It’s over! Well, for me, anyway — the festival rolls on through the weekend, but tomorrow I’ll be jetting back to SF, watching edited-for-content episodes of The Wire on Air Canada’s seatback television. I only had one spontaneous celebrity sighting (Wyclef, scampering into an SUV outside his hotel as I plodded past in search of breakfast this morning). But I did see some enjoyable movies these last two days, plus a few feh offerings.
Movies
Autumn reels
› cheryl@sfbg.com
As summer dwindles into, well, Indian summer (this is San Francisco, after all), film fans are all asking the same thing: will The Dark Knight be nominated for Best Picture, or what? Like, what other 2008 release has even come close? As the temperature tries to make up its mind between freezing fog and freaky heat, the only thing to do is haul ass to the movieplex and let Hollywood deplete your brain cells as painlessly as possible. Who knows, there might be some awards-season contenders in the following list of fall movie picks. There’s at least one talking chihuahua, anyway. All dates subject to change.
Sept. 26: Seems like just yesterday that Shia LaBeouf was giving interviews about how he wasn’t going to be a show biz cliché — you know, keeping his head down, concentrating on his career, and avoiding scandalous run-ins with the law. Maybe Eagle Eye, in which the erstwhile spawn of Indy Jones plays a ne’er-do-well mysteriously targeted by terrorists, will make it into theaters before he has his first tabloid-fodder romance. Tick-tock, Us Weekly!
Oct. 3: Weirdly, there aren’t many horror flicks primed for October releases this year. Guess Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which stars the voices of nearly every known Latino actor in Hollywood (Edward James Olmos, how could you?), is gonna have to fit the bill. Director Raja Gosnell also helmed both Scooby-Doo movies. Far more promising is Ed Harris’ Appaloosa, a Western about two lawmen (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) whose friendship is tested by, natch, a dame (Renée Zellweger). Those of us for whom "Viggo on a horse" is box-office draw enough can work around the Zellweger.
Oct. 10: Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, and William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Departed, join forces for Body of Lies, a political thriller worth seeing based on the above pedigree alone. So what if Leo has a weird Southern accent in the trailer, and Ridley and Russell’s last collaboration birthed the 2006 bomb A Good Year?
Oct. 17: Do we really need to see Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, W., having just suffered through eight years of the worst president ever to take office? Is it too soon to point and laugh? Judging from the hilarious (and scary-because-it-might-actually-be-true) trailer, the performances of Josh Brolin and others cast as real-life newsmakers will make W. well worth it. Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice may be a stretch, but Toby Jones as Karl Rove is particularly inspired.
Oct. 24: Two cunning linguists, Brick writer-director Rian Johnson and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind writer Charlie Kaufman, have new flicks out today. Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom follows the entanglements of con men played by Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo; Kaufman makes his directorial debut with Synecdoche, New York, in which a dying theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman aims to create one last great work of art.
Nov. 14: James Bond (extra-buff Daniel Craig version) returns in Quantum of Solace. In Australia, Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman, and Hugh Jackman combine their home-country superpowers for a sweeping epic set you-know-where.
Nov. 21: I realize I already foamed over Viggo Mortensen above, but The Road — directed by The Proposition‘s John Hillcoat and adapted from the postapocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel — absolutely gets my vote for most-anticipated 2008 release.
Nov. 26: The Castro Theatre gets a two-day exclusive on Milk before it opens wide Nov. 28. Don’t know what Milk is? What kind of a San Franciscan are you?
Dec 12: Keanu Reeves stars in The Day the Earth Stood Still remake. Insert your own Klaatu/Keanu joke here.
Dec. 25: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reunites Fight Club director David Fincher with star Brad Pitt. Based on a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film explores the curious-indeed life of a man (Pitt, with copious CG assistance) who ages in reverse.
Shakespeare and sexy Jesus
More in this issue:
>>An interview with Steve Coogan
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Sundance darling Hamlet 2 has been dubbed by at least one critic as this year’s Napoleon Dynamite; but with an R rating and dialogue like, "I feel like I’ve been raped in the face," the movie isn’t nearly as quirky as that assessment implies. This is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy comedy served with a side of whimsy just as much as any Juno fan; but brazenly puerile movies that lie on the more ribald end of the humor spectrum have their own undeniable charms.
