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Rate irate

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Rate irate

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM “Bloody bugger to you, you … beastly bastard. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. F-fornication. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck and fuck. Fuck, fuck, and bugger. Bugger, bugger, buggety buggety buggety fuck. Fuck ass. Balls! Balls! Fuckety shit. Shit, fuck and willy. Willy, shit and fuck, and … tits.”

The above is, in toto, the reason why The King’s Speech — a movie that might very well turn out Oscar’s idea of this year’s Best Picture next February — is rated R. This childish explosion of potty-mouth is coaxed from England’s future king (Colin Firth) by his speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) to demonstrate that the former’s crippling stammer flies away whenever he’s unself-consciousness enough to cuss a bit. It’s a comic moment (one of few, and perhaps the film’s highlight in general) that, by reducing the words to sniggering playground naughtiness — this king is, after all, in a state of arrested development — robs them of any genuine scatology or shock value. They’re just words.

But those words (give or take a few fucks and shits — only the MPAA can or would bother to count every rapid-fire cuss) were still enough to get this otherwise very chaste, polite Masterpiece Theatre exercise classified with Saw 3D and The Human Centipede as viewable by minors only with parental accompaniment. Not that many teens are likely to be lining up for The King’s Speech — certainly far fewer than saw Saw 3D with or without adult chaperoning. But really, this is what they need protecting from?

This was a year in which the usual grousing undercurrent about arbitrary ratings-board standards started to seep overground. There were small hubbubs about two excellent documentaries, The Tillman Story and A Film Unfinished, getting R’s due to cursing on one hand and nudity (among Nazi concentration camp inmates) on the other. In both cases prudishness means these searing indictments of historical wrongs probably can’t be used for classroom educational purposes.

A larger controversy surrounded Blue Valentine, the acclaimed indie feature slapped with an NC-17 for a sex scene so subversive that no one who saw the film at Sundance could recall it; the MPAA rating mystified many. Turns out the scene in question is a happy flashback in this slow-agonizing-death-of-a marriage portrait, with Michelle Williams’ thrusty body language expressing clear enjoyment of Ryan Gosling’s mouthy activities downtown. Nonetheless, there’s nothing more explicit displayed than the outside of her thighs — as one colleague put it, “I’ve seen more of Britney Spears on the Internet.” The drama’s sobriety and its awards momentum finally won a rare MPAA reversal on appeal, reducing its rating to R.

But the case still underlines the injustice of our current system. As Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated pointed out in 2006, as a tool of the Hollywood mainstream the MPAA routinely judges independent films more harshly than major studio releases. It also exercises double standards when it comes to gender nudity and gender-preference sexuality, and most crucially continues to heighten the American morality gap between depictions of sex and violence.

These complaints have prompted some vague hints of change afoot, albeit more toward hitting torture-porn horror harder than lightening up on the birds ‘n’ bees. In any case, it’s difficult to be very hopeful: for every progressive cultural step forward these days, there seem to be two Tea Party dance-steps back. It was announced earlier this month that Christian pastor and cable honcho Robert H. Schuller had contracted to broadcast G-rated versions of movies like the original Alien (1979) and Predator (1987). OK, so they’ll have bad language and explicit violence removed; but even these eviscerated edits will still offer entertainment predicated on the horrific (if now nongraphically suggested) murders of humans by icky monsters. Giving kids nightmares is more godly (and provides a more “positive message,” per the Rev. Schuller) than showing them (God forbid) a nipple.

Such hypocrisies run rampant in U.S. entertainment and society in general. Media outlets generally refuse to advertise NC-17 films, giving them and their modicum of sexual explicitness the commercial kiss of death while most kids freely access porn online. Screen violence grows ever more desensitizing; explosions of cars, buildings, entire cities, or planets are viewed as harmless while anything truly unpleasant enough to act as a deterrent sparks outrage. (By now the escapist Saw and Hostel movies get shrugged at, whereas the recent Killer Inside Me remake offended many because its protracted scenes of domestic violence were realistically painful to watch.)

Penises are now OK in small doses, albeit only in the clownish contexts of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Observe and Report (2009), etc. Ironically, any time sex is taken seriously, sans juvenile humor or lurid “erotic-thriller” type judgment, it becomes unfit for allegedly innocent eyes. Blue Valentine‘s good sex, and subsequent bad breakup sex, disturbs the MPAA because it is all too real-world relatable in both its pleasure and fallibility, something you won’t often find in porn, either.

The logic gap grows ever more ridiculous even as our culture wars’ battle lines harden. Imagine a Palin White House two years hence, presiding over a land in which sex education is nonexistent, abstinence clubs are the new Honor Society, and teenage pregnancy rates skyrocket. When in doubt as to the nation’s course, say grace, then settle down to dinner with the kids as you watch a “clean” tube edit of something like 1995’s Braveheart, its medieval spears through the chest trimmed but that humorous throwing of a prince’s homosexual BFF from the castle tower left intact. Then drift off to slumberland, family values affirmed.

Past imperfect

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Past imperfect

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM We’re all media scavengers now, but archival sounds and images remain a tantalizing lure for both the documentary profile and its surrealistic double, the found footage film. The first repackages capsules of the past while the second hijacks them — different economies of exchange, to be sure, though perhaps less starkly contrasted to those accustomed to hyperlinking their way through the dustbin.

The use of obscure footage as leverage is exceedingly clear in Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a film structured around director Tamra Davis’ intimate camcorder interview with the artist in 1985. The close-up portrait gives us Basquiat’s sly intelligence, spacey charisma, and tragic oversensitivity to judgment — all to the good, but Davis’ inability to reckon with the exchange value of her insider access is disappointing. Selling and chronicling are inextricably linked with the celebrity artist, but Basquiat’s early graffiti partner Al Diaz is the only interviewee who addresses the issue of the golden goose frankly.

The Rolling Stones have always excelled at selling themselves, so it’s no surprise to see Mick and Keith’s executive producer credits on Stones in Exile. Fortunately for us, director Stephen Kijack (2006’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) recognizes 1972’s Exile on Main Street as a masterpiece of vibe and accordingly focuses great attention on the zonked record’s mise-en-scène. But the strictly MOR slate of interviewees — alas, no Pussy Galore here — makes the scraps of Robert Frank’s long suppressed Cocksucker Blues (1972) feel all the more bowdlerized.

The bankable aura of the rarely seen supplants Frank’s prickly immediacy, and the dream of a rock ‘n’ roll cinema is the poorer for it. If it’s easier to accept the brief stream of Jonas Mekas’ New York City film-diaries borrowed in LennonNYC, that’s because the footage serves a narrow expositional purpose in establishing the bohemian milieu that John Lennon and Yoko Ono embraced — and also because Mekas is himself interviewed. The PBS-produced doc’s failings are the conventional ones, but its archival trove does illuminate Lennon and Ono’s creative collaborations, especially insofar as their art hinged upon probing self-consciousness and the redemptive potential of intimacy.

On the other side of the archival aisle, the mad detectives and film theorists who whisper hidden truths in our ears have become increasingly ambitious storytellers. Johan Grimonprez’s inventive Double Take slips into the realms of the unreal by characterizing the Cold War as a literally Hitchcockian play of ciphers, while Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished submits an oft-cited, little-understood Nazi propaganda film to ontological deliberation. Adam Curtis introduces his most recent raid of the archive, It Felt Like a Kiss, with print titles that speak for all these projects: “When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future/ The stories can be enchanting or frightening/ But they make sense of the world/ But when that power begins to ebb the stories fall apart/ And all that is left are fragments which haunt you like half-forgotten dreams.”

As with Curtis’ earlier multipart films, It Felt Like a Kiss registers history as a shifting series of simultaneities and unforeseen consequences. The only slightly tongue-in-cheek cast includes Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Enos the cosmonaut chimp, and everyone above level seven in the CIA. Initially conceived as a multichannel promenade, the film is named for the singularly disturbing pop song Carole King penned for Phil Spector and his Crystals. It’s one of four ’60s sides Curtis builds out as deeply personal, but emblematic chronicles of anguish and dread (the others are “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “River Deep, Mountain High” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”). In each case, Curtis surveys the decade’s interlocking horror shows with something like poignancy — a new feature of his work.

Atop all the uncanny déjà vus and dream-life convergences, It Felt Like a Kiss also serves up one of the greatest WTF endings in recent memory. After revealing a bunker’s worth of government computers (repurposed from Cold War fighting to credit card debt), Curtis cuts to Pillow Talk (1959). Doris Day is a vision of contentment going to bed, but then something disturbs her — on the soundtrack, a soaring engine noise is followed by a hard cut to black silence. Amazed at how economically Curtis suggests the coming impact, we cue the sequence up again and let our jaws drop when we see Day’s room number: 2001.

To be sure, there’s no rule that found footage films must generate conspiratorial heat. Jay Rosenblatt’s The Darkness of Day materializes a reserved contemplation of suicide using industrial discards — the forgotten nature of these older films itself becoming a token of loss in an elegiac context. Oblique images float upon fragmented suicide stories narrated from many different vantages: near and far, first-person and third, male and female, young and old, anonymous and notable. We hear excerpts drawn from 10 years of a diary of depression, read of an ancient Egyptian’s dispute with his own soul, and learn about the first man to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

This last story surfaces with a montage of the bridge’s construction — a monument, but to what? — and might be read as a critique of The Bridge (2006), which unaccountably turned us into voyeurs of suicide. The Darkness of Day travels the path of Night and Fog (1955), regarding trauma indirectly, as traces and shadows. Industrial footage is not the most obvious resource to make darkness visible, but Rosenblatt’s use of mass-produced materials subtly underscore the film’s suggestion that while suicide is always discrete and thus unknowable, it is also a social phenomenon.

For a more concrete cultural history glazed with Debordian wit, Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is matchless. After opening with a thoroughly demystified, inquisitorial video of Ceausescu and his wife Elena in 1989 — previously seen in Ujica’s 1992 collaboration with Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution — we double back to the spectacular public funeral for the Romanian leader’s predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dej, in 1965. From here, Ujica proceeds more or less chronologically (and without voice-over) through Ceausescu’s decades in power, collecting speeches, press conferences, soft debates, home movies, inspections of factories and construction sites, and trips abroad to Communist countries and Hollywood (a letdown after the stupefying parades in China and North Korea).

One of the director’s most cunning insights is that since the totalitarian state stages reality to furnish proof of its own dominion — the problem with measuring Triumph of the Will (1933) as documentary — the resulting footage might be considered as if dictated by the leader. But by letting these “autobiographical” materials run at length, Ujica also opens a space for the accidents and lacunae that surely would have been excised from the official record. The fact that it’s so easy to imagine the propaganda version of this footage is part of the point: we calculate where the cuts would have been to “correct” Ceausescu’s diminutive posture and speechmaking, and in that gap lies much of 20th century history. The closest Ujica comes to giving the game away is when he cuts from one of Ceausescu’s baroque rhetorical performance (filmed in black-and-white, as with everything else we’ve seen up to this point) to his cheating at volleyball in a color home movie. It’s a wonderfully rude swipe at rulers everywhere and likely the single most smashing edit of the year.

Babes in bondage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Babes in bondage

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM ‘Tis the season to dismantle. For us film critic types, that means picking over the past year’s movie offerings with the ill-advised intensity of Natalie Portman working a hangnail in Black Swan. (That scene was so gross, yes?)

Speaking of sadomasochistic tendency (and La Portman), 2010 saw an intriguing mini-trend in psychological horror, most exemplified by a trio of films: Vincenzo Natali’s riotous sci-fi cheesefest Splice, Mark Romanek’s austerely devastating Never Let Me Go, and Darren Aronofsky’s aforementioned phenom Black Swan. Superficially, these movies couldn’t be more different. Splice is an homage to B exploitation and Cronenbergian body horror; Never Let Me Go is a pedigreed adaptation of a dead-serious study of emotional subtlety and Black Swan is a grandiose, visually exhilarating spectacle, not to mention one of the weirdest films ever to likely get an Oscar nod.

Dig a little deeper (perhaps with Winona Ryder’s Black Swan nail file?) and some surprisingly similar themes, motifs, and motivations become clear. This new breed of female-centered “body horror” challenges certain well-worn horror tropes, whether intentionally or not, along with the subject-object relationship of women in movies in general. And while female body horror is certainly nothing new (vaginas with teeth, anyone?) these movies do offer a refreshing new spin.

Genetic clones, genetic hybrids, and guano-crazy ballerinas, the female characters in these films exemplify the idea of the “other” superficially, but also collapse the traditional idea the “monstrous feminine.” Even if we aren’t meant to identify with them in totality, their terror is still our terror, not some janky Freudian nightmare of their otherness and our supposed repulsion to it. This kind of female subject-object horror revisionism has been seen before — Georges Franju’s 1960 French quasi-surrealist masterpiece Eyes Without a Face and the raucous little Canadian cult indie Ginger Snaps (2000) come to mind — but it hasn’t punctured mainstream Hollywood film in quite this way before.

All three movies work off the principle relationship of the matriarch and her offspring: Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Dren (Delphine Chaneac) in Splice; Nina (Natalie Portman) and her mother (Barbara Hershey, her plastic surgery–pummeled visage unintentionally representing the concept of “face horror”) in Black Swan; and Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling) and later Madame (Nathalie Richard) and Kathy (Carey Mulligan) in Never Let Me Go.

Black Swan goes so far as to encourage a curiously gender-flipped Oedipal reading of Nina’s relationship with her (s)mother, who feverishly paints portraits of her daughter while Nina slaves away at ballet practice. Indeed, the movie’s true WTF moment comes when, at the behest of her tyrannical director Thomas (Vincent Cassel), Nina masturbates, almost violently so, until she realizes that her mother is watching her from the bedroom corner.

From her raw, toe-shoe ravaged feet to her undernourished frame to the intermittent appearances of blood oozing from imaginary sores, Nina experiences physical and psychological disturbances that lead to an eventual complete breakdown and physical metamorphosis in the classic body horror tradition. “I wanna be perfect,” she laments. That desire for perfection ultimately manifests itself in the masochistic self-infliction of physical pain to achieve transcendence. It’s a subject Aronofsky mined to great effect in his last film, 2008’s The Wrestler.

Psychological and physical metamorphoses are rampant in the movie, characterized by Nina’s overly precious pink butterfly wallpaper and Thomas’ uber-masculine Rorschach blotter–inspired living room. In a motif most reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Nina begins to see nonhuman physical transformations in the form of scratches that elicit bristle-like feathers on her back, much in the same way The Fly‘s Seth Brundle grew coarse insect hairs as he slowly morphs into “Brundlefly.” Nina finally asserts her sexual independence by absorbing her “black swan” by way of sexually demonstrative doppelganger, Lily (Mila Kunis). In the process, she becomes something all-powerful and completely unknowable, achieving total perfection. She also ceases to be human.

Transcending the entrapment of biology plays a major role in Splice and Never Let Me Go as well. In Splice, Dren’s jacked-up DNA is a source of fear and revulsion to Elsa’s husband and coresearcher, Clive (Adrien Brody), and she is held captive while they study her in their pursuit of greater scientific truth. But her creator-mother can’t help but delight in her otherness, which mirrors her own in some perverse way. She even insists that Dren, who resembles something akin to a beautiful chicken-alien-minotaur, is “perfectly formed.” The moment Dren reveals her magnificent wings for the first time (wings she didn’t even know she possessed) recalls Nina’s crazed transformation in Black Swan. Both characters eventually embrace their outsider status, although it’s hard to say if it really works out for either of them. (Baby steps.)

Officially, Never Let Me Go isn’t really a horror film, but more of a Merchant Ivory–style sci-fi. In addition to being an exercise in stylistic restraint and melancholy, Romanek’s film is an affecting, straight-faced mediation on life and loss. But its core conceit can easily be read as a story of body horror as well. Kathy, the pretty, waifish clone-girl at the center of the narrative, grows up at a genteel English boarding school called Hailsham, a place she finds as warm and nurturing as the womb. But it’s also a place from which there is no escape. By virtue of her very birth, Kathy is bound by a grisly obligation, metaphorically and literally: eventually her body will be dismantled bit by bit, her organs redistributed, so that in her death (or “completion,” as its dubbed in a kind of gentle Newspeak) “real” people may live. But her body’s eventual betrayal is not Kathy’s ultimate source of horror. Her true other-ness isn’t represented by physicality, but by spirituality: like all her fellow clones, she must question the very idea that she is human, what it means to be human, and whether or not she even possesses that supposed essential blueprint, a soul. The audience shares Kathy’s existential horror at that most inner fear. Eventually, though, it’s virtually impossible to not acknowledge what makes Kathy, like Nina and even Dren, so potently human. Their humanity, of course, is in their very imperfection. Nobody’s perfect, except for maybe that little spitfire Natalie Portman. At this point, I think it’s safe to say she’s at least better than the rest of us.

Year in Film: 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Year in Film: 2010

YEAR IN FILM To recap: 2010 was the year Oscar started dipping his golden fingers into the previous year’s pot of (mostly forgettable) big releases and fishing out 10 Best Picture nominees. Blue Pandora people were defeated at the podium, though they did leave a cultural stain behind — it’s safe to say, for example, that nobody’s been styling weddings after The Hurt Locker.

Predicting the next Academy Awards class requires looking past 2010’s top earners (Toy Story 3 and Inception aside) and focusing on films that pleased both critics and audiences (The Social Network, Winter’s Bone, Black Swan) — though if you’re in a betting mood, the carefully calibrated The King’s Speech seems exactly like the kind of movie the Academy will reward over anything achingly contemporary, staunchly gritty, or knowingly out-there. But as any true film fan knows, it’s usually not the movies that make the most money, or even win the most awards, that resonate and beg revisiting in the months and years that follow.

The Guardian’s annual Year in Film issue takes a look at some of 2010’s more notable trends, starring films you liked (The Kids Are All Right) and hated (I’m Still Here) — and films you wanted to see but forgot about and are now rushing to put on your Netflix queue (Splice). (Note: the “you” in the previous sentence is, uh, me.) And since I’m talking in the first person now, let me steer you toward my favorite documentary of the year (and 2010 boasted some great ones, including my second-favorite, The Tillman Story), made-for-ESPN tale The Two Escobars. I was lured in by heavy advertising during the World Cup — apologies to the Giants, but Landon Donovan’s ridiculous game-winner in USA versus Algeria is my pick for sports highlight of the year — and was unexpectedly mesmerized by its tragic story; only later did I learn of the film’s San Francisco connection. Read on, and pass the popcorn.

>>Babes in bondage

Or, 2010’s perfection-pursuing fatal femmes

>>Get “real”

The Social Network, Catfish, and I’m Still Here push the boundaries of truth and fiction

>>Past imperfect

Digging through the year in archival footage

>>Rate irate

Confidential to the Motion Picture Association of America: F-U

>>Baby daddy drama

Parsing 2010’s bumper crop of sperm donor comedies

>>Goal difference

Top 2010 doc The Two Escobars examines two sides of Colombian narco-soccer

>>Guardian critics pick their best movies of the year

 

 

 

 

Scrooge you can use

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scrooge you can use

caitlin@sfbg.com

CULTURE/ALT-XMAS At some point this December, my holiday spirit failed to launch. It’s strange in a way — I love gluttony, formal wear, time with loved ones, and the Latino church procession I saw going down South Van Ness Avenue the other day gave me a little shiver of happiness (not to mention the purple lights bedecking kink.com’s Armory). But I just don’t want to do the tree, the presents, the pressure. Really, this list of Xmas week alternative activities is for me as much as anyone, which I hope means I still get to do the mistletoe thing.

 

OPTION ONE: HEAD FOR THE HILLS

You ain’t got shit to do, so why not take your melancholy and foist it on nature? The recent spate of rain may make for a wet winter wonderland, but that should suit misanthropes just fine. Wear your best raincoat and mittens and you’ll be snug as the baby JC in his manger.

Where to go? The No. 76 Muni bus can get you to the Marin Headlands Recreational Area (remember, the buses run on the holiday-Sunday schedule on the 25th , check www.511.org for times) where foul weather makes for thrilling, wind-whipping hikes about the hills to the north of Golden Gate Bridge. Or you can take advantage of the greenery within city limits. Glen Canyon Park’s many trails are an excellent place to wait out the tinsel and treacle, as are the startlingly beautiful red rocks jutting out over the city in Corona Heights Park and the idiosyncratic bison paddock in Golden Gate Park.

Bonus round: get your conservation on the day after Christmas in Muir Woods with a free hike called “Get Your Spawn On: Searching for Endangered Salmon.” The hike will take you on a hunt for salmonids and reveals how we can help the fishies swim their way back into species security. (Meets at Muir Woods Dipsea Trail Trailhead, Mill Valley. (415) 349-5787, www.wildequity.org. 10 a.m.–noon, free with $5 park entrance fee)

 

OPTION TWO: GET A LITTLE CULTCHA IN YA

Sure, many of our venerable cultural institutions stay away from organizing events over the holiday weekend. But with only a small amount of searching, you can dig up the brave souls who see no reason to halt their arty trot on account of jingle bells. These include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which will be celebrating Dec. 24 with part one of its two-part exhibition “Audience as Subject,” a multimedia exploration of crowd behavior. Filmmaker Stefan Constantinescu will screen Troleibuzul 92 (2009), an examination of reactions to a planted actor on a crowded bus making abusive phone calls to his “girlfriend,” and visual and video artists investigate variations on the theme. (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2700, www.ybca.org. Noon, $7.)

If self scrutiny’s not your jam, head to the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Christmas Day, where free admission all day means that you can save your bones for New Year Eve’s and still check out the work of H.A. Rey and Margret Rey, the husband and wife who created Curious George. The couple just barely managed to smuggle the early sketches of George (and themselves) in their escape from the Nazi invasion of Paris, which they accomplished by bicycle. The drama might explain George’s penchant for close calls and saving the day. Kind of makes that cycling slog through this week’s foul weather seem less onerous, no? (Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; (415) 655-7800, www.thecjm.org. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m.)

 

OPTION THREE: GET IT ON FILM

Going to the movies on Christmas has long been the treasured territory of awkward family gatherings, and with the mega-release of Tron: Legacy (playing at various Bay Area theaters) you can take it to the third dimension! Why talk about each others’ lives when you can plop down in the Castro Theatre with a tub of popcorn, affix 3-D glasses to your face and zone … out … for two hours and seven minutes? Hell, you can even skip the fam-fam and bring your girl Mary Jane, because this is one flick that promises to look real cool with a side of herb — soundtrack, acting, and plot notwithstanding.

And there’s no need to be a lonely anime geek by the Christmas tree. Bebop Nights, the recurring get-together of cult classic TV show Cowboy Bebop fans is holding its sixth installment Dec. 25, a day stereotypically characterized by animated features with way, way less cooler characters. Sure, Rudolph and Frosty are bulbous and ebullient, but Spike, Vicious, and Julie are deep space bounty hunters with a penchant for dope background music. Which cast better characterizes your lump of coal attitude this yuletide? (Bridge Theatre, 3010 Geary, SF; (415) 668-6384, www.landmarktheaters.com. Midnight–3 a.m., suggested donation $4)

Other promising showings include Natalie Portman’s psycho-ballet thriller, Black Swan, camp of the year Burlesque, the Coen brothers’ remake of the western True Grit, and Naomi Watts as CIA agent Valerie Plame in Fair Game.

 

OPTION FOUR: DRINK

And when all else fails, raise a glass to (and of, see how that works?) booze. Many of your watering hole favorites will be open Christmas Eve and day, but why not try on a new barstool and pack of regulars for size? My pick for caroling into the bottom of your glass is Trad’r Sam (6150 Geary, SF; (415) 221-0733. Open noon–late), a kick-ass Outer Richmond tiki bar where I am cautioned that a solo scorpion bowl mission will result in the ability to see reindeers, unless that’s what you’re going for. To make your Christmas denial complete, keep one eye on the jukebox, and your clobbering stick handy for any poor schlub who opts for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas.”

Violence please!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Violence please!

Christmas is here early, horror geeks: not only is a brand-new print of 1980’s Maniac playing the Castro Theatre, but director William Lustig will be in attendance. After the big-screen experience, make sure Santa knows you want the extras-packed 30th anniversary DVD, released by Lustig’s own Blue Underground label, wrapped in bloody butcher paper under the tree.

For the uninitiated, Maniac — the tale of a mommy-haunted New York City creep who stalks and kills women, using their body parts to accessorize his mannequin collection — features a tour de force performance by the late Joe Spinell, who co-wrote the screenplay. Spinell was a grindhouse favorite who also appeared in the first two Rocky movies, the first two Godfather movies, and Taxi Driver (1976). Lustig directed Spinell in 1983’s Vigilante; he also helmed the Maniac Cop series. He hasn’t directed a feature since 1997’s horror comedy Uncle Sam (“I want you … DEAD!”), but he’s still very much involved in the world of genre films. Since I’m a Maniac maniac, I gave him a call at his New York City office to talk about exploding heads and other topics.

SFBG How long have you been planning Maniac‘s 30th anniversary celebration?

William Lustig About 18 months ago, the idea popped into my head that it was time to freshen up the movie. Six months ago, somebody came up with the idea of testing it as a theatrical release. We started playing it in Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, and it’s done quite well, so we’re going to be rolling it out over the next three or four months in about 50 cities throughout North America.

SFBG Are most audiences already familiar with the movie, or are you getting some first-timers?

WL People who have seen it on video make up a good portion of the audience, but the other portion are seeing it for the first time. It’s amazing — you know, when you make a movie like this, I guess it’s like somebody who makes a comedy. After a while, you don’t find it funny anymore. As a person who made a horrific movie, I can’t imagine anybody finding it scary, and yet people do. They still respond as strongly as people did 30 years ago. It feels great!

SFBG Are you surprised that Maniac became such a cult favorite?

WL Somebody recently asked me, when did I realize it was a classic? I guess it must have been about 18 months ago when I realized that this movie continues to sell, continues to intrigue people. I think a portion of it is the mystique of its star, Joe Spinell, who’s become kind of a cult figure for people who are rediscovering movies from the ’70s. But Maniac is not a film that was lost and now it’s been found — it’s been around and it continues to attract audiences and to please them.

SFBG What was Joe Spinell like in real life?

WL Like any great actor, there was a part of Joe in every role he played. Joe was a loner, and he was an insomiac. He would roam the streets of New York and be at bars until all hours. He was a troubled soul, but at the same time, he was one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He had a charisma that would attract beautiful women even though he wasn’t a classically handsome guy. He had a magic about him. So when you see Maniac, there are aspects of his personality in there.

SFBG Maniac was quite controversial when it was released. Did that surprise you?

WL You know, when you’re making a movie and you’re throwing ketchup around, it’s almost kind of comical. It’s not intended to be serious — you intend it to be a kind of roller-coaster ride for an audience. And when people take a movie like that so seriously, and look at it as being a political statement, and look at it as being some kind an outcry for violence against women and things like that, it kind of takes you aback. When I made the film, I was 24 years old and I was just trying to survive the experience. I wasn’t thinking about the wider implications of what we were doing. And I think we’ve gone beyond that in the world today. I think we kind of look at it as being make-believe.

SFBG I have to ask you about the famous exploding head, courtesy of effects wizard Tom Savini. Did you realize that would be Maniac‘s defining moment?

WL I think after we made the movie, we realized it had a tremendous impact. But when we were doing it, we were like burglars in the night. First off, there is no permit in existence, in any part of New York City, or I would imagine in any part of the country, that allows to you fire a live gun on a movie set and on public streets. Which is what we did — we actually filmed that in that parking lot, under the Verrazano Bridge, with a live shotgun, double-loaded. That was our major concern: would we get busted? It wasn’t until later, when we saw the dailies, that we realized, “Holy shit! It actually turned out to be something!” We rigged up three cameras and we just went for it.

SFBG You’re the owner of Blue Underground, which has released top-notch DVDs and Blu-rays of Maniac and other grindhouse movies. Why did you become such a champion of these films?

WL It was kind of satisfying my own need. I always loved having people over to my house, showing them these obscure grindhouse movies that I had seen on 42nd Street in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and I would see their [enthusiastic] reactions. One of the things that bothered me back in the ’80s and the ’90s was that these movies were never really treated with any respect. So it was my intention to treat grindhouse movies the same way Criterion treats its Fellini movies.

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS: PUSH IT TO THE LIMIT TRIPLE FEATURE

Just One of the Guys (1985), Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Point Break (1991), Fri., 9:30 p.m.;

Maniac: The Restored Director’s Cut (1980), Fri., midnight, $12

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120 www.castrotheatre.com

‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

You don’t have to be into winter solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa celebrations to realize that there’s something about December — the end of another decade this time around, the darkest part of the year — that calls out for treats either for yourself or a friend or two. Here are a few dance-related suggestions between now and the end of the year that won’t bust your budget.

Born in Imperial Russia, The Nutcracker has become a peculiarly American institution. Almost against my will, it pulls me in every time. Though bifurcated, the masterful music — no matter its commercialization — pulls together the story of a brave little girl and her adventures. Reasonably priced options exist. San Francisco Ballet’s (through Dec. 27; War Memorial Opera House, SF) starts at $32. Take binoculars, you’ll be fine. The Oakland Ballet Company’s highly acclaimed version by new Artistic Director Graham Lustig (Dec. 23-26; Paramount Theater, Oakl.) starts at $15. Berkeley Ballet Theater’s (Dec. 10-12 and 17-19; Julia Morgan Theater, Berk.) has a one-price ticket for $26. After 20 years, this will be former ODC dancer Brian Fisher’s last Fritz.

