims to “provide a platform for collaborative artmaking that utilizes drag to disturb traditional notions of beauty, femininity, and masculinity while promoting interdisciplinary collaborations among artists,” according to its mission statement. Its latest incarnation: drag queens paired with fine artists. The resulting non-performative works go on display at an opening that features (what else?) a drag show; future events include a “fake docent tour” with Laura Arrington and Phillip Huang, and a panel discussion on “Illegitimate Art” with co-curator Cara Rose DeFabio. (Eddy)

Exhibit runs through April 24

Opening party and performance tonight, 7pm, free

SOMArts Gallery

934 Brannan, SF

www.cargocollective.com/workmore

 

SATURDAY 29

 

Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation

“I am not a creator,” the architect Antonio Gaudi once said. “I only copy.” Purely original or not, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, an enormous church that blends Gothic and Art Nouveau forms that imitate the rolling hills and landscapes of the Catalan countryside, is not exactly a common sight to behold. With only eight of its 18 steeples built and an ambitious blueprint, the Sagrada Familia has been under construction for 132 years with no end in sight. Stefan Haupt’s documentary Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation explores the cathedral’s construction — delayed by Gaudi’s death and by the complexity of the building’s designs — through the voices of the artisans working on the cathedral and its historical and philosophical context. Like the construction itself, the film moves slowly, pondering the unfinished masterpiece Gaudi left behind, and delivers sublime cinematography exploring Sagrada’s unusual shapes and meditative history. Get caught up in the rapture at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Childs)

7:30pm, $10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

The Apache Relay

Since getting their start just a few short years ago, Nashville-based band The Apache Relay have come a long way — they’ve released several well-received albums, and toured with acts such as Mumford and Sons. Mixing Springsteen-esque rock with the sweet country sounds of their adopted hometown, the band’s new, self-titled album, out on So Recordings, was put to tape at Fairfax Recordings — the former location of legendary Sound City Studios. The first single from the record (which hits stores April 22), “Katie Queen of Tennessee,” takes inspiration from another icon of the recording industry, namely Phil Spector and his “Wall of Sound.” With The Lonely Wild and The Soil & The Sun. (McCourt)

9pm, $12

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

(415) 551-5157

www.thechapelsf.com

 

SUNDAY 30

Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along

Come and relive your childhood — assuming your childhood included adults in princess-themed costume contests — at the best Castro Theatre sing-along event of the year. At 23 years old, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on a big screen is still, well, beautiful — from the rich, ahead-of-its-time animation and cinematography to Angela Lansbury’s tear-jerking rendition of the title song to non-stop, grown-up-funny quips from an ensemble cast that, for a brief moment, made us all covet furniture that came to life and gave us advice in French accents. In addition to the aforementioned costume contest, all attendees receive a goodie bag with bubbles, noisemakers, and other accessories to be used en masse at exciting points in the film. It’s tradition — and as Cogsworth always says, “If it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it.” (Emma Silvers)

2:30pm and 7pm, $16 general/$10 kids

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

 

MONDAY 31

Opening Day Viewing Party at AT&T Park

Giants fans, we can stop counting down the days, obsessing over every news nugget about Timmy’s mustache that comes out of Spring Training — the 2014 baseball season is on. Though the boys are on the road for Opening Day, the Giants organization isn’t one to miss the chance to throw a party (er, cash in on fandom), so they’re opening the ballpark to fans who want to watch the season opener, with sweetheart Madison Bumgarner pitching against the Diamondbacks, on a very big screen. Admission is free, as are hot dogs for the first 5000 orange-and-black-clad die-hards through the door. Beers, we assume, will still be roughly $40 a pop. (Silvers)

5:30pm, free

AT&T Park

24 Willie Mays Plaza, SF

www.giants.mlb.com


TUESDAY 31

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

One of the most encouraging things that can happen to a highly successful, well-established dance company is a willingness to change gear. When Robert Battle assumed the artistic directorship of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, you immediately felt a new spirit entering the much beloved ensemble. The dancers have always been astounding; now to see them in appropriately challenging choreography is simply exhilarating. These three programs are bringing the best of Ailey, but also some of the best of this generation’s choreographers. The astoundingly inventive and also deeply spiritual Ronald K. Brown’s Four Corners is not to be missed. Yes, Revelations is still with us; but perhaps one of these years it can be retired for a while, and Ailey will still be Ailey. (Rita Felciano)

April 1-5, 8pm,

also April 5, 2pm, April 6, 3pm

$30-92

Cal Performances

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley

(510) 642-9988

www.calperformances.org

 

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, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or email (paste press release into email body — no 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.

Film Listings: March 26 – April 1, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, Sam Stander, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Cesar Chavez “You always have a choice,” Cesar Chavez (Michael Peña) tells his bullied son when advising him to turn the other cheek. Likewise, actor-turned-director Diego Luna had a choice when it came to tackling his first English-language film; he could have selected a less complicated, sprawling story. So he gets props for that simple act — especially at a time when workers’ rights and union power have been so dramatically eroded — and for his attempts to impact some complicated nuance to Chavez’s fully evident heroism. Painting his moving pictures in dusty earth tones and burnt sunlight with the help of cinematographer Enrique Chediak, Luna vaults straight into Chavez’s work with the grape pickers that would come to join the United Farm Workers — with just a brief voiceover about Chavez’s roots as the native-born son of a farm owner turned worker, post-Depression. Uprooting wife Helen (America Ferrera) and his family and moving to Delano as a sign of activist commitment, Chavez is seemingly quickly drawn into the 1965 strike by the Mexican workers’ sometime rivals: Filipino pickers (see the recent CAAMFest short documentary Delano Manongs for some of their side of the story). From there, the focus hones in on Chavez, speaking out against violence and “chicken shit macho ideals,” hunger striking, and activating unions overseas, though Luna does give voice to cohorts like Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson), growers like Bogdanovitch (John Malkovich), and the many nameless strikers — some of whom lost their lives during the astonishingly lengthy, taxing five-year strike. Luna’s win would be a blue-collar epic on par with 1979’s Norma Rae, and on some levels, he succeeds; scanning the faces of the weathered, hopeful extras in crowd scenes, you can’t help but feel the solidarity. The people have the power, as a poet once put it, and tellingly, his choice of Peña, stolidly opaque when charismatic warmth is called for, might be the key weakness here. One suspects the director or his frequent costar Gael García Bernal would make a more riveting Chavez. (1:38) (Chun)

Cheap Thrills Craig (Pat Healy) is having the worst day of his life — but it’s going to get a lot worse before a new day dawns. Already in dire financial need supporting his loving wife (Amanda Fuller) and baby, he discovers they’re about to be evicted from their apartment. And far from getting a hoped-for raise at his job, he’s being laid off. Amidst this bitter news he runs into party-hearty, slightly gamey old high school bud Vince (Ethan Embry), who convinces him that the best immediate medicine is a drink or three. At the bar they are aggressively befriended by a deep pocketed couple consisting of overly palsy Colin (David Koechner) and his frigidly cool — but hawt — younger wife Violet (Sara Paxton). On the pretext that it’s in pursuit of fun on her birthday, these strangers propose a series of dares to be performed (and competed over) by the two reunited classmates. The cash-money stakes rise as the “dares” escalate in antisocial behavior, humiliation, harm to others, and harm to oneself; milquetoast Craig’s desperate circumstances make him a reluctant but willing participant dismayed to discover that Vince is a greedy competitor whose empathy vanishes at the sight of a greenback. This cheerfully mean black comedy, written by Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo, is a first directorial feature for E.L. Katz, who’d previously contributed as a scenarist to some interesting early features by indie horror regulars Adam Wingard and Adam Gierasch. This kind of exercise in can-we-top-this-yes-we-can bad taste has been done better on occasion — and less well on many more. Cheap Thrills ultimately balances the cynical, clever, and exploitative to degrees that give good guilty pleasure, particularly if you’re not the guilt-inclined type. (1:25) Roxie. (Harvey)

Ernest & Celestine Belgian animators Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier are best known for the stop-motion shorts series (and priceless 2009 subsequent feature) A Town Called Panic, an anarchic, absurdist, and hilarious creation suitable for all ages. Their latest (co-directed with Benjamin Renner) is … not like that at all. Instead, it’s a sweet, generally guileless children’s cartoon that takes its gentle, watercolor-type visual style from late writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s same-named books. Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) is an orphaned girl mouse that befriends gruff bear Ernest (the excellent Lambert Wilson), though their improbable kinship invites social disapproval and scrapes with the law. There are some clever satirical touches, but mostly this is a softhearted charmer that will primarily appeal to younger kids. Adults will find it pleasant enough — but don’t expect any Panic-style craziness. (1:20) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

“I Wake Up Dreaming 2014 Preview Night” Elliot Lavine’s latest Roxie film noir series, which starts May 16, gets an advance jump-start with this special fundraiser evening Wed/26. The program will include live music, intoxicating libations, the auctioning of relevant memorabilia, and more. Plus, of course, there are movies. The big attraction is The Argyle Secrets, an extremely rare 1948 mystery-thriller (even Lavine hadn’t seen it until this 16mm print surfaced just recently) written and directed by the intriguing Cy Endfield, a Yalie whose idiosyncratic screen career spanned from novelty MGM shorts to programmers (1949’s Joe Palooka in the Big Fight, 1952’s Tarzan’s Savage Fury) to big-budget adventures (Mysterious Island, Zulu) and 1969’s Fellini-esque kinkfest misfire DeSade. Based on his own radio drama, Secrets revolves around a sheath of incriminating papers (we never really find out more about them) sought by a variety of shady types. Caught up in their midst is a William Gargan’s exceptionally loutish “hero,” a newspaper reporter not at all shy about misleading police or manhandling (even punching out) women in pursuit of a good story. (The two ladies he plays rough with here had very wholesome futures: Barbara Billingsley later essayed Mrs. Clever on Leave It to Beaver, while San Francisco-born Marjorie Lord likewise played mom on the even longer-running sitcom Make Room for Daddy.) It’s a dirt-cheap independent production with a rather seedy atmosphere, colorfully broad character types and one very convoluted, possibly senseless plot. The festivities will also include Rudolph Mate’s classic original 1950 D.O.A., with Edmund O’Brien as an accountant whose San Francisco vacation turns into a desperate race to discover who has fatally poisoned him, and why. Roxie. (Harvey)

Jodorowsky’s Dune See “Lost in Space.” (1:30) Embarcadero.

Mistaken for Strangers Tom Berninger, brother to the National vocalist Matt Berninger, is the maker of this doc — ostensibly about the band but a really about brotherly love, competition, and creation. It spins off a somewhat genius conceit of brother vs. brother, since the combo is composed of two sets of siblings: twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner on guitars and Scott and Bryan Devendorf on bass and drums respectively. The obvious question — what of singer Matt and his missing broheim? Turns out little bro Tom is one of those rock fans — of metal and not, it seems, the National — more interested in living the life and drinking the brewskis than making the music. So when Matt reaches out to Tom, adrift in their hometown of Cincinnati, to work as a roadie for the outfit, it’s a handout, sure, but also a way for the two to spend time together and bond. A not-quite-realized moviemaker who’s tried to make his own Z-budget scary flicks but never seems to finish much, Tom decides to document, and in the process gently poke fun at, the band (aka his authority-figures-slash-employers), which turns out to be much more interesting than gathering their deli platters and Toblerone. The National’s aesthetic isn’t quite his cup of tea: they prefer to wrap themselves in slinky black suits like Nick Cave’s pickup band, and the soft-spoken Matt tends to perpetually stroll about with a glass of white wine or bubbly in hand when he isn’t bursting into fourth-wall-busting high jinks on stage. Proud of his sib yet also intimidated by the National’s fame and not a little envious of the photo shoots, the Obama meetings, and the like, Tom is all about having fun. But it’s not a case of us vs. them, Tom vs. Matt, he discovers; it’s a matter of connecting with family and oneself. In a Michael Moore-ian sense, the sweet-tempered Mistaken for Strangers is as much, if not more so, about the filmmaker and the journey to make the movie than the supposed subject. (1:15) Roxie. (Chun)

Noah Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Emma Watson star in Darren Aronofsky’s take on the Bible tale. (2:07) Presidio, Shattuck.

Sabotage Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the head of a DEA task force that runs afoul of a drug cartel. (1:49)

ONGOING

Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq Writer-director Nancy Buirski’s documentary follows the short, brilliant career of a young dancer named Tanaquil Le Clercq, who came up in the New York City ballet world of the 1940s and ’50s. Le Clercq was discovered by George Balanchine, married him (as three other dancers had done before her), sparked a paradigm shift in the ballet world regarding what was considered the quintessential dancer’s body, had numerous ballets set on her by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and then, at the peak of her career, at age 27, was stricken by polio and left paralyzed in both legs. The film takes its time moving toward this catastrophe, recounting Le Clercq’s early adult life through interviews with her contemporaries and tracking her professional progress through gorgeous archival footage of her performances. Equally moving archival material are the letters from a longtime correspondence between Le Clercq and Robbins that documented two very different periods of her life: the first, when Robbins was choreographing ballets for her, including Afternoon of a Faun, and professing his love; the second, after her paralysis, when she wrote him a series of poignant communications describing her impressions of her illness and her new, circumscribed world. The film has some trouble holding on to its center — as in life, Balanchine proves a magnetic force, and Afternoon of a Faun feels inexorably drawn to his professional and personal details. We don’t get enough of Le Clercq, which you could say is the tragedy of her story — nobody did. But the letters do provide a sense of someone resourceful and responsive to life’s richness and joys, someone who would get past this crisis and find a way to reshape her life. (1:31) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

American Hustle David O. Russell’s American Hustle is like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct. He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses; she’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward and gave herself a bombshell makeover. The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go. She’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of Mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians, hustling a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) in the process. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting here is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity. (2:17) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Anita In 1991, Anita Hill found herself at the center of a political firestorm when she testified about being sexually harassed by US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “The issue became my character as opposed to the character of the nominee,” she recalls in Anita, a revealing new documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Freida Mock (1994’s Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision). Twenty years after she first made headlines, Hill recounts her story in the same eloquent voice familiar to anyone who watched her testimony; her first-person narrative, paired with accounts by her supporters, stresses the consequences many women suffer from daring to speak out. The documentary, which shows how one woman’s forthrightness about sexual harassment can upturn her life, also explores the ways in which Hill’s Bush-era notoriety laid the foundation for a prolific career dedicated to battling sexual harassment and women’s oppression. She became an unlikely icon, and a role model for women battling similar circumstances. On the other hand, Thomas still sits on the bench. (1:17) Opera Plaza. (Laura B. Childs)

Bad Words Settling a grudge score whose precise origin remains unclear until late in the game, world-class misanthrope Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) is celebrating his 40th birthday by competing in a national spelling bee. Yes, spelling bees are generally for children, and so is this one. But Guy has found a legal loophole permitting his participation, and the general hate wending his way from contest staff (Allison Janney, Philip Baker Hall) — let alone the tiger-mom-and-dad parents ready to form a lynch mob — is just icing on the cake where he’s concerned. What’s more, as some sort of majorly underachieving near-genius, he’s in fact well equipped to whup the bejesus out of overachieving eight-year-olds when it comes to saying the right letters out loud. The only people on his side, sorta, are the online journalist (Kathryn Hahn) reporting on his perverse quest, and the insidiously cute Indian American competitor (Rohan Chand) who wants to be besties, or perhaps just to psych him out. (Note: The tyke’s admitted favorite word is “subjugate.”) Written by Andrew Dodge, this comedy in the tradition (a little too obviously) of 2003’s Bad Santa and such provides the always enjoyable Bateman with not only a tailor-made lead role, but a directorial debut as well. He does just fine by both. Yet as nicely crafted and frequently-pretty-funny Bad Words is, at core it’s a rather petty movie — small, derivative, and cynically mean-spirited without the courage of genuine biliousness. It’s at once not-half-bad, and not half as badass as it pretends to be. (1:29) Marina, Piedmont, Shattuck, SF Center. (Harvey)

Child’s Pose The Romanian New Wave that began making waves internationally about a decade ago is as far from guilty pleasure genre terrain as possible, being heavy on the very long takes, cryptic narratives, and bleak realism of a particular, stratifying form of high art cinema. At last, however, it has its very own terrifying monster movie of sorts — since nothing has been quite as skin-crawling a filmic experience in a while as watching Luminita Gheorghiu as a Bucharest grande dame practicing her particular form of Machiavellian maternal concern in Child’s Pose. Gheorghiu’s Cornelia is introduced kvetching about her son’s girlfriend; you sense right away she wouldn’t approve of anyone who complicated her successful apron-string strangulation of said only child. When she gets an emergency call with some bad news — her thirtysomething “boy,” driving recklessly on a country road, has hit and killed an actual boy — she immediately sets about intimidating the local police. This might be a heartrending tale of sacrifice and love under tragic circumstances, if it weren’t for the fact that Cornelia is palpably a horrible, horrible person, and her son — who shows no signs of being much better — hates her guts. This Golden Bear winner by Calin Peter Netzer, who co-wrote it with Razvan Radulescu, is a bit over infatuated with hand-held jerky-cam at first, a distracting aesthetic choice that does not heighten the immediacy of its mostly cold, conversational scenes. But Netzer settles down after a while, his film’s impact gathering as the camera grows more and more still. When Cornelia meets with the parents of the dead child, she tries every trick in the book to manipulate them. It’s a bravura performance of grief, empathy, and desperation, such that Cornelia might even believe it herself. Like her peroxided hair, the emotions she expresses have been inauthentic for so long she can no longer tell the difference. (1:52) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Dallas Buyers Club Dallas Buyers Club is the first all-US feature from Jean-Marc Vallée. He first made a splash in 2005 with C.R.A.Z.Y., which seemed an archetype of the flashy, coming-of-age themed debut feature. Vallée has evolved beyond flashiness, or maybe since C.R.A.Z.Y. he just hasn’t had a subject that seemed to call for it. Which is not to say Dallas is entirely sober — its characters partake from the gamut of altering substances, over-the-counter and otherwise. But this is a movie about AIDS, so the purely recreational good times must eventually crash to an end. Which they do pretty quickly. We first meet Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) in 1986, a Texas good ol’ boy endlessly chasing skirts and partying nonstop. Not feeling quite right, he visits a doctor, who informs him that he is HIV-positive. His response is “I ain’t no faggot, motherfucker” — and increased partying that he barely survives. Afterward, he pulls himself together enough to research his options, and bribes a hospital attendant into raiding its trial supply of AZT for him. But Ron also discovers the hard way what many first-generation AIDS patients did — that AZT is itself toxic. He ends up in a Mexican clinic run by a disgraced American physician (Griffin Dunne) who recommends a regime consisting mostly of vitamins and herbal treatments. Ron realizes a commercial opportunity, and finds a business partner in willowy cross-dresser Rayon (Jared Leto). When the authorities keep cracking down on their trade, savvy Ron takes a cue from gay activists in Manhattan and creates a law evading “buyers club” in which members pay monthly dues rather than paying directly for pharmaceutical goods. It’s a tale that the scenarists (Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack) and director steep in deep Texan atmospherics, and while it takes itself seriously when and where it ought, Dallas Buyers Club is a movie whose frequent, entertaining jauntiness is based in that most American value: get-rich-quick entrepreneurship. (1:58) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Divergent Based on the blockbuster dystopian-future YA novel by Veronica Roth (the first in a trilogy), Divergent is set in a future city-state version of Chicago in which society is divided into five character-based, color-coded factions: Erudite, Amity, Candor, Abnegation, and Dauntless. Like her peers, Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley), the film’s Abnegation-born teenage heroine, must choose a permanent faction — with the help of a standardized aptitude test that forgoes penciling in bubbles in favor of virtual reality psychic manipulation. When the test fails to triangulate her sole innate personality trait, she learns that she belongs to a secret, endangered sixth category: Divergent, an astonishing set of people who are not only capable of, say, acts of selflessness but can also produce intelligent thought, or manifest bravery in the face of danger. Forced to hide her aberrant nature in a society whose leaders (Kate Winslet) are prone to statements like “The future belongs to those who know where they belong,” and seemingly bored among Abnegation’s hive of gray cardigan-wearing worker bees, Beatrice chooses Dauntless, a dashing gang of black-clad, alterna-rock music video extras who jump on and off moving trains and live in a warehouse-chic compound whose dining hall recalls the patio at Zeitgeist. Fittingly, a surly, tattooed young man named Four (Theo James) leads Beatrice, now Tris, and her fellow initiates through a harsh proving regimen that, if they fail, will cast them into an impoverished underclass. Director Neil Burger (2006’s The Illusionist, 2011’s Limitless) and the behemoth marketing force behind Divergent are clearly hoping to stir up the kind of madness stoked by the Twilight and Hunger Games series, but while there are bones a-plenty to pick with those franchises, Divergent may have them beat for pure daffiness of premise and diameter of plot holes — and that’s after screenwriters Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor’s major suturing of the source material’s lacunae. The daffiness doesn’t translate into imaginative world-building, and while a couple of scenes convey the visceral thrills of life in Dauntless, the tension between Tris and Four is awkwardly ratcheted up, and the film’s shift into a mode of crisis is equally jolting without generating much heat. (2:20) Balboa, Marina, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Frozen (1:48) Metreon.

The Grand Budapest Hotel Is this the first Wes Anderson movie to feature a shootout? It’s definitely the first Anderson flick to include a severed head. That’s not to say The Grand Budapest Hotel, “inspired by” the works of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, represents too much of a shift for the director — his intricate approach to art direction is still very much in place, as are the deadpan line deliveries and a cast stuffed with Anderson regulars. But there’s a slightly more serious vibe here, a welcome change from 2012’s tooth-achingly twee Moonrise Kingdom. Thank Ralph Fiennes’ performance as liberally perfumed concierge extraordinaire M. Gustave, which mixes a shot of melancholy into the whimsy, and newcomer Tony Revolori as Zero, his loyal lobby boy, who provides gravitas despite only being a teenager. (Being played by F. Murray Abraham as an older adult probably helps in that department.) Hotel‘s early 20th century Europe setting proves an ideal canvas for Anderson’s love of detail — the titular creation rivals Stanley Kubrick’s rendering of the Overlook Hotel — and his supporting cast, as always, looks to be enjoying the hell out of being a part of Anderson’s universe, with Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Adrien Brody having particularly oversized fun. Is this the best Wes Anderson movie since 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums? Yes. (1:40) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy)

Gravity “Life in space is impossible,” begins Gravity, the latest from Alfonso Cuarón (2006’s Children of Men). Egghead Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is well aware of her precarious situation after a mangled satellite slams into her ship, then proceeds to demolition-derby everything (including the International Space Station) in its path. It’s not long before she’s utterly, terrifyingly alone, and forced to unearth near-superhuman reserves of physical and mental strength to survive. Bullock’s performance would be enough to recommend Gravity, but there’s more to praise, like the film’s tense pacing, spare-yet-layered script (Cuarón co-wrote with his son, Jonás), and spectacular 3D photography — not to mention George Clooney’s warm supporting turn as a career astronaut who loves country music almost as much as he loves telling stories about his misadventures. (1:31) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Great Beauty The latest from Paolo Sorrentino (2008’s Il Divo) arrives as a high-profile contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, already annointed a masterpiece in some quarters, and duly announcing itself as such in nearly every grandiose, aesthetically engorged moment. Yes, it seems to say, you are in the presence of this auteur’s masterpiece. But it’s somebody else’s, too. The problem isn’t just that Fellini got there first, but that there’s room for doubt whether Sorrentino’s homage actually builds on or simply imitates its model. La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) are themselves swaying, jerry-built monuments, exhileratingly messy and debatably profound. But nothing quite like them had been seen before, and they did define a time of cultural upheaval — when traditional ways of life were being plowed under by a loud, moneyed, heedless modernity that for a while chose Rome as its global capital. Sorrentino announces his intention to out-Fellini Fellini in an opening sequence so strenuously flamboyant it’s like a never-ending pirouette performed by a prima dancer with a hernia. There’s statuary, a women’s choral ensemble, an on-screen audience applauding the director’s baffled muse Toni Servillo, standing in for Marcello Mastroianni — all this and more in manic tracking shots and frantic intercutting, as if sheer speed alone could supply contemporary relevancy. Eventually The Great Beauty calms down a bit, but still its reason for being remains vague behind the heavy curtain of “style.” (2:22) Four Star, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Her Morose and lonely after a failed marriage, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) drifts through an appealingly futuristic Los Angeles (more skyscrapers, less smog) to his job at a place so hipster-twee it probably will exist someday: beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he dictates flowery missives to a computer program that scrawls them onto paper for paying customers. Theodore’s scripting of dialogue between happy couples, as most of his clients seem to be, only enhances his sadness, though he’s got friends who care about him (in particular, Amy Adams as Amy, a frumpy college chum) and he appears to have zero money woes, since his letter-writing gig funds a fancy apartment equipped with a sweet video-game system. Anyway, women are what gives Theodore trouble — and maybe by extension, writer-director Spike Jonze? — so he seeks out the ultimate gal pal: Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the year’s best disembodied performance. Thus begins a most unusual relationship, but not so unusual; Theodore’s friends don’t take any issue with the fact that his new love is a machine. Hey, in Her‘s world, everyone’s deeply involved with their chatty, helpful, caring, always-available OS — why wouldn’t Theo take it to the next level? Inevitably, of course, complications arise. If Her‘s romantic arc feels rather predictable, the film acquits itself in other ways, including boundlessly clever production-design touches that imagine a world with technology that’s (mostly) believably evolved from what exists today. Also, the pants they wear in the future? Must be seen to be believed. (2:00) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Lego Movie (1:41) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

The Lunchbox Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is a self-possessed housewife and a great cook, whose husband confuses her for another piece of furniture. She tries to arouse his affections with elaborate lunches she makes and sends through the city’s lunchbox delivery service. Like marriage in India, lunchbox delivery has a failure rate of zero, which is what makes aberrations seem like magical occurrences. So when widow Saajan (Irrfan Khan) receives her adoring food, he humbly receives the magical lunches like a revival of the senses. Once Ila realizes her lunchbox is feeding the wrong man she writes a note and Saajan replies — tersely, like a man who hasn’t held a conversation in a decade — and the impossible circumstances lend their exchanges a romance that challenges her emotional fidelity and his retreat from society. She confides her husband is cheating. He confides his sympathy for men of lower castes. It’s a May/December affair if it’s an affair at all — but the chemistry we expect the actors to have in the same room is what fuels our urge to see it; that’s a rare and haunting dynamic. Newcomer Kaur is perfect as Ila, a beauty unmarked by her rigorous distaff; her soft features and exhausted expression lend a richness to the troubles she can’t share with her similarly stoic mother (Lillete Dubey). Everyone is sacrificing something and poverty seeps into every crack, every life, without exception — their inner lives are their richness. (1:44) Albany, Clay. (Vizcarrondo)

The Monuments Men The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” goes both ways. On paper, The Monuments Men — inspired by the men who recovered art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and directed by George Clooney, who co-wrote and stars alongside a sparkling ensemble cast (Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh “Earl of Grantham” Bonneville, and Bill Fucking Murray) — rules. Onscreen, not so much. After they’re recruited to join the cause, the characters fan out across France and Germany following various leads, a structural choice that results in the film’s number one problem: it can’t settle on a tone. Men can’t decide if it wants to be a sentimental war movie (as in an overlong sequence in which Murray’s character weeps at the sound of his daughter’s recorded voice singing “White Christmas”); a tragic war movie (some of those marquee names die, y’all); a suspenseful war movie (as the men sneak into dangerous territory with Michelangelo on their minds); or a slapstick war comedy (look out for that land mine!) The only consistent element is that the villains are all one-note — and didn’t Inglourious Basterds (2009) teach us that nothing elevates a 21st century-made World War II flick like an eccentric bad guy? There’s one perfectly executed scene, when reluctant partners Balaban and Murray discover a trove of priceless paintings hidden in plain sight. One scene, out of a two-hour movie, that really works. The rest is a stitched-together pile of earnest intentions that suggests a complete lack of coherent vision. Still love you, Clooney, but you can do better — and this incredible true story deserved way better. (1:58) Four Star, Metreon, Piedmont. (Eddy)

Mr. Peabody and Sherman Mr. P. (voiced by Ty Burrell) is a Nobel Prize-winning genius dog, Sherman (Max Charles) his adopted human son. When the latter attends his first day of school, his extremely precocious knowledge of history attracts jealous interest from bratty classmate Penny (Ariel Winter), with the eventual result that all three end up being transported in Peabody’s WABAC time machine to various fabled moments — involving Marie Antoinette, King Tut, the Trojan Horse, etc. — where Penny invariably gets them in deep trouble. Rob Minkoff’s first all-animation feature since The Lion King 20 years ago is spun off from the same-named segments in Jay Ward’s TV Rocky and Bullwinkle Show some decades earlier. It’s a very busy (sometimes to the brink of clutter), often witty, imaginatively constructed, visually impressive, and for the most part highly enjoyable comic adventure. The only minuses are some perfunctory “It’s about family”-type sentimentality — and scenarist Craig Wright’s determination to draw from history the “lesson” that nearly all women are pains in the ass who create problems they must then be rescued from. (1:30) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Harvey)

Muppets Most Wanted Building on the success of The Muppets, Jim Henson’s beloved creations return to capitalize on their revitalized (and Disney-owned) fame. This follow-up from Muppets director James Tobin — technically, it’s the seventh sequel to the original 1979 Muppet Movie, as Dr. Bunsen Honeydew points out in one of the film’s many meta moments — improves upon the 2011 film, which had its charms but suffered by concentrating too much on the Jason Segal-Amy Adams romance, not to mention annoying new kid Walter. Here, human co-stars Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey, and others (there are more cameos than you can count) are relegated to supporting roles, with the central conflict revolving around the Muppets’ inability to notice that Constantine, “the world’s most dangerous frog,” has infiltrated their group, sending Kermit to Siberian prison in his place. Constantine and his accomplice (Gervais, whose character’s last name is “Badguy”) use the Muppets’ world tour as a front for their jewel-heist operation; meanwhile, his infatuated warden (Fey) forces Kermit to direct the annual gulag musical. Not helping matters are a bumbling Interpol agent (Ty Burrell) and his CIA counterpart (Sam the American Eagle, natch). Really, all that’s needed is a simple plot, catchy songs, and plenty of room to let the Muppets do their thing — Miss Piggy and Animal are particularly enjoyable here; Walter’s still around, but he’s way more tolerable now that he’s gotten past his “man or muppet” angst — and the film delivers. All the knowing winks to the grown-up fans in the audience are just an appreciated bonus. (1:46) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Need for Speed Speed kills, in quite a different way than it might in Breaking Bad, in Aaron Paul’s big-screen Need for Speed. “Big” nonetheless signals “B” here, in this stunt-filled challenge to the Fast and the Furious franchise, though there’s no shame in that — the drive-in is paved with standouts and stinkers alike. Tobey (Paul) is an ace driver who’s in danger of losing his auto shop, also the hangout for his pals (Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, Ramon Rodriguez) and young sidekick Pete (Harrison Gilbertson), when archrival Dino (Dominic Cooper) arrives with a historic Mustang in need of restoration. Tragedy strikes, and Tobey must hook up with that fateful auto once more to win a mysterious winner-takes-all race, staged by eccentric, rich racing-fiend Monarch (Michael Keaton). Along for the ride are the (big) eyes and ears for the Mustang’s new owner — gearhead Julia (Imogen Poots). All beside the point, since the racing stunts, including a showy helicopter canyon save, are the real stars of Speed, while the touchstone for stuntman-turned-director Scott Waugh — considering the car and the final SF and Northern California race settings — is, of course, Bullitt (1968), which is given an overt nod in the opening drive-in scene. The overall larky effect, however, tends toward Smokey and the Bandit (1977), especially with Keaton’s camp efforts at Wolfman Jack verbiage-slanging roaring in the background. And despite the efforts of the multicultural gallery of wisecracking side guys, this script-challenged popcorn-er tends to blur what little chemistry these characters have with each other, skip the residual car culture insights of the more specific, more urban Fast series, and leave character development, in particular Tobey’s, in the dust in its haste to get from point A to B. (2:10) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Non-Stop You don’t want to get between Liam Neeson and his human shield duties. The Taken franchise has restyled the once-gentle acting giant into the type of weather-beaten, all-business action hero that Harrison Ford once had a lock on. Throw in a bit of the flying-while-addled antihero high jinks last seen in Flight (2012) and that pressured, packed-sardine anxiety that we all suffer during long-distance air travel, and we have a somewhat ludicrous but nonetheless entertaining hybrid that may have you believing that those salty snacks and the seat-kicking kids are the least of your troubles. Neeson’s Bill Marks signals the level of his freestyle alcoholism by giving his booze a stir with a toothbrush shortly before putting on his big-boy air marshal pants and boarding his fateful flight. Marks is soon contacted by a psycho who promises, via text, to kill one person at a time on the flight unless $150 million is deposited into a bank account that — surprise — is under the bad-good air marshal’s name. The twists and turns — and questions of who to trust, whether it’s Marks’ vaguely likeable seatmate (Julianne Moore) or his business class flight attendant (Michelle Dockery) — keep the audience on edge and busily guessing, though director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn’t quite dispel all the questions that arise as the diabolical scheme plays out and ultimately taxes believability. The fun is all in the getting there, even if the denouement on the tarmac deflates. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

Nymphomaniac: Volume I Found battered and unconscious in a back alley, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is taken in by good Samaritan Seligman (Stellan Skarsgaard), to whom she explains “It’s all my fault — I’m just a bad human being.” But he doesn’t believe there are such things. She seeks to enlighten him by narrating the story of her life so far, from carnally curious childhood to sexually voracious adulthood. Stacy Martin plays her younger self through a guided tour of excesses variously involving Christian Slater and Connie Nielsen as her parents; a buncha guys fucked on a train, on a teenage dare; Uma Thurman as one histrionically scorned woman; and Shai LaBeouf as a first love who’s a cipher either because he’s written that way, or because this particular actor can’t make sense out of him. For all its intended provocation, including some graphic but unsurprisingly (coming from this director) unerotic XXX action, von Trier’s latest is actually less offensive than much of his prior output: He’s regained his sense of humor here, and annoying as its “Look at me, I’m an unpredictable artist” crap can be (notably all the stuff about fly-fishing, cake forks, numerology, etc. that seems randomly drawn from some Great Big Book of Useless Trivia), the film’s episodic progress is divertingly colorful enough. But is Joe going to turn out to be more than a two-dimensional authorial device from a director who’s never exactly sussed women (or liked people in general)? Will Nymphomaniac arrive at some pointed whole greater than the sum of its naughty bits? The answer to both is probably “Nah.” But we won’t know for sure until the two-hour second half arrives (April 4) of a movie that, in fairness, was never really intended to be split up like this. (1:50) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Particle Fever “We are hearing nature talk to us,” a physicist remarks in awe near the end of Particle Fever, Mark Levinson’s intriguing doc about the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Earlier, another scientist says, “I’ve never heard of a moment like this in [science] history, where an entire field is hinging on a single event.” The event, of course, is the launch of the Large Hardon Collider, the enormous machine that enabled the discovery. Though some interest in physics is probably necessary to enjoy Particle Fever, extensive knowledge of quarks and such is not, since the film uses elegant animation to refresh the basics for anyone whose eyes glazed over during high-school science. But though he offers plenty of context, Levinson wisely focuses his film on a handful of genial eggheads who are involved in the project, either hands-on at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), or watching from afar as the mighty LHC comes to life. Their excitement brings a welcome warmth to the proceedings — and their “fever” becomes contagious. (1:39) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

RoboCop Truly, there was no need to remake 1987’s RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s smart, biting sci-fi classic that deploys heaps of stealth satire beneath its ultraviolent imagery. But the inevitable do-over is here, and while it doesn’t improve on what came before, it’s not a total lost cause, either. Thank Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, whose thrilling Elite Squad films touch on similar themes of corruption (within police, political, and media realms), and some inspired casting, including Samuel L. Jackson as the uber-conservative host of a futuristic talk show. Though the suit that restores life to fallen Detroit cop Alex Murphy is, naturally, a CG wonder, the guy inside the armor — played by The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman — is less dynamic. In fact, none of the characters, even those portrayed by actors far more lively than Kinnaman (Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley), are developed beyond the bare minimum required to serve RoboCop‘s plot, a mixed-message glob of dirty cops, money-grubbing corporations, the military-industrial complex, and a few too many “Is he a man…or a machine?” moments. But in its favor: Though it’s PG-13 (boo), it’s also shot in 2D (yay). (1:50) Metreon. (Eddy)

Shirin in Love This blandly TV-ready romantic comedy stars Nazanin Boniadi as a ditzy child of privilege in Beverly Hills’ Iranian-American community. Sent by her aggressively shallow magazine-editor mother (Anita Khalatbari) to find an elusive best-selling novelist for an interview, she not only stumbles upon that author (Amy Madigan) but discovers she’s already had a meet-cute with the latter’s hunky son (Riley Smith) under embarrassing circumstances. Will Shirin be able to shrug off the future her family has planned for her (including Maz Jobrani as a plastic-surgeon fiancé ) in order to, y’know, find herself? The very obvious answer takes its sweet time arriving in writer-director Ramin Niami’s innocuous film, which hews to a stale lineup of formulaic genre conventions even when relying on whopping coincidences to advance its predictable plot. The novelty of its particular social milieu goes unexplored in a movie that reveals even less about assimilated modern US Persian culture than My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) did about Greek Americans. (1:45) AMC Bay Street 16. (Harvey)

300: Rise of An Empire We pick up the 300 franchise right where director Zack Snyder left off in 2006, with this prequel-sequel, which spins off an as-yet-unreleased Frank Miller graphic novel. In the hands of director Noam Murro, with Snyder still in the house as writer, 300: Rise of an Empire contorts itself, flipping back and forth in time, in an attempt to explain the making of Persian evil prince stereotype Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) —all purring androgyny, fashionable piercings, and Iran-baiting, Bush-era malevolence — before following through on avenging 300‘s romantically outnumbered, chesty Spartans. As told by the angry, mourning Spartan Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey of Game of Thrones), the whole mess apparently began during the Battle of Marathon, when Athenian General Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) killed Xerxes’s royal father with a well-aimed miracle arrow. That act ushers in Xerxes’s transformation into a “God King” bent on vengeance, aided and encouraged by his equally vengeful, elegantly mega-goth naval commander Artemisia (Eva Green), a Greek-hating Greek who likes to up the perversity quotient by making out with decapitated heads. In case you didn’t get it: know that vengeance is a prime mover for almost all the parties (except perhaps high-minded hottie Themistokles). Very loosely tethered to history and supplied with plenty of shirtless Greeks, taut thighs, wildly splintering ships, and even proto-suicide bombers, Rise skews toward a more naturalistic, less digitally waxy look than 300, as dust motes and fire sparks perpetually telegraph depth of field, shrieking, “See your 3D dollars hard at work!” Also working hard and making all that wrath look diabolically effortless is Green, who as the pitch-black counterpart to Gorga, turns out to be the real hero of the franchise, saving it from being yet another by-the-book sword-and-sandal war-game exercise populated by wholesome-looking, buff, blond jock-soldiers. Green’s feline line readings and languid camp attitude have a way of cutting through the sausage fest of the Greek pec-ing order, even during the Battle of, seriously, Salamis. (1:43) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Tiger and Bunny: The Rising Based on the Japanese anime series (and a 2012 film, Tiger and Bunny: The Beginning), this lighthearted look at superheroes with human problems imagines a world in which the blaring Hero TV channel tracks the movements of various caped crusaders, who compete against each other for points as they race to defeat random villains. All of the heroes, who we meet both in and out of costume, work for the same parent company, and each has a corporate sponsor whose logo is a prominent part of his or her ensemble. (Heroes are big business, after all.) In the first film, we met “Wild Tiger,” a bumbling single dad, who’s reluctantly paired with talented new kid “Bunny.” They clash at first, but eventually prove a powerful team. In The Rising, a douchey new boss relegates Tiger to the junior-varsity Second League, while Bunny gets an annoying new partner, “Golden Ryan.” Meanwhile, a mysterious trio of baddies menaces the city, forcing all of the heroes to work together whether they want to or not. The most surprising part of The Rising is its sensitive development of the “Fire Emblem” character. Presented as a mincing gay stereotype in the first film, here he’s given a sympathetic back story via dream sequences that detail his youthful exploration of cross-dressing and personal identity struggles. Encouraging, to say the least. (1:48) New People. (Eddy)

Veronica Mars Since the cult fave TV show Veronica Mars went off the air in 2007, fans of the series, about a smart, cynical teenager who solves mysteries and battles her high school’s 1 percenters — a sort of adolescent noir minus the ex nihilo patois of Rian Johnson’s 2005 Brick — have had their hopes raised and dashed several times regarding the possibility of a big-screen coda. While that sort of scenario usually involves a few of the five stages of grief, this one has a twist happy ending: a full-length film, directed by show creator Rob Thomas and cowritten by Thomas and show producer-writer Diane Ruggiero (with a budget aided by a crowdfunding campaign), that doesn’t suck. It’s been a decade since graduation, and Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) has put a continent between herself and her creepy, class war–torn hometown of Neptune, Calif. — leaving behind her P.I. vocation and a track record of exposing lies, corruption, and the dark side of the human soul in favor of a Columbia law degree and a career of covering up same. But when Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), her brooding, troubled ex, gets charged with the murder of his pop star girlfriend and asks Veronica for help, she can’t resist the pull of what she admits is a pathological impulse. Plus, it’s her 10-year reunion. And indeed, pretty much anyone who had a character arc during the show’s three seasons makes an appearance — plus (naturally) James Franco, Dax Shepard (Bell’s husband), and (oddly) Ira Glass. It could have been a cameo fusillade, but the writing here is as smart, tight, funny, and involving as it was on the TV series, and Thomas and Ruggiero for the most part manage to thread everyone in, taking pressure off a murder mystery that falls a little flat, updating the story to reflect current states of web surveillance and pop cultural mayhem, and keeping the focus on the joy of seeing Veronica back where she belongs. (1:43) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Le Week-End Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi first collaborated two decades ago on The Buddha of Suburbia, when the latter was still in the business of being Britain’s brashest multiculti hipster voice. But in the last 10 years they’ve made a habit of slowing down to sketching portraits of older lives — and providing great roles for the nation’s bottomless well of remarkable veteran actors. Here Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent play a pair of English academics trying to re-create their long-ago honeymoon’s magic on an anniversary weekend in Paris. They love each other, but their relationship is thorny and complicated in ways that time has done nothing to smooth over. This beautifully observed duet goes way beyond the usual adorable-old-coot terrain of such stories on screen; it has charm and humor, but these are unpredictable, fully rounded characters, not comforting caricatures. Briefly turning this into a seriocomedy three-way is Most Valuable Berserker Jeff Goldblum as an old friend encountered by chance. It’s not his story, but damned if he doesn’t just about steal the movie anyway. (1:33) Albany, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki announced that Oscar nominee The Wind Rises would be his final film before retiring — though he later amended that declaration, as he’s fond of doing, so who knows. At any rate, it’d be a shame if this was the Japanese animation master’s final film before retirement; not only does it lack the whimsy of his signature efforts (2001’s Spirited Away, 1997’s Princess Mononoke), it’s been overshadowed by controversy — not entirely surprising, since it’s about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed war planes (built by slave labor) in World War II-era Japan. Surprisingly, a pacifist message is established early on; as a young boy, his mother tells him, “Fighting is never justified,” and in a dream, Italian engineer Giovanni Caproni assures him “Airplanes are not tools for war.” But that statement doesn’t last long; Caproni visits Jiro in his dreams as his career takes him from Japan to Germany, where he warns the owlish young designer that “aircraft are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction.” You don’t say. A melodramatic romantic subplot injects itself into all the plane-talk on occasion, but — despite all that political hullabaloo — The Wind Rises is more tedious than anything else. (2:06) California, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy) *

 

Lost in space

Michael Redmond
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Lost in space

FILM It’s so seldom a film of major scale and budget is made without at least some standard commercial aspirations — however misguided — that the rare exceptions seem as curious, improbable, and wonderful as unicorns. (And about as useless, any bottom-line-oriented producer might say.) We’re not talking Heaven’s Gate (1980), Ishtar (1987), or Battlefield Earth

It’s rare enough for an artist to complete one such project. Alejandro Jodorowsky stands nearly alone in having made at least two. A Chilean émigré to Paris, he had avant-garde interests that led him from theater and comic book art to film, making his feature debut with 1968’s Fando y Lis — a low-budget, little-seen harbinger of things to come, based on a play by likeminded Spanish stage and screen surrealist Fernando Arrabal. Undaunted by its poor reception, he created El Topo (1970), a blood-soaked mix of spaghetti western, mysticism, and Buñuellian parabolic grotesquerie with the director playing a messianic lone gunman whose spiritual path requires violent cleanup of a corrupt society. It gradually became the very first “midnight movie” sensation, playing for years to audiences of stoned hippies — no doubt causing some bad trips en route.

After that success, he was given nearly a million dollars to “do what he wanted” with 1973’s The Holy Mountain. It was, essentially, El Topo redux, albeit without the western motifs and with a staggering Pop-Op-surreal pictorialism to its less-Leone-more-Hesse vision quest. He played the Alchemist, a seer-trickster who leads nine representatives of the modern world on a journey to their own souls. It ended with the camera turning on itself and cast turning toward the audience, “breaking the illusion” because “real life awaits us.”

This extraordinary, singular, pretentious, crazy epic was a big hit in Europe. (Rather strangely, it utterly flopped in the US, and its revival was tied up in legal woes for years; before one announced SF screening at the old York Theater, a private collector’s print was seized and impounded.) French producer Michel Seydoux asked Jodorowsky what he’d like to do next. Dune, he said — though as he confesses in Frank Pavich’s fascinating new documentary, he hadn’t actually read Frank Herbert’s cult science-fiction novel yet, though a friend “told [him] it was fantastic.”

In many ways it seemed a perfect match of director and material. Yet Dune would be an enormous undertaking in terms of scale, expense, and technical challenges. What moneymen in their right mind would entrust this flamboyant genius/nut job with it?

They wouldn’t, as it turned out. So doc Jodorowsky’s Dune is the story of “the greatest film never made,” one that’s brain-exploding enough in description alone. But there’s more than description to go on here, since in 1975 the director and his collaborators created a beautifully detailed volume of storyboards and other preproduction minutiae they hoped would lure Hollywood studios aboard this $15 million space phantasmagoria. From this goldmine of material, as well as input from the surviving participants, Pavich is able to reconstruct not just the film’s making and unmaking, but to an extent the film itself — there are animated storyboard sequences here that offer just a partial yet still breathtaking glimpse of what might have been. Intending to create “a cinematographic god … a prophet to change the minds of all the young people in the world,” Jodorowsky’s plans were more fabulously grandiose even than Herbert’s fantasy of galactic war over a planet producing hallucinogenically enlightening “spice.” (The author himself did not appreciate all the director’s ideas.) His cast, to be led by son Brontis (like dad, an eerily ageless interviewee), would include such outsize personalities as Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, and David Carradine. Music would be provided in part by Pink Floyd; designers included H.R. Giger, Moebius, and Dan O’Bannon. Not everyone met the filmmaker’s requirements for collaborative “spiritual warriors” — Douglas Trumbull, the FX wizard for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), was rejected for being all business.

As the documentary details, this dazzling package did indeed impress the Hollywood suits needed to complete its financing. They had just one quibble: Jodorowsky. It was his vision, but he was too much of a wild card for a commercial gamble of this scale.

Finally, bitter defeat was admitted. Screen rights were later acquired by Dino De Laurentiis’ company. Hired after numerous other directors jumped ship, David Lynch still considers 1984’s Dune his worst, most creatively compromised film. (Thirty years later it’s still awful, despite some stubborn defenders.) Jodorowsky, who admires Lynch, admits he was perversely relieved at how abysmally that costly flop turned out.

His own filmic career took a hard hit from which it never really recovered. 1980’s Tusk and 1990’s The Rainbow Thief were incongruous, barely-seen, half-hearted stabs at the mainstream; 1989’s Santa Sangre a welcome return to form, yet it also a somewhat pale imitation of earlier work. (His forthcoming first feature since, The Dance of Reality, has elicited similar responses.) He busied himself in other projects, notably writing fantasy comics. His Dune became a mostly forgotten industry tale — ah, the Seventies, when they were that crazy. (But not that crazy, alas.)

Yet the incredible storyboard tome got circulated around. As vividly suggested here via clips, its influence is unacknowledged yet hard to deny in umpteen subsequent movies and other media, from the Star Wars and Alien films to recent releases. As the now 85-year-old Jodorowsky serenely observes, “[My] Dune is in the world like a dream. But dreams change the world, also.” *

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE opens Fri/28 in San Francisco.

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