There is an art to making an enjoyable lowbrow comedy, as bizarre as it may seem. It’s the reason why deceptively dumb movies like Team America: World Police (2004) have achieved cult status and obscenely dumb movies like Hot Rod (2007) should never, under any circumstances be viewed — and incidentally, both were scripted (at least in part) by Hamlet 2 cowriter Pam Brady. There may be a fine line between stupid and clever, but the line that separates silly from moronic is just as — if not more — tenuous. Brady’s good name is happily on the road to recovery, though, with this over-the-top farce. To quote Polonius from Hamlet 1, "Though this be madness … there is method in it."
All of the madness, as it were, revolves around Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), an inept but undeniably gung-ho high school drama teacher. You see, Marschz (and every consonant is pronounced in that name) is a failed actor who devotes himself to the two students in his class and the low-budget, sparsely attended stagings of recent Hollywood classics like Erin Brockovich. When the school newspaper’s prepubescent, hyperarticulate drama critic gives his latest production a scathing review, Marschz is distraught, but he flirts with the idea of writing something original. It isn’t until the following school year, when funding for drama is cut, that he’s shocked into action. He begins working on what will become a sort of play-within-a-play — a lewd and ridiculous sequel to Hamlet with a cast of characters that includes Albert Einstein, sexy Jesus, a bi-curious Laertes, and everyone else from the original Shakespearean tragedy, brought back to life via time machine.
Though the tone is overwhelmingly absurd, this is a satire. It isn’t a particularly sophisticated satire, but it’s effective nonetheless — offering a critique of censorship and the ACLU; Amy Poehler plays a sassy, foul-mouth lawyer with no qualms about defending a high school play wherein Jesus gets a hand job. Rounding out the cast is Catherine Keener as Marschz’s crass wife, David Arquette as the Marschzs’ virtually silent boarder, who inexplicably follows them everywhere, and Elisabeth Shue as herself. But make no mistake, this is Coogan’s show. He’s a star in his native England, yet as far as American cinema is concerned, he’s consistently been relegated to supporting roles. Finally he’s allowed to shine here, and the movie ultimately owes its success to his performance. He falls down repeatedly in an intersection while wearing roller skates, he exposes his butt, he moonwalks on water as sexy Jesus — all of it inspired. Shakespearean comedies usually end in a wedding: though no one gets married in Hamlet 2, it’s a hell of a lot funnier than anything the Bard ever wrote. *
HAMLET 2
Opens Fri/22 at Bay Area theaters
Predictably good
REVIEW The year is 1976, the American Bicentennial, and snooty British wine seller Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) decides to organize a blind taste test, pitting French wine against the then-fledgling California wine. While in Napa he meets Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), a perfectionist, and his long-haired surf bum son Bo (Chris Pine). Impressed by Barrett’s Château Montelena chardonnay, Spurrier hopes to include it in the competition. It isn’t too difficult to see where all of this is headed, not only because the outcome of the 1976 blind taste test is obvious every time we drink wine produced in the Napa Valley, but also because Bottle Shock isn’t exactly blazing any new territory. The characters are all familiar: an earnest father, his slacker son, and a budding Mexican vintnerready to get out from under the thumb of his white boss. The subplots are equally familiar: a strained father-son relationship and a love triangle. Nevertheless, there is something warm and charming about Bottle Shock. It’s one of those based-on-a-true-story, America-as-underdog movies that are as predictable as they are hard to resist.
BOTTLE SHOCK opens Wed/6 in Bay Area theaters.
Orson
› paulr@sfbg.com
If there was ever a doubt that Elizabeth Falkner had a thing for Orson Welles, her new restaurant — named Orson — should lay to rest any lingering uncertainties. Falkner’s first venture, a bakery called Citizen Cake, first appeared in the late 1990s in a northeast Mission District space (near Rainbow Grocery) now occupied by Chez Spencer. After a few years it moved to considerably posher quarters in the performing arts quarter while retaining its Wellesian moniker.
But even the upscaling of Citizen Cake, including its expansion to a full-scale, full-service restaurant, could not begin to prepare people for the strange wonder of Orson. (Orson is a fine name, but am I alone in being reminded first not of Orson Welles but of Orson Bean, the character actor who’s turned up in all sorts of movies and TV shows over the years?) The restaurant’s design doesn’t offer much in the way of clues, either. It’s very au courant SoMa: large and lofty, with a huge wall of exposed concrete, a mezzanine, swaths of industrial carpeting on the floor, and a persistent hiss of ambient sound, as if a huge white-noise machine in some hidden corner had been turned up to "loud" but not "very loud." The noise doesn’t preclude conversation, but, like cigarette smoke, it’s impossible to ignore. Perhaps this is the new standard.
So we have a SoMa restaurant with a whimsical name, bearing a general physical resemblance to other SoMa restaurants with whimsical names and run by a woman whose reputation is rooted in high-style baking and what we might call classic California cuisine. And we find, on the menu of that restaurant, a dish called parmaggiano pudding ($5), an ivory-colored custard presented in a crock. The idea of a savory flan made with parmesan cheese might seem like plenty of cleverness for one dish, but Orson’s kitchen, under the guidance of Falkner and chef de cuisine Ryan Farr, isn’t likely to be called complacent. They are full of wild and wacky ideas, such as lacing the parmesan pudding with cocoa nibs. The wonder is not that a few of these gambits fail — they do, spectacularly, like some of those early space shots in which the rocket collapses in flames or whizzes off in the wrong direction — but that so many of them so sensationally succeed. The parmesan pudding is only one such success.
The only dish on Orson’s rather complex menu I would describe as a total flop is the foie bonbon ($5), a chocolate truffle filled with a buttery pâté de foie gras. One by one, the faces around our table wrinkled in distaste after a nibble, and while I didn’t hate the bonbon, I did think it was a bad marriage between incompatible elements that had nothing more than richness in common.
On the other hand, the jolt of espresso in the potato cream bathing the short ribs ($15) was, like the cocoa nibs, a cunning bit of counterpoint, adding depth, mystery, and a little smokiness to what might otherwise have been an ordinary soupy sauce. (Leaves of braised spinach brought some color but were texturally uncooperative; they reminded me of sails left in choppy water by a capsized sloop.) And the egg atop a pizza ($14) of tomato, crisped guanciale, chile flakes, and robiola cheese was less out of place than it looked — and it looked quite out of place, as if there’d been some kind of head-on collision in the kitchen. But the yolk drained nicely across the pie (imagine flooding a rice paddy, in miniature, with yellow paint) and added a nice note of velvetiness to what was otherwise a rather brash Neapolitan pizza.
Not all the food is eccentric. A boudin noir pizza ($14), for instance, was topped with (in addition to the blood sausage), arugula, oregano, and thin slices of potato — a perfectly genteel combination you might find at any number of places. Garganelli ($11) — pasta tubes that looked like mottled cinnamon sticks — were tossed in a simple sauce of basil and splinters of summer squash. A sprightly kimchee ($5) was festooned with throw pillows of fried tofu. Chicharrones ($5), a.k.a. pork rinds, arrived in a tall cup looking like twisted French fries suitable for dipping in the shallow tub of barbecue sauce on the side. And a chicken beer sausage link ($14), although accompanied by flecks of nectarine, whispers of frisée, and a hint of pistachio, was satisfyingly all about the sausage.
Some of the exotic touches were discreet to the point of being unnoticeable. Actual French fries ($7) were cooked in duck fat and presented with a small ramekin of browned butter béarnaise, a subtle aioli alternative. Tongue ($5), never an easy row to hoe, was transformed into a golden-crusted, nicely rectangular croquette and served with cherries and what might be one of our most underappreciated greens, purslane.
Does all this sound like the stuff of DIY tasting menus, a sequence of memorable bites? The glory of DIY is the randomness of it — we’ll have a few of those and one of that — but for more orderly types, Orson does offer four formal tasting menus that consist of three to five courses and cost from $50 to $65. One is vegetarian, another pork-based. Caveat: your whole table must participate. Tables for two have several additional "for two" options, though Orson doesn’t really strike me as a restaurant for couples. Its pulsing energy is that of a crowded club for the young and the restless, whose packs are forever rearranging themselves. It’s easy to picture them talking about movies. But do they talk about, or have they even seen, Citizen Kane?
ORSON
Dinner: Mon., 6–10 p.m.
Tues.–Sat., 6 p.m.–midnight
508 Fourth St., SF
(415) 777-1508
Full bar
AE/MC/V
Fairly noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Guy Maddin’s special specimen
REVIEW We all knew it was his Winnipeg after gobstoppers like Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and The Saddest Music in the World (2003), but Guy Maddin certainly puts a fine point on it with his latest. Finally, a Maddin film that fully incorporates the homely comic-pathos of his essays and movie reviews. In My Winnipeg, the Canuck filmmaker’s punch-drunk dissolves and superimpositions aren’t just cinematographic cake-frosting; