Military

Board accepts EIR, but vows to amend Candlestick-Shipyard plan

Mary Magee
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14

Text by Sarah Phelan, images by Luke Thomas


At the end of a ten-hour hearing to appeal the final environmental impact report  for the city and Lennar’s massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment project, the Board voted 8-3 to accept the FEIR, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar voting to reverse certification of what they said was a flawed document.


But the vote does not mean the Board has voted to accept the city and the developer’s final redevelopment plan. That plan will come before the Board on July 27, and the supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments, in addition to  five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced earlier this week.


These amendments are intended to address longstanding concerns about toxins at the shipyard, limited liability on the part of the developer, the questionable need for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, the reality that Bayview residents may be cut out of any upcoming jobs, and the desire to nail down efforts to use public power at the site


“We can’t do the amendments here, we are frozen out, all we can do is an up and down vote on the EIR for now,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian last night. 
Mirkarimi anticipates that the Board will seek additional mitigations, such as requiring liquidated damages to shore up a community benefits agreement that Labor entered into with Lennar in May 2008.


Mirkarimi said the Board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits.
“Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex-offenders, so while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction,” Mirkarimi observed.


Mirkarimi was proud of the Public Power amendment that Chiu has already lintroduced, pointing to an ordinance that he and then Sup. Gerardo Sandoval introduced and Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law, in March 2006. This public power ordinance established that “where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects.”


“PG& E was ripped when we pushed that through,” Mirkarimi said.


During yesterday’s marathon hearing, the supervisors grilled city staff on issues that have proved to be key sticking points, as the city seeks to win final project approvals, even though they cannot address these issues with amendments until the July 27 meeting.


The Board questioned the wisdom of moving forward with development on the Shipyard, as the Navy continues to clean up radiological contamination and other toxins at the site, including Parcel E-2, which contains some of the nastiest pollution at the yard.


“Why not just wait until the CERCLA process is completed?” Sup. Campos asked, referring to the fact that the Navy is responsible for shipyard clean up, under CERCLA, which is also known as the Superfund Act.


Campos question came after acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra and national environmental human rights lawyer Monique Harden, challenged the sanity of having the Navy digging out toxins while a developer simultaneously installs infrastructure at the same site.


Subra, who works in Superfund sites throughout the U.S, warned the Board that it’s very common to find contamination at these sites after they have been declared clean.


“So, the number of samples isn’t the magic answer,” Subra said, referring to the city’s constant refrain that the Navy has taken thousands of samples at the site. Subra also warned that it is not uncommon for a contractor to dig into an area that has been capped, thereby potentially exposing workers and the community to contamination and resulting in legal stand-offs, as various parties argue as to who has responsibility to fix the resulting mess.


Harden, who is based in New Orleans but also has an office in D.C., expressed concern over the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels, even as the Navy continues to remove radiologically contaminated sewers and other deep infrastructure at the site.
“That’s like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make up,” Harden said


But Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief economic advisor countered that there was no scientific evidence to support Subra or Harden’s concerns.


“It’s a very common situation, especially on brownfields,” Cohen said, (though the Shipyard is a Superfund site that’s been contaminated with radiological waste that was sandblasted off ships returning from a Bikini Atoll atomic testing experiment gone awry.)


“It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years,” Cohen continued. “It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data.”


But Cohen did agree that language in Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment should be changed from “should” to “shall” to indicate that city oversight is a requirement, not a request, when it comes to final decisions over the transfer of this particular parcel.


Mark Ripperda of U.S. EPA assured the Board that his agency is not going to permit transfer of parcels for development until cleanup is completed.
“We are not going to allow any transfer until we are convinced it’s safe,” Ripperda said.


Sup. Eric Mar chastised the EIR for its apparent failure to adequately discuss the impacts of the proposed development on schools in the surrounding area.


“There is less discussion of the impacts on schools than there is of the A-Bomb, which was held at the Shipyard for 1 to 2 days,” Mar said. “The analysis seems very weak.”


And Daly expressed frustration that the Board was being asked to take a decision when it lacked sufficient information about and understanding of the project.


“How do we know it’s safe? ” Daly asked, noting that, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
(His point resonated as City staff scrambled to find key information within the 7,000 pages of comments and responses in the massive FEIR documents, and Amy Brownell of the city’s Public Health Department rattled off a series of measurements and schedules that few on the Board seemed to understand.)


“The risks are acceptable,” Brownell said. “And the only people allowed on the property [during the development] will be the ones doing the work.”


The Board also challenged the need for a bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, especially in the wake of the June 2010 election in which Santa Clara voters approved building a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America.


“One reason I’ve been given for [the need for the bridge] is the financial viability of this project,” Campos said.


Cohen replied that if the city does not to build the bridge, “it elevates the financial risk.”


“Parcel C [on the shipyard] has been zoned for green tech, and for major employers, having that direct connectedness to BART and the T-Third is very important.”


Cohen also indicated that, thanks to the project’s huge reliance on tax increment financing, the loss of the bridge would translate into lost property tax revenues.


“Some of the repayment comes from generation of tax increment financing, so the failure to have a bridge here, degrades the potential of property tax revenues, and so you get much less tax increment,” Cohen stated.


The Board also expressed concerned that under the current terms of the deal they are now set to consider July 27, the developer has limited liability—an arrangement that has got supervisors worried that the city, and Bayview residents whose increased property taxes will help pay for the development, could end up on the wrong end of the financial hook.


Campos pointed to the disposition and development agreement (DDA) that the city drew up with Lennar.
“I’m specifically worried about a provision that on the face of it limits the developer’s liability,” Campos said, pointing to language that seems to say that “monetary damages are inappropriate”—conditions that Campos deemed, “Very unusual.


Cohen responded that the deal reflects the reality that, “the Navy, not Lennar is responsible for the cleanup.”
He added that the city retains the legal ability to sue, various remedies and, ultimately, “the right of reverter” (which folks call the “nuclear option” since it involves kicking out the developer, but losing everything in the process.)


“This is an incredibly frontloaded project,  in which we have the ability to terminate the developer at the cost of millions of dollars,” Cohen said.


But while the city and the developer ultimately affirm EIR certification, the decision left the Bayview community deeply divided, with many concerned that the FEIR failed to address their concerns, while others rejoiced, believing that they will benefit from jobs that will be created during the development’s 10-15 year build out and beyond. Only time will tell how it all plays out, but stay tuned as the Board prepares to try and make the plan the best it can in face of all these competing concerns.


 

Tax cuts, unemployment and the deficit

Zelda Bronstein
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10
Tax cuts, unemployment and the deficit

Fifty-five thousand people a day are losing their unemployment insurance because Congress won’t extend benefits. Why? Well, gee, any federal spending will increase the deficit — and like Herbert Hoover, everyone in Washington is talking about cutting deficits.


But check out this handy chart from the Commitee on Budget and Policy Priorities (thanks, Calitics). The overwhelming factors in the current budget deficit are left over from the Bush administration: Two wars, massive tax cuts for the rich, and an economic meltdown. Unemployment insurance barely even counts.


So the obvious solution to the deficit problem is to get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan, cut the size of the military and end the tax cuts. Funny: The deficit hawks aren’t talking about any of those things. 


 


Appetite: Rogue wines and hearty burgers

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: Rogue wines and hearty burgers

B3 — or B-cubed, as in “Bottles, Burgers and Bites” — should finally see the light of day on July 20 (call to confirm as this is the hoped-for grand opening). I had the privilege a couple months ago of being part of a test dinner for B3, which set up shop in the former Senses space on Valencia, redone in warm, neutral tones. I’m delighted to give you the preview scoop (see original details in The Perfect Spot), as I have been following this concept since inception.

Basically, B3 is part wine tasting spot, part full-service restaurant with a burger and sausage emphasis as well as a retail wine source. You taste wines as if you were at a tasting room (don’t call it a wine bar!) and can purchase what you’re tasting by the bottle or case at retail prices rather than at restaurant mark-up.

Rogue wines for days. Photo by Virginia Miller

Wine guys Johnny Gato and Ron Elder invested personal passion into a hand-selected list of affordable local bottles difficult to procure from small-production winemakers — most don’t even have a wine tasting facility. Many are influenced by Old World technique with modern interpretations. Just start talking to Gato and Elder and you’ll begin to discover all kinds of Wine Country gems you had no idea were there… not your typical California wines. Initially the focus will be Napa and Sonoma producers, but they eventually plan to showcase wines (roughly 50 on hand at any given time) from regions like Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, or Santa Barbara, with a goal to rotate wines monthly.

The wine aspect of B3 is called the Winemakers’ Speakeasy, an idea in development since 2008, referring to the underground status of the type of wines they want to share with the consumer… truly “small batch”, without wine tasting facilities, “by appointment” tours, or major distributors. In many cases, you wouldn’t be able to try the kind of wines served here unless you bought a bottle at one of the few restaurants or shops that carry them. They’re what Gato calls “rogue” or “punk rock” wines.

Through Gato, who has worked at Moussy’s and Bouchon in Napa, I’ve discovered incredible wineries such as Napa’s Forlorn Hope, bittersweetly named after the term used to describe the front line of soldiers in a high-risk military operation. I’m smitten with their floral, bright ‘08 La Gitana Torrontes, fabulously layered ‘07 Nacre Semillion, and ‘05 Gascony Cadets Petit Verdot. Then there’s Poem Cellars in Yountville, who’s wines are often sold out completely, particularly their light and spicy 2006 Tastevin Napa Valley Red (only 140 cases produced). Or Beaucanon’s ‘07 Cabernet Franc, Y. Rousseau’s ‘08 Russian River Valley Colombard and ‘08 ‘Milady’ Mount Veeder Chardonnay, Peripolli’s ‘06 Sauvignon Blanc. Just ask Gato, who has followed these wineries closely in his Napa years with a dream to bring them “on the road” to the general public, and he’ll tell you about the wine itself but also stories behind winemakers and wineries. Each glass becomes something personal, fascinating.

Chef Kevin Ahajanian, who worked with Gato at Bouchon, is keeping it solid with a burger and sausage menu. If the test dinner and initial menu is any indication, you won’t suffer on the food front. You can top your burger with everything from a fried Petaluma egg to Humboldt Fog cheese. There’s lush salads, like a B-Cubed cobb with chicken breast confit, bourbon brown sugar Hobbs bacon and Point Reyes blue cheese.

Yep, there’s some luscious salad in there, too. Photo by Virginia Miller

Or maybe you want a Boudin Noir (aka blood) sausage with choice of pineapple salsa, roasted apples, roasted red peppers or house slaw on top? Ahajanian doesn’t leave vegans and vegetarians out — there will be burgers for them. He has fun with the details, like making his own ketchup, blanching fresh-cut potatoes in rice bran oil, or serving sausages in buns layered with mashed potatoes. In a nod to all things local, dessert is Humphry Slocombe ice cream (including those addictive foie gras ice cream sandwiches), Mission Mini cupcakes or Recchiuti chocolates.

The B3 crew eventually plans to launch lunch and weekend brunch, becoming a go-to for wine lovers and a pre and post-shift source for industry types to stop in for a bite or drink. Though wine is clearly the focus, they’ll also offer six beers on tap, another 8-10 by the bottle. And with a twice nightly happy hour, it’s going to be an unusual wine and burger spot where you can meet lovingly-made, truly small batch wines… and even take them home with you.

Tue-Sun, 3pm-2am (wine happy hours: 3-6pm, 10pm-12am)
1152 Valencia, SF.
415-401-7258
Reservations: should have Open Table reservations by opening date

Film listings

David Talbot
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Erik Morse, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide. Due to the July 4 holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

The seventh Another Hole in the Head Film Festival runs July 8-29 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; and Viz Cinema, New People, 1746 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $11), visit www.sfindie.com. For commentary, see Trash and http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision

THURS/8

Roxie Death Kappa 5. Mutant Girls Squad 7. A Serbian Film 9.

FRI/9

Roxie Samurai Princess 5. Symbol 7. RoboGeisha 9. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil 11.

SAT/10

Roxie Satan Hates You 5. A Serbian Film 7. Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl 9. The Exterminator 11.

SUN/11

Roxie Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue 5. The Violent Kind 7. Yatterman 9.

MON/12

Roxie Sexy Time Trip Ninjas 5. Samurai Princess 7. Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue 9.

TUES/13

Roxie Satan Hates You 5. Silent Night, Zombie Night 7. Yatterman 9.

OPENING

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Opening with the humid buzz of crickets and the probings of bug aficionados in the thick of a forest, first-time documentarian Jessica Oreck puts Japan’s fascination with insects under the microscope. Preferring to let the images and interview subjects speak for themselves, she turns a lens to young children who clamor to buy sleek, shiny, obsidian beetles, as well as the giant big city gatherings of insect collectors — events that likely are less than familiar to western audiences. Oreck’s intent is to get at the ineffable attraction behind such astonishing sales as that of a single beetle for $90,000 not so long ago, and to that end, she weaves in looks at insect literature and art, visits to Buddhist temples, and historical factoids about, for instance, the first cricket-selling business in the early 1800s. (1:30) Elmwood, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Daddy Longlegs Purportedly based on their own growing-up experiences, Ben and Joshua Safdie’s feature does for the terminally immature Manhattan reluctant father what Roger Dodger (2002) did for the terminally predatory heterosexual Manhattan bachelor: provide gruesome shaky-cam dissection of a dad dreadful by any common moral standard, yet who is more pathetic and oddly ingratiating than loathsome. The two weeks Lenny (Ronald Bronstein) is charged with caring for his two unruly young sons (Sage Ranaldo, Frey Ranaldo) by a pointedly estranged, vacationing ex-spouse provide enough evidence for a hundred angry divorce proceedings. While a friend is behaving inappropriately with the kids, Lenny goes into the bathroom to smoke a doob; when he’s got a babysitting work conflict, he sedates them into a near-coma. Yet at the same time he’s also a really fun, loving dad — just one lacking all conventional instincts for appropriate behavior. On the one hand this is a parental horror film, on the other a touching and delicate portrait of someone who would very much like to be a good dad but is congenitally doomed as fuckup. Both hands say: this is rather wonderful, ultimately very poignant movie. (1:40) Roxie. (Harvey)

Despicable Me The ad campaign for this film is completely impenetrable, is it not? Apparently it’s a 3-D animated comedy about a guy plotting to steal the moon, with some sentimental stuff thrown as a bonus. (1:35)

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

Grease Sing-A-Long Snore. Where’s the sing-a-long love for Grease 2 (1982)? “Cool Rider” forever! (1:50)

John Rabe John Rabe (Ulrich Tukur) was the Oskar Schindler of Nanking: A man who, under discreetly opportunist pretenses, attempted to keep the Chinese in a safety zone from the Japanese in the late 30s. Steve Buscemi plays Robert Wilson, a surly American doctor. He’s to Tukur as Ben Kingsley was to Liam Neeson in 1993’s Schindler’s List, but without the nuance or iconic chemistry. Tukur is understated, bordering on uninteresting, and Buscemi is just over-the-top. Unlike Spielberg’s film, John Rabe grants us little access to the stories of civilians. The film is so preoccupied with people of power and those like Rabe, couched in a world of privilege, that the film lacks an emotional, human center. It’s impossible to feel much of anything because we’re never asked to feel, nor are we ever asked to endure any especially difficult scenes. Even the occasional rain of hellfire isn’t as wallop-packing as it ought to be. (2:14) Elmwood, Presidio. (Ryan Lattanzio)

*The Kids Are All Right See “We Are Family.” (1:47) SF Center.

Predators The hunt-happy creatures take a break from fighting the Aliens to terrorize a surprisingly highbrow cast, including Adrien Brody and Laurence Fishburne (but not, alas, Chris Hansen). (runtime not available)

*Stonewall Uprising See “Riot Awakening.” (1:22)

*Wild Grass The premise of Wild Grass, Alain Resnais’ loopy new film, could have come straight from Nancy Meyers: an older married man finds a single, middle-aged woman’s wallet. He returns it but can’t stop thinking about her. She, in turn, is intrigued by his attentions. Both are surprised by the connection they feel growing between them, one which they nevertheless have difficulty articulating. When they finally meet, sparks fly. That purloined wallet, along with the romcom set-up, aren’t the only MacGuffins in Resnais’ Wild ride, which uses Christian Gailly’s novel L’ Incindent as a rough guide for its careening tour of the irrational courses that desire can lead us down. The man and woman in question are Georges, an embittered writer with a possibly dark past, and flame-haired Marguerite, a dentist and part-time aviatrix, both played to neurotic perfection by longtime Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma. Resnais’ attempt to translate what he has called the “musicality” of Gailly’s prose has resulted in a frenetic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach that tries to visually approximate Georges and Marguerites’ every internal monologue, fantasy, and increasingly risky instance of impulsive behavior, throwing in some knowing winks to classic Hollywood cinema for good measure. It’s a mess, to be sure (there are even two endings!). But like Mr. Magoo, the 87-year-old Resnais, as if by some unseen hand, steers clear of complete disaster. There hasn’t been a Gallic car crash this delightful to watch since Godard’s famous pile-up in 1967’s Week End. (1:44) Clay, Shattuck. (Sussman)

ONGOING

The A-Team Why was the original A-Team the most popular band of mercenaries on TV? The estimable chemistry and comedic skills of Mr. T; legit Breakfast at Tiffany‘s star George Peppard; conservative commentator Dwight Schultz; and Dirk Benedict, fresh from his role as the original Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, played a major part, as did the quasi-anti-authoritarian, boyish, blow-’em-up-real-good tone, making it more of a cartoonishly violent kin to MASH than First Blood (1982). The cheeky humor and snappy writing were the real key to The A-Team‘s popularity — the reason impressionable protein units like yours truly tuned in. Director Joe Carnahan (2006’s Smokin’ Aces) and cast seem to have sussed out a bit of that magic, especially when the sun-roasted Bradley Cooper as Faceman and Sharlto Copley as Murdock roll with the what-the-hell non-sequiturs (less sure is the star of last year’s District 9‘s grip on exactly what accent he’s been charged with). But the cinematic version won’t be rehabbing the public’s view of guns-for-hire like Blackwater anytime soon. Liam Neeson lacks the cigar-chomping paternal bravado of Peppard, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson is tasked with the unenviable job of following T time, and the script, complete with the ludicrously elaborate plans and a spark-challenged romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel, is just a rough excuse to watch boys and their toys. (1:57) (Chun)

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky Revered for the innovative fashion house that set the bar for style and was always knocked off but never cut prices for the real deal (and still sniffs at online clothing sales), Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel gets her second biopic, as an artist on par with composer Igor Stravinsky in this rhapsodically sensuous love letter to an unlikely romance. It opens with the designer and future branding legend (depicted with burning eyes and pantherine mystery by Anna Mouglalis) attending the controversial, riot-starting 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris. Recognizing Stravinsky (a viral avant-garde stud-muffin in the hands of Mads Mikkelsen, last in deadlocks and warrior face in Clash of the Titans) as a simpatico radical spirit, Chanel lends her house to the composer. He comes with considerable baggage: a slew of children and a consumptive wife, Katarina (Elena Morozova). Morozova’s performance as the angel-faced earth mother scorned, so blatantly disrespected by the rad lovers madly getting down on the music-room carpet, almost steals the show, but then the house-porn fabulosity of the recreated Chanel villa in Garches — a symbol of their hermetic attraction and shot like a seductive, claustrophobic, black-and-white deco womb — takes over, and we’re back in the thick of CoGor’s somewhat inexplicable affair once again. (1:55) (Chun)

Cyrus It’s tempting to label Mark and Jay Duplass’ Cyrus as “mumblecore goes mainstream.” Yes, the mumblecore elements are all there: plentiful moments of awkward humiliation, characters fumbling verbally and sometimes physically in desperate attempts to establish emotional connections, and a meandering, character-driven plot, in the sense that the characters themselves possess precious little drive. The addition of bona fide indie movie stars John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, and Marisa Tomei — not to mention Hollywood’s chubby-funny guy du jour, Jonah Hill — could lead some to believe that the DIY-loving Duplass brothers (2005’s The Puffy Chair, 2008’s Baghead) have gone from slacker disciples of John Cassavetes (informally known as “Slackavetes”) to worshippers at the slickly profane (with a heart) altar of Judd Apatow. But despite the presence of Apatow protégé Hill (2007’s Superbad) in the title role, Cyrus steers clear of crowd-pleasing bombast, instead favoring small, relatively naturalistic moments. That is to say, not much actually happens. Mumblecore? More or less. Mainstream? Not exactly. Despite playing a character with some serious psychological issues, Hill comes off as likeable. Unfortunately the movie is neither as broadly comic nor as emotionally poignant as it needs to be — the two opposing forces seem to cancel each other out like acids and bases. (1:32) (Devereaux)

8: The Mormon Proposition (1:30)

*Everyone Else Maren Ade’s Everyone Else is a distinctly modernist romantic comedy — one without air. Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) are on vacation, and failing miserably at basic communication. Everyone Else figures holiday as a stage, in which the principles grasp for their roles in relationship to the other. They are a young, bourgeoisie German couple staying at his parents’ villa in Sardinia. He is a disappointed architect, she a music publicist. Already, though, this capsule betrays the film’s methodical mode of exposition, whereby facts like “his parents’ villa” and “in Sardinia” are realized in conversation, later than we expect. Before then, we’re privy to inner jokes, private nonsense, and gestural rapport. Rather than using such minutiae to ingratiate us into Chris and Gitti’s quirks, Ade is embedding us in the relationship’s interior. We realize how deeply during the course of two dinners with an architect acquaintance and his wife, the first at the new couple’s house and the second at the villa. The other pair stands in for the “everybody else” of the title, and, in their outsized performance as a couple, acts as a convenient cipher for Chris and Gitti’s bottomless insecurities. Chris and Gitti are not cold fish — their passion is intense, if swollen by doubt — but the fact that their relationship’s obstacles are self-imposed leads to a certain captive mentality, in which staying together means being marooned from the outside world. (1:59) (Goldberg)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, “the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art,” as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his “art” is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) (Sussman)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called “Millennium” books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Grown Ups In order of star power, Grown Ups casts Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade as five fortysomething friends who reunite to attend the funeral of their high school basketball coach, and play catch-up over a long weekend together at a cabin by the lake. If you’re expecting five of America’s biggest comedy stars to form like Voltron and make the most hilarious movie of the year, you’ve got a sad day coming. Grown Ups is never the sum of its parts, it’s about on par with Sandler’s other producing/starring affairs, and probably features a lot of the same jokes. People fall in poop and little kids say cute things designed to make audiences awww, but history has shown that’s exactly what a popcorn viewer is looking for. By these standards, Grown Ups is a perfectly summer-y movie. (1:42) (Galvin)