If you like your Nutcracker to have sharp edges, the Dance Brigade’s mashup of politics and fun, The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie (Dec. 11-12; Brava Theater, SF; $15–$17), has been reimagined by another generation of grrrl dancers and friends. The Dance Along Nutcracker (Dec. 11-12; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; $16–$50) was a hoot the first time around and continues to be a splendid mix of circus, dress-up, and community celebration. This year the revelers have invited the Twilight Vixen Revue. The SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band does the musical honors — fabulously.

Stepping outside of Nutcracker territory into original holiday fare, Kirstin E. Williams’ all-female Strong Pulse company hooks up with CCSF students for Be Cool, (Dec. 10-11; CCSF Performance Theater, SF; $10–$15) a jazz/ modern dance/hip-hop concert that is guaranteed to resonate all over the Phelan Avenue campus.

If you have never seen ShaSha Higby work her magic with phantasmagoric concoctions of human-made and natural materials, be prepared to being pulled into a world as dreamlike as it is tangible. In Folds of Gold (through Dec. 10-11; Noh Space, SF; $12-20) examines deep winter issues surrounding life, death, and rebirth.

The circus-based Sweet Can Productions newest show, Candid (Dec. 17-Jan. 9; Dance Mission Theater, SF; $15–$60), is sweet but not saccharine-sweet. These performers juggle and subvert cherished concepts as well as objects — brooms, dinner plates, hula hoops — to stretch credulity and the imagination. It’s what happens when life meets art.

With Lo Clásico, (Dec. 17-19; Cowell Theater, SF; $15–$35), Caminos Flamencos — 22 dancers and musicians — are performing Spain’s two major historical dance forms. There is, of course, flamenco, including Yaelisa’s breathtaking Soleares, but also examples of lesser-known Spanish classical dance choreographed to Ravel and de Falla.

WestWave Dance (Dec. 13; Cowell Theater, SF; $22–$68) closes its season with another quintet of new choreography by Pam Gonzales (from L.A.), Alyce Finwall, Christy Funsch, Carolé Acuna, and Ingrid Graham. The festival curates promising work by artists who can’t on their own afford the professional production values WestWave offers.

How about insight into dancers’ thought processes? For free? Chime Live (Dec. 11; Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, SF; free) offers conversations and showings of work from Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab’s mentoring program. In the monthly program “2nd Sundays” (Dec. 12; CounterPULSE, SF; free), artists show pieces-in-progress and invite feedback. “Dancemaker’s Forum” (Dec. 19; SF Conservatory of Dance, SF; free) workshops new choreography by Manuelito Biag.

Contact improvisation has become a valued tool for choreographers, but it’s also a glorious performance art that redefines the concept of being “in the moment.” One of its originators, the masterful Nancy Stark Smith (Dec. 18; Eighth Street Studios, Berk.; $10–$20) is in town to connect with local and guest practitioners.

The connection between the Odette and Odile characters has puzzled Swan Lake lovers forever; the roles used to be danced by two different performers. SF Ballet’s recent production hinted at one interpretation. For another take, you might want to go to the movies and see Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (now playing; Bay Area theaters; prices vary).

Our Weekly Picks: December 8-14, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

WEDNESDAY 8

MUSIC

Holy Grail

Though you practically need a PhD in metal to keep track of Holy Grail’s ever-shifting lineup, one thing is obvious to anyone — even a layperson — when he or she first hears the band: singer James Paul Luna has one of the best young voices in rock ‘n’ roll, period. Ascending to falsetto heights with polished ease, the siren-lunged Pasadena, Calif., native fronts a band dedicated to the exuberant excess of early eighties speed metal, and his Halfordesque attack on the mic is complimented by the frenetic shredding and double-bass gallop of the band that backs him up. Touring in support of long-awaited debut LP Crisis in Utopia, Holy Grail is not to be missed. (Ben Richardson)

With Blind Guardian and Seven Kingdoms

8 p.m., $32

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

1-800-745-3000

www.theregencyballroom.com

PERFORMANCE

 

David Liebe Hart

Along with James Quall and Richard Dunn (R.I.P.), David Liebe Hart is the cream of the crop of lovingly bizarre actors populating Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! The show takes pride in exposing the world to forgotten Hollywood street performers, bit actors, outsider musicians, and left-field comedians, all of which can be used to sum up Liebe Hart’s career. Armed with his trusty puppet and musical tales of being abducted by Corrinian aliens, he’ll be headlining Club Chuckles’ Seventh Anniversary Show lineup. Be sure to greet him with a friendly “Salame!” (Landon Moblad)

With Hot Panda, Chris Thayer, and Donny Divanian

9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

 

FILM

“Andy Warhol: Face and The Velvet Underground in Boston Cinematheque Benefit”

An early look at recent restorations of two of Andy Warhol’s most obscure movies (both long out of circulation) is the hidden jewel of San Francisco Cinematheque’s fall season. Face (1965) is an hour-long expression of Edie Sedgwick’s superstar photogenie. The Velvet Underground in Boston (1967) collects rare footage of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable house-band in its prime. Taken together, the films should present an unusual view of Factory life. The screening benefits Cinematheque’s upcoming programming, so you’ll leave knowing you’ve done your part for underground movies. (Max Goldberg)

8 p.m., $15

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

(415) 863-7576

www.sfcinematheque.org

 

PERFORMANCE

Legacy, A One Ho Show

Presented by the AIRspace residency program, Trashina Cann (real name: Randen Kane) stars in Legacy, A One Ho Show, a queer-friendly, autobiographical dance theater piece exploring the misfortunes and vices passed down through Kane’s family and their effects on her life today. Journeying through three generations of women and their struggles with abandonment, sexual abuse, unwanted motherhood, prostitution, and incarceration, Kane comes to understand that her troubling past can also save her. Using burlesque, song, dance, and video, Kane manifests her incredible life story and her will to overcome, all the while staying extraordinarily entertaining. (Emmaly Wiederholt)

Wed/8–Thurs/9, 8 p.m., $10–$20

Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 518-1517

www.975howard.com

 

THURSDAY 9

PERFORMANCE

Adam Carolla

What hasn’t funny guy Adam Carolla done in his show business career? He got his start in radio (Loveline), branched out into television (The Man Show), written and starred in a feature film (2007’s The Hammer), and expanded onto the Internet with his podcast talk show. Carolla’s latest foray finds him as the author of a new book, In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks … And Other Complaints From An Angry Middle-Aged White Guy, which he’ll be promoting and signing during his “Christmas Carolla” tour of the West Coast, bringing his caustic yet sidesplitting and hilarious, stand-up to the raw and uncensored — as it should be — live stage. (Sean McCourt)

Thurs/9, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.;

Fri/10–Sat/11, 8 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., $32.50–$35.50

Cobb’s Comedy Club

915 Columbus, SF

(415) 928-4320

www.cobbscomedyclub.com

 

FRIDAY 10

VISUAL ART

 

“Boom”

Art is made in all manners of cracks and crevices and four-bedroom apartments. How are we to know that what we have the pleasure of viewing gallery-side is the best of the best, the most succulent bit of Dungeness in San Francisco’s cioppino? Well, we don’t, and now I’m hungry. But events like “Boom” tend to help matters. The event is an entry fee-free juried art show, which means that a) artists don’t gotta have sold a $700,000 piece to kick it (congrats to Chor Boogie, by the way); and b) Southern Exposure has supplied an expert mind to deem said art worthy of your collection or not. (Caitlin Donohue)

Through Dec. 18

Opening reception tonight, 6–9 p.m., free

Southern Exposure

3030 20th St., SF

(415) 863-2141

www.soex.org

 

EVENT

“The Lusty Lady’s Kinky Kiss-Mass Party”

Ohhhhh! Uhhhhuh! Fuhkuhhhhhhh … there, no, therrrreee! Ahhhhhhh! Yesssssss! Can’t get enough? Don’t worry, babe, there’ll be plenty to get you off at the Lusty Lady’s ho-ho-holiday fundraiser. Love peppermint? Enter the Candy Cane Suck-Off Contest! Love cheeky 1960s garage rock and ’70s hard glam? See the Minks and Destroyer, covering two great bands named after two great things: the Kinks and Kiss, respectively. Love hot naked women who are unionized, lionized, organized, and revolutionized? Then raise your glass of cheap booze while you help raise funds to keep the shades raised, one hot dollar at a time. (Kat Renz)

With Trixxie Carr, Horror X, and DJ Omar

8 p.m.-3 a.m., $12–$15

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

 

SATURDAY 11

MUSIC

“The I Am Donald Tour” with Donald Glover + Childish Gambino

As the man-child Troy on NBC’s Community (and a former writer for 30 Rock), 26-year-old Donald Glover currently stands on the precipice of a breakout comedic acting career. So what’s he doing releasing a non-novelty rap album (under the name Childish Gambino)? Although his current celebrity makes it initially hard to take his music seriously, once you move past the indie-kid stroking (“H.O.V.A. with glasses/Weezy but nerdy”) and TV-star titillation (“NBC is not the only thing I’m coming on tonight”), Glover’s casual willingness to be introspective and examine uncomfortable personal struggles signals that he plans on doing more than vacationing in the genre. (Peter Galvin)

9 p.m., $15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

THEATER

Siddhartha, The Bright Path

Performed entirely by kids and young adults, Siddhartha, The Bright Path chronicles Siddhartha’s epic journey to becoming the Buddha alongside the story of modern-day Chandra from San Francisco. Chandra finds herself amid a bounty of birthday presents posing questions about the real value of material goods in the face of human suffering. The two meet on the banks of the Ganges River under a bodhi tree where the Buddha helps Chandra find enlightenment relevant to her life. Fused with Indian music, art, and kathak dance, this play combines traditional Indian culture with the warmth of the holiday season. (Wiederholt)

Through Jan. 9

Previews Sat/11–Sun/12, 3 p.m.; Dec 16, 7:30 p.m.

Opens Dec 17, 7:30 p.m. (schedule varies), $10–$50

Marsh Youth Theater

1062 Valencia, SF

www.themarsh.org

 

MUSIC

Gama Bomb

The burgeoning retro-thrash movement has become so overcrowded that it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, but hold onto your gigantic white Reebok hi-tops — Gama Bomb is coming. The Dublin, Ireland, quintet is among the best of an uneven bunch, cranking out gleeful, inventive ditties full of machine-gun picking and nerdy, caterwauled vocals. Tales from the Grave in Space (2009) picked up where its previous effort left off, drawing on the band’s love of booze, bawdiness, and pulpy pop culture to weave an adrenalized tapestry shot through with divebombing solos and single-stroke rolls. Hearing the blitzkrieg live will be another matter entirely, and the Bomb is making its first visit to the U.S., so expect an all-out assault. (Richardson)

With Forbidden, Evile, Bonded by Blood, and Fog of War

2:30 p.m., $20

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-2532

www.dnalounge.com

 

SUNDAY 12

EVENT

Jeff Hoke

Alchemy, dreams, psychology, the stars — wrapped up in an enigmatic Myst-like museum and served to you in a picture book that aims to explain all four. Jeff Hoke is a unique mind. He’d have to be to hold his position as senior exhibits designer at Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we’re given an inside track to the inner workings of the man’s cerebellum with his new book, Museum of Lost Wonder (whose basic premise is explained above). On this day, he takes to the Exploratorium, where he plans to “merge the myths of science and nature,” according to the museum’s website. Screw on your thinking cap. (Donohue)

3–5 p.m., free with museum admission ($10–$15)

Exploratorium

3601 Lyon, SF

(415) 561-0360

www.exploratorium.edu

 

MONDAY 13

MUSIC

Tame Impala

Tame Impala describes itself as “the movement in Orion’s nebula and the slime from a snail journeying across a footpath.” Clearly, Tame Impala is a psychedelic rock band, complete with outrageous metaphor and hyperbole. But unlike a number of other noted bands in the resurging genre, its heavy sound derives more from a traditional hard groove than wild, in-studio manipulation. If at times the sound is evocative of the Flaming Lips, there’s good reason: Lips producer Dave Fridmann had his hand in Tame Impala’s debut, Innerspeaker. Adding to the vibe, this bill features Stardeath and White Dwarfs, contributors to the Lips’ 2009 Dark Side of the Moon remake and musical progeny of Wayne Coyne. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Stardeath and White Dwarfs

8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 

TUESDAY 14

FILM

The Triplets of Belleville

With luck, January 2011 will bring the release of the much-delayed animated picture The Illusionist. Originally intended for rollout in 2007, director Sylvain Chomet’s second film should be of particular interest to Francocinephiles, based on an unproduced script written by Jacques Tati. Until then, revisit The Triplets of Belleville, a showcase of Chomet’s unique gift for caricature and Tati’s influence, free of excessive dialogue. Nominated for Best Animated Film at the 2003 Academy Awards, it lost to Finding Nemo, but it should have at least won Best Animated Dog of All Time. (Prendiville)

Dec. 14–15, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.;

Also Dec. 15, 2 p.m., $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

 

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

Hollywood ho-hum

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hollywood ho-hum

FILM Some mainstream filmmakers grow so encumbered by the industry-within an-industry they’ve become that they profess yearning for those “small, personal” projects they started out with — often vowing they’ll get right back there just as soon as they’ve finished the obligatory Behemoth IV: The Next Generation in 3-D. (Coppola actually did it; Lucas needs to stop saying he will until he actually quits finding new ways to commercially reanimate the charred remains of Star Wars. Meaning never.)

It is exceedingly rare to find a director who over the long haul has managed to make nothing but small, personal projects, particularly if they’re American and within orbit of Hollywood influence. How could you resist admiring such a person’s determination and purity of intent?

Well, there may be exceptions. For nearly four decades, Henry Jaglom has been creating “personal” movies like other people make home movies — privately, prolifically, perhaps indiscriminately. He uses the same stable of cronies, some short-termers and some long, as well as their homes (or his own) as settings. His method (or Method — he did train under Lee Strasberg) echoes the semi-improv, amorphous ensemble feel of Robert Altman movies like Nashville (1975), albeit in a manner that seldom transcends the bubble of participants’ very Hollywood-centric perceptions of reality.

These features no doubt delight those actively involved — their self-satisfaction is tumescent — but can become an exasperating bore for anyone else forced to watch. The last good movie Jaglom made was the uncommonly disciplined Last Summer in the Hamptons 15 years ago. His new Queen of the Lot doesn’t change its status.

After her second DUI, improbable action-flick star Maggie Chase (Tanna Frederick) is placed under ankle-bracelet house arrest. She chooses to spend it at the impressive hilltop manse of her manager, along with a vain married actor boyfriend (Christopher Rydell) and a posse of personal assistants. Then she moves to the equally expansive digs of said BF’s historied showbiz family, all either industry players or dedicated wannabes. There, Maggie finds herself attracted to her ne’er-do-well mate’s supposedly worse brother (Noah Wyle, so thoughtfully restrained you wonder how he strayed into such company).

This shrill, shapeless enterprise lurches from feeble satire to clumsy melodrama, never seeming more credible or necessary than another excuse for Jaglom’s pals to indulge themselves in public. The cast includes faces from the past (like Dennis Christopher from 1979’s Breaking Away), Jaglom perennials, several children of stars, and miscellaneous industry insiders. When exactly was it that Jaglom decided anyone on his dinner party list was automatically fascinating enough to play a “character” onscreen? His first four features, all flawed but interesting, at least tried to be about other people. Since 1984, with a couple exceptions, they’ve become like the windbag who clears rooms upon arrival, because no matter whom he talks to or about, the overweening subject will be the World of Me and Mine.

Playing a famous director here is famous director Peter Bogdanovich, who once was criticized for making indulgent movies that foisted then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd on the public in unsuitable roles. Yet he never made films as insular and irrelevant as most of Jaglom’s. Nor did he ever showcase a talent as effortful, unappealing, and limited as Frederick, “discovered” when she wrote Jaglom a fan letter some years ago — having heard that anyone who flattered his movies might get cast in one. (She pretended to worship the unerringly titled 1997 Déjà vu, which she hadn’t even seen.) Is that a cute story — both director and actor never tire of telling it — or the symptom of an atrophied imagination?

Queen of the Lot is a sequel to 2006’s Hollywood Dreams, in which Frederick’s hysterical eagerness to please was somewhat apt for the role of a delusionally ambitious, alarmingly pushy Hollywood newbie. Now we’re supposed to believe that toxic figure has “made it.” This is the actress’ third starring vehicle for Jaglom; a fourth is imminent. This creative partnership demonstrates a judgment-impaired loyalty that is perhaps one part chivalry to nine parts WTF.

QUEEN OF THE LOT opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Highbrow-beaten

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Highbrow-beaten

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It has been such a feeble year for movies overall that it’s easy to understand why The King’s Speech would incite near-rapture on the festival and Oscar-countdown beats. Films like The King’s Speech have filled a certain notion of “prestige” cinema since the 1910s: historical themes, fully-clothed romance, high dramatics, star turns, a little political intrigue, sumptuous dress, and a vicarious taste of how the fabulously rich, famous, and powerful once lived. Whether derived from literary classics or the historical record, they usually involve aristocracy and British accents, reflecting our perennial escapist jones for Old World gentility.

At its best, this so-called Masterpiece Theatre moviemaking can transcend formula — it would be stupid to lowball the merits of Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End (1992), Terence Davies’ House of Mirth (2000), or Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006) simply because they’re exquisitely appointed, polite entertainments. At their less-than-best, however, these movies sell complacency, in both style and content.

The King’s Speech purveys a particular fantasy not unlike Cinderella‘s (or Twilight‘s): that of the unappreciated “commoner” whose very special qualities prove exactly what is needed by the remote, glamorous, extraordinary — but lonely and misunderstood! — prince or vampire or whatnot who plucks them from the madding crowd. Here, Colin Firth plays King George VI, forced onto the throne his favored older brother Edward abandoned. This was especially traumatic because George’s severe stammer made public address tortuous.

The special friend he acquires is matey Australian émigré Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, mercifully controlled), a speech therapist whose unconventional methods include insisting his royal client treat him as an equal. This ultimately frees not only the king’s tongue, but his heart — you see, he’s never had anyone before to confide in that daddy (Michael Gambon as George V) didn’t love him enough. Aww.

David Seidler’s conventionally inspirational script and BBC miniseries veteran Tom Hooper’s direction deliver the expected goods — dignity on wry, wee orgasms of aesthetic tastefulness, much stiff-upper-lippage — at a stately promenade pace. Firth, so good in the uneven A Single Man last year, is perfect in this rock-steadier vehicle. Yet he never surprises us; role, actor, and movie are on a leash tight enough to limit airflow.

The stuffiness lifts when George, exasperated and egged on, lets loose a string of childish profanity, his priggish reserve dissolving at last. Absurdly, this sole moment of naughty-boy silliness earned The King’s Speech — a PG prestige picture if ever there was one — its R rating from our wise protector, the MPAA.

THE KING’S SPEECH opens Fri/10 in San Francisco.

Saint Gravy

Andrew Lam
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2

There is a certain faction of society — I think it’s pretty large, if you judge by NorCal standards — that regards Wavy Gravy as some sort of mystical deity from their parents’ generation. We’re not sure what he did, but you should probably address him as Mr. Gravy ’til he tells you not to.

This is a perception that is left unquibbled-with by director Michelle Esrick’s ten year labor of docu-love, Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie (opening Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters), and further untouched by my interview with Esrick and the man himself.

Saint Misbehavin’ opening scenes are an iteration of a tie-died holy man’s daily routine. We start out in Wavy’s corner bedroom, awash in sitting Buddha figurines, plastic Disney toys, beads, books, and other sacred objects. Wavy enters, and says a pray and a brief recitation of his heroes. 

This spoken list serves as a blueprint for the bio-pic to come: Jesus, Mohammed, Ghandi, MLK Jr., Jerry Garcia are among those name-dropped. They serve as a background compass for the movie’s neatly plotted trajectory of Wavy’s life: Gravy is born in New York, goes from folk-beatnik Greenwich Village, to acid be-ins with Kesey in California, to the Further Bus.

And then: a stint with the Hopi tribe, and later, off to the East: to Nepal to heal blindness (with the aide of his international medical non-profit Seva). Of course, his creation of Camp Winnarainbow, a summer camp that has been teaching West Coast flower children how to play for three generations now. Today, Wavy is an elder statesman of hippies and their descendents as well as a frozen dessert. His sold-out birthday spectaculars attract crowds like a Phish concert. 

A more recognizable Gravy. Photo Courtesy of Ripple Effect Films

But for our movie-viewing purposes those names at the start also essential because we don’t get to hear a whole lot about Wavy’s inner monolouge in the flick – he’s onstage here, clowning away as he does, well everywhere, not really dishing per se. Saint Misbehavin’ is no E! True Hollywood Story. 

So when I got the chance to sit face to face with the man (I wore a Ringling Brothers clown hat, he had on a blue bowler and carried his familiar fish on a leash), I thought maybe we’d talk a little about how he got so Gravy. “It’s not too many kids that grow up to be a seminal member of so many artistic scenes,” I say. “Washington Park in the early ’60s, SF during the ’60s, Woodstock… but what was special about Hugh Romney (that was his square name from before he was Wavy — even before his first nom de nonsense Al Dente), how’d you get to where you are today?”

Gravy, just a little sleepy-looking in the warm office building where our interview takes place, tells me “one thing just followed from another, listing off his general path across the world.” Such is the role of a tribe elder talking to a youngster: there are things that we are not to know. What more do we need to know, really? He quotes Thelonius Monk, a friend who stand-up comedian Hugh Romney opened for. “Everyone is a genius by just being themselves.”

That’s his deal: the rainbow he travels on is available to us all, if we can only see it and trust to it’s pretty suspended bands of color. Luckily, we do have Saint Misbehavin’ to get literal with. Esrick has put together a wild ride and the information it contains teaches about Wavy’s contributions to the hippie and anti-Vietnam war movement. He was on the front lines back then – Esrick tells me that the way he deals with the chronic pain he sustains from police beatings from those days is one of the most impressive things she learned about Wavy in the 10 years she spent researching for the film with him. 

I ask Wavy his reaction to seeing his epic life laid out on celluloid for thousands of strangers’ viewing pleasure. He refused to see early versions of the film when Esrick was still editing: what was it like to finally view the real thing? “You realize what a long strange trip it was – and continues to be,” he says after a moment’s pause. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen Wavy speechless,” Esrick smiles.

And so I leave our interview without really having gained any insider info on the life of Gravy. But I haven’t departed without a few gems, the primos being the story of meeting his wife (“she put peanuts in my hamburger and I fell in love,”) tips for graceful protests: “I always gave the best cop my rose. They were always very touched,” vegetarianism: “remember you are not what you eat, you are what you don’t shit,”and the truth about relations with the Middle East, spoken by a man who traveled through Iraq and Afghanistan on a rainbow bus in the 1970s: “They know the difference – there are ugly Americans that you see, and there are fellow travelers on the path of life. They recognized us as the latter.”

This from Michelle: “A full biography of Wavy’s would be 10 movies. I was interested in stringing a necklace of pearls together.” Maybe there are things we’re not supposed to know about those on high, or rather, that we don’t have to in order to know that they’re up there.

Epilogue: To gauge what maybe I am missing from the story of Wavy by virtue of not having been there in the glory days, I texted my mom today. “What did Wavy Gravy mean to you back in the day? Was he cool?” She wrote back “I don’t remember him!” Which of course, means she was really there. 

 

Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.  

 

Cash and Carrey

Andrew Lam
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Cash and Carrey

arts@sfbg.com

FILM You had to forgive most of the gay press for getting a little too excited over Brokeback Mountain (2005). Oh, no doubt it’s a great movie, or that the Oscar going to the fraudulent Crash (2004) said less about that film’s virtues than a skittishness that other movie stirred. But its excellence and commercial success induced widespread bouts of wishful thinking in the form of announcing new trends that never came to pass.

Five years later, there hasn’t been another mainstream American film in which a gay relationship is taken seriously and granted central importance. (You could argue for The Kids Are All Right, but that’s mostly a comedy, a big arthouse hit rather than even a modest mainstream one — and the fact remains that lesbians played by attractive actresses aren’t nearly as threatening to the sanity, morality, masculinity, and private parts of many Americans as gay men.) Nor has a single major movie star come out as gay or bi, despite the hilarity induced by excuses for such police-intervention activities as “offering a ride” to transgender sex workers at 4 a.m. or getting mugged while “walking the dog” in a well-known cruising park (also at 4 a.m.). In all these regards, television has leapt well ahead of the big screen.

Given typically imitation-crazed Hollywood’s failure to built on Brokeback‘s success — or see it as anything more than a fluke — the case of I Love You Phillip Morris is interesting for what it is and isn’t. It is, somewhat by default, the biggest onscreen gay romance (not including foreign and indie productions, which are always ahead of the curve) since that earlier film, even if it is (again) primarily a comedy, and one whose true-story basis provides the leavening element of stranger-than-fiction curiosity. (Nobody’s bothered by the gayness of movies like 2005’s Capote because we accept the otherness of real people too famous and/or peculiar to be relatable.)

What Phillip Morris is not, however, is a Hollywood or even American film, all appearances to the contrary. Its financing was primarily French — presumably because there wasn’t enough willing coin on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, not even for a comedy starring Jim Carrey. And for a while it didn’t even look like Phillip Morris would be an American release, even after it had played (and done pretty well) virtually everywhere else, from Europe to Latin America to Southeast Asia to frikkin’ Kazakhstan. The reasons (some legal) are unclear, but it seems pretty certain the aforementioned squeamishness around guys kissing and cuddling and diddling factored in — never mind that those guys are Carrey and Ewan McGregor.

Free at last, albeit without much fanfare, Phillip Morris proves to have a whole lot more in common with Steven Soderburgh’s The Informant! (2009) — true tale turned farcical caper, to diverting if mixed results — than to tragic Brokeback, even if love runs a rather sad, thwarted course here, too. We meet Steven Jay Russell as an uber-perky all-American lad — a nascent Jim Carrey — perhaps permanently warped at age eight by the discovery that he’s adopted. Nonetheless he proceeds along the road of dead-center normality, getting married (Leslie Mann manages to be both very droll and very Christian as Debbie), having kids, being a loveable Mr. Policeman, and fucking guys only on the QT.

A near-fatal accident, however, induces him to merrily chuck it all — he’s so nice the family can’t help wishing him well — and live life to the fullest by moving from Georgia to South Beach and becoming a “big fag.” He soon discovers that “being gay is really expensive,” or at least his chosen A-lister lifestyle is. Having been schooled by his adoption trauma, Steve figures if everything you think you know can so easily turn out to be a lie, why not becoming a fibbing superstar? He begins diverting funds from his corporate employer, amazed at what a chief financial officer position and a golf-playing, polo-shirt-wearing front can get away with. At least to a point — the point that commences several ensuing revolving-door years of cons, captures, prison stints, and ingenious escapes.

It is during one hoosegow stay that he meets the non-tobacco-related Phillip Morris (McGregor), a sweet Southern sissy who got there by sheer haplessness rather than criminal guile. Steven is an ardent, protective lover — if he’s also slippery as an eel, that’s at least partly because he thinks his lies protect those he loves — and Phillip is a slavishly adoring 1950s housewife who just happens to have been born with a penis.

Like The Informant!, Phillip Morris fudges the facts a bit for narrative convenience and strains at times for an antic tone that makes life itself a sort of genre parody. In his genius-IQ mind, does Russell see himself as the hero of a perfect if artificial sitcom-type world? Or does casting Carrey require the same sort of hyperreal gloss routinely applied to gimmick-driven vehicles like Yes Man (2008), Bruce Almighty (2003), and Liar Liar (1997), because he bends any context like a funhouse mirror? (Only once, in 1998’s The Truman Show, did that context meaningfully amplify his cartoonishness; and only once, in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has he calmed down to ordinary human proportions.) Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, making their directorial debut after team-writing a bewildering trio of mainstream comedies (2001’s Cats and Dogs, 2003’s Bad Santa, and 2005’s The Bad News Bears), approach their fascinating material with brashness and some skill, but without the control to balance its steep tonal shifts.

Surprisingly, it’s in the “love” part that they often succeed best. While their comic aspects sometimes tip into shrill, destabilizing caricature — the excess that brilliant but barely-manageable Carrey will always drift toward unless tightly leashed — this movie’s link to Brokeback is that it never makes the love between two men look inherently ridiculous, as nearly all mainstream comedies now do to get a cheap throwaway laugh or three.

Russell’s scenes with AIDS-fallen first boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) are very poignant. And the many more with McGregor, who plays white-trash nelly with an uncondescending delicacy that’s both amusing and wistful, are quite lovely. There’s one scene of them chatting in their prison cell — viewed overhead in bed, Phillip’s head in the crook of Steven’s arm — that’s so affectionately intimate you can see exactly why the movie took two years to get a U.S. release. Even the prior scene of Carrey riding a different man’s ass like a bucking bronco isn’t as half so threatening as this, an utterly unguarded moment with two famous faces that both happen to be male conveying a perfectly synched love.

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS opens Fri/3 in San Francisco.

 

Ho-ho-horror

Andrew Lam
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0
Ho-ho-horror

arts@sfbg.com

FILM There is probably nowhere in the Christian-majority world where it’s as OK to wax hum-buggy about Christmas and all it entails as San Francisco. Allergies to carols (admit it, they’re horrible), frantically enabled shopaholicism, and forced contact with those people you moved here to get away from are all tolerated, even encouraged here.

In the rakishly Grinch-like spirit such sentiments allow, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is observing “the season” with “Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December.” This series might just as easily have been titled “Grievous Bodily Harm” since it serves up a six-program lineup of film and video features whose common thread is excess of a highly splattery kind. Included are a few variably antiqued golden oldies, as well as newer titles unlikely to get local commercial runs anytime soon (if ever). Some are fun, some deliberately unpleasant, and a couple manage to be both. All provide a sort of palliative effect for those seeking refuge from the suffocation of wholesome holiday cheer.

Because Jesus probably would, let’s approach “Hell”‘s contents tactfully, in ascending order of assault on any delicate sensibilities. The sole double bill on offer is also hands-down winner in terms of camp value, providing unintentional laughs in bulk for every intended scare. In fact, these two underseen gems of bright and shining awfulness comprise one of the more genius programming matches of 2010.

First up is the barely describable, let alone explicable, 1985’s Night Train to Terror, which alongside They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968), Al Adamson’s ouevre, and a handful of other oddities personifies that most secret, least natural of genres: the Frankensteinian film. By which we don’t mean anything directly related to Mary Shelley, but rather movies crudely, grotesquely composed of parts harvested from other movies abandoned as dead.

Few are as triumphantly, energetically, and entertainingly arbitrary as Night Train, which stitches together bits of three features variably orphaned by legal trouble, runaway funding, aborted shooting, or all the above. Linking them — or desperately trying to — are scenes in which “Mr. Satan” and a white-bearded God gamble in a private car for the souls of their fellow train passengers. The latter are an ensemble of ultra-perky “New Wave” youth in Flashdance (1983) garb singing and kinda dancing in a neverending MTV video for synthpop non-hit “Dance With Me.”

Familiar B-flick faces like John Phillip Law and Cameron Mitchell surface sporadically in the wildly condensed “case histories” our biblical antagonists debate, drawn from individual films otherwise known as Cataclysm, Carnival of Fools, and Scream Your Head Off. That this bastard 1985 anthology was assembled, let alone actually shown in theaters, restores your faith in predictable mankind’s ability to occasionally touch the truly, inspirationally senseless.

This feeling one could apply to virtually anything by the late Doris Wishman, whose decades of bottom-rung exploitation work left miraculously intact an approach to such basics as continuity, camera coverage, and synch sound so primitive it achieves a sort of abstract impressionism. Her 1983 A Night to Dismember was stab at the slasher genre after almost a quarter century selling softcore sex. She brought to it exactly the same WTF aesthetic and narrative perversity she had to Nude on the Moon (1961) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965). If you’re a Wishman newbie, Dismember is a great place to start since its saga of the compulsively homicidal suburban Kent family is awesomely clumsy without being too dull or claustrophobic.

The mayhem she contrives (no doubt most “gore” was thriftily broiled for stew after each day’s shoot) looks even more laughable alongside the too convincing graphic ugh-liness of Thai cinematographer Tiwa Moeithaisong’s directorial debut Meat Grinder (2009). Its protagonist is a Bangkok noodle shop proprietor whose extremely abused history triggers a Texas Chainsaw style attitude toward fresh victuals, and whose threadbare grip on reality provides our brain-scrambling POV. Starting out like just another exercise in “Asian Extreme” excess, this grows both more outre and controlled as it goes along, balancing jet-black comedy with a certain grotesque pathos.

Charting a reverse trajectory is Red White & Blue, the first U.S. feature by Brit writer-director Simon Rumley, whose 2006 The Living and the Dead is one of the most original films (horror or otherwise) in recent memory. For 80 minutes, it’s a chillingly fine portrait of some well-marginalized characters in Austin, Texas, culminating in possibly the most alarming home invasion since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). But the rest degenerates into rote revenge-fantasy torture porn, further weakened by deliberate story mystifications more enervating than enigmatic.

There are excuses for horror fans who’ve missed Living and Dead — it was barely released in the U.S. — but none for those as yet unbathed in the blood of Wolf Creek. Allegedly based on actual events (a fib), Greg Mclean’s 2005 first feature takes exactly half its length to let nothing happen. Nothing, that is, save our getting to know three young people just ordinary and interesting enough to grow concerned about as they drive across Australia at summer holiday’s end, halted in the middle of nowhere by what at first seems routine bad luck. Several long dread-accruing minutes later, it turns out what’s happening to them is something far, far worse, unrelated to either luck or anything routine. Brilliantly atmospheric and visceral, Creek justifies YBCA’s hyperbolic claim as “possibly the best horror film of the decade.”

Also on “Hell”‘s menu are two films I could say more about, but won’t. Regarding Mladen Djordjevic’s Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009), that’s because this all-outrages-inclusive tragicomedic mock-doc road flick was only available for preview in its original Serbian language. Still, it’s recommendable. Whereas Marc D. Levitz’s U.S. documentary Feast of the Assumption: BTK and The Otero Family Murders (2008), about a serial killer’s capture and impact on victims’ families 30 years later, would merit further discussion if it didn’t wobble between tabloid TV and home movie — all the while raising serious questions it doesn’t address, or perhaps even notice.

“GO TO HELL FOR THE HOLIDAYS”

Dec. 2–18, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

Mädchen gone wild

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Mädchen gone wild

Every nation had its distinct cinematic response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Germany’s was characteristic in offering the pretense of order, “scientific” educational value, and encouraging a healthy collective morality — even if all this was usually mere gloss over the usual, more marketable qualities of copious T&A.

Encouraged by Scandinavian films already tearing down censorship barriers worldwide, Deutschland screens (the free-Western ones only, needless to say) began addressing the matter directly in 1968. Then, Oswalt Kolle, a psychiatrist’s son and tabloid journalist turned celebrity sex educator, commenced making features like Sexual Partnership (1968), The Sensual Male (1970), and Your Child, That Unknown Creature (1970). These fairly sober mixtures of documentary and dramatized “case histories” were as widely translated as his writings. (Nonetheless, Kolle and his family relocated to Amsterdam, citing constant harassment by conservative German politicians and media as the cause.)

Such success inevitably attracted imitation. Dr. Gunther Hunold’s Schulmädchen-Report had made best-seller waves with its collection of interviews with 14- to 20-year-old women about their sexual experiences and opinions. Enter Wolf C. Hartwig of Rapid Film, producer-distributor of such savory titles as Satan Tempts With Love (1960) and Your Body Belongs to Me (1959). He bought the book’s film rights, retaining Hunold as co-scenarist and consultant for 1970’s Schoolgirl Report: What Parents Don’t Think Is Possible, which proved so enormously popular that an entire national subgenre was born.

The resulting series of Schoolgirl Report features stretched through the entire Me Decade. All 13 are being issued on DVD by the Impulse Pictures label of South San Francisco’s CAV Distributing Corporation, a project that reaches its precise midpoint next month with 1974’s Schoolgirl Report Volume 7: What the Heart Must Thereby …. Watching too many of these interchangeable vintage sexploitation “documentaries” in close succession can be hazardous to your mental health, but in moderation — as with most things – — they prove instructive.

Volume 1 set the mold, sometimes in stone: factors like the groovy Farfisa-acid guitar-flute rock instrumental theme by Gert Wilden and His Orchestra (whose original soundtracks would continue to run a delightfully dated gamut from go-go discotheque to cocktail jazz to Mantovani-like schmuzak), cheap production values, Ernst Hofbauer’s on-the-nose direction, the wooden acting (despite allegedly “starring many anonymous youths and parents”), and an entire opening credits sequence would scarcely budge in film after film. More flexible within a limited range were the bodies bared by 20-something actors playing teens (seldom convincingly) and the framing devices for each installation of variably comic, dramatic, and tragic vignettes.

The first movie started with a flower-decal-covered VW full of hippie chicks and dudes driving by as a female voice says “That’s us: today’s youth. We want a new morality without hypocrisy.” Then an actor playing a reporter announces this “effective and spontaneous documentary shows our youth as they really are. [It] will open many parents’ eyes.”

More likely the Schoolgirl films opened a lot of men’s pants. For all the earnest jabber about “sexual prejudice and why German families hang on to it,” Hartwig, Hofbauer, scenarist Gunther Heller (Hunold split after the series’ launch) and company weren’t interested in liberating minds — let alone promoting feminism — so much as wrapping age-old male fantasies in a cloak of socioanthropological inquiry.

Women are occasionally victimized in the Schoolgirl universe: a lone black girl is set up for gang rape by racist classmates, a country lass is forced into prostitution by loutish dad, etc. But such instances usually end up with the protagonist rescued by a convenient Prince Charming, often as our narrator urges us to question whether they brought the abuse on themselves.

The overwhelming majority of tales present a brave new world of brazenly aggressive females demanding satisfaction whenever, wherever, with whomever. Particularly with older men, including priests, teachers, bus drivers, family friends, guest workers (Rinaldo Talamonti often appears as a comedy-relief Italian stereotype addressed in terms like “Hey, spaghetti! Show us your macaroni!”), even sexy older brothers.

Their behavior sometimes edges from fantasy fodder into the fanatical, as when a married fencing instructor tells his obsessed student, “You must be reasonable!” and she replies “I’ll be reasonable when I’m 75!” Or when another underage lassie brags that beyond regular partner sex, “I also do myself four or five times a day.” Most disturbing is a frequent refrain of blackmail, almost invariably used by nymphets on a reluctant authority figures to maintain a sexual relationship (and/or good grades). In the ickiest instance, Volume 5‘s 15-year-old Margit seduces Grandpa, saying if he refuses she’ll say he raped her; three months of action later he confesses to parents and police rather than endure more shame.

Ostensibly celebrating women’s newfound sexual freedom, the Schoolgirl Reports often seem to regard that as a menace to society as well. (At one curious point we’re informed “They’re all reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, which turns men into slaves and a necessary evil for sex.”) Needless to say, the series’ major off-camera collaborators were an entirely penis-bearing roll call.

These films made tens of millions, not just in Western Europe but in overseas locations where their copious full-frontal nudity (nearly all female, of course) required cutting or fogging to meet local standards. Entries appeared around the globe under titles like Campus Pussycats, Smartie Pants, Further Confessions of a Sixth Form Girl, and Super Sexy Show. The 1980 final chapter didn’t hit American screens until three years later as Making Out — quite the reduction from an original German title translating as Don’t Forget the Love in Sex. Meanwhile Germany had been flooded with copycat “reports” (housewife, schoolboy, nurse, etc.), and in 1975 saw the legalization of hardcore porn. So a once ubiquitous, now quaint and bizarre example of mainstream softcore slowly petered (ahem) out.

The Impulse-CAV discs are notably stingy with extras — there aren’t any, not even trailers or a horrible-English-dubbing option — but in a way that suits their blunt appeal. After all, one shouldn’t expect many frills from movies wherein a dessert-spooning virgin (sex aside, ice cream appears this generation’s predominant onscreen indulgence) muses that a passing motorist “could help me get rid of that bothersome hymen,” or the “pathological dream world” of a girl troubled by incestuous thoughts features psychedelic imagery of Daddy menacing her nubile naked self with a shish kabob.

Joystick to the world

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Joystick to the world

culture@sfbg.com

You can see it at your local Walgreens: that magical moment, at midnight every Nov. 1, when the Halloween display melts into the ether, replaced by a bevy of festive, possibly toxic, green-and-red confections. Christmas comes similarly early in the game business; unlike holiday movies, year-end software blockbusters have to be sitting on store shelves in time to entice flocks of early-bird shoppers.

This year promises a winter harvest of diverse delights, though there is a clear emphasis on familiar faces and established names. Groundbreaking technology will wheedle its way into American shopping carts alongside intellectual property that dates back to 1928.

 

ROCK HARDWARE

Though its most promising features are spread out over multiple months, Rock Band 3‘s release in the dying embers of October signaled the start of the holiday game glut. On the more casual end of the spectrum, there are many changes designed to improve the title’s performance as a party-powering karaoke machine on steroids. But it’s on the hardcore end that Harmonix’s offering really shines. New “Pro” instrument modes transform the entire idea of the rhythm game, promising exact correspondence between notes heard and notes played, turning an exercise in plastic-instrument frivolity into an actual teaching tool. The retail version ships with a full two-octave keyboard; future bedroom shredders will have to wait until March 1 to get their hands on Squier’s six-string electric guitar-controller hybrid.

 

KINECTRIC SLIDE

Harmonix rolled out another big title this year: Dance Central, a gleefully earnest dancing simulator that aims to do for cutting rugs what Guitar Hero did for ripping solos. Taking advantage of Microsoft’s Wii-killing, Xbox 360-exclusive Kinect technology (available now), which uses a TV-mounted camera to record player movements, the game weans digital dance off Dance Dance Revolution‘s cheesy floor pads, tracking your entire body and translating that motion into animated on-screen boogieing.

A number of other games have been released that are calibrated for use with the Kinect, either focusing on fitness (YourShape: Fitness Evolved, EA Sports Active 2) or cartoonish, arm-waving sports-mime (Kinect Adventures, Kinect Sports). Liberated from the tyranny of holding onto a controller, 360 owners will also be able to deploy the Kinect’s voice commands, which be useful for browsing through a number of new software features, which include ESPN and Last.fm, streaming direct to your console.

 

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Cannibalizing the past is nothing new when there are profits on the line, but no one does it with the kind of capitalist élan that the game industry evinces. Did you enjoy NBA Jam and Goldeneye 007 in the 1990s? Of course you did. And you’ll enjoy them again, now that they’re back, sporting upgraded display resolutions and gameplay adapted to modern, button-coruscated controllers. NBA Jam began as a downloadable adjunct to NBA Elite 2011; now that that game has been pushed back, the two-on-two hoops title is getting a full retail release on all the major consoles Nov. 17. Goldeneye is available now for Wii and Nintendo DS; playing as Oddjob is still totally cheating.

Japanese giants Namco Bandai have dusted off Splatterhouse, their goofily gory 1988 smash. Musclebound protagonist Rick is back, still sporting a hockey mask, still dismembering ghosts and ghouls with a blood-soaked two-by-four. The survival horror-brawler hybrid is due out Nov. 23 for PS3 and Xbox 360.

 

MOUSE HOUSE

It’s been a long time since Disney’s iconic character was featured in his own video game, so Junction Point Studio’s Epic Mickey is sure to be met with high expectations. Helmed, bizarrely, by legendary designer Warren Spector, who is better known for gritty cyberpunk classics System Shock and Deus Ex, the game promises a slightly more adult — even gothic — take on Disney’s least-adult character.

Gameplay will center around a painting mechanic. Using his trusty brush, Mickey will be able to transform his environment, daubing in bridges over otherwise impassable chasms. The judicious application of paint thinner will erase dastardly enemies. Look for Epic Mickey Nov. 30.

 

WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD (OF WARCRAFT)

If you were to measure the impact of this year’s holiday releases using total hours invested as your metric, there’s no doubt that World of Warcraft: Cataclysm would come out on top. As the third expansion to Blizzard’s megalithic franchise, the game can count on a built-in player-base of some 12 million subscribers, each about as likely to buy Cataclysm as a heroin addict is to buy more smack.

The attractions this time around include two brand-new races — players will now be able to battle their way around Azeroth as Goblins or Worgen (read: werewolves). The expected litany of new dungeons, new loot, and new gameplay tweaks is also provided. The Cataclysm begins Dec. 7. And if you don’t know what to get that tween WoWer in your life at the last minute? But her some game time at www.blizzard.com.

Rep Clock

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Schedules are for Wed/17–Tues/23 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. Cine Barrio presents: Los Bastardos (Escalante, 2008), Fri, 8. “Other Cinema:” Future So Bright (McCormick), plus other “psycho geography” films, Sat, 8:30. Calvin and Sweetpea (Fletcher, 2007), Sun, 8.

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES 1453 Mission, SF; www.ciis.edu. Free. “Queers, Gringos, and Other Deviants,” films from Mexico’s School of Arts of the State University of Morelos, Wed, 6:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $10-15. Grease (Kleiser, 1978), Wed-Tues, 7:30 (also Sat-Sun, 2:30). Presented sing-along style.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Alfredson, 2009), call for dates and times. Inside Job (Ferguson, 2010), call for dates and times. Leaving (Corsini, 2009), call for dates and times. Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen (von Trotta, 2009), call for dates and times. “San Francisco Grand Opera Cinema Series:” La Boheme (2008-2009), Thurs, 7; Sat, 10am. Today’s Special (Kaplan, 2009), Nov 19-25, call for times. Breath Made Visible (Gerber, 2009), Sun, 4:15.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; (415) 666-3488; www.lntsf.com/2010_chinese_american_film_festival. $7-9. “Fourth Chinese American Film Festival 2010,” Wed-Tues.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Sicko (Moore, 2007), Wed, 7:30.

MAGNET 4122 18th St, SF; www.tolerance.org/bullied. Bullied: A Student, a School, and a Case That Made History, Sat, 7.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. “CinemaLit: Lights! Camera! Action!”: Day for Night (Truffaut, 1973), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Alternative Visions:” “Surface Tension: Short Films by Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, and Robert Nelson,” Wed, 7:30. “Carl Theodor Dreyer:” Michael (Dreyer, 1924), Fri, 7; Medea (von Trier, 1987), Fri, 9; The Master of the House (Dreyer, 1925), Sat, 6:30; Leaves from Satan’s Book (Dreyer, 1921), Sun, 2. “Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:” “1990-1999,” Sun, 5:15.

PIEDMONT 4186 Piedmont, Oakl; www.landmarktheatres.coom. $8. The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Life During Wartime (Solondz, 2010), Wed, 2, 7:15, 9:15. Bold Native (Hennelly and Suchan, 2010), Thurs, 7, 9:30. Inception (Nolan, 2010), Fri-Mon, 8 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 5). ID (The Film), Fri, 4. Soul Kitchen (Akin, 2009), Nov 23-24, 7:15, 9:25 (also Nov 24, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Carlos (Assayas, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 6:45. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 10:15. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields (Fix and O’Hara, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 6:45, 8:30. “Destroy All Movies!!! Punk-Sploitation Double Feature:” •Times Square (Moyle, 1980), Fri, 6, 9:45, and Surf II (Badat, 1984), Fri, 8. “Nine Nation Animation,” Nov 19-25, call for times. “Midnites for Maniacs: Back to After School Specials Triple Bill:” •A Movie Star’s Daughter (Fuest, 1979), Sat, 7; Rich Kids (Young, 1979), Sat, 8:15; Stoned (Herzfeld, 1980), Sat, 10:30. “Animals Are Absurd!,” co-presented with McSweeney’s, Sat-Sun, call for times. “Magyar Tales of Kornél Mundruczó:” Delta (2008), Nov 22-24, call for times; Johanna (2005), Nov 22-24, call for times.

SAN FRANCISCO LGBT CENTER 1800 Market, SF; www.queerculturalcenter.org. $10. “Between Sizes: An Evening with Skinnyfat,” films about body image, Sat, 7.

VICTORIA 2961 16th St, SF; www.sfcinema.org. $10. San Francisco Cinematheque presents: “New Landscapes for the New World: Contemporary Spanish Experimental Cinema,” Wed, 7:30.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10. Electric Button (Moon and Cherry) (Tanada, 2004), Wed-Thurs, 5, 7:15. Kamu Gaidan (Sai, 2009), Nov 19-Dec 1, check website for times. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Remembering Kazuo Ohno:” An Offering to Heaven (2002), Thurs, 7:30; •O, Kind God!, and Flower (2001), Sat, 7:30; •Kazuo Ohno (Schmid), with “Admiring La Argentina” (1994), Sun, 2.

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