*I Am Love I Am Love opens in a chilly, Christmastime Milan and deliberately warms in tandem with its characters. Members of the blue-blood Recchi family are content hosting lavish parties and gossiping about one another, none more than the matriarch Emma (Tilda Swinton). But when prodigal son Edoardo befriends a local chef, Emma finds herself taken by both the chef’s food and his everyman personality, and is reminded of her poor Soviet upbringing. The courtship that follows is familiar on paper, but director Luca Guadagnino lenses with a strong style and small scenes acquire a distinct energy through careful editing and John Adams’ unpredictable score. Swinton portrays Emma’s unraveling with the same gritty gusto she brought to Julia (2008), and her commitment to the role recognizes few boundaries. You’ve probably seen this story before, but it has rarely been this powerful. (2:00) (Galvin)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole “with great power comes great responsibility” thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) (Eddy)

Jonah Hex Based on DC’s dark western comics, Jonah Hex is a jumbled mess of mishandled superhero tropes and obligatory attempts at badass-ery. The title character, a grizzled gunfighter with a distinctive facial scar, could be an engaging outsider antihero, but as portrayed by Josh Brolin, he feels neither as cool nor as tortured as we’re clearly expected to believe. The film has a decidedly ’90s feel to it — think overbudgeted, underthought masterpieces like Wild Wild West (1999) — with its farcically fantastical take on post-Civil War supervillainy. Its ridiculous cast of character actors is almost completely squandered, including archvillain John Malkovich, Aidan Quinn as Ulysses S. Grant, and Will Arnett in an inexplicably serious role. Megan Fox is trying the hardest out of the whole cast, but in a rather sleazy move, her character always seems to appear in soft focus. Oh, and there are a few explosions. (1:81) (Sam Stander)

The Karate Kid The most baffling thing about The Karate Kid is its title: little Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) never actually learns karate. He practices kung-fu, an entirely different form of martial arts — you know, from a different country. There’s something obnoxious and absurd about the misnomer: the film seems to suggest that if you’ve seen one Asian culture, you’ve seen them all. That aside, it’s not a bad movie. Smith is mostly pretty likeable, and there’s a definite satisfaction to seeing him grow from bullied weakling to kung-fu star. And Jackie Chan gets to exercise his dramatic chops — he even gets a crying scene! But Karate Kid is a “reboot,” the preferred term for the endless stream of unnecessary remakes Hollywood keeps churning out. You can’t help but think about the superior 1984 version. Jaden Smith is no Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan is no Pat Morita, and kung-fu is no karate. Don’t even get me started on the “jacket on, jacket off” crap. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds a little adult for a PG movie. (2:20) (Peitzman)

*The Killer Inside Me This January a Sundance controversy broke. The movie in question was eclectic English director Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, the latest screen version of a beloved and spectacularly nasty noir tale by literary pulp hero Jim Thompson. The protest was that the onscreen violence against women was viciously excessive. The accusation is true: in Winterbottom’s film, violence is horribly immediate, sadistic yet matter-of-fact, almost unendurable — everything movie violence almost never is. There’s nothing remotely comfortable about the highly personal, unnecessary cruelty our antihero wreaks. Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a good ol’ boy in his dusty, back-slappy west Texas hometown of the late 1950s, is a world-class sociopath who depends on lazy small-town gullibility and rote suspicion toward outsiders to literally get away with murder. Lou is shagging local Amy (Kate Hudson) — but gets distracted by Joyce (Jessica Alba), a probable prostitute he’s asked to bum rush outta town. Leading ladies Alba and Hudson are widely perceived as spoiled hotties of little talent — hence perfect battering-rams for pulp-machismo movie violence. What’s cool about Winterbottom’s Killer is that it refuses to let you enjoy the abuse they endure, which is viscerally unpleasant as a fist to the gut. It’s abrupt, grueling, and horrific. At once folksy-nostalgic and vicious, The Killer Inside Me is unabashedly about men who hate women. It successfully translates Thompson’s gambit of insinuating us into the seemingly pleasant, reasonable viewpoint of a protagonist we are then surprised to discover is psychotic and without a conscience. Offended Sundance attendees should’ve gotten a clue: deliberately misleading in its pulp-nostalgia trappings, this is one movie that upsets not gratuitously, but exactly as it should. (1:48) (Harvey)

Killers (1:40)

*Knight and Day A Bourne-again Vanilla Sky (2001)? Considerably better than that embarrassingly silly stateside remake, though not quite as fulfilling as director James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) rework, this action caper played for yuks still isn’t the most original article in the cineplex. But coasting on the dazzling Cheshire grins of its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, reunited for the first time since Sky, you can just make out the birth of a beautiful new franchise. Everygirl June Havens (Diaz) is on her way to her sister’s wedding when she collides-cute at the airport with Roy Miller (Cruise). After killing the passengers and pilots on their plane, he literally sweeps her off her feet — thanks to some potent drugs. Picture a would-be Bond girl dragged against a spy-vs.-spy thriller semi-against-her-will — grappling with the subtextual anxiety rushing beneath all brief romantic encounters as well as some very justifiable survival fears. Can June overcome her trust issues? Is Roy the man of her dreams — or nightmares? Mangold and company miss a few opportunities to have more fun with those barely teased out ideas, and the polished, adult-yet-far-from-knowing charisma of the leads doesn’t quite live up to sophisticated interplay of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, or even the down-home fun of Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, but it’s substantial enough for Knight and Day to coast on, for about 90 minutes tops. (2:10) (Chun)

The Last Airbender There must be some M. Night Shyamalan fans out there. How else does one explain the fact that he keeps making movies? And yet, most of his post-Sixth Sense (1999) work has ranged from forgettable to downright reviled. His latest disaster is sure to fall into the latter category: in The Last Airbender, he takes a much-loved Nickelodeon cartoon and transforms it into an awkwardly paced, poorly acted mess. Woefully miscast Noah Ringer stars as Aang, the avatar with the power to end the Fire Nation’s dominion. Along with his friends, siblings Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), Aang must — oh, just watch the damn show. For newcomers, the film is as confusing as Shyamalan’s equally self-indulgent Lady in the Water (2006). For fans of the TV show, The Last Airbender is nearly unbearable, condensing the entire first season into one film by removing the humor, the heart, and the complexity of the characters. There’s no twist here — we expect Shyamalan to disappoint, and he does. (1:34) (Peitzman)

Love Ranch “Who do you think you are, the queen of fucking England?” That’s Joe Pesci to Helen Mirren in Love Ranch, a film that takes Mirren about as far as possible from her titular role in 2006’s The Queen. She stars as Grace Botempo, co-owner of Nevada’s first legal brothel alongside her husband, Pesci’s Charlie. The fact that the regal British dame is entirely convincing as an American madam speaks to her impressive versatility. While the movie as a whole is engaging — insofar as it’s a 1970s period piece about legalized prostitution — the plot is mostly predictable. Grace finds herself drawn to the Argentinean prize fighter her husband forces her to manage. In Bruza (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), she gets the attention and appreciation Charlie can no longer offer. In Grace, Bruza gets a woman who looks damn good at 64. Above all else, it’s enjoyable watching Mirren in this context; she gets ravaged by a much younger man, breaks up girl-on-girl fights, and says things like “I’ve got 25 psychotic whores to manage. That’s a full dance card.” Though it has its charmingly trashy moments, it’s doubtful Love Ranch would be worthwhile without her performance. (1:57) (Peitzman)

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking “This kid rides my last nerve.” It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super “power.” They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed “Circus,” thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) (Chun)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) (Rapoport)

*Restrepo Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a “narrative arc” — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of “progress” in Afghanistan. (1:33) (Harvey)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07)

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be “one of the girls” — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the “new Middle East” women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not “cheating” if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) (Sussman)

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) (Chun)

*Splice “If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will,” declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) (Devereaux)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its “feel bad, then feel good” style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

*Toy Story 3 You’ve got a friend in Pixar. We all do. The animation studio just can’t seem to make a bad movie — even at its relative worst, a Pixar film is still worlds better than most of what Hollywood churns out. Luckily, Toy Story 3 is far from the worst: it’s actually one of Pixar’s most enjoyable and poignant films yet. Waiting 11 years after the release of Toy Story 2 was, in fact, a stroke of genius, in that it amplifies the nostalgia that runs through so many of the studio’s releases. The kids who were raised on Toy Story and its first sequel have now grown up, gone to college, and, presumably, abandoned their toys. For these twentysomethings, myself included, Toy Story 3 is a uniquely satisfying and heartbreaking experience. While the film itself may not be the instant classic that WALL-E (2008) was, it’s near flawless regardless of a viewer’s age. Warm, funny, and emotionally devastating—it’s Pixar as it should be. (1:49) (Peitzman)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The only person more bored by the Twilight franchise than I am is Kristen Stewart. In Eclipse, the third installment of the film series, she mopes her way through further adventures with creepily obsessive vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson). Look, you’re either sold on this star-crossed love story or you’re not, and it’s clear which camp I fall into. Besides, Eclipse is at least better than New Moon, the dreadful Twilight film that preceded it last year. But the story is still ponderous and predictable — Eclipse sets up a conflict and then quickly resolves it, just so it can spend more time on the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle. (As if we don’t know how that ends.) Then there’s the unfortunate anti-sex subtext: carnal relations are cast as dirty, wrong, and soul-destroying. I’m not saying we should be encouraging all teenagers to have sex, but that doesn’t mean we should make them feel ashamed of their desires. And what parent would approve of Eclipse‘s conclusion? Marrying your first boyfriend at 18—not always the best move. (2:04) (Peitzman)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit.

Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) (Eddy)

 

Political litmus test for Hunters Point Shipyard access?

Mary Magee
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Even though the U.S. Navy abandoned the Hunters Point Shipyard in 1974, the military has continued to control access to the shipyard that helped launch the A-Bomb. That’s because the Navy still owns most parcels of land on the shipyard and remains on the hook for cleaning up pollutants on these sites, including a radiologically impacted dump on Parcel E2, which has been deemed to be the dirtiest land on the site.

Currently, the Navy is proposing to cap, not excavate this landfill, despite repeated requests from the local community, and a citywide vote in support of Proposition P in 2000, which urged the Navy to clean up the land to the best extent possible, which would mean excavating the Parcel E2 landfill and replacing it with clean uncontaminated soil. And oddly, the City appears to want government agencies and officials to sign off on its final EIR for Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, even though the Navy has not yet completed an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to its proposed shipyard cleanup activities.

Currently, the Navy controls access to the facility beyond a couple of trailers that the city’s Redevelopment Agency has set up just within the yard’s main gate. And to gain access to the shipyard these days, you need to call or visit Redevelopment’s trailer and get a pass. Or, alternatively, if you know any of the artists who continue to rent studios at shipyard, you can call them to try and get the city to give you a pass.

Underlying these limits to accessing the shipyard are some legitimate safety concerns related to equipment and excavations on what is now an active clean up and construction site, along with fears that untoward characters could break into the abandoned buildings or bother the artists who still have studios in operation at the shipyard. But has an additional political litmus test been put in place when it comes to critics of Lennar’s redevelopment plan, who want to access to the yard? If so, does it mirror the tap dancing that the local community has had to undergo to get its voices heard as Lennar pushes to get final approval for its shipyard/ Candlestick Point redevelopment plan.

Those questions resurfaced last week when a private security guard manning the shipyard’s front gate denied access to D. 10 supervisor candidate DeWitt Lacy, who had dropped by hoping to take this reporter around the yard as part of an ongoing conversation about Parcel E2, which Lacy believes needs to be excavated completely, and how best to hold the Navy accountable for cleaning up a mess it created decades ago. The security guard told Lacy that folks who want to visit must get a pass at the Redevelopment Agency trailer.

At the Redevelopment trailer, Micah Fobbs, administrative assistant for W.B. Kennedy and Associates, which has a contract with Redevelopment’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee. told Lacy that without a preauthorized pass, he couldn’t let us onto the site. Fobbs added that he would be happy to take us on a tour himself, but he could not leave the trailer unmanned, since he was the only staff member there at the time. Fair enough. Though the rebuff gave us the feel that the City doesn’t want pesky investigative reporters that have been critical of the development running around the site. “And if they found out I was a civil rights attorney, they probably wouldn’t want me out here, either,” Lacy joked.

But the next day, I encountered what sounded like overt hostility to other critics of Lennar’s plan, when I tried to ride along on what had been billed as a “Toxic Tour of the Navy Shipyard” by POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights). POWER had advertised its tour in an email which said it would involve 23 expert urban planners, who happened to be in the Bay Area for a Progressive Planning Forum. The tour was billed as happening on the morning of June 17, before an afternoon discussion at POWER’s Third Street office in the Bayview, which was to focus “on alternative approaches to the city’s current plan for development at the Shipyard/ Candlestick Point.”

Caught in traffic, I didn’t arrive at the Boys and Girls Club on Kiska Road in Bayview Hunters Point in time to join POWER’s kick-off get together. So, I headed direct to the shipyard, a move that meant I arrived alone and ahead of the school bus that POWER had rented for the occasion. At the gate, I was told by the security guard that I couldn’t get in, that another guard lost his job for letting unauthorized individuals onto the site, that POWER didn’t have a pass and that they’d been warned to watch for POWER “because they want to stop the development.”

“If you are not authorized with badges, you are not let through,” the guard said, giving me the telephone number of the Hunters Point Duty police officer, who in turn said I needed to call the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which in turn told me to call the folks at the Redevelopment Agency’s shipyard trailer. And so I called Fobbs again, who confirmed that the Navy still controls all the property, except Parcel A which has already been conveyed to the City which in turn has granted developer Lennar the right to develop thousands of condos on that particular parcel.

“As far as viewing the rest of the property, you have to put in a request, and no photography or videography is allowed,” Fobbs said. This stated ban on photography came as a surprise, given recent photos of the shipyard that ran in a New York Times article about Lennar and the city’s vision for the 770-acre property.

And the sudden difficulties in gaining media access seemed odd, given that Lennar’s PR firm, Sitrick and Company, offered to take the media on a tour on the morning of June 3—the day the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions subsequently approved the final EIR for Lennar’s plan to redevelop the rest of the shipyard, plus Candlestick Point, a FEIR that has now been appealed to the Board, on the grounds that it was rushed for political reasons, leading to fatal flaws in the final document.

“Well, if folks come here through Redevelopment or the Mayor’s Office, then they have been able to take photographs,” Fobbs said. “But we have had people trying to climb fences and get through doors of some of the buildings.” (Fobbs last comment was a reference to a recent climbing of the fence that the Nation of Islam’s Leon Muhammad engaged in, in an effort to determine if air quality monitoring devices near the Nation’s school and Oakdale public housing site were operating. (After Muhammad scaled the fence and reported that he’d found an empty bin where monitoring equipment was supposed to be, a kafuffle ensued, with the US EPA saying Muhammad was looking in the wrong place for the monitors which, it claimed, were in operation.)

Ultimately, Fobbs told me to call Redevelopment’s Audrey Kay if I wanted a tour, and several shipyard artists told me they would be happy to arrange a day pass so I can visit their studios and hear concerns that they will be required to move from a couple of shipyard buildings before replacement studios have been completed–an arrangement that would amount to a breach of promise that Lennar and the city previously made to the shipyard artists.

Shortly after I was turned away for a second time, POWER’s bus arrived at the gate, only to be blocked–a denial of access that meant 23 progressive planners were forced to view the shipyard from various remote viewing spots atop the hills that surround the site.

Together these episodes left me wondering what kind of political litmus test could end up being enforced at the site, if Lennar’s mega project gets the green light this summer, and what will happen if the Board decides to kick the plan back to the drawing board until the Navy completes a environmental impact statement and all of the community’s ongoing environmental and economic justice concerns are addressed.

So stay tuned, and don’t forget to mark July 13 on your calendar when the full Board of Supervisors is tentatively to hear appeals of the project’s final EIR, which the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions rubberstamped June 3. And, as always, it will be revealing to see which candidates in the hotly contested race for D. 10 supervisor, show up and speak truth to power.

 

 

Film listings

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

OPENING

*Everyone Else See "Nobody But You." (1:59) Lumiere, Shattuck.

The Last Airbender Millions of people out of work, and M. Night Shyamalan is still making movies. (1:34) Presidio.

Love Ranch See "Madam Majesty." (1:57) Embarcadero.

*Restrepo Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a "narrative arc" — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of "progress" in Afghanistan. (1:33) Bridge. (Harvey)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Another one already? Jeez. (2:04) California, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki.

ONGOING

The A-Team Why was the original A-Team the most popular band of mercenaries on TV? The estimable chemistry and comedic skills of Mr. T; legit Breakfast at Tiffany‘s star George Peppard; conservative commentator Dwight Schultz; and Dirk Benedict, fresh from his role as the original Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, played a major part, as did the quasi-anti-authoritarian, boyish, blow-’em-up-real-good tone, making it more of a cartoonishly violent kin to MASH than First Blood (1982). The cheeky humor and snappy writing were the real key to The A-Team‘s popularity — the reason impressionable protein units like yours truly tuned in. Director Joe Carnahan (2006’s Smokin’ Aces) and cast seem to have sussed out a bit of that magic, especially when the sun-roasted Bradley Cooper as Faceman and Sharlto Copley as Murdock roll with the what-the-hell non-sequiturs (less sure is the star of last year’s District 9‘s grip on exactly what accent he’s been charged with). But the cinematic version won’t be rehabbing the public’s view of guns-for-hire like Blackwater anytime soon. Liam Neeson lacks the cigar-chomping paternal bravado of Peppard, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson is tasked with the unenviable job of following T time, and the script, complete with the ludicrously elaborate plans and a spark-challenged romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel, is just a rough excuse to watch boys and their toys. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky Revered for the innovative fashion house that set the bar for style and was always knocked off but never cut prices for the real deal (and still sniffs at online clothing sales), Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel gets her second biopic, as an artist on par with composer Igor Stravinsky in this rhapsodically sensuous love letter to an unlikely romance. It opens with the designer and future branding legend (depicted with burning eyes and pantherine mystery by Anna Mouglalis) attending the controversial, riot-starting 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris. Recognizing Stravinsky (a viral avant-garde stud-muffin in the hands of Mads Mikkelsen, last in deadlocks and warrior face in Clash of the Titans) as a simpatico radical spirit, Chanel lends her house to the composer. He comes with considerable baggage: a slew of children and a consumptive wife, Katarina (Elena Morozova). Morozova’s performance as the angel-faced earth mother scorned, so blatantly disrespected by the rad lovers madly getting down on the music-room carpet, almost steals the show, but then the house-porn fabulosity of the recreated Chanel villa in Garches — a symbol of their hermetic attraction and shot like a seductive, claustrophobic, black-and-white deco womb — takes over, and we’re back in the thick of CoGor’s somewhat inexplicable affair once again. (1:55) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Cyrus It’s tempting to label Mark and Jay Duplass’ Cyrus as "mumblecore goes mainstream." Yes, the mumblecore elements are all there: plentiful moments of awkward humiliation, characters fumbling verbally and sometimes physically in desperate attempts to establish emotional connections, and a meandering, character-driven plot, in the sense that the characters themselves possess precious little drive. The addition of bona fide indie movie stars John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, and Marisa Tomei — not to mention Hollywood’s chubby-funny guy du jour, Jonah Hill — could lead some to believe that the DIY-loving Duplass brothers (2005’s The Puffy Chair, 2008’s Baghead) have gone from slacker disciples of John Cassavetes (informally known as "Slackavetes") to worshippers at the slickly profane (with a heart) altar of Judd Apatow. But despite the presence of Apatow protégé Hill (2007’s Superbad) in the title role, Cyrus steers clear of crowd-pleasing bombast, instead favoring small, relatively naturalistic moments. That is to say, not much actually happens. Mumblecore? More or less. Mainstream? Not exactly. Despite playing a character with some serious psychological issues, Hill comes off as likeable. Unfortunately the movie is neither as broadly comic nor as emotionally poignant as it needs to be — the two opposing forces seem to cancel each other out like acids and bases. (1:32) California, Metreon. (Devereaux)

8: The Mormon Proposition (1:30) Elmwood, Sundance Kabuki.

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) Lumiere. (Sussman)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Clay, Four Star, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Grown Ups In order of star power, Grown Ups casts Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade as five fortysomething friends who reunite to attend the funeral of their high school basketball coach, and play catch-up over a long weekend together at a cabin by the lake. If you’re expecting five of America’s biggest comedy stars to form like Voltron and make the most hilarious movie of the year, you’ve got a sad day coming. Grown Ups is never the sum of its parts, it’s about on par with Sandler’s other producing/starring affairs, and probably features a lot of the same jokes. People fall in poop and little kids say cute things designed to make audiences awww, but history has shown that’s exactly what a popcorn viewer is looking for. By these standards, Grown Ups is a perfectly summer-y movie. (1:42) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Peter Galvin)

Have You Heard from Johannesburg? The best word to describe Connie Field’s Have You Heard From Johannesburg? is "impressive." At eight-and-a-half hours, the seven-part documentary series spans nearly five decades of the South African anti-apartheid movement. The individual films are well-researched and thought-provoking. The stories are compelling — that is, until you put them all together. The complete series is just too long for those without a strong, vested interest in South African history. It’s simply not approachable for the mainstream, and the approximately three-hour chunks it’s meant to be consumed in are daunting. These films are better suited to a televised series, where viewers could appreciate hearing about anti-apartheid pioneers like Oliver Tambo and Desmond Tutu in smaller, digestible bites. As it stands, Field’s documentary is not likely to find a wide audience — a real pity, given the 10 years of effort she put into it, and the importance of sharing the South African struggle for equality with the rest of the world. (8:30) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

*I Am Love I Am Love opens in a chilly, Christmastime Milan and deliberately warms in tandem with its characters. Members of the blue-blood Recchi family are content hosting lavish parties and gossiping about one another, none more than the matriarch Emma (Tilda Swinton). But when prodigal son Edoardo befriends a local chef, Emma finds herself taken by both the chef’s food and his everyman personality, and is reminded of her poor Soviet upbringing. The courtship that follows is familiar on paper, but director Luca Guadagnino lenses with a strong style and small scenes acquire a distinct energy through careful editing and John Adams’ unpredictable score. Swinton portrays Emma’s unraveling with the same gritty gusto she brought to Julia (2008), and her commitment to the role recognizes few boundaries. You’ve probably seen this story before, but it has rarely been this powerful. (2:00) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Galvin)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a "trailblazer" when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. (1:24) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Jonah Hex Based on DC’s dark western comics, Jonah Hex is a jumbled mess of mishandled superhero tropes and obligatory attempts at badass-ery. The title character, a grizzled gunfighter with a distinctive facial scar, could be an engaging outsider antihero, but as portrayed by Josh Brolin, he feels neither as cool nor as tortured as we’re clearly expected to believe. The film has a decidedly ’90s feel to it — think overbudgeted, underthought masterpieces like Wild Wild West (1999) — with its farcically fantastical take on post-Civil War supervillainy. Its ridiculous cast of character actors is almost completely squandered, including archvillain John Malkovich, Aidan Quinn as Ulysses S. Grant, and Will Arnett in an inexplicably serious role. Megan Fox is trying the hardest out of the whole cast, but in a rather sleazy move, her character always seems to appear in soft focus. Oh, and there are a few explosions. (1:81) 1000 Van Ness. (Sam Stander)

The Karate Kid The most baffling thing about The Karate Kid is its title: little Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) never actually learns karate. He practices kung-fu, an entirely different form of martial arts — you know, from a different country. There’s something obnoxious and absurd about the misnomer: the film seems to suggest that if you’ve seen one Asian culture, you’ve seen them all. That aside, it’s not a bad movie. Smith is mostly pretty likeable, and there’s a definite satisfaction to seeing him grow from bullied weakling to kung-fu star. And Jackie Chan gets to exercise his dramatic chops — he even gets a crying scene! But Karate Kid is a "reboot," the preferred term for the endless stream of unnecessary remakes Hollywood keeps churning out. You can’t help but think about the superior 1984 version. Jaden Smith is no Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan is no Pat Morita, and kung-fu is no karate. Don’t even get me started on the "jacket on, jacket off" crap. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds a little adult for a PG movie. (2:20) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Peitzman)

*The Killer Inside Me This January a Sundance controversy broke. The movie in question was eclectic English director Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, the latest screen version of a beloved and spectacularly nasty noir tale by literary pulp hero Jim Thompson. The protest was that the onscreen violence against women was viciously excessive. The accusation is true: in Winterbottom’s film, violence is horribly immediate, sadistic yet matter-of-fact, almost unendurable — everything movie violence almost never is. There’s nothing remotely comfortable about the highly personal, unnecessary cruelty our antihero wreaks. Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a good ol’ boy in his dusty, back-slappy west Texas hometown of the late 1950s, is a world-class sociopath who depends on lazy small-town gullibility and rote suspicion toward outsiders to literally get away with murder. Lou is shagging local Amy (Kate Hudson) — but gets distracted by Joyce (Jessica Alba), a probable prostitute he’s asked to bum rush outta town. Leading ladies Alba and Hudson are widely perceived as spoiled hotties of little talent — hence perfect battering-rams for pulp-machismo movie violence. What’s cool about Winterbottom’s Killer is that it refuses to let you enjoy the abuse they endure, which is viscerally unpleasant as a fist to the gut. It’s abrupt, grueling, and horrific. At once folksy-nostalgic and vicious, The Killer Inside Me is unabashedly about men who hate women. It successfully translates Thompson’s gambit of insinuating us into the seemingly pleasant, reasonable viewpoint of a protagonist we are then surprised to discover is psychotic and without a conscience. Offended Sundance attendees should’ve gotten a clue: deliberately misleading in its pulp-nostalgia trappings, this is one movie that upsets not gratuitously, but exactly as it should. (1:48) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Killers (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

*Knight and Day A Bourne-again Vanilla Sky (2001)? Considerably better than that embarrassingly silly stateside remake, though not quite as fulfilling as director James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) rework, this action caper played for yuks still isn’t the most original article in the cineplex. But coasting on the dazzling Cheshire grins of its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, reunited for the first time since Sky, you can just make out the birth of a beautiful new franchise. Everygirl June Havens (Diaz) is on her way to her sister’s wedding when she collides-cute at the airport with Roy Miller (Cruise). After killing the passengers and pilots on their plane, he literally sweeps her off her feet — thanks to some potent drugs. Picture a would-be Bond girl dragged against a spy-vs.-spy thriller semi-against-her-will — grappling with the subtextual anxiety rushing beneath all brief romantic encounters as well as some very justifiable survival fears. Can June overcome her trust issues? Is Roy the man of her dreams — or nightmares? Mangold and company miss a few opportunities to have more fun with those barely teased out ideas, and the polished, adult-yet-far-from-knowing charisma of the leads doesn’t quite live up to sophisticated interplay of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, or even the down-home fun of Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, but it’s substantial enough for Knight and Day to coast on, for about 90 minutes tops. (2:10) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

Lovers of Hate Living out of his car after being dumped by Diana (Heather Kafka), perpetually dour Rudy (Chris Doubek) can hardly find a place to take a shower. In stark contrast to his desperate situation, Rudy’s brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky) is a successful children’s fantasy writer, holed up in a borrowed mansion in Utah to work on his next book. Rudy decides to pay his bro an unwelcome surprise visit, but he arrives just behind Diana, who has come to have a serious chat (and also some sex) with Paul. Still in love with Diana, Rudy skulks unnoticed through the tremendous house, playing vengeful voyeur to the new couple’s already rather weird relationship. Lovers of Hate‘s central trinity are not especially nice people, but neither are any of them evil; writer-director Bryan Poyser balances pity and disgust at their painfully human actions, without necessarily making a case for why we care. (1:33) Roxie. (Stander)

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

La Mission A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, fortysomething Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place. (1:57) Opera Plaza, Roxie. (Harvey)

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed "Circus," thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) Elmwood. (Rapoport)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07) Albany, Lumiere.

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Sussman)

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) Elmwood, Opera Plaza, Piedmont. (Chun)

*Splice "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) SF Center. (Devereaux)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

*Toy Story 3 You’ve got a friend in Pixar. We all do. The animation studio just can’t seem to make a bad movie — even at its relative worst, a Pixar film is still worlds better than most of what Hollywood churns out. Luckily, Toy Story 3 is far from the worst: it’s actually one of Pixar’s most enjoyable and poignant films yet. Waiting 11 years after the release of Toy Story 2 was, in fact, a stroke of genius, in that it amplifies the nostalgia that runs through so many of the studio’s releases. The kids who were raised on Toy Story and its first sequel have now grown up, gone to college, and, presumably, abandoned their toys. For these twentysomethings, myself included, Toy Story 3 is a uniquely satisfying and heartbreaking experience. While the film itself may not be the instant classic that WALL-E (2008) was, it’s near flawless regardless of a viewer’s age. Warm, funny, and emotionally devastating—it’s Pixar as it should be. (1:49) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit.

Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

“No new taxes,” but fees and restrictions may apply

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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The agenda for the June 29 Board of Supervisors meeting reads like the fine print of a credit card statement, with fees piled upon more fees.  Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing a slew of increases to sums that must be forked over for a wide array of city services or permits as a way to bridge a gaping budget gap. With major cuts to critical services in the face of a dramatic revenue shortfall, it’s not surprising that the city is tightening its squeeze to make up for some of the damage.

Some of the proposals make a certain amount of sense. There are higher fees proposed for an underground parking lot at Golden Gate Park, which could potentially help dissuade motorists and promote more environmentally friendly transportation options. There are higher fees for tow truck operators, which most anyone who’s ever involuntarily had their car towed could get behind. And the fee for discharging a cannon may go up from $400 to $636. While we’re pretty sure that last one is more likely to irk people who attend military ceremonies, we nonetheless take delight in imagining a rambunctious crew of pirates spilling into the board chambers to oppose it.

But this roster of Newsom’s new hidden fees begs an important question: Why is a mayor so adamantly against raising taxes bent on vacuuming more money out of the pockets of small business owners with higher fees? After all, many of these proposed increases will squeeze struggling, Mom-and-Pop businesses just a little tighter. City permits for auto wreckers, billiard parlors, junk dealers, and massage establishments may go up significantly. The fee for taking an EMT course may get higher. Permits for selling food on the street, driving a pedicab, dealing in second-hand auto parts, or operating a shooting gallery could also increase. Even the annual permit fee for street artists (several of whom we wrote about in our Streets Issue) is getting more expensive.
 
The list of fee hikes is on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, and was referred to the full board by the Budget & Finance Subcommittee. Supervisors recently proposed a number of new revenue generating measures including a nickel-per-drink tax on alcoholic beverages, an increase to the hotel tax, and a restructuring of the business payroll tax.

“There are no new taxes in this budget,” Newsom declared during a June 1 announcement in which he unveiled his 2010-2011 budget. “I know some folks just prefer tax increases. I don’t.”

But why reject taxes outright and then quietly propose a bunch of fees that will place a higher burden on the individuals they impact?

“No new taxes” may sound like music to the ears of a public awash in financial woes, but Newsom’s hidden fees are not unlike taxes. Under this philosophy, it’s not desirable to ask everyone to pitch in an extra nickel the next time they buy a cocktail, but there’s no problem with asking the bar to fork over hundreds more annually for a health inspection. That doesn’t seem to be as simple as a campaign-ready “no new taxes” slogan, but then again, there’s a reason credit card companies bury their hidden fees in the fine print.

Benefits: June 23-June 29

David Talbot
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Benefits: June 23-June 29

Ways to have fun while giving back this week


Wednesday, June 23

Water Bond Happy Hour
Join the Food and Water Watch team in helping to get people to vote NO on the California Water Bond, which will appear on the November ballot. Meet other people who care about the issues and discuss a sustainable water future for California and how water issues effect us all. Featuring stainless steel water bottle raffles to benefit Food and Water Watch, a local non-profit corporate accountability organization.
6 p.m., free
Elixer Bar
3200 16th St., SF
www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Thursday, June 24

Ecocity Builders Art Auction
Ecocity Builders is a non-profit dedicated to reshaping cities, towns, and villages for the long-term health of human and natural systems. Attend this slient art auction to help raise funds for Ecocity featuring hors d’oeuveres and an artist talk with Richard Register.
6 p.m.; $50 donation, fee goes towards bidding
SPUR Urban Center
654 Mission, SF
(510) 452-9522
www.ecocitybuilders.org

Saturday, June 26

Like Water for Chocolate
Inspired by chapter three of Laura Esquivel’s acclaimed novel, Like Water for Chocolate, this fundraiser will feature the spice of Mexico and the heat of love simmering in this fusion of food and performance. Proceeds to benefit Word for Word and Z Space. There is no parking at the performance site. Guests should park at the Mill Valley Middle School parking lot, where they will be shuttled to Hillside Gardens starting at 4:15 p.m. The event will be held outdoors, so dress warmly and comfortably.
5 p.m., $250
Hillside Gardens, Mill Valley
via Mill Valley Middle School
425 Sycamore, Mill Valley
(415) 626-0453

Walk in the Wild
Attend the Oakland Zoo’s annual fundraiser featuing vendors from over 90 restauants, caterers, bakeries, wineries, and breweries offering beverages and cuisine to be enjoyed while walking around the zoo and live music and dancing. Proceeds support the Oakland Zoo’s conservation, education, and animal enrichment programs. This event is 21 and over.
5 p.m., $150
Oakland Zoo
9777 Golf Links Road, Oakl.
www.oaklandzoo.org
(510) 632-9525

Sunday, June 27

Fundraiser for Alan
Alan, who has worked as a waiter at the historic Old Clamhouse in Bayview for 12 years, was one of the four cyclist who were purposely run down by a driver on June 2nd in the Mission and Potrero Hill neighborhoods. Alan has severe injuries to his head and face and has had to undergo 14 hours of surgery. Help raise money for his medical bills at this fundraiser where a door donation of $20 gets you a plate of food from the buffet, one free drink, and two raffle tickets. Featuring live music and a DJ.
3 p.m., $20 donation
The Old Clamhouse
299 Bayshore, SF
(415) 826-4880


Monday, June 28

Honduras Resiste
Watch three videos presented by the Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition (BALASC) on the one year military coup that happened in Honduras in 2009,starting with The Coup and the Popular Resistance, followed by Exposing a Fraudulent Election, and ending with False Democracy in Honduras, and the U.S. Complicity.  Proceeds to benefit the Popular Resistance in Honduras.
8 p.m., $6
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
http://balasc.org

Here’s your big gay homo-cone with sprinkles, sugar: a lickable listicle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Here’s your big gay homo-cone with sprinkles, sugar: a lickable listicle

Alas, we have no year-round Big Gay Ice Cream Truck like they do in the Big Apple. But, as SFist alerted us today (via Haighteration), our own beloved zany-zygote Three Twins Creamery has gone all light in its scoopers for Pride weekend, Fri-Sun offering such lavender lickers as “Rainbow/Gay Sherbet, Pink Triangle (‘a fruity chocolate base with pink chocolate triangles’), Pride Vanilla, Hot Cookie (‘with cookies from the Castro’s favorite cookie shop’), Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (‘vanilla ice cream with blueberry dessert from military rations mixed in’), Rice Milk Harvey Milk and Cookies, and Salted Nuts.” Plus, well, lavender.

Sounds delish. And we have some more ideas.

As SFist editor Brock Keeling suggests, why not “Juanita More Dulce de Leche Please? Sondheim ‘God That’s Good’ Swirl? Bambi Lake‘s Butterscotch Stain?” Here’s our own list of confection suggestions named for notable local homos, beyond Ms. Milk:

Anise Conda
Bevan Marshmallow Fluffty
Carole Migdenscotch
Dan Chipoletta
Mark Praline-o
Tom Amaretto
Clevanilla Jones
Donna Sorbet
Chillvester
The Choclettes
Harry Britt and Nut
Armistead Brownie
Dustin Lance Blackberry
The Sisters of Perpetual Indul-Mint
Cookies and Cream and Phyl and Del
Jose Sa-ripple I, the Strawberry Norton
Cranistat
Brockolate Keeling

 

Anti-war groups disappointed with Obama’s speech

Sasha Cuttler
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Anti-war groups disappointed with Obama’s speech

By Kristen Peters

Bay Area-based anti-war organizations were disappointed that President Barack Obama reaffirmed his support for war in Afghanistan while ousting the commanding general there, saying the doomed and dangerous military intervention is a bigger problem than the generals involved in executing it.

General Stanley McChrystal was today relieved from his post by the president for exhibiting an openly contemptuous view of the Obama administration and other civilian leaders in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, replacing him with General David Petraeus, pending approval from Congress.

“There is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy,” President Obama said during his announcement in the Rose Garden.

That was precisely what the anti-war crowd didn’t want to hear.

“Although there is a personnel change, there is no change in the occupation of Afghanistan,” Nancy Mancias of Code Pink told the Guardian. “The troops are still present. Local groups need to remain focused on bringing our troops home, halt funding and stop the continued occupation overflowing into Pakistan.”

Instead of finding red flags in McChrystal’s insubordinate comments or the RS article’s quotes from disgruntled soldiers and dubious diplomats, Obama simply used the occasion to mix up the staff hierarchy running a war that few think is going well.

“It has proven an incredible waste of resources,” Richard Becker, regional director of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, told the Guardian. “No one can pretend that anything resembling progress has been made. In fact, it’s just the opposite.”

More deaths have occurred over the last 10 months than have taken place in the last five years of combat. In addition to the staggering number of casualties accompanying the war, it also boasts a hefty price tag. According to organizational leaders, expenditure on the war has just exceeded the $1 trillion mark with no end in sight.

“The war — which will soon enter its tenth year – has meant a complete disaster for the people of our nation, a continuation of disasters for U.S. policy, and has inflicted disaster on the people of Afghanistan,” Becker said.

From great man to great screw-up: behind the McChrystal uproar

David Talbot
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Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

When the wheels are coming off, it doesn’t do much good to change the driver.

Whatever the name of the commanding general in Afghanistan, the U.S. war effort will continue its carnage and futility.

Between the lines, some news accounts are implying as much. Hours before Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that “the firestorm was fueled by increasing doubts — even in the military — that Afghanistan can be won and by crumbling public support for the nine-year war as American casualties rise.”

It now does McChrystal little good that news media have trumpeted everything from his Spartan personal habits (scarcely eats or sleeps) to his physical stamina (runs a lot) to his steel-trap alloy of military smarts and scholarship (reads history). Any individual is expendable.

For months, the McChrystal star had been slipping. A few days before the Rolling Stone piece caused a sudden plunge from war-making grace, Time Magazine’s conventional-wisdom weathervane Joe Klein was notably down on McChrystal’s results: “Six months after Barack Obama announced his new Afghan strategy in a speech at West Point, the policy seems stymied.”

Now, words like “stymied” and “stalemate” are often applied to the Afghanistan war. But that hardly means the U.S. military is anywhere near withdrawal.

Walter Cronkite used the word “stalemate” in his famous February 1968 declaration to CBS viewers that the Vietnam War couldn’t be won. “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” he said. And: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

Yet the U.S. war on Vietnam continued for another five years, inflicting more unspeakable horrors on a vast scale.

Like thousands of other U.S. activists, I’ve been warning against escalation of the Afghanistan war for a long time. Opposition has grown, but today the situation isn’t much different than what I described in an article on December 9, 2008: “Bedrock faith in the Pentagon’s massive capacity for inflicting violence is implicit in the nostrums from anointed foreign-policy experts. The echo chamber is echoing: the Afghanistan war is worth the cost that others will pay.”

The latest events reflect unwritten rules for top military commanders: Escalating a terrible war is fine. Just don’t say anything mean about your boss.

But the most profound aspects of Rolling Stone’s article “The Runaway General” have little to do with the general. The takeaway is — or should be — that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is an insoluble disaster, while the military rationales that propel it are insatiable. “Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further,” the article points out. And “counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.”

There was something plaintive and grimly pathetic about the last words of the New York Times editorial that arrived on desks just hours before the general’s White House meeting with the commander in chief: “Whatever President Obama decides to do about General McChrystal, he needs to get hold of his Afghanistan policy right now.”

Like their counterparts at media outlets across the United States, members of the Times editorial board are clinging to the counterinsurgency dream.

But none of such pro-war handwringing makes as much sense as a simple red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that says: “These colors don’t run . . . the world.”

Fierce controversy has focused on terminating a runaway general. But the crying need is to terminate a runaway war.

_________________________________________

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Why McChrystal had to go

Zelda Bronstein
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Why McChrystal had to go

Respect for civilian control over the military chain of command. That’s what Obama talked about in his comments on “accepting the resignation of” (that is, firing) Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And it was the right point to make. The president noted that McChrystal’s conduct “doesn’t meet the standard of a commanding general,” and I think what he was really saying was this:


I may be a Democrat, and I may be (something of) a liberal, and I may never have served in the armed forces, and the military officer corps tends to be overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, but guess what: I’m still the boss. Don’t forget it.


I still think the real issue here isn’t McChrystal — it’s the fact that the war in Afghanistan was and is a mistake, and we can’t possibly win, and the president can shuffle the generals around all he wants, but it won’t change the doomed nature of this pointless mission.


But it seems pretty clear from the tone of Obama’s remarks that he saw a need to remind the military about respect for the commander in chief. And that’s a good thing: When the military starts getting uppity, and the senior officers start acting as if they know more about running things than the elected leaders, you plant the seeds for some very nasty trouble.


And by the way: What a coup for Rolling Stone, for Michael Hastings and for the world of in-depth reporting. It took Hastings more than a month to get this story; without the support of a magazine that could pay for that kind of work, we never would have learned how the military leadership in Afghanistan feels about the president. A reminder that despite the light-speed pace of modern journalism, paying writers to take the time they need to get big stories is still central to democracy. 

Put on a happy face

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Put on a happy face

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Twenty-first-century post-9/11 gay America doesn’t get a makeover in Paul Rudnick’s new collection of short plays, it goes out for one. Rudnick (The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told; Valhalla) surveys the state of the gay nation through four small, broadly comical vignettes in three far-flung American locales — all slouching toward Manhattan — and finds it taking itself and everything else far too seriously.

Admittedly, this is an opportune moment for some accounting. The Proposition 8 battle rages its way toward the Supreme Court; the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy looks set to become a quaint anachronism; and in another cunning argument for atheism, the bishop of Essen, Germany — hip-deep in an ongoing clerical sexual abuse scandal — has just declared that all gays are bound for hell.

Time sashays on. But The New Century, taking its local bow in director George Maguire’s sporadically effective production at New Conservatory Theatre Center, already feels a bit stale, despite dependable one-liners from its witty playwright.

In the first playlet, "Pride and Joy," well-to-do Jewish mother Helene Nadler (Marie O’Donnell, in a smart skirt and blouse and a less well-fitting New York accent) addresses us from the linoleum floor of a school auditorium. Backed by a banner whose utter inclusiveness demands the most estranging acronym, Helene relates her determination to be "the most loving mother of all time" in the face of three children whose homosexual orientations range from the hum-drum to the downright pootré ("In this house we use the toilet," she tells son David, "not a friend from Tribeca!"). The spirit of can-do parenting achieves a kind of crescendo when David (Seth Michael Anderson) briefly appears in full BDSM attire.

"Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach" opens on the eponymous late-night cable-access flaneur (a solid Patrick Michael Dukeman) in an explosion of pastel finery. He’s a former Manhattanite forced into South Florida exile, we are told, for being "too gay." True to form, Mr. Charles flounces about in unabashed embrace of his self-proclaimed title as the last of the true queens. Answering viewer letters, he reads, "Mr. Charles, do you enjoy gay theater?" and responds, with perhaps too much truth, "I am gay theater!" Assistant Shane (Anderson) brings the beefcake to this on-air party, whose point again has to do with the embrace of radical — if heavily stereotyped — difference over conformity to the dreary American norm.

"Crafty," the third playlet, offers yet another angle, this one from a not so with-it but terribly handy mother from Decatur, Ill., (a sharp, genial Deborah Rucker) addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce with her eye-poking assortment of craft treasures. "Crafts allow me to express myself," she says sweetly, "to create something worth dusting!" As she reminisces about her gay son Hank, a talented Broadway designer long dead of AIDS, we find an expansive note of acceptance peaking out from an unlikely assortment of tea cozies and sock monkeys.

All points and characters converge in the eponymous closer, set in a Manhattan maternity ward. There, Mr. Charles trains his "gay ray" on the next generation, and Shane describes an epiphany at the site of the old WTC brought on by the Century 21 sign beaming in neon above it. To Shane, the discount chain is like Prozac with parking, offering a way out of everyone’s funk. "It’s like if Patti LuPone were a store," he enthuses. That image of a new material neon dawn rising over the emptiness of ground zero is probably about right. But is it really so great or new?

THE NEW CENTURY

New Conservatory Theatre Center

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (through July 11), $22–$40

25 Van Ness, SF

www.nctcsf.org

Your big queer week

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

ONGOING

Boys in their Bedrooms Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. Mon-Thu 5 p.m.–2 a.m., Sat–Sun 2 p.m.–2 a.m. Through June 30. Photographer Amos Mac of Original Plumbing zine gets up close and personal, chronicling the trans male lifestyle.

Chronotopia SOMArts, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 552-1770, www.somarts.org. Explore “the past, present, and future of queer histories” with this eye-popping photography exhibit that celebrates the spectrum of queer images.

Faetopia Festival Old Tower Records space at Market and Noe streets, SF; Various times and prices. Through June 26. www.playajoy.org/faetopia. The lovely, radical faeries of Comfort and Joy take over this huge space for a “remix of the past and present for future utopias,” including eco-homo installations, “cuddle cinema” events, and a gossamer wing-load of ideas and performances.

Frameline Film Festival Various locations; see website for dates and times, www.frameline.org. The humongous citywide queer flick fest is still going strong, with dozens of screen gems.

Golden Girls Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 690-9410, www.voicefactorysf.org. Thu/24 and Fri/25, 7p.m. and 9 p.m.. $20–$25. Heklina, Cookie Dough, Matthew Martin, and Pollo Del Mar are joined by Mike Finn and Laurie Busman for live-action versions of two all-new episodes of the beloved TV show.

National Queer Arts Festival Various locations; see website for details, www.queerculturalcenter.org. Experience scandalously good spoken word, cabaret, art installations, and so much more as this powerhouse monthlong celebration of queer revelations continues.

 

WEDNESDAY 23

Allstars 4 The Garage, 975 Howard, SF; (415) 518-1517, www.975howard.com. 8 p.m., $10-$20. An array of one-person shows and monologues that focus on the diversity and struggle of queer daily life.

Booty Call Q Bar, 456 Castro, SF; (415) 626-7220, www.qbarsf.com. 9p.m., $3. Juanita More, Joshua J, and photographers whip up dirty tunes and photobooth eye-candy, with DJ W, Jeremy of House of Stank.

HomoEvolution El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8p.m., free. LGBT hip-hop showcase in full effect, with Foxxjazell, Bry’Nt, Benni E, Drew Mason, and Sgt. Sass.

Mary Go Round LookOut, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-3111, www.lookoutsf.com. 10 p.m., $5. House of Glitterati invades the weekly drag show, anchored by Suppositori Spelling, Cookie Dough, and Pollo Del Mar.

OH! Powerhouse, 1347 Folsom, SF; (415) 552-8689, www.powerhouse-sf.com. The Bright Young Gentlemen’s Adventuring Society cordially invites you to get it on. With DJs Taco Tuesday and PDX hottie Stormy.

Pullin’ Pork for Pride Pilsner Inn, 225 Church, SF; (415) 621-7058. 6 p.m.–9 p.m. free. Hot pork in hot buns (free sandwiches from the Funk N Chunk crew, we mean). It’s the Guardian’s annual free-for-all shindig with DJ Stanley Frank of Vienetta Discotheque, games, surprises, more.

Radar: Old School 3 San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4400, www.radarproductions.org. SF’s top writers reimagine the lives and legacies of queers gone by. With Justin Chin, Len Plass, Cyd Nova, and more.

 

THURSDAY 24

A Spot of Tea African American Arts and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.queerculturalcenter.org. 8 p.m., $12–$20. Original Plumbing brings on an all-transmale cabaret extravaganza with Chris Vargas, Berlin Reed, Ketch Wehr, Glenn Marla, and more.

Bad Reputation Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. The sexy Lex’s infamous Pride kick-off, with DJs Jenna Riot and Dee Dee Crocodile, go-gos, drink specials. Oh, and smokin’ hot grrrls.

Bedtime Stories A Different Light, 498 Castro, SF; (415) 431-0891, www.adlbooks.com. 7:30 p.m., free. Fabio, oh, Fabio? Erotic gay romance author G.A. Hauser steams up the windows of A Different Light.

Carletta Sue Kay, Brent James, Pepperspray The Eagle, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com. 10 p.m., $5. Faggotty rock time. A screwed-up Appalachian-ish crooner, a naughty country high-flyer, and four heavy metal drag queens take over the Eagle. What’s not to love?

Gold Queers in the Night 111 Minna, SF; (415) 974-1719, www.111minnagallery.com. 9 p.m., $7. The Stay Gold and Hella Gay crews team up with Blood, Sweat, and Queers for an epic night of youthful, sweaty jams in the indie dance vein.

Gretchen Phillips and Phranc El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8 p.m., $8–$15. Texan Phillips and “all–American, Jewish, lesbian folksinger” Phranc bring the Sapphic sounds.

Marga Gomez is Proud and Bothered New Conservatory Theater, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-4914, www.nctcsf.org. 8 p.m., $28 advance. Also Sat/26. The hilarious lesbian Latina queen of comedy takes a sharp-shootin’ walk of shame through her not-so-Prideful past.

Nightlife California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF; (415) 379-5128, www.calacademy.org. 6 p.m.-10 p.m., $8–$10. Get thee to the awesome museum for tunes by Juanita More!, LadyHouse, and Stanley Frank, plus Sex Talk with Jane Tollini, and, of course, live penguins.

Queer Radicals New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin, SF; (415) 864-1278. 7p.m., free (summer buffet for $7.50). A panel of queer and transgender activists discusses how to build a militant movement for LGBT liberation.

The Sound of Fabulous Mission High School, 3750 18th St., SF: www.sfprideconcert.org. 8 p.m., $15–$40. Also Fri/25. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco celebrates 30 years of, yes, fabulous, joining forces with the Gay Men’s Chorus, and the Freedom Marching Band for some “out loud and proud.”

Sybaritic Cougars with Ecosexual Tendencies Good Vibrations Polk, 1620 Polk, SF; (415) 345-0400, www.goodvibes.com. 6 p.m.–8 p.m., free. Sex-positive activists Annie Sprinkle and partner Beth Stephens host a retrospective of their Love Art Lab series.

The Tubesteak Connection Aunt Charlie’s, 133 Turk, SF; (415) 441-2922, www.auntcharlieslounge.com. 10 p.m., $4. A sticky, finger-lickin’, Hi-NRG hijinks tribute to bathhouse disco and funk rarities, swarthy clones, and outfits Grace Jones would die for. With DJ Bus Station John.

 

FRIDAY 25

Art Attack Pride Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF; (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com. 9 p.m., $20. Video artist III paints the club fuchsia for DJ Lady Kier of Deee-Lite, the return of drag-rock amazers Pepperspray, and LA mesh-wonder Fade-Dra.

Bearracuda Pride DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-2532, www.dnalounge.com. 9 p.m.-late. $20. Two floors of beard rubs, belly bumps, fur fun, and hairy hijinks as the city’s wild bear club goes big. DJ Ted Eiel heads up.

Bibi Gay Middle Eastern Mega Pride Party Paradise, 1501 Folsom, SF; (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com. 9 p.m., $15. One of the most-anticipated parties of the season, with DJs Nile, Nadar, and Cheon delving into global sounds for a hip-shaking, ululating crowd of all stripes. Hookahs! Hotties! Bellydancers!

Folsom Friday Various SoMa venues, www.folsomfriday.com. 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free. Shuttles run down Folsom Street all night for a sleazy-fun bar crawl in SF’s other mecca for queer venues, including Truck, Chaps, Powerhouse, Blow Buddies, Lone Star, Mr. S, and Off Ramp Leathers.

MR. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF; (415) 626-7001, www.mighty119.com. 8 p.m.–4 a.m. $15. Break out your giant fake mustaches: NYC’s Larry Tee and our own house hero David Harness rock all night at this annual campy hoot. Yes, there’ll be a hot ‘stache (and ‘stache-riding?) contest.

San Francisco Trans March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th St.; (415) 447-2774, www.transmarch.org. 3 p.m. stage, 7 p.m. march; free. Join the transgender community of San Francisco and beyond for a day of live performances, speeches, and not-so-military marching.

Some Thing Biggest Bestest Gayest Funnest Drag Show Sensation! Ever The Stud, 399 Ninth St., SF; (415) 863-6623, www.studsf.com. 9 p.m.–4 a.m., $10. Er, the name kind of says it all? The packed weekly club goes nuclear. VivvyAnne ForeverMore, Glamamore, Juanita More, Down-E, Diamond Daggers, Anna Conda &ldots; who’ll walk away with the mushroom cloud?

Original Plumbing presents Unofficial! Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF; (415) 552-7788, www.elbo.com. 9 p.m., $10. A party in honor of trans pride and visibility — plus, it’ll be a blast. Rocco Katastrophe and Jenna Riot host, DJs Chelsea Starr and 100 spokes spin, furry photo booth, trans slideshow, performances by Glenn Marla and Ice Cream Socialites.

Trans March 2010 Dolores Park, 17 Street and Dolores, SF. Rally at 3:30, march at 7 p.m.. www.transmarch.org. “United by Pride, United by Power” is the theme of this year’s inspiring event, with performances by the Transcendence Gospel Choir, Nori Herras, and a ton more.

.

SATURDAY 26

Big Top vs. Trannyshack Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; (415) 431-1151, www.eightsf.com. 9 p.m., $10 adv. Surely, it will be a circus when these two balls-out parties collide. Big Top brings the half-naked cockring-masters, Trannyshack brings the barkers. With DJ W. Jeremy. Midnight dragocalypse with Heklina, Ambrosia Salad, Miss Rahni, and more.

Bootie: Lady Gaga vs. Madonna DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-2532, www.dnalounge.com. Could it get any stereotypically gayer? Don’t worry, punkers, the Bootie mashup crew are here to subvert it into happy chaos. Huge drag show at midnight.

Chaser: The Imminent Return EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF; (415) 896-1075, www.theendup.com. 5 p.m.–10 p.m., $10. Monistat lives! Her ass-whoopin’, drink-spillin’ drag club resurrects itself, with a full-on show of every insanely entertaining alternaqueen in the phonebook, apparently. Plus DJ Guy Ruben.

Cockblock Mega-Pride Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com. 9 p.m., $20-$25. Wild, wet, and more wild at this ecstatic, high-hoofin’ joint for lezzies, queers, and lovers. With DJs Nuxx and Motive and hot chicks galore.

Excuses for Skipping and Lauren DeRose Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 3 p.m., free. Warm up for the Dyke March with these two live rockin’ acts.

Go Bang! Pride Edition Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com. 9 p.m.-after hours, $5. One of our cutest disco and house parties goes pink with DJs Jason Kendig, Marcelino Andrade, Sergio, and more. Expect to be turned out, put upside-down, and spun around.

Lights Down Low Pride Edition Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF; (415) 863-3516, www.triplecrownsf.com. 8 p.m.–4 a.m., $15. The gonzo electro party delivers a worthy Pride blackout with DJs Larry Tee, Kim Ann Foxman, Saratonin from Brownies for my Bitches, Sleazemore, Derek Bobus, and more. Hosted by the Miss Honey kids and Davi.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McAllister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon–6 p.m., free. Celebrate LGBT pride at this free outdoor event featuring DJs, speakers, and live music. This is the first half of the weekend-long celebration sponsored by SF Pride, featuring hip-hop, a battle of the bands, and more.

LGBTQ History Bike Tour Meet at Cupid’s Arrow on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building, SF; 2 p.m.–5 p.m., $5 donation. Get smart (and fit) for Pride on this eight-mile tour of queer history hotspots, ending up at the Dyke March.

Love and Happiness SOM, 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521, www.som-bar.com. 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $15. It’s a glorious old-school house reunion for the rainbow children, with David Harness and Ruben Mancias on decks, Robnoxious at the door, and Joseph Solis hosting.

Kiss Me Deadly Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. After the Dyke March, cool off (most likely get hotter) with DJ Bunnystyle of Blood, Sweat, and Queers.

Mango After Dyke March Party El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8 p.m., $10/$15. Food, drink, dancing, and girls, girls, girls at this juicy ladies night.

Pink Pleasure Party Good Vibrations Valencia, 603 Valencia, SF; (415) 522-5460, www.goodvibes.com. 8–10p.m., free. Drop in, dyke out, gear up for a sensual Pride at this Good Vibes mix n’ mingle.

Pink Saturday Castro District, SF; www.thesisters.org. 6p.m.–midnight, donation requested, all ages. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence host their cuckoo annual outdoor event, featuring entertainment, beer, cocktails, food, and, duh, cruising galore.

Pink Triangle Installation Twin Peaks Vista, Twin Peaks Blvd parking area, SF; (415) 247-1100, ext 142, www.thepinktriangle.com. 7:30–10:30 a.m., free. Bring a hammer and your hunky work boots and help install the humongous pink triangle atop Twin Peaks for everyone to see. Volunteers needed! Do it!

San Francisco Dyke March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th St., SF; www.dykemarch.org. Rally at 3 p.m.. March at 7 p.m.. Free. The one “do not miss” event of Pride, with tons of entertainment and speakers, impossibly sexy crowd, and a “Dyke Planet, Green Planet” theme.

Sundance Saloon Pride Dance Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.sundancesaloon.org. 8 p.m., $10. Also Sun/27. Shine up your spurs for a country line-dance party that’ll put you in a hootin’ mood.

 

SUNDAY 27

Body Rock Temple Bar, 600 Polk, SF; (415) 931-5196. 11 a.m.–6 p.m., 18+ free. Delightfully tawdry Miss Monistat queens it over this all-day dragstravaganza, featuring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Mutha Chucka, Cher-A-Little, and others. With crazy beats from Electronic Music Bears, High Fantasy, and more.

Gay Shame Goth Cry-In Outside LGBT Center, 1800 Market, SF; www.gayshamesf.org. 2 p.m.–3:30 p.m., free. Protest and grieve the commercialization of Pride and the community – throw on your blackest black and let the tears roll.

Juanita MORE!’s Pride Party 2010 Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois Blvd, SF; (415) 626-5355, www.juanitamore.com. 2 p.m.–2 a.m., $35. Pretty much the charitable Pride party of the year, flooded with cool kids, admirers, and the sounds of the mind-blowing Cougar Cadet Corps Drumline. DJs James Glass, Chelsea Starr, Kim Ann Foxman, and many more. Benefiting Bay Positives. Shuttles available from the Pride Celebration.

Les Beaux SOM, 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521, www.som-bar.com. 3 p.m.–9 p.m., $10. Don’t catch your breath after Pride, girls. Get beautiful with Cockblock’s DJ Nuxx and decks guests Sarah Delush and Rapid Fire.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon–7 p.m., free. The celebration hits full stride, with a buttload of musical and dance performances and, truly, something for everyone. Don’t forget your sunscreen or little umbrella.

LGBT Pride Parade Market at Davis to Market and Eighth Sts, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. 10:30 a.m.–noon, free. This 40th annual parade, with an expected draw of 500,000, is the highlight of the Pride Weekend in the city that defines queer culture.

Honey Pride Paradise, 1501 Folsom, SF; (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com. 6 p.m.–2:30 a.m., $3. Legendary (actually) disco DJ Steve Fabus goes classic house on us, joining the regular Honey Soundsystem discaires for stylish specialness all around. $8 beer bust 6 p.m.-9 p.m..  

Queerly Beloved Pink Sunday Party El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3 p.m.–8 p.m., $5. Courtney Trouble and Tina Horn host this benefit for queerporn.tv. DJs Campbell and Venus in Furs, performers Alotta Boutte and Dexter James, kissing and kink booths, and dirty, sexy queers.

Too Fast for Love Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. “Shake it, fake it, take it” as DJ Campbell spins the dirty at this Pride after-affair.

Your big queer week

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Your big queer week

ONGOING

Boys in their Bedrooms Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. Mon-Thu 5 p.m.–2 a.m., Sat–Sun 2 p.m.–2 a.m. Through June 30. Photographer Amos Mac of Original Plumbing zine gets up close and personal, chronicling the trans male lifestyle on the sexy Lex’s walls.

Chronotopia SOMArts, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 552-1770, www.somarts.org. Explore “the past, present, and future of queer histories” with this eye-popping photography exhibit that celebrates the spectrum of queer images.

Faetopia Festival Old Tower Records space at Market and Noe streets, SF; Various times and prices. Through June 26. www.playajoy.org/faetopia. The lovely, radical faeries of Comfort and Joy take over this huge space for a “remix of the past and present for future utopias,” including eco-homo installations, “cuddle cinema” events, and a gossamer wing-load of ideas and performances.

Frameline Film Festival Various locations; see website for dates and times, www.frameline.org. The humongous citywide queer flick fest is still going strong, with dozens of screen gems.

Golden Girls Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 690-9410, www.voicefactorysf.org. Thu/24 and Fri/25, 7p.m. and 9 p.m.. $20–$25. Heklina, Cookie Dough, Matthew Martin, and Pollo Del Mar are joined by Mike Finn and Laurie Busman for live-action versions of two all-new episodes of the beloved TV show.

National Queer Arts Festival Various locations; see website for details, www.queerculturalcenter.org. Experience scandalously good spoken word, cabaret, art installations, and so much more as this powerhouse monthlong celebration of queer revelations continues.

 

 

WEDNESDAY 23

Allstars 4 The Garage, 975 Howard, SF; (415) 518-1517, www.975howard.com. 8 p.m., $10-$20. An array of one-person shows and monologues that focus on the diversity and struggle of queer daily life.

Booty Call Q Bar, 456 Castro, SF; (415) 626-7220, www.qbarsf.com. 9p.m., $3. Juanita More, Joshua J, and photographers whip up dirty tunes and photobooth eye-candy, with DJ W, Jeremy of House of Stank.

HomoEvolution El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8p.m., free. LGBT hip-hop showcase in full effect, with Foxxjazell, Bry’Nt, Benni E, Drew Mason, and Sgt. Sass.

Mary Go Round LookOut, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-3111, www.lookoutsf.com. 10 p.m., $5. House of Glitterati invades the weekly drag show, anchored by Suppositori Spelling, Cookie Dough, and Pollo Del Mar.

OH! Powerhouse, 1347 Folsom, SF; (415) 552-8689, www.powerhouse-sf.com. The Bright Young Gentlemen’s Adventuring Society cordially invites you to get it on. With DJs Taco Tuesday and PDX hottie Stormy.

Pullin’ Pork for Pride Pilsner Inn, 225 Church, SF; (415) 621-7058. 6 p.m.–9 p.m. free. Hot pork in hot buns (free sandwiches from the Funk N Chunk crew, we mean). It’s the Guardian’s annual free-for-all shindig with DJ Stanley Frank of Vienetta Discotheque, games, surprises, more.

Radar: Old School 3 San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4400, www.radarproductions.org. SF’s top writers reimagine the lives and legacies of queers gone by. With Justin Chin, Len Plass, Cyd Nova, and more.

 

THURSDAY 24

A Spot of T African American Arts and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.queerculturalcenter.org. 8 p.m., $12–$20. Original Plumbing brings on an all-transmale cabaret extravaganza with Chris Vargas, Berlin Reed, Ketch Wehr, Glenn Marla, and more.

Bad Reputation Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. The sexy Lex’s infamous Pride kick-off, with DJs Jenna Riot and Dee Dee Crocodile, go-gos, drink specials. Oh, and smokin’ hot grrrls.

Bedtime Stories A Different Light, 498 Castro, SF; (415) 431-0891, www.adlbooks.com. 7:30 p.m., free. Fabio, oh, Fabio? Erotic gay romance author G.A. Hauser steams up the windows of A Different Light.

Carletta Sue Kay, Brent James, Pepperspray The Eagle, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com. 10 p.m., $5. Faggotty rock time. A screwed-up Appalachian-ish crooner, a naughty country high-flyer, and four heavy metal drag queens take over the Eagle. What’s not to love?

Gold Queers in the Night 111 Minna, SF; (415) 974-1719, www.111minnagallery.com. 9 p.m., $7. The Stay Gold and Hella Gay crews team up with Blood, Sweat, and Queers for an epic night of youthful, sweaty jams in the indie dance vein.

Gretchen Phillips and Phranc El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8 p.m., $8–$15. Texan Phillips and “all–American, Jewish, lesbian folksinger” Phranc bring the Sapphic sounds.

Marga Gomez is Proud and Bothered New Conservatory Theater, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-4914, www.nctcsf.org. 8 p.m., $28 advance. Also Sat/26. The hilarious lesbian Latina queen of comedy takes a sharp-shootin’ walk of shame through her not-so-Prideful past.

Nightlife California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF; (415) 379-5128, www.calacademy.org. 6 p.m.-10 p.m., $8–$10. Get thee to the awesome museum for tunes by Juanita More!, LadyHouse, and Stanley Frank, plus Sex Talk with Jane Tollini, and, of course, live penguins.

Queer Radicals New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin, SF; (415) 864-1278. 7p.m., free (summer buffet for $7.50). A panel of queer and transgender activists discusses how to build a militant movement for LGBT liberation.

The Sound of Fabulous Mission High School, 3750 18th St., SF: www.sfprideconcert.org. 8 p.m., $15–$40. Also Fri/25. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco celebrates 30 years of, yes, fabulous, joining forces with the Gay Men’s Chorus, and the Freedom Marching Band for some “out loud and proud.”

Sybaritic Cougars with Ecosexual Tendencies Good Vibrations Polk, 1620 Polk, SF; (415) 345-0400, www.goodvibes.com. 6 p.m.–8 p.m., free. Sex-positive activists Annie Sprinkle and partner Beth Stephens host a retrospective of their Love Art Lab series.

The Tubesteak Connection Aunt Charlie’s, 133 Turk, SF; (415) 441-2922, www.auntcharlieslounge.com. 10 p.m., $4. A sticky, finger-lickin’, Hi-NRG hijinks tribute to bathhouse disco and funk rarities, swarthy clones, and outfits Grace Jones would die for. With DJ Bus Station John.

 

FRIDAY 25

Art Attack Pride Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF; (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com. 9 p.m., $20. Video artist III paints the club fuchsia for DJ Lady Kier of Deee-Lite, the return of drag-rock amazers Pepperspray, and LA mesh-wonder Fade-Dra.

Bearracuda Pride DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-2532, www.dnalounge.com. 9 p.m.-late. $20. Two floors of beard rubs, belly bumps, fur fun, and hairy hijinks as the city’s wild bear club goes big. DJ Ted Eiel heads up.

Bibi Gay Middle Eastern Mega Pride Party Paradise, 1501 Folsom, SF; (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com. 9 p.m., $15. One of the most-anticipated parties of the season, with DJs Nile, Nadar, and Cheon delving into global sounds for a hip-shaking, ululating crowd of all stripes. Hookahs! Hotties! Bellydancers!

Folsom Friday Various SoMa venues, www.folsomfriday.com. 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free. Shuttles run down Folsom Street all night for a sleazy-fun bar crawl in SF’s other mecca for queer venues, including Truck, Chaps, Powerhouse, Blow Buddies, Lone Star, Mr. S, and Off Ramp Leathers.

MR. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF; (415) 626-7001, www.mighty119.com. 8 p.m.–4 a.m. $15. Break out your giant fake mustaches: NYC’s Larry Tee and our own house hero David Harness rock all night at this annual campy hoot. Yes, there’ll be a hot ‘stache (and ‘stache-riding?) contest.

San Francisco Trans March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th St.; (415) 447-2774, www.transmarch.org. 3 p.m. stage, 7 p.m. march; free. Join the transgender community of San Francisco and beyond for a day of live performances, speeches, and not-so-military marching.

Some Thing Biggest Bestest Gayest Funnest Drag Show Sensation! Ever The Stud, 399 Ninth St., SF; (415) 863-6623, www.studsf.com. 9 p.m.–4 a.m., $10. Er, the name kind of says it all? The packed weekly club goes nuclear. VivvyAnne ForeverMore, Glamamore, Juanita More, Down-E, Diamond Daggers, Anna Conda &ldots; who’ll walk away with the mushroom cloud?

Original Plumbing presents Unofficial! Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF; (415) 552-7788, www.elbo.com. 9 p.m., $10. A party in honor of trans pride and visibility — plus, it’ll be a blast. Rocco Katastrophe and Jenna Riot host, DJs Chelsea Starr and 100 spokes spin, furry photo booth, trans slideshow, performances by Glenn Marla and Ice Cream Socialites.

Trans March 2010 Dolores Park, 17 Street and Dolores, SF. Rally at 3:30, march at 7 p.m.. www.transmarch.org. “United by Pride, United by Power” is the theme of this year’s inspiring event, with performances by the Transcendence Gospel Choir, Nori Herras, and a ton more..

 

SATURDAY 26

Big Top vs. Trannyshack Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; (415) 431-1151, www.eightsf.com. 9 p.m., $10 adv. Surely, it will be a circus when these two balls-out parties collide. Big Top brings the half-naked cockring-masters, Trannyshack brings the barkers. With DJ W. Jeremy. Midnight dragocalypse with Heklina, Ambrosia Salad, Miss Rahni, and more.

Blow Off Slim’s 333 11th St., SF. (415) 255-0333, www.slims-sf.com. 10pm, $15-$20. DJs Bob Mould (of Sugar) and Rich Morel spin the rock remixes for a packed crowd of large hairies, scruffy fairies, and their admirers. Get into it. 

Bootie: Lady Gaga vs. Madonna DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-2532, www.dnalounge.com. Could it get any stereotypically gayer? Don’t worry, punkers, the Bootie mashup crew are here to subvert it into happy chaos. Huge drag show at midnight.

Chaser: The Imminent Return EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF; (415) 896-1075, www.theendup.com. 5 p.m.–10 p.m., $10. Monistat lives! Her ass-whoopin’, drink-spillin’ drag club resurrects itself, with a full-on show of every insanely entertaining alternaqueen in the phonebook, apparently. Plus DJ Guy Ruben.

Cockblock Mega-Pride Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com. 9 p.m., $20-$25. Wild, wet, and more wild at this ecstatic, high-hoofin’ joint for lezzies, queers, and lovers. With DJs Nuxx and Motive and hot chicks galore.

Excuses for Skipping and Lauren DeRose Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 3 p.m., free. Warm up for the Dyke March with these two live rockin’ acts.

Go Bang! Pride Edition Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com. 9 p.m.-after hours, $5. One of our cutest disco and house parties goes pink with DJs Jason Kendig, Marcelino Andrade, Sergio, and more. Expect to be turned out, put upside-down, and spun around.

Lights Down Low Pride Edition Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF; (415) 863-3516, www.triplecrownsf.com. 8 p.m.–4 a.m., $15. The gonzo electro party delivers a worthy Pride blackout with DJs Larry Tee, Kim Ann Foxman, Saratonin from Brownies for my Bitches, Sleazemore, Derek Bobus, and more. Hosted by the Miss Honey kids and Davi.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McAllister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon–6 p.m., free. Celebrate LGBT pride at this free outdoor event featuring DJs, speakers, and live music. This is the first half of the weekend-long celebration sponsored by SF Pride, featuring hip-hop, a battle of the bands, and more.

LGBTQ History Bike Tour Meet at Cupid’s Arrow on the Embarcadero near the Ferry Building, SF; 2 p.m.–5 p.m., $5 donation. Get smart (and fit) for Pride on this eight-mile tour of queer history hotspots, ending up at the Dyke March.

Love and Happiness SOM, 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521, www.som-bar.com. 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $15. It’s a glorious old-school house reunion for the rainbow children, with David Harness and Ruben Mancias on decks, Robnoxious at the door, and Joseph Solis hosting.

Kiss Me Deadly Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. After the Dyke March, cool off (most likely get hotter) with DJ Bunnystyle of Blood, Sweat, and Queers.

Mango After Dyke March Party El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 8 p.m., $10/$15. Food, drink, dancing, and girls, girls, girls at this juicy ladies night.

Pink Pleasure Party Good Vibrations Valencia, 603 Valencia, SF; (415) 522-5460, www.goodvibes.com. 8–10p.m., free. Drop in, dyke out, gear up for a sensual Pride at this Good Vibes mix n’ mingle.

Pink Saturday Castro District, SF; www.thesisters.org. 6p.m.–midnight, donation requested, all ages. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence host their cuckoo annual outdoor event, featuring entertainment, beer, cocktails, food, and, duh, cruising galore.

Pink Triangle Installation Twin Peaks Vista, Twin Peaks Blvd parking area, SF; (415) 247-1100, ext 142, www.thepinktriangle.com. 7:30–10:30 a.m., free. Bring a hammer and your hunky work boots and help install the humongous pink triangle atop Twin Peaks for everyone to see. Volunteers needed! Do it!

San Francisco Dyke March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th St., SF; www.dykemarch.org. Rally at 3 p.m.. March at 7 p.m.. Free. The one “do not miss” event of Pride, with tons of entertainment and speakers, impossibly sexy crowd, and a “Dyke Planet, Green Planet” theme.

Sundance Saloon Pride Dance Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.sundancesaloon.org. 8 p.m., $10. Also Sun/27. Shine up your spurs for a country line-dance party that’ll put you in a hootin’ mood.

 

SUNDAY 27

Body Rock Temple Bar, 600 Polk, SF; (415) 931-5196. 11 a.m.–6 p.m., 18+ free. Delightfully tawdry Miss Monistat queens it over this all-day dragstravaganza, featuring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Mutha Chucka, Cher-A-Little, and others. With crazy beats from Electronic Music Bears, High Fantasy, and more.

Gay Shame Goth Cry-In Outside LGBT Center, 1800 Market, SF; www.gayshamesf.org. 2 p.m.–3:30 p.m., free. Protest and grieve the commercialization of Pride and the community – throw on your blackest black and let the tears roll.

Juanita MORE!’s Pride Party 2010 Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois Blvd, SF; (415) 626-5355, www.juanitamore.com. 2 p.m.–2 a.m., $35. Pretty much the charitable Pride party of the year, flooded with cool kids, admirers, and the sounds of the mind-blowing Cougar Cadet Corps Drumline. DJs James Glass, Chelsea Starr, Kim Ann Foxman, and many more. Benefiting Bay Positives. Shuttles available from the Pride Celebration.

Les Beaux SOM, 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521, www.som-bar.com. 3 p.m.–9 p.m., $10. Don’t catch your breath after Pride, girls. Get beautiful with Cockblock’s DJ Nuxx and decks guests Sarah Delush and Rapid Fire.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon–7 p.m., free. The celebration hits full stride, with a buttload of musical and dance performances and, truly, something for everyone. Don’t forget your sunscreen or little umbrella.

LGBT Pride Parade Market at Davis to Market and Eighth Sts, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. 10:30 a.m.–noon, free. This 40th annual parade, with an expected draw of 500,000, is the highlight of the Pride Weekend in the city that defines queer culture.

Honey Pride Paradise, 1501 Folsom, SF; (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com. 6 p.m.–2:30 a.m., $3. Legendary (actually) disco DJ Steve Fabus goes classic house on us, joining the regular Honey Soundsystem discaires for stylish specialness all around. $8 beer bust 6 p.m.-9 p.m..  

Queerly Beloved Pink Sunday Party El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3 p.m.–8 p.m., $5. Courtney Trouble and Tina Horn host this benefit for queerporn.tv. DJs Campbell and Venus in Furs, performers Alotta Boutte and Dexter James, kissing and kink booths, and dirty, sexy queers.  

Too Fast for Love Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9 p.m., free. “Shake it, fake it, take it” as DJ Campbell spins the dirty at this Pride after-affair.

The real issue in Afghanistan

Zelda Bronstein
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The real issue in Afghanistan

The Rolling Stone article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal has the blog and pundit world all atwitter, with calls for the general’s resignation, deep sighs of remorse, lofty comments about the sanctity of the commander in chief and the chain of command and lots more. The dude screwed up; you don’t let your aides dis the president like that. But that’s really off the point.


Frankly, if there were a way for the U.S. to be successful in Afghanistan, and McChrystal were the guy to do it, Obama shouldn’t care what the guy says. Whatever; you mean you never griped about your boss? It happens. Calling dinner with a French cabinet minister “fucking gay” is pretty fucking stupid, I admit. Overall, the interviews show astonishly bad judgment. (Oh, and General, sir: Don’t go out drinking and get shitfaced with a reporter if you don’t want to look bad in print.)


But the real point of the Rolling Stone story comes at the very end:


Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.


In other words, who cares if the commanding general is a moron with a staff made up of armed frat boys? We can’t win anyway. And we don’t belong there. That’s the only thing that matters.


 

Alerts

David Talbot
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0

alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23

Remembering torture victims


Commemorate U.N.-enacted International Day in Support of Victims of Torture at this screening of The Response, a courtroom drama based on the transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals. Featuring guest speakers from UCSF and SF State, members of Survivors International, Amnesty International, and Health Professionals Against Torture.

6 p.m., free

Amnesty International SF Office, Suite 210

350 Sansome, SF

(415) 546-2080

Water bond happy hour


Join the Food and Water Watch team in helping to get voters to reject the California water bond on the November ballot. Meet others who care about the issues and discuss a sustainable water future for California and how water issues effect us all. Raffles of stainless steel water bottles benefit Food and Water Watch, a local nonprofit corporate accountability organization.

6 p.m., free

Elixir Bar

3200 16th St., SF

www.foodandwaterwatch.org

THURSDAY, JUNE 24

Radically queer


Radical Women celebrates LGBTIQ month with a panel discussion titled "Queer Radicals: Strategies for Our Movement." Queer and transgender activists will discuss how to build a militant movement for LGBT liberation. Pre-discussion buffet with vegetarian options available at 6:15 p.m. for $7.50. Call for information about childcare.

7 p.m., free

New Valencia Hall

Suite 202

625 Larkin, SF

(415) 864-1278

SATURDAY, JUNE 26

Protest Big Oil


Join thousands for a beach lie-in to create a "slash oil" image that will be photographed from a helicopter. Arrive no later than 10:30 a.m. to participate. Attendees will receive an overhead postcard of the event. Then at noon, join Hands Across the Sand, an international statement on protecting coastlines from oil pollution. Carpooling, biking, or taking public transit to the events is highly encouraged.

10 a.m.; free, donations accepted

Ocean Beach

1000 Great Highway, SF

www.slashoil.blogspot.com

www.handsacrossthesand.org

SUNDAY, JUNE 27

Have a good cry


Attend this "cry-in" against the commercialization and corporate sponsorship of the Gay Pride festival. Wear your most morbidly gothic clothing, bring your favorite sad songs, and share your best morose attitude with other queer people and allies eulogizing the demise of the grassroots queer community.

2 p.m., free

San Francisco LGBT Center

1800 Market, SF

www.gayshamesf.org

MONDAY, JUNE 28

Honduras resistance


Watch three videos presented by the Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition (BALASC) on the 2009 military coup in Honduras. Proceeds benefit the Popular Resistance in Honduras.

8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.balasc.org

A tale of animal liberation


Hear activist and former prisoner Andy Stepanian tell how he stood up to one of the world’s largest contract animal testing labs, was charged with terrorism, and served three years in federal prison.

7 p.m., free

Station 40

3030B 16th St., SF

www.sparrowmedia.net

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

Film listings

David Talbot
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0

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

FRAMELINE34

The 34th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 17-27 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $8-15) can be purchased at www.frameline.org. All times pm unless otherwise noted.

THURS/17

Castro The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister 7. Off World 10.

FRI/18

Castro The Real Anne Lister noon. "Curious Thing" (shorts program) 1:45. Sasha 4:30. The Owls 7. Grown Up Movie Star 9:30.

Roxie "Hustlers and Exhibitionists: Andy Warhol Retrospective" 7. "Bi Request" (shorts program) 9:30.

Victoria 8: The Mormon Proposition 7. Open 9:30.

SAT/19

Castro "Fun in Boys’ Shorts" (shorts program) 11am. "Fun in Girls’ Shorts" (shorts program) 1:30. Elvis and Madona 4. I Killed My Mother 6:45. A Marine Story 9:30.

Roxie Mississippi Queen 11am. On These Shoulders We Stand 1:30. Postcard to Daddy 4. Hooters 6:30. "Sex, Leather Jackets, and Hustlers: Andy Warhol Retrospective" 9:30.

Victoria "Trans Francisco" (shorts program) 11am. The Adonis Factor 2. "Gay Aesthetics and Iconography in the Films of Andy Warhol" (illustrated talk) 4:15. Arias With a Twist 6:30. The Man Who Loved Yngve 9:30.

SUN/20

Castro "Dottie’s Magic Pockets Live!" 11am. We Were Here: Voices From the AIDS Years in San Francisco 1. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls 3:45. The Four Faced Liar 6:30. The Consul of Sodom 9:30.

Roxie Mountains That Take Wing 11am. "Skinnyfat" (shorts program) 1:45. "Generations: Youth and Elders Making Movies" (shorts program) 4:15. Bear Nation 6:45. Out of the Blue 9:30.

Victoria Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride 11am. Paulista 1:30. "F**king Traditional Values: Queer Women of Color Shorts" (shorts program) 4:15. William S. Burroughs: The Man Within 7. The Queer X Show 9:30.

MON/21

Castro Dzi Croquettes 11am. Swimming with Lesbians 2. Off World 4. The Last Summer of La Boyita 7. Brotherhood 9:30.

Roxie New York Memories 7. "Are You Krazy?" (shorts program) 9:30.

Victoria Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance 7. My Normal 9:30.

Elmwood The Sea Purple 7. Plan B 9:30.

TUES/22

Castro The Motionless 11am. Sex in an Epidemic 1:15. Is It Just Me? 3:45. Undertow 7. Baby Jane? 9:45.

Roxie Gayby 7. One Night 9:30.

Victoria The Sisters 7. Eyes Wide Open 9:30.

Elmwood William S. Burroughs: The Man Within 7. The Fish Child 9:30.

OPENING

Bluebeard Writer-director Catherine Breillat returns to her 2001 Fat Girl‘s motifs of troubled sisterhood and the adolescent female imagination in this stealthy adaptation of Charles Perrault’s pathological fairy tale. Bluebeard‘s parable of murder coiled around marriage resonates rather obviously with Breillat’s own signature themes, but she avoids obviousness by serving the punishing logic of Perrault’s story chilled. That Breillat is concerned with how the fairy tale is experienced, and specifically the adolescent desires it awakens, is clear from the frame narrative in which two sisters (named autobiographically) ritualistically read "Bluebeard," both of them knowing it (and each other’s reactions) by heart. Their dualities mirror those of the sisters trapped inside the story, the younger of whom, prone to romantic fantasies of castles and marooned by her father’s death, joins Bluebeard in unholy matrimony. Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) may be a sprite next to the titular ogre (Dominique Thomas), but never underestimate the appetite of a younger sibling. Breillat’s visual style is unassuming in its tableaus, but her mastery of point-of-view and restricted narration brings great insight to the mechanisms of the fairy tale. Créton conjures the younger girl’s familiar mix of confidence and innocence with something like joy, while Thomas plays Bluebeard as a tender foil. He appears nearly forlorn when he uncovers his young wife’s fateful act of disobedience and realizes he will now and forever carry out the terrible deed we expect of him. A sharp turn provides a different moral than we might expect, and while it’s not so self-consciously shocking an ending as Fat Girl‘s, it inscribes the birth of a storyteller named Catherine with far greater piquancy.(1:20) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Goldberg)

*Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky Revered for the innovative fashion house that set the bar for style and was always knocked off but never cut prices for the real deal (and still sniffs at online clothing sales), Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel gets her second biopic, as an artist on par with composer Igor Stravinsky in this rhapsodically sensuous love letter to an unlikely romance. It opens with the designer and future branding legend (depicted with burning eyes and pantherine mystery by Anna Mouglalis) attending the controversial, riot-starting 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris. Recognizing Stravinsky (a viral avant-garde stud-muffin in the hands of Mads Mikkelsen, last in deadlocks and warrior face in Clash of the Titans) as a simpatico radical spirit, Chanel lends her house to the composer. He comes with considerable baggage: a slew of children and a consumptive wife, Katarina (Elena Morozova). Morozova’s performance as the angel-faced earth mother scorned, so blatantly disrespected by the rad lovers madly getting down on the music-room carpet, almost steals the show, but then the house-porn fabulosity of the recreated Chanel villa in Garches — a symbol of their hermetic attraction and shot like a seductive, claustrophobic, black-and-white deco womb — takes over, and we’re back in the thick of CoGor’s somewhat inexplicable affair once again. (1:55) Shattuck. (Chun)

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then Before it was torn down by a new landowner, multimedia artist Brent Green went to visit the house built by late Kentucky hardware store clerk Leonard Wood — a poor man’s Winchester Mystery House, endlessly elaborated with newly knocked-down walls and weird handmade detailing. This obsessive one-man construction effort was commenced as a hopeful "healing machine" for its other resident, his beloved wife Mary, and continued after her death from cancer. Green built his own backyard replica of the house for this experimental first feature, a sort of live-action stop motion movie whose characters like move like puppets in stuttering frame jumps, with animation, dubbed occasional dialogue, crude intertitles, and some gently fantastical imagery adding to its dreamlike aura. Mary (played by Donna K.) makes a curious living breeding and selling wild bird eggs; Leonard (Michael McGinley), among his other callings, composes and records droning minimalist "church music." They met, purportedly, in a car crash. Green’s strangle-voiced blank verse narration and filmic folk-art affectations can sometimes make Gravity just sit there — certainly it feels longer than its 75 minutes. But it also has an off-center lyricism that in the end serves honorably this story of profound love between two very odd people. The director (who currently has an installation across the street at the Berkeley Art Museum) will appear at this one-night Pacific Film Archive screening. (1:20) Pacific Film Archive. (Harvey)

Jonah Hex Josh Brolin and Megan Fox star in this Wild West-set graphic novel adaptation. (1:81) Elmwood.

Lovers of Hate Living out of his car after being dumped by Diana (Heather Kafka), perpetually dour Rudy (Chris Doubek) can hardly find a place to take a shower. In stark contrast to his desperate situation, Rudy’s brother Paul (Alex Karpovsky) is a successful children’s fantasy writer, holed up in a borrowed mansion in Utah to work on his next book. Rudy decides to pay his bro an unwelcome surprise visit, but he arrives just behind Diana, who has come to have a serious chat (and also some sex) with Paul. Still in love with Diana, Rudy skulks unnoticed through the tremendous house, playing vengeful voyeur to the new couple’s already rather weird relationship. Lovers of Hate‘s central trinity are not especially nice people, but neither are any of them evil; writer-director Bryan Poyser balances pity and disgust at their painfully human actions, without necessarily making a case for why we care. (1:33) Roxie. (Sam Stander)

*The Oath Laura Poitras’ disturbing documentary is a portrait of two men closely bound to al Qaeda, though only one is interviewed. That would be Abu Jandal, a husband, father, current Yemen taxi driver, erstwhile jihadist operating from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and former chief bodyguard to Osama bin Laden. The off-camera one is his brother-in-law Salim Hamdan, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner from late 2001 whom he’d recruited as bin Laden’s driver-mechanic. Was Salim merely a for-hire worker with no knowledge of the 9/11 conspiracy or other terrorist actions? Was his lengthy imprisonment an example of the War on Terror’s flaunting of legal conventions? (After Hamdan won a Supreme Court victory, Congress invented a whole new kind of charge — "material support to terrorism" — to keep him in custody.) These are questions more pondered than answered here. We do, however, get a big close-up dose of Jandal, who laments the harm he might have done his bro-in-law while still counseling young Muslim Yemenites and his own barely-past-toddler son in jihadist righteousness, not excluding justification of killing Western civilians. He comes off as dangerous and charming, a hustler and braggart. Offering further insight into what makes up (or sculpts) a terrorist mindset is a pre-9/11 clip of an elegant, prissy bin Laden — a salt pillar of airless judgment
sure he’s channeling the intentions of Allah. (1:36) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Sun Behind the Clouds In this doc, the Dalai Lama comments on the 2008 Tibetan demonstrations against Chinese rule. (1:19) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Toy Story 3 Somehow, it’s terrifying that in this installment, the toy-owning kid is heading off to college. (1:49) Cerrito, Marina.

*Winter’s Bone See "True Grit." (1:40) California, Embarcadero.

ONGOING

The A-Team Why was the original A-Team the most popular band of mercenaries on TV? The estimable chemistry and comedic skills of Mr. T; legit Breakfast at Tiffany‘s star George Peppard; conservative commentator Dwight Schultz; and Dirk Benedict, fresh from his role as the original Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, played a major part, as did the quasi-anti-authoritarian, boyish, blow-’em-up-real-good tone, making it more of a cartoonishly violent kin to MASH than First Blood (1982). The cheeky humor and snappy writing were the real key to The A-Team‘s popularity — the reason impressionable protein units like yours truly tuned in. Director Joe Carnahan (2006’s Smokin’ Aces) and cast seem to have sussed out a bit of that magic, especially when the sun-roasted Bradley Cooper as Faceman and Sharlto Copley as Murdock roll with the what-the-hell non-sequiturs (less sure is the star of last year’s District 9‘s grip on exactly what accent he’s been charged with). But the cinematic version won’t be rehabbing the public’s view of guns-for-hire like Blackwater anytime soon. Liam Neeson lacks the cigar-chomping paternal bravado of Peppard, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson is tasked with the unenviable job of following T time, and the script, complete with the ludicrously elaborate plans and a spark-challenged romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel, is just a rough excuse to watch boys and their toys. (1:57) Cerrito, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Presidio, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) Lumiere, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*The Father of My Children Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a perpetual motion machine: a Paris-based veteran film producer of complicated multinational whose every waking moment is spent pleading, finessing, reassuring, and generally putting out fires of the artistic, logistic, or financial kind. But lately the strain has begun to surpass even his Herculean coping abilities. Debtors are closing in; funding might collapse for a brilliant but uncommercial director’s already half-finished latest. After surviving any number of prior crises, Gregoire’s whole production company might finally dissolve into a puddle of red ink and lawsuits. He barely has time to enjoy his perfect family, with Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three young daughters happily ensconced in a charming country house. Something’s got to give — and when it does, writer-director Mia Hansen-Love’s drama (very loosely based on the life of a late European film producer) drastically shifts its focus midway. Her film’s first half is so arresting — with its whirlwind glimpse at a job so few of us know much about, yet which couldn’t be more important in keeping cinema afloat — that the second half inevitably seems less interesting by comparison. Still, for about 55 minutes The Father of My Children offers something you haven’t quite seen before, an experience well worthwhile even if the subsequent 55 are less memorable. (1:50) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*The Full Picture The unusually high proportion of non-native San Franciscans not only underlines our living in a "destination" city, but also suggests that many of us were eager to leave something behind. Certainly it’s no accident The Full Picture’s fraternal protagonists both chose to live here. Yes, it’s a lovely place. It also happens to be 3,000 insulating miles from where they were raised, and where the dragon still dwells. Unfortunately, she can fly: sensible heels clacking militaristically across airport tarmac first clue us to the personality of monster-mother Gretchen Foster (Bettina Devin), who sweetly announces she’s off to visit "my boys" in SF, then breathes fire when that charm fails to secure a first class upgrade. Clearly it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Jon Bowden’s first feature is based on his original play, and this screen incarnation doesn’t entirely leave the whiff of stagecraft behind. It’s smart, fluid, funny, and biting, as well as a nice addition to the roster of movies that really do convey something about living here. (1:20) Roxie. (Harvey)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Clay, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Harry Brown Shades of Dirty Harry (1971) for the tea cozy and tweed set: elegantly rendered and very nicely played, Harry Brown might be the dark, late-in-the-day elder brother to 1971’s Get Carter, in the hands of eponymous lead Michael Caine. He’s a pensioner mourning the passing of his beloved wife, his mysterious life as a Marine stationed in Northern Ireland firmly behind him. Then his chess-playing pal Leonard (David Bradley) is terrorized and killed by the unsavory gang of heroin dealing hoodlums who lurk near their projects in a tunnel walkway like gun-toting, foul-mouthed, sociopathic trolls. Harry Brown is, er, forced to forsake a vow of peace and go commando on the culprits’ asses, triggering some moments of ultraviolence that are unsettling in their whole-hearted embrace of vigilante justice. Like predecessors similarly fixated on vengeance in their respective urban hells, a la Hardcore (1979) and Taxi Driver (1976) (Harry Brown echoes key moments in the latter, in particular — see, for instance, its keenly tense, eerily humorous gun shopping scene), Harry Brown is essentially an arch-conservative film, if good looking and even likable with Caine meting out the punishment. The overall denouement just might make some seniors feel very, very good about the coiled potential for hurt embedded in their aging frames. (1:42) Four Star. (Chun)

Holy Rollers Holy Rollers isn’t a movie — it’s a headline stretched out to 90 minutes. Yes, the set-up is worthy of adaptation: Hassidic Jewish kid begins importing ecstasy from Amsterdam. And it’s based on a true story! But the film is far too matter-of-fact, never delving into the important questions that might elevate it past a glorified reenactment. That’s not to say the performances aren’t good. Jesse Eisenberg continues to prove he can do well in leading roles, while supporting actors Justin Bartha and Ari Graynor are both charming, in their own ways. The problem is the material. What is Holy Rollers saying about the war on drugs, or organized religion, or the desire to live above one’s means? Nothing, really. The tone is equally problematic, as it repeatedly fails to find the right blend of comedy and drama. The movie’s major selling point is that it will make you want to visit Amsterdam — you know, if you didn’t already. (1:29) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a "trailblazer" when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. (1:24) Bridge, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Karate Kid The most baffling thing about The Karate Kid is its title: little Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) never actually learns karate. He practices kung-fu, an entirely different form of martial arts — you know, from a different country. There’s something obnoxious and absurd about the misnomer: the film seems to suggest that if you’ve seen one Asian culture, you’ve seen them all. That aside, it’s not a bad movie. Smith is mostly pretty likeable, and there’s a definite satisfaction to seeing him grow from bullied weakling to kung-fu star. And Jackie Chan gets to exercise his dramatic chops — he even gets a crying scene! But Karate Kid is a "reboot," the preferred term for the endless stream of unnecessary remakes Hollywood keeps churning out. You can’t help but think about the superior 1984 version. Jaden Smith is no Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan is no Pat Morita, and kung-fu is no karate. Don’t even get me started on the "jacket on, jacket off" crap. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds a little adult for a PG movie. (2:20) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Killers (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) SF Center. (Chun)

*Looking for Eric Eric Bishop (Steve Everts) is a single dad, frustrated at his inability to bond with his teenage sons and heartbroken over his failed marriage to Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the woman he walked out on 20 years ago but never managed to get over. Just when things are looking dire, Eric is delivered in surprising, magical fashion by hallucinatory visitations from Eric Cantona, his favorite soccer player, a philosophical Frenchman who was as renowned for his inscrutable press conferences as he was for his scintillating goals. Cantona plays himself, and passes pensive joints with Bishop as they slowly piece his shattered life back together. American viewers might be have trouble deciphering the intricacies of soccer culture or the molasses-thick Mancunian accents, but at its heart the movie (by Brit director Ken Loach) is an amusing, tautly crafted fable of middle-aged alienation giving way to hope and gumption. (1:57) Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

Marmaduke (1:27) 1000 Van Ness.

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

La Mission A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, fortysomething Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place. (1:57) Four Star, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed "Circus," thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) Albany, Piedmont, Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) Elmwood, Lumiere, Piedmont. (Rapoport)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Richardson)

Robin Hood Like it or not, we live in the age of the origin story. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood introduces us to the outlaw while he’s still in France, wending his way back to Albion in the service of King Richard III. The Lionheart soon takes an arrow in the neck in order to demonstrate the film’s historical bona fides, and yeoman archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) — surrounded by a nascent band of merry men — accidentally embroils himself in a conspiracy to wrest control of England. The complications of this intrigue hie Robin to Nottingham, where he is thrown together with Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett), a plucky rural aristocrat who likes getting her hands dirty almost as much as she likes a bit of smoldering Crowe seduction. A lot of hollow medieval verisimilitude ensues, along with a good bit of slow-mo swordplay, but the cumulative effect is tepid and rote. (2:20) 1000 Van Ness. (Richardson)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07) Albany, Embarcadero.

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

Shrek Forever After 3D It’s easy to give Dreamworks a hard time for pumping out a fourth sequel to a film that never really needed a sequel in the first place. But Shrek Forever After isn’t all that bad — it’s mostly just irrelevant. The film does begin on an interesting note, with Shrek discovering the consequences of settling down with a wife and kids: serious ennui. It’s refreshing to see a fairy tale in which "happily ever after" is revealed to be rather mundane. But soon there are wacky magical hijinks that spawn an alternate universe, a cheap way to inject new life into tired old characters. (You like Puss in Boots? Well, he’s fat now.) Luckily, the voice actors are still game and the animation remains top-notch. The 3D effects are well used for once, fleshing out Shrek’s world rather than providing an unnecessary distraction. The end result is a mildly entertaining addition to the franchise, but like the alternate universe in which Shrek finds himself stranded, there’s no real reason it should exist. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) Empire, Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Splice "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) Elmwood. (Sussman)

Bread and Circuses: Mexico and the World Cup

Zelda Bronstein
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Bread and Circuses: Mexico and the World Cup

MEXICO CITY (June 11th) — The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy, from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year’s edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.


Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with ten men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister “whores.” Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico’s downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.


One group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico’s fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association Finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. “Forget about football,” sneered “El Guerro” Gonzalez, a regular, “this is where the real money gets made.” Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred-point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.


But the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA’s despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms “soccer” and the rest of the Planet Earth calls football.


Indeed, the “Copa del Mundo” (“Cup of the World”) will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens — let alone political scandal, of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, including the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters. The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tailspinning out of control — a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon’s rosy claims of “recovery.”


Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation’s most powerful politicians will fade from the primetime news, and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady’s cousin will not even be noticed. The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions — this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution — could rock the land, but for the next month, Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.
“In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives,” philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, “if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life.”
With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the “seleccion” will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.


If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon, who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago, is banking on the national selection’s triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon’s bet is hardly a sure thing.


Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation’s rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament, and “His Excellency” Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The “Bafana Bafana” (“Boys Boys”) as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics’ incessantly droning “vuvazelas” or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.


On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent — five other African teams are in the draw, with war-torn Cote d’Ivoire the cream of the crop.


Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico’s four-team group — while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon’s popularity.


Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team’s poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico — and Calderon — from ignominious elimination.


When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma — drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis. On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico’s side will be pronounced from the altars and saints dressed up in the national colors.


Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the “FIFA Fan Fest” on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.


Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.)  The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 for the 2010 World Cup.


This year’s Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world’s best player, Leonel “the Flea” Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales’ immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?


If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.


How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d’etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France, which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry’s illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders’ film)? Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?


But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.


South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA. Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent’s fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.
Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.


In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela’s 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Madiba was held in isolation and could never participate.


Nelson Mandela’s vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession — the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film “Invictus,” and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.


The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country’s very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa’s 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day. The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.


Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) — 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism.
If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing’s much-praised “Birds’ Nest” coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed in part thanks to  the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games. 


With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats — a week’s wages in the cities and a month’s income in some rural areas — are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup’s 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at “friendly” preliminary games.


Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.


Although conflict is my bread and butter, I’m not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world. 


John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org


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Film listings

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

OPENING

The A-Team Is nothing sacred? (1:57) Presidio.

The Full Picture See "Mama Drama." (1:20) Roxie.

Holy Rollers Holy Rollers isn’t a movie — it’s a headline stretched out to 90 minutes. Yes, the set-up is worthy of adaptation: Hassidic Jewish kid begins importing ecstasy from Amsterdam. And it’s based on a true story! But the film is far too matter-of-fact, never delving into the important questions that might elevate it past a glorified reenactment. That’s not to say the performances aren’t good. Jesse Eisenberg continues to prove he can do well in leading roles, while supporting actors Justin Bartha and Ari Graynor are both charming, in their own ways. The problem is the material. What is Holy Rollers saying about the war on drugs, or organized religion, or the desire to live above one’s means? Nothing, really. The tone is equally problematic, as it repeatedly fails to find the right blend of comedy and drama. The movie’s major selling point is that it will make you want to visit Amsterdam — you know, if you didn’t already. (1:29) Contemporary Jewish Museum, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a "trailblazer" when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. (1:24) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Karate Kid Is nothing sacred? (2:20)

Kinatay See Trash. (1:45) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

9500 Liberty 9500 Liberty spins off co-directors Eric Byler and Annabel Park’s YouTube series of "interactive documentary" footage surrounding a recent immigration policy struggle in Prince William County, Virginia. The Board of County Supervisors passed a resolution in 2007 mandating that police perform an immigration status check on any individual they had "probable cause" to believe was an illegal alien. The filmmakers emphasize the significance of new media in this local battle, as both sides mobilize through aggressive blogging. And you heard the part about how this movie is based on YouTube videos, right? The filmmakers’ sympathies are clear, as they reveal the hateful rhetoric of the anti-illegal immigration forces, but their emotional appeal hardly seems irresponsible — it serves to highlight the humanity often obscured by reductive xenophobia. The film apparently predates the recent Arizona immigration strife, but as the story unfolds, the parallels are both eerie and hopeful. (1:21) Lumiere. (Sam Stander)

*Ondine You want to believe in mermaids, leprechauns, tooth fairies, and Father Christmas — and director Neil Jordan plays with those hopes, and fears, in this unabashedly romantic fable set in a Irish fishing village. Mullet-ed fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), dubbed "Circus," thanks to his days as a drinking fool, is the butt of everyone’s jokes till he happens to catch a mysterious girl (Alicja Bachleda) in his net. She calls herself Ondine, shies away from people, and sings in an unknown tongue to the sea, drawing salmon, lobster, and fortune to the fisherman otherwise down on his luck. His precocious daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), is in need of a kidney transplant — and a measure of hope — and she grows convinced that her father’s hidden-away water baby is a selkie, a mythical Celtic sea creature that can shed its seal skin, bond with humans, and make wishes come true. Unfortunately believing in magic doesn’t always make it so, though Ondine gracefully limns that space between belief and reality, squeezing small moments of pleasure and humor from its rough, albeit attractive, characters and absolutely stunning landscapes in scenes beautifully lensed by onetime Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. (1:43) Albany, Clay, Piedmont. (Chun)

*Perrier’s Bounty Not about sparkling water, director Ian Fitzgibbon and writer Mark O’Rowe’s giddy Irish crime tale is this year’s In Bruges (2008): a crass, self-consciously clever, amusingly characterful, and twisty take on Brit gangster tropes, with double-plus good actors and very scenic widescreen photography. Cillian Murphy — convincingly scruffy now that he’s aging out of excessive prettiness — plays a Dublin reprobate whose debt to some shady types is overdue. His attempts to neutralize that situation rapidly envelope the best-friend neighbor he’s secretly sweet on (Jodie Whittaker, Peter O’Toole’s protégée in 2006’s Venus) and the coke addict father (Jim Broadbent) he’s generally estranged from. Perrier’s Bounty
remains crafty and jaunty even as foretold "brutal and tragic events" unfold. Of course it’s contrived — but well contrived, with performances (including Brendan Gleeson as the titular crime boss) and piled-up incidents alike quite enjoyable. (1:28) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

ONGOING

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Piedmont, Presidio, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

*The Father of My Children Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a perpetual motion machine: a Paris-based veteran film producer of complicated multinational whose every waking moment is spent pleading, finessing, reassuring, and generally putting out fires of the artistic, logistic, or financial kind. But lately the strain has begun to surpass even his Herculean coping abilities. Debtors are closing in; funding might collapse for a brilliant but uncommercial director’s already half-finished latest. After surviving any number of prior crises, Gregoire’s whole production company might finally dissolve into a puddle of red ink and lawsuits. He barely has time to enjoy his perfect family, with Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three young daughters happily ensconced in a charming country house. Something’s got to give — and when it does, writer-director Mia Hansen-Love’s drama (very loosely based on the life of a late European film producer) drastically shifts its focus midway. Her film’s first half is so arresting — with its whirlwind glimpse at a job so few of us know much about, yet which couldn’t be more important in keeping cinema afloat — that the second half inevitably seems less interesting by comparison. Still, for about 55 minutes The Father of My Children offers something you haven’t quite seen before, an experience well worthwhile even if the subsequent 55 are less memorable. (1:50) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Bridge, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Harry Brown Shades of Dirty Harry (1971) for the tea cozy and tweed set: elegantly rendered and very nicely played, Harry Brown might be the dark, late-in-the-day elder brother to 1971’s Get Carter, in the hands of eponymous lead Michael Caine. He’s a pensioner mourning the passing of his beloved wife, his mysterious life as a Marine stationed in Northern Ireland firmly behind him. Then his chess-playing pal Leonard (David Bradley) is terrorized and killed by the unsavory gang of heroin dealing hoodlums who lurk near their projects in a tunnel walkway like gun-toting, foul-mouthed, sociopathic trolls. Harry Brown is, er, forced to forsake a vow of peace and go commando on the culprits’ asses, triggering some moments of ultraviolence that are unsettling in their whole-hearted embrace of vigilante justice. Like predecessors similarly fixated on vengeance in their respective urban hells, a la Hardcore (1979) and Taxi Driver (1976) (Harry Brown echoes key moments in the latter, in particular — see, for instance, its keenly tense, eerily humorous gun shopping scene), Harry Brown is essentially an arch-conservative film, if good looking and even likable with Caine meting out the punishment. The overall denouement just might make some seniors feel very, very good about the coiled potential for hurt embedded in their aging frames. (1:42) Four Star. (Chun)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Killers (1:40) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness.

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) SF Center. (Chun)

Living in Emergency Filmmakers follow four volunteers of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) in Liberia and the Congo, from the initial shock of a first-timer to the overwhelming exhaustion of a veteran. Morally ambiguous decisions have left many of them arrogant and bitter and it’s apparent that these people are not the inflated heroes that we might wish, but normal people who were drawn to test themselves in circumstances of little hope. Some fail. Living in Emergency is an interesting glimpse into a provocative world, and the morally icky stuff is sometimes worse than the blood and death on screen. But a glimpse is all it is. The filmmakers clearly have an agenda that doesn’t include time for exploring the lives of any of the doctors, patients or procedures, and they leave the audience wondering whether there might be more lurking beneath the surface. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Galvin)

*Looking for Eric Eric Bishop (Steve Everts) is a single dad, frustrated at his inability to bond with his teenage sons and heartbroken over his failed marriage to Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the woman he walked out on 20 years ago but never managed to get over. Just when things are looking dire, Eric is delivered in surprising, magical fashion by hallucinatory visitations from Eric Cantona, his favorite soccer player, a philosophical Frenchman who was as renowned for his inscrutable press conferences as he was for his scintillating goals. Cantona plays himself, and passes pensive joints with Bishop as they slowly piece his shattered life back together. American viewers might be have trouble deciphering the intricacies of soccer culture or the molasses-thick Mancunian accents, but at its heart the movie (by Brit director Ken Loach) is an amusing, tautly crafted fable of middle-aged alienation giving way to hope and gumption. (1:57) Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

Marmaduke (1:27) 1000 Van Ness.

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

La Mission A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, fortysomething Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place. (1:57) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) Lumiere, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Richardson)

Robin Hood Like it or not, we live in the age of the origin story. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood introduces us to the outlaw while he’s still in France, wending his way back to Albion in the service of King Richard III. The Lionheart soon takes an arrow in the neck in order to demonstrate the film’s historical bona fides, and yeoman archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) — surrounded by a nascent band of merry men — accidentally embroils himself in a conspiracy to wrest control of England. The complications of this intrigue hie Robin to Nottingham, where he is thrown together with Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett), a plucky rural aristocrat who likes getting her hands dirty almost as much as she likes a bit of smoldering Crowe seduction. A lot of hollow medieval verisimilitude ensues, along with a good bit of slow-mo swordplay, but the cumulative effect is tepid and rote. (2:20) 1000 Van Ness. (Richardson)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07) Albany, Embarcadero.

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Sussman)

Shrek Forever After 3D It’s easy to give Dreamworks a hard time for pumping out a fourth sequel to a film that never really needed a sequel in the first place. But Shrek Forever After isn’t all that bad — it’s mostly just irrelevant. The film does begin on an interesting note, with Shrek discovering the consequences of settling down with a wife and kids: serious ennui. It’s refreshing to see a fairy tale in which "happily ever after" is revealed to be rather mundane. But soon there are wacky magical hijinks that spawn an alternate universe, a cheap way to inject new life into tired old characters. (You like Puss in Boots? Well, he’s fat now.) Luckily, the voice actors are still game and the animation remains top-notch. The 3D effects are well used for once, fleshing out Shrek’s world rather than providing an unnecessary distraction. The end result is a mildly entertaining addition to the franchise, but like the alternate universe in which Shrek finds himself stranded, there’s no real reason it should exist. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Solitary Man Consider this another chapter in a larger recession-era cinematic narrative: a kind of corollary to Up in the Air and another dispatch from the flip side of the American dream — namely, American failure. Wheeling, dealing, disgusting, and charming in turns, Michael Douglas manages the dubious achievement of making a hungry and lecherous BMW dealership honcho compelling, even as we roll our eyeballs in disgust. His Ben Kalmen was once at the top of the world, a fairy-tale self-made star whose luxury auto commercials were all over TV, a sharp-tongued wife (Susan Sarandon) and tenderly tolerant daughter (Jenna Fischer) by his side. After his career lands in the crapper, Ben begins a long climb up, trading favors with his girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker) and taking her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to his alma mater for her college interview. During this trip down memory lane he renews his ties with old pal Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and befriends budding schlub Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), all while making some very bad, reflexively womanizing choices. If you can stomach its morally bereft, perpetually backsliding yet endearingly honest protagonist, you’ll be rewarded with on-point dialogue and a clear-eyed yet empathetic character study concerning the free fall of a self-sabotaging, old-enough-to-know-better prick, individualistic to the core and even more. Is Ben as worthy of a bailout, or a second chance, as the American auto industry? The answer remains up in the air. (1:30) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Splice "If we don’t use human DNA now, someone else will," declares Elsa (Sarah Polley), the brash young genetic scientist bent on defying the orders of her benign corporate benefactors in Vincenzo Natali’s pseudo-cautionary hybrid love child, Splice. From that moment on, it’s pretty clear that any ethical conundrums the movie raises aren’t really worthy of debate: what Elsa wants to do in the name of scientific progress — splice human DNA into gooey muscle masses to provide said corporation with proteins for gene therapy — is, you know, deranged. Elsa bucks both corporate policy and sound moral judgment and does it anyway, much to the horror of her husband and fellow hotshot research scientist, Clive (Adrien Brody). Her genetic tinkering soon results in the dramatic birth of something akin to a homicidal fetal chick crossed with a skinned bunny. It grows at an alarming rate, and when human characteristics become apparent, Elsa clings to it with the instinctual vigor of a tigress protecting her cub. When Elsa and Clive are forced to hide their creation at Elsa’s abandoned family farmhouse to escape detection from prying corporate eyes, Splice evolves into another kind of hybrid: a genetically engineered Scenes from a Marriage (1973) crossed with the DNA of The Omen (1976) and grafted onto the most very special My So-Called Life episode ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Splice may be a ludicrous, cut-rate exercise in Brood-era David Cronenberg — but it’s a damned entertaining one. (1:45) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)<\!s>

Alerts

David Talbot
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0

alert@sfbg.com

THURSDAY, JUNE 10


“This Bridge Called My Back”

Radical Women, an international socialist feminist organization, begins its summer Fiery Feminist Theory Series with selected readings from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Home cooked dinner with vegetarian options available at 6:15 p.m. for $7.50.

7 p.m., free

New Valencia Hall

Suite 202

625 Larkin, SF

(415) 864-1278

FRIDAY, JUNE 11


ARCO/BP Boycott Party

Join this peaceful protest calling for the shut down of BP franchises. If you feel helpless as oil continues to kill wildlife and poison the Gulf of Mexico and its shores, make your voice heard with your dollars. Boycott BP and it’s franchises, including Amoco, Castrol, ARAL, ARCO, AM/PM, and Wild Bean Café.

5:30 p.m., free

ARCO Gas Station

1175 Fell, SF

Berkeley Critical Mass

Advocate for the creation of human speed transportation zones while having fun with other members of the bicycling community at this “bike prom” themed critical mass through the streets of Berkeley.

6 p.m., free

Gather at Berkeley BART

Center and Shattuck, Berk.

www.berkeleycriticalmass.org

SATURDAY, JUNE 12

 

Drone Warfare

Join this community forum on the moral, ethical, and legal implications of drone warfare. Use of drones by the U.S. military has increased and is responsible for the deaths of numerous civilians. The U.S. military argues that using drones in sensitive areas reduces the risks to American lives. Hear experts and activists against drone warfare weigh in on this debate.

1:30 p.m., free

Berkeley Public Library

Third Floor Community Room

2090 Kitteredge, Berk.

(510) 845-3815

www.gawba.org

 

Toxic Triangle Hearing

Speak out against the environmental racism and cumulative pollution affecting poor communities in San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond. Demand action from the Environmental Protection Agency, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, State Department of Toxics, Health Department, Navy, and elected officials.

9 a.m., free

St. John’s Baptist Church

825 Newhall, SF

(415) 284-5600

 

World Naked Bike Ride

Help get the message out about America’s inadequate energy policy, which is harming our economy, the environment, and the planet by catering to oil cartels and increases dependency on oil imports. Go as bare as you dare and arrive early for body paint. Special attention will be paid to protesting BP. Simultaneous worldwide bike rides also scheduled.

Noon, free

Meet at Justin Herman Plaza

Market at Embarcadero, SF

wiki.worldnakedbikeride.org

TUESDAY, JUNE 15

 

Peace Pie Cookbook

CodePink tells the story of women “waging peace” in a new book, Peace Never Tasted so Sweet: Deliciously Sweet and Savory Pie Recipes from Women around the World. Attend this release party and pie-tasting featuring speakers Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CodePink and Global Exchange; recipe contributor Samina Faheem, founder of American Muslim Voice; and recipe contributor Lorene Zouzounis reading poetry.

6 p.m.; free, $5–$10 suggested donation pies

Mission Pie

2901 Mission, SF

www.codepinkalert.org

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

 

Spill it over

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Spill it over

I may be at wit’s end over the crude-stained feathers of everything else, but I’m more than OK with music so far in 2010. Sounds are stretching out, sonic categories are superimposing translucent wings, folks are taking chances for granted. For the past five years, the best DJs have been slowing down their sets, some to the point of blissful stasis — lightly back-pedaling in the midst of history’s traffic. This year that’s help lead to a swelling of the unexpected: indie rock fusing with ghostly rave (Delorean’s sublime Subiza, Caribou’s tricky Swim, Toro Y Moi’s soul-phasic Causers of This) and the return rush of breezy Balearic vibes, with analog synths and subtle digital dubbiness lending a just-left-of-human touch.

Casual experiment is the norm, and even cracked electro-pop stunners like Sleigh Bells’ melted-cheerleader Treats or the skitter-goth Atarics of Crystal Castles’ eponymous new disc make it seem like ultranoise just ain’t no thang. And hey, if I could marry the cinematic hypnodrome-hop of Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces to the sly live techno canter of Zurich’s Galoppierende Zuversicht — both coming to town this weekend — I would be in aural heaven. (I think that’s legal in Portugal now?)

In short, we may be entering a genre-free experiential zone. So why not step it up by immersing yourself in the two-month wonder of our very own experiential music festival, Soundwave? Trust, it’ll be amaze. There will be illuminated forests. There will be “extreme natural resonance” drones in abandoned bunkers. There will be live string duets inside famous sculptures.

This is the fourth installment of the fest, whose theme this time is “green sound.” Artists from around the world will be generating sonic experiments that play off the green ideal. Bike-powered stages, solar- and wind-powered music, real and imagined environments, fantasy creatures — all on the menu and then some.

“The green thing is so big in culture, especially in light of recent events,” Alan So, executive director of Project Soundwave (and total babe, btw) told me. “We want to showcase a full creative, innovative range of responses to the ideas of sustainability and reuse. It’s far from literal, though. There’s a spectrum of ideas. We have a sonic fabric artist from Texas, Alyce Santoro, who makes her clothes out of old cassette tape and then plays herself. She’ll be performing during our month-long Illuminated Forest residency at the Lab.

“Another great thing will be Inflorescence at the Civic Center on June 17. Brett Ian Balogh will install tiny solar-powered devices he calls ‘florets’ in the trees that will collect sound all day, and then at sunset they’ll ‘bloom’ as little lights emitting a sonic tapestry. And our opener on June 6, Resonance, gathers artists to the awesome Battery Townsely concrete military bunker in the Marin Headlands to really play with the possibilities of leftover architecture. Different perspectives, sonic ecology, that type of thing.”

So brings an installation art and design background to bear on the proceedings, insuring a 360-degree experience. The Bay, of course, has a huge experimental music history and a still-thriving scene. But Project Soundwave’s youthful programming, consciously or not, parallels a lot of local nightlife developments, from the gonzo digital culture offerings at the Tenderloin’s Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (www.gaffta.org) to the sonic vanguardism of live analog party OK Hole (third Saturdays at Amnesia, 853 Valencia, SF. www.amnesiathebar.com).

And Soundwave’s green attempts could provide a tingly synthesis of experiment and action. “It’s easy to assume a passive role as an artist or musician,” So told me. “Political art can be so off-putting in its bluntness or perceived negativity that, for an artist, pure abstraction is the only attractive way. We’d like to take a stab at changing that. Developing and utilizing alternative technologies to create ideal states can be both a statement and a contribution.”

SOUNDWAVE FESTIVAL ((4)) GREEN SOUND June 6–Aug. 13, various times and prices, www.projectsoundwave.com

RED BULL BIG TUNE PRODUCER BATTLE with Shabazz Palaces, Rick Rock, and DJ Toomp. Fri/4, 8 p.m., $5. DNA Lounge, 375 11th Street, SF. www.redbullbigtune.com

[KONTROL] FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY with Galoppierende Zuversicht and Craig Richards. Sat/5, 10 p.m.–6 a.m., $20. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.kontrolsf.com

Political juggernaut

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Political juggernaut

sarah@sfbg.com

City officials are scrambling to secure final approvals to allow Lennar Corp. to move forward with its 770-acre Candlestick/Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment of San Francisco’s impoverished and polluted southeast sector. But the community remains divided on the project, raising concerns that wary residents will end up being steamrolled by this politically powerful juggernaut.

Some groups say the project needs major amendments, but fear it will be rushed to the finish for political reasons. Others say they are hungry to work and desperate to move into better housing units, so they don’t want all the myriad project details to slow that progress. And Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration is arguing that approving the project’s final environmental impact report by June 3 is crucial if San Francisco wants to keep the San Francisco 49ers in town.

But many observers fear Lennar wants its entitlements now before its project can be subjected to greater scrutiny that could come with the November elections. Newsom, who made Lennar’s project the centerpiece of his housing policy, will be replaced as mayor if he wins the lieutenant governor’s race. And a crowded field of candidates, many of them progressives concerned about the project’s impacts on the poor and the environment, are vying to replace termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Lennar’s massive territory.

“It’s 180 percent about the 49ers,” land use attorney Sue Hestor told the Guardian, referring to the city’s proposed rush job, as evidenced by a rapid entitlement schedule that the Newsom’s administration wants city commissions and the board to follow.

Under that schedule, which Hestor procured from the Mayor’s Office, Planning and Redevelopment commissioners are expected to certify the project’s final 6,000-page EIR, adopt California Environmental Quality Act findings, approve amendments to the project’s original disposition and development agreement, and authorize land trust and open space reconfigurations — all during a June 3 meeting where public comment will likely last for many hours.

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a community-based nonprofit that tracks the development, says this schedule stretches the credulity that this is a deliberative process. “There’s no way anyone could make a functional reasoned assessment,” Bloom told us. “How do you have any meaningful public conversation under those circumstances?”

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s chief economic advisor, asserted in an April 29 article in The New York Times that Lennar’s plan is a “really, really good project,” echoing the glowing praise he’s heaped on the project since its conception.

“But there’s nothing new in their proposal,” Bloom told us. “That’s because they haven’t been listening to the public’s concerns. [Cohen] says, ‘Haven’t we talked enough? The community’s been waiting all these years!’ But waiting to get what done?”

Lennar’s project — which had early backing from Newsom, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and other political power brokers — was sold as creating “jobs, housing, and parks” and “revitalizing the abandoned shipyard” when voters approved the Lennar-financed Proposition G in 2008.

“Proposition G is from the community and for the community,” Lennar’s campaign promised. “You can turn the abandoned Hunters Point Shipyard into a clean, healthy, sustainable, livable neighborhood — a place where people can raise their children.”

The shipyard once employed thousands of workers, including African Americans who were recruited from the South in the 1940s and ’50s. But the district’s economic engine fell into disrepair when the military left in 1974. Today the neighboring Hunters Point and Bayview neighborhoods have the highest unemployment and crime rates and the largest concentration of African American families in the city.

But the city’s final EIR for the project, which the Planning Department released mid-May, shows that 68 percent of the developer’s proposed 10,500 new housing units will be sold at market rates unaffordable to area residents, and that many of these units will be built on state park land at Candlestick Point.

Lennar is also proposing to build a bridge across the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, significantly changing the southeast waterfront. Lennar says it plans to develop the project’s remaining 3,000 units at below market prices, including one-for-one replacement of rundown Alice Griffith public housing units. Its proposal includes a dozen high-rise towers, 2.7 million square feet of commercial space, 1 million square feet of retail space, a performing arts theater, and an artists colony.

Lennar claims its proposal will create 1,500 construction jobs annually during the project’s 20-year build-out, along with 10,000 permanent jobs, thanks to a United Nations Global Compact Sustainability Center and a vaguely defined green technology office park.

The project and its impacts are already an issue in this year’s District 10 supervisor’s race (see “The battle for the forgotten district,” Feb. 23). Candidate Chris Jackson says Lennar’s proposal is weak when it comes to creating well-paying, low-skilled green collar jobs. He supports Arc’s proposal to including green maritime industrial use at the shipyard.

Arc recommends that the city’s final EIR allow recycling and repairing of ships, including the Suisun Bay Ghost fleet — decommissioned U.S. Navy, cruise, and ferry ships — arguing that “ship recycling and repair are resurgent strategic industrial activities yielding employment opportunities for our existing pool of skilled and unskilled workers.”

Jackson, who was elected to the Community College Board in 2008 and recently jumped into the District 10 race, wants the city to assert that the project is not a regional housing plan.

“It’s a local housing plan for local residents,” Jackson asserts. “It’s not here to provide housing for Silicon Valley. It’s for Bayview-Hunters Point and District 10 residents.”

Jackson understands why some local residents want no delays on final EIR approval: “I can never blame folks in Alice Griffith public housing for coming out and saying ‘no delays.’ They really want something real, housing that is not rat and cockroach infested.”

As a policy analyst (a position he’s quitting to focus on the District 10 race) for the San Francisco Labor Council — which gave key backing to the project in the 2008 election — Jackson knows labor is frustrated by all the project meetings. “I try to tell them it’s better to get this project right than rush it through and find out later that it goes against the interests of labor,” Jackson said.

In May 2008, the Labor Council signed a community benefits agreement (CBA) with Lennar. Since then labor leaders have urged no delays on the project’s draft EIR review. But Jackson believes the city must demand that financial consequences, such as liquidated damages, be a project approval condition if the developer reneges on the CBA.

“Right now the only push-back the city has is to threaten to kill the whole project if Lennar doesn’t meet its timeline,” Jackson said. “But people are really invested in this project, and I don’t believe anyone would pull the trigger and end the entire development. We don’t need to throw everything out; we just need to change them.”

Jackson wants to see the inclusion of a special-use district that would create a cooperative land trust to ensure affordability and home ownership opportunities for local residents. “I love open space and sustainability, but I also want affordable housing and real light-industrial opportunities that can employ people living in the district now.”

Special-use districts, Jackson argues, give city commissioners a way to amend this project to make it more acceptable.

Jackson wants to see strong tenant protections for public housing residents. “The vast majority of those residents are African American. At the end of the day, I want to see economic and environmental justice, so we can say we brought the right change to our community.”

Jackson also would like to see a more independent Mayor’s Office. “Don’t you feel like its 2002/2003, and that if you speak out against the project, it’s like you are speaking out against the Iraq war, and all of a sudden you are not patriotic?”

Fellow District 10 candidate Eric Smith concurred. “The powers that be are definitely moving this thing forward,” he said. “And this is a monster train, a juggernaut that is gathering steam. But how it shakes out down the road remains to be seen. My whole mantra is that there needs to be greater transparency down the line. If I become the sheriff, I’ll be shining a light on all this stuff.”

Smith warned that the community needs to work together or it won’t win a better deal. “It’s clear that folks in the city are hoping against all odds that Lennar can pull this stuff off so they can prove all the naysayers wrong and these community benefits can be realized, and that scrutiny of the projects can go on while all this happens,” he said.

But Arthur Feinstein, the Sierra Club’s political chair, worries that the city’s rush job is resulting in seriously flawed documents and decision-making. “It’s difficult for folks to digest 6,000 pages of comments and responses on the draft EIR in the three weeks since planning posted them online,” Feinstein said. “And nothing has changed despite all the comments, which is why it continues to be a nonsense process.”

Feinstein says the Sierra Club’s top concerns are the Parcel E-2 cleanup on the shipyard, a deal to transfer 23 acres at Candlestick Park for development, and the bridge over Yosemite Slough.

“You can cover most of the site,” he said. “But when it comes to Parcel E-2, where the dump burned for six months in 2002, that’s only 20 acres, it could and should be removed. This is the environmental justice issue that has the community up in arms.”

Feinstein worries about the precedent that selling a state park for condos sets. “This is our park, and they are shrinking it.” He is also concerned that the developer wants to bridge Yosemite Slough for cars.

How many of these concerns will be addressed at the June 3 hearing, which is just days before Santa Clara County voters decide whether to try to lure away the 49ers with a new publicly financed stadium? We’ll see.

Film listings

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

OPENING

*Best Worst Movie See "Green is Good." (1:33)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) (Galvin)

Killers Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher star in this comedy about marriage and hired assassins. (1:40)

Living in Emergency Filmmakers follow four volunteers of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) in Liberia and the Congo, from the initial shock of a first-timer to the overwhelming exhaustion of a veteran. Morally ambiguous decisions have left many of them arrogant and bitter and it’s apparent that these people are not the inflated heroes that we might wish, but normal people who were drawn to test themselves in circumstances of little hope. Some fail. Living in Emergency is an interesting glimpse into a provocative world, and the morally icky stuff is sometimes worse than the blood and death on screen. But a glimpse is all it is. The filmmakers clearly have an agenda that doesn’t include time for exploring the lives of any of the doctors, patients or procedures, and they leave the audience wondering whether there might be more lurking beneath the surface. (1:33) (Galvin)

Marmaduke Big. Talking. Dog. (1:27)

Micmacs See "Cute Is What He Aims For." (1:44) Smith Rafael.

*Ran Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 historical epic Ran brings the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely to life with such veracity and ambition, such magnificence and devastation, that its like has never been equaled since. Storyboarded by Kurosawa in paintings a decade prior to filming and equipped with the largest budget for a Japanese film up until that time, Ran is gorgeous to behold (in no small part to Emi Wada’s Oscar-winning costumes and thousands of extras) and harrowing to experience. Kurosawa fuses the premise of Shakespeare’s King Lear with historical accounts of Warring States-era general Mori Motonari to tell the tragedy of Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), the senile patriarch of the once powerful Ichimonji clan who erroneously decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons. Like his Shakespearean counterpart, Hidetora is certainly a fool, but unlike Lear, he’s also a merciless despot who learns firsthand, as his empire crumbles around him and he sinks further into dementia, that bloodshed can only be repaid with further bloodshed. Nakadai, his face made up to resemble the furrowed intensity of a Noh mask, turns out a performance as resplendent as it is terrifying, equaled only by Mieko Harada’s turn as the Lady MacBeth-like Lady Kaede, who welcomes Hidetora’s downfall with vengeful relish.Catch this 35mm restored print while you can, since no home entertainment system, no matter how pimped out, can truly do Kurosawa’s late masterpiece justice. (2:42) (Sussman)

Solitary Man Michael Douglas has a (post?) midlife crisis. (1:30)

*Splice See "In the Cut." (1:45)

*Trash Humpers What is Trash Humpers? Is it filmmaker Harmony Korine’s rage against his experiences making 2007’s Mister Lonely? Despite being characteristically bizarre, with tales of celebrity impersonators and flying nuns, Mister Lonely was Korine’s most technically polished (i.e., expensive-looking) film to date. By contrast, Trash Humpers, shot on the quick and mega-cheap, literally looks like "an old VHS tape that was in some attick [sic] or buried in some ditch," per the film’s charmingly lo-fi press kit. There’s also Trash Humpers’ rather, uh, subversive content. Basically, it’s 78 minutes of shenanigans, starring a trio of ne’er-do-wells who are either wearing elderly-burn-victim masks or are actually supposed to be elderly burn victims. The creepy crew and their pals cavort through an unidentified Nashville, smashing TVs, slipping razor blades into apples, guzzling booze, spanking hookers, setting off firecrackers, cracking racist and/or homophobic jokes, eating pancakes doused in dish soap, and humping trash cans. Lots of trash cans. Primitive video technology (the film was edited on two VCRs) makes everything look even worse, if that’s even possible. Now, if you or I submitted Trash Humpers, the programmers at the Toronto International Film Festival would chuckle condescendingly and fling it into the nearest (humpable) trash bin. But you have to consider the source: Salon recently dubbed Korine "the most hated man in art-house cinema," which if true is probably the director’s most cherished triumph. (1:18) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Eddy)

Women Without Men Potent imagery has always been at the forefront of photographer and installation artist Shirin Neshat’s explorations of gender in Islamic society, and her debut feature Women Without Men certainly has its share. Loosely based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, the film follows four Iranian women (down from the novel’s original five) — Fakhri, an upper-class military wife who longs to reconnect with an old lover; Zarin, a traumatized prostitute who escapes captivity; Munis, a housebound young woman reborn as a political dissident; and her friend, Faezeh, who longs to marry Munis’ domineering brother — in the days leading up to the 1953 coup d’etat that overturned democracy and restored the Shah to power. From the suicidal leap — filmed so as to suggest flight as much as falling — which opens the film, to the mist-shrouded groves of a rural orchard that becomes a refuge for the women, each shot is as striking for its beauty as it is uneven in conveying the allegorical significance behind all the lushness. The casts’ largely stilted performances don’t help much in this regard either. "All that we wanted to was to find a new form, a new way," says Munis in voiceover. As a creative act of mourning for Iran’s short-lived experiment in democracy — a moment, Neshat acknowledges in the film’s postscript, that clearly resonated with last year’s Green revolution — Women Without Men ambitiously attempts, albeit with mixed success, to envision just that. (1:35) (Sussman)

ONGOING

Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton’s take on the classic children’s tale met my mediocre expectations exactly, given its months of pre-release hype (in the film world, fashion magazines, and even Sephora, for the love of brightly-colored eye shadows). Most folks over a certain age will already know the story, and much of the dialogue, before the lights go down and the 3-D glasses go on; it’s up to Burton and his all-star cast (including numerous big-name actors providing voices for animated characters) to make the tale seem newly enthralling. The visuals are nearly as striking as the CG, with Helena Bonham Carter’s big-headed Red Queen a particularly marvelous human-computer creation. But Wonderland suffers from the style-over-substance dilemma that’s plagued Burton before; all that spooky-pretty whimsy can’t disguise the film’s fairly tepid script. Teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska) displaying girl-power tendencies is a nice, if not surprising, touch, but Johnny Depp’s grating take on the Mad Hatter will please only those who were able to stomach his interpretation of Willy Wonka. (1:48) (Eddy)

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Big River Man Some people are just larger than life. Martin Strel is 53-year-old overweight, alcoholic, endurance swimmer from Slovenia who has made it his calling to swim the world’s longest rivers. Borut Strel, his son and primary publicist, might say his father does it to increase awareness about pollution or, in the Amazon’s case, deforestation, but we quickly see that there is a deeper compulsion that goes into Martin’s swims. Big River Man chronicles Martin’s descent down the Amazon river, from Peru to Brazil, as he scoffs at piranhas and alligators, all while drinking two bottles of wine a day. Martin is definitely a funny guy and he helps make Big River Man a funny film, but most impressive is the subtle shift from quirky human interest documentary to Heart of Darkness-style thriller when too many days in the sun cause Martin to lose his grip on reality. (1:34) Roxie. (Peter Galvin)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) (Harvey)

The City of Your Final Destination In James Ivory’s latest literary adaptation, Omar (Omar Metwally), an Iranian American graduate student of Latin American literature, precipitously descends on a rural estate in Paraguay, hoping to petition the relatives of deceased writer Jules Gund for authorization to write his biography. Numbering among the somewhat complicated ménage are Gund’s widow, Caroline (Laura Linney), his mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), their child, Portia (Ambar Mallman), the author’s brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins), and Adam’s lover, Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada), a household that the film depicts as caught in a sedative isolation obstructing any progress or flourishing or change. But where Gund’s violent suicide has failed to produce a cataclysmic shift, the somewhat hapless Omar manages to interrupt their idle routines and mobilize them, stirring up sentiment and ambition. The notion of redirected fate is telegraphed by the title, but what the film does best is show the calm before the storm (really more of a heavy downpour) — and showcase the fineness of Hopkins’s and Linney’s dramatic abilities. In the final act, we see the characters being moved about rather than moved, and the sound of screeching brakes applied as the film reaches its conclusion undoes much of the subtlety invested in their performances. (1:58) (Rapoport)

Clash of the Titans The minds behind Clash of the Titans decided their movie should be 3D at the last possible moment before release. Consequently, the 3D is pretty janky. I don’t know what the rest of the film’s excuse is. Clash of the Titans retreads the 1981 cult classic with reasonable faithfulness, though Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects have been (of course) replaced with CG renderings of all the expected monsters, magic, gods, etc. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes — as other reviews have pointed out: Schindler’s List (1993) reunion! — glow and glower as Zeus and Hades, while Sam Worthington (2009’s Avatar) once again fills the role of bland hero, this time as a snooze-worthy Perseus. You might have fun in the moment with Clash of the Titans, but it’s hardly memorable, and certainly nowhere near epic. (1:58) (Eddy)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) (Sussman)

*The Father of My Children Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a perpetual motion machine: a Paris-based veteran film producer of complicated multinational whose every waking moment is spent pleading, finessing, reassuring, and generally putting out fires of the artistic, logistic, or financial kind. But lately the strain has begun to surpass even his Herculean coping abilities. Debtors are closing in; funding might collapse for a brilliant but uncommercial director’s already half-finished latest. After surviving any number of prior crises, Gregoire’s whole production company might finally dissolve into a puddle of red ink and lawsuits. He barely has time to enjoy his perfect family, with Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and three young daughters happily ensconced in a charming country house. Something’s got to give — and when it does, writer-director Mia Hansen-Love’s drama (very loosely based on the life of a late European film producer) drastically shifts its focus midway. Her film’s first half is so arresting — with its whirlwind glimpse at a job so few of us know much about, yet which couldn’t be more important in keeping cinema afloat — that the second half inevitably seems less interesting by comparison. Still, for about 55 minutes The Father of My Children offers something you haven’t quite seen before, an experience well worthwhile even if the subsequent 55 are less memorable. (1:50) (Harvey)

*The Ghost Writer Roman Polanski’s never-ending legal woes have inspired endless debates on the interwebs and elsewhere; they also can’t help but add subtext to the 76-year-old’s new film, which is chock full o’ anti-American vibes anyway. It’s also a pretty nifty political thriller about a disgraced former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who’s hanging out in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion with his whip-smart, bitter wife (Olivia Williams) and Joan Holloway-as-ice-queen assistant (Kim Cattrall), plus an eager young biographer (Ewan McGregor) recently hired to ghost-write his memoirs. But as the writer quickly discovers, the politician’s past contains the kinds of secrets that cause strange cars with tinted windows to appear in one’s rearview mirror when driving along deserted country roads. Polanski’s long been an expert when it comes to escalating tension onscreen; he’s also so good at adding offbeat moments that only seem tossed-off (as when the PM’s groundskeeper attempts to rake leaves amid relentless sea breezes) and making the utmost of his top-notch actors (Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach have small, memorable roles). Though I found The Ghost Writer‘s ZOMG! third-act revelation to be a bit corny, I still didn’t think it detracted from the finely crafted film that led up to it. (1:49) (Eddy)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Harry Brown Shades of Dirty Harry (1971) for the tea cozy and tweed set: elegantly rendered and very nicely played, Harry Brown might be the dark, late-in-the-day elder brother to 1971’s Get Carter, in the hands of eponymous lead Michael Caine. He’s a pensioner mourning the passing of his beloved wife, his mysterious life as a Marine stationed in Northern Ireland firmly behind him. Then his chess-playing pal Leonard (David Bradley) is terrorized and killed by the unsavory gang of heroin dealing hoodlums who lurk near their projects in a tunnel walkway like gun-toting, foul-mouthed, sociopathic trolls. Harry Brown is, er, forced to forsake a vow of peace and go commando on the culprits’ asses, triggering some moments of ultraviolence that are unsettling in their whole-hearted embrace of vigilante justice. Like predecessors similarly fixated on vengeance in their respective urban hells, a la Hardcore (1979) and Taxi Driver (1976) (Harry Brown echoes key moments in the latter, in particular — see, for instance, its keenly tense, eerily humorous gun shopping scene), Harry Brown is essentially an arch-conservative film, if good looking and even likable with Caine meting out the punishment. The overall denouement just might make some seniors feel very, very good about the coiled potential for hurt embedded in their aging frames. (1:42) (Chun)

How to Train Your Dragon (1:38)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Director Tom Six had a vision, a glorious dream of surgically connecting three human beings via their gastro-intestinal systems, or as Kevin Smith would say — "ass to mouth." When two girlfriends on a road trip across Europe get a flat tire, they stumble upon the home of a mad doctor (Dieter Laser) with a similar dream, who drugs them and ties them up in his basement laboratory. The Human Centipede is an entry into the torture porn arena, but it feels especially icky because you just know that the girls have zero chance of escaping the "100 percent medically accurate!" surgery. Once hooked up, there’s nowhere for the film to go and two out of three actors can’t talk because they are sewn to someone else’s anus. Still, as one-note as The Human Centipede is, I think we’d do well to encourage more films to be as batshit insane as this one. (1:30) (Galvin)

*Iron Man 2 Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returns, just as rich and self-involved as before, though his ego his inflated to unimaginable heights due to his superheroic fame. Pretty much, he’s put the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing on the back burner, exasperating everyone from Girl Friday Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow); to BFF military man Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing the first installment’s Terrence Howard); to certain mysterious Marvels played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson; to a doofus-y rival defense contractor (Sam Rockwell); to a sanctimonius Senator (Garry Shandling). Frankly, the fact that a vengeful Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke) is plotting Tony’s imminent death is a secondary threat here — for much of the film, Tony’s biggest enemy is himself. Fortunately, this is conveyed with enjoyable action (props to director Jon Favreau, who also has a small role), a witty script (actor Justin Theroux — who knew? He also co-wrote 2008’s Tropic Thunder, by the way), and gusto-going performances by everyone, from Downey on down. Stay for the whole credits or miss out on the geek-gasm. (2:05) (Eddy)

Just Wright (1:51)

*Kick-Ass Based on a comic book series by Mark Millar, whose work was also the model for 2008’s Wanted, Kick Ass is a similarly over-the-top action flick that plays up its absurdity to even greater comedic effect. High school nerd Dave (Aaron Johnson) decides to become the world’s first real superhero. Donning a green wetsuit he bought on the internet and mustering some unlikely courage, he takes to the streets to avenge wrongdoing. Unsurprisingly, Dave is immediately beaten almost to death because he’s just a kid who has no idea what he’s doing, but Kick-Ass‘ greatest achievement is knowing exactly how to subvert audience expectations. Scenes that marry the film’s innocent story with enormously exaggerated violence enhance the otherwise Superbad-lite high-school comedy unfolding around them, and a parallel plot-line involving Nicolas Cage instructing his 12-year-old daughter to commit grievous murders will probably end up being the most gratifying aspect of the film. Though too much set-up and spinning gears mars the middle act, it’s hard to fault the film for competently setting up one of the most crowd-pleasing endings in recent memory. (1:58) (Galvin)

Kites As randomly exuberant, shamelessly cheesy, and as garishly OTT as an amalgam of Bollywood song-and-dance flash and ’80s Hollywood blockbuster can get, Kites is a lovable mutt through and through — ready for its stateside close-up with by way of a forthcoming Brett Ratner English-language "remix" treatment. But first the two-hour original: J (Hrithik Roshan) is a poor but studly, V-chested dance teacher who hits the jackpot in Vegas with Gina (Kangna), his besotted student and the daughter of a powerful and deadly casino owner. Their dance competition number — jumpily cut like a hybrid of Dancing With the Stars, Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Fame (1980) — lands J in the bosom of Gina’s family, where he meets her sadistic bro, Tony (Nick Brown), and his fiancée, Natasha (Barbara Mori), an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But J and Natasha have met briefly before, when she hired him to marry her for a green card. How can a connected, killer family possibly get in the way of true love — between two leads who resemble a youthful, performance-enhanced, manically happily Nicolas Cage and Megan Fox? Smoothly integrating the dance numbers into the predictable narrative, Kites has polished off any possible edge from its high-energy Bollywood riff on the movies of Michael Bay and Ridley Scott, but that doesn’t mean you can tear your eyes from the screen, or stop the music. (1:30) (Chun)

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) (Chun)

*Looking for Eric Eric Bishop (Steve Everts) is a single dad, frustrated at his inability to bond with his teenage sons and heartbroken over his failed marriage to Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the woman he walked out on 20 years ago but never managed to get over. Just when things are looking dire, Eric is delivered in surprising, magical fashion by hallucinatory visitations from Eric Cantona, his favorite soccer player, a philosophical Frenchman who was as renowned for his inscrutable press conferences as he was for his scintillating goals. Cantona plays himself, and passes pensive joints with Bishop as they slowly piece his shattered life back together. American viewers might be have trouble deciphering the intricacies of soccer culture or the molasses-thick Mancunian accents, but at its heart the movie (by Brit director Ken Loach) is an amusing, tautly crafted fable of middle-aged alienation giving way to hope and gumption. (1:57) Smith Rafael. (Richardson)

MacGruber Mudflaps, moptops, box-office flippity-flops, such is the sad transition Saturday Night Live skits make to the big screen. Handicapped as such MacGruber also has a very specific demographic in mind: the Gen-Xers who popularized the use of MacGyver as a verb and harbor a picture-tube-deep ironic affection for the lousy ’80s TV action shows of their youth. Does anyone younger — or older — than that population get MacGruber‘s interest in Howard Stern-style transgressive humor, its "Cunth"/dick/poop/butt jokes, and its shameful identification with badly dated hair styles? That said, MacGruber isn’t half bad if one keeps expectations nice ‘n’ low, much like its hero’s brow, and one enjoys a comic antihero who uses his buds as human shields and can’t MacGyver a weapon out of a tennis ball and rubber-band to save his life. Laughs can be had — as long as your bad Gen-X self is still in touch with your inner 13-year-old. MacGruber won’t make the Bay Area-born-and-bred Will Forte a superstar, but at least it gives Kristen Wiig fans another, if somewhat inexplicable, chance to glimpse their heroine in action, with little to do — someone get this smart, likable actress into a Nicole Holofcener comedy ASAP. (1:39) (Chun)

*Mid-August Lunch Gianni Di Gregorio’s loose, engaging comedy is about an aging bachelor still living with his ancient mum in their Rome flat. When his landlord offers to forgive some debts in return for briefly taking in his own elderly ma, Gianni (played by the director himself) soon finds himself in cat-herding charge of no less than five old ladies who delight in one another’s company while running him ragged. Gomorrah (2008) screenwriter Di Gregorio used nonprofessionals to play those parts in this semi improvised miniature, which is as light and flavorful as a first course of prosciutto and mozzarella. It’s a solid addition to the canon of palate-pleasing culinary flicks such as Big Night (1996) and Babette’s Feast (1987), as opposed to the repulsive ones like Super Size Me (2004) or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). (1:15) (Harvey)

La Mission A veteran S.F. vato turned responsible — if still muy macho — widower, father, and Muni driver, fortysomething Che (Benjamin Bratt) isn’t the type for mushy displays of sentiment. But it’s clear his pride and joy is son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), a straight-A high school grad bound for UCLA. That filial bond, however, sustains some serious damage when Che discovers Jes has a secret life — with a boyfriend, in the Castro, just a few blocks away from their Mission walkup but might as well be light-years away as far as old-school dad is concerned. This Bratt family project (Benjamin’s brother Peter writes-directs, his wife Talisa Soto Bratt has a supporting role) has a bit of a predictable TV-movie feel, but its warm heart is very much in the right place. (1:57) Roxie. (Harvey)

Mother and Child Adoption advocates who railed against Orphan (2009) should turn their sights on Mother and Child, a ridiculous melodrama with a thoroughly vile message. I’d wager writer-director Rodrigo García didn’t set out to make an anti-adoption film: this is a movie about the relationship between mothers and daughters. But the undertones are impossible to miss. Annette Bening plays Karen, a miserable woman consumed by regret for putting her daughter up for adoption 37 years ago. That biological daughter is Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), who — despite having been adopted at birth — speaks dismissively of her "adoptive" parents as though they were never really hers. She’s cold and manipulative, sleeping with her boss and married neighbor because she can. Mother and Child offers no real explanation for why these women are so unpleasant, so we’re forced to conclude it’s the four decades-old adoption. Despite a stellar cast, which also includes Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and S. Epatha Merkerson, the film’s misguided politics are too distracting to ignore. (2:06) (Peitzman)

*OSS 117: Lost in Rio The Cold War heated up a public appetite for spy adventures well before James Bond became a pop phenomenon. In fact, Ian Fleming hadn’t yet created 007 in 1949, when Jean Bruce commenced writing novels about Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, a.k.a. Agent OSS 117. This French superspy was ready-made to join the ranks of umpteen 007 wannabes, appearing in somewhere between six and 11 films (it’s unclear whether all involved de La Bath, or were just Bruce-based) through 1970, played by at least four actors. The series remained well-known enough to get a new life in 2006 when director Michel Hazanavicius and top French comedy star Jean Dujardin sought to spoof 1960s espionage flicks a la Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). That was a big hit, so now we’ve got a sequel. OSS 117: Lost in Rio isn’t as fresh or funny as the preceding Cairo, Nest of Spies. But it’s still a whole lot fresher and funnier than Austin Powers Nos. two (1999) and three (2002). Dujardin’s de La Bath is the very model of jet-set masculinity, twisting the night away at a ski chalet with umpteen soon-to-be-machine gunned "Oriental" lovelies in the opening sequence. Of course such pleasure pursuits take place strictly between car chases, shootouts, and karate fights. Agreeably silly, Lost in Rio doesn’t go for Hollywood-style slapstick and gross out yuks. Instead, its biggest laughs are usually droll throwaways, as when 117 explains a shocking sudden costume change with the unlikely declaration "I sew," or during an LSD-dosed hippie orgy proves quite willing to go with the flow — even when that involves another guy’s groovy finger breaching security up the pride of French intelligence’s derriere. (1:37) (Harvey)

*Please Give Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are the proprietors of an up-market vintage furniture store — they troll the apartments of the recently deceased, redistributing the contents at an astonishing markup — and they’ve purchased the entire apartment of their elderly next-door neighbor (Ann Guilbert). As they wait for her to expire so they can knock down a wall, they try not to loom in anticipation in front of her granddaughters, the softly melancholic Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and the brittle pragmatist Mary (Amanda Peet). Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has entered this territory before, examining the interpersonal pressures that a sizable income gap can exert in 2006’s Friends with Money. Here she turns to the pangs and blunderings of the liberal existence burdened with the discomforts of being comfortable and the desire to do some good in the world. The film capably explores the unexamined impulses of liberal guilt, though the conclusion it reaches is unsatisfying. Like Holofcener’s other work, Please Give is constructed from the episodic material of mundane, intimate encounters between characters whose complexity forces us to take them seriously, whether or not we like them. Here, though, it offers these private connections as the best one can hope for, a sort of domestic grace accrued by doing right, authentically, instinctively, by the people in your immediate orbit, leaving the larger world to muddle along on its axis as best it can. (1:30) (Rapoport)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time It takes serious effort to make a movie with a story dumber than the video game it’s based on. Director Mike Newell somehow accomplishes this feat with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Disneyfied flop that flails clumsily in the PG-13 demilitarized zone, delivering sanitized violence, chaste romance, and dreary drama. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, an urchin boy — one jump, ahead of the bread line — adopted by the king and raised to be the wise-cracking black sheep in a family of feuding princes. He’s got Middle East ninja skills — one swing, ahead of the sword — and his infiltration of a sacred city nets him the magical Dagger of Time, a gilded rewind button coveted by his evil uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley), who wants to use it for, well, evil, and Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who’s sworn to protect it. Pressing a button on the dagger’s hilt allows its wielder to undo past events. If you have the misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll want one for yourself. (2:10) (Richardson)

Princess Kaiulani Well-meaning and controversial (the independent’s first title, Barbarian Princess, and the tragic events it depicts has distressed some native Hawaiians) in its own inoffensive way, Princess Kaiulani is unfortunately overshadowed by star Q’orianka Kilcher’s first film, 2005’s The New World, in which she portrayed Pocahontas. The Hawaii-raised Kilcher appears to be getting typecast as a tragic, romanticized native royal. Still, if you can get past director Marc Forby’s weak attempts to match New World director Terrence Malick’s searingly poetic montages and the clunky History Channel-by-the-numbers screenplay, you might give a little credit to the makers for bringing to the screen the tale of Hawaii’s last intelligent, beautiful, and accomplished princess — a young woman determined to fight an overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and battle its annexation against the white land owners and descendents of missionaries who tried to block the voting rights of native Hawaiians. Kilcher possesses some of the noble charisma claimed by the real Kaiulani, but the obligatory romance superimposed on the narrative and the neglect of some of genuinely promising threads, such as Kaiulani’s friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, make Princess Kaiulani feel as faux as those who pretended to Hawaii’s rule. (2:10) (Chun)

Robin Hood Like it or not, we live in the age of the origin story. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood introduces us to the outlaw while he’s still in France, wending his way back to Albion in the service of King Richard III. The Lionheart soon takes an arrow in the neck in order to demonstrate the film’s historical bona fides, and yeoman archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) — surrounded by a nascent band of merry men — accidentally embroils himself in a conspiracy to wrest control of England. The complications of this intrigue hie Robin to Nottingham, where he is thrown together with Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett), a plucky rural aristocrat who likes getting her hands dirty almost as much as she likes a bit of smoldering Crowe seduction. A lot of hollow medieval verisimilitude ensues, along with a good bit of slow-mo swordplay, but the cumulative effect is tepid and rote. (2:20) (Richardson)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07)

Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2 couldn’t be anymore brazenly shameless, dizzyingly shallow, or patently offensive if it tried. This is aspiration porn, pure and simple, kitted out in the Orientalist trappings of a Vogue spread and with all the emotional intelligence of a 12 year-old brat. As the first SATC film nearly made short work of any shred of nuance or humanity that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda carried over from their televised selves, SATC 2 fully embraces the bad pun-spewing, couture-clad clichés the girls have hardened into. Sure they have kids, husbands, career changes, and menopause to deal with, but who cares about those tired signposts of middle age when there is more shit to buy, more champagne to swill, private airlines to fly on, $22,000-a-night luxury suites to inhabit, Helen Reddy songs to butcher, and whole other peoples — specifically, the people of Abu Dhabi, who speak funny, dress funnier, and have craaazy notions about what it means to be "one of the girls" — to alternately boss around, offend, and pity? (Fun SATC2 fact: did you know that in the "new Middle East" women secretly wear designer duds underneath their abayas?) Oh, that one tiny pang of sympathy you feel during the tipsy confessional between Charlotte and Miranda in which they bond over how being a mother and giving up one’s life ambition is difficult? A mirage. Because really, the greater concern is flying back to JFK first class or bust. And let’s not even get into the few bones the film tosses to the homos, such as the opening set piece: a gay wedding only a straight man could’ve thought up, replete with a shopworn Liza Minnelli having her Gene Kelly-in-Xanadu moment. But seriously, Michael Patrick King, don’t get it twisted: Stanford may call it such, but it’s not "cheating" if you’re already in an open relationship. Then again, if being a foil for your straight BFF’s insecurities about the luxe confines of monogamy gets you a gift registry at Bergdorf’s, why not? The laughs are cheaper this time around, but SATC 2‘s fuckery is strictly price-upon-request. (2:24) Castro. (Sussman)

Shrek Forever After 3D It’s easy to give Dreamworks a hard time for pumping out a fourth sequel to a film that never really needed a sequel in the first place. But Shrek Forever After isn’t all that bad — it’s mostly just irrelevant. The film does begin on an interesting note, with Shrek discovering the consequences of settling down with a wife and kids: serious ennui. It’s refreshing to see a fairy tale in which "happily ever after" is revealed to be rather mundane. But soon there are wacky magical hijinks that spawn an alternate universe, a cheap way to inject new life into tired old characters. (You like Puss in Boots? Well, he’s fat now.) Luckily, the voice actors are still game and the animation remains top-notch. The 3D effects are well used for once, fleshing out Shrek’s world rather than providing an unnecessary distraction. The end result is a mildly entertaining addition to the franchise, but like the alternate universe in which Shrek finds himself stranded, there’s no real reason it should exist. (1:33) (Peitzman)

Survival of the Dead George A. Romero’s 2007 Diary of the Dead was a surprise hit, and with an eye toward delivering similar results, Survival of the Dead spins off one of its predecessor’s minor characters. Amid a zombie attack that already seems like old news by movie’s start, a disaffected soldier (Alan Van Sprang) goes AWOL with a few comrades and a teenage drifter they meet along the way. A possible refuge from the undead presents itself in the form of Plum Island, which despite being in the United States is populated by two extremely Irish families with a long-standing hillbilly-style feud that simply won’t be mended, zombies be damned. Props to Romero for finding a way to make movies on his own terms; the horror legend is back to working with a small budget and enjoying the kind of creative control that shaped his earliest films. But Survival of the Dead is tonally uneven, and its Western-inspired story veers into the ridiculous (surprise twins?!) End result: there’s more human drama than zombie fun. (1:30) (Eddy)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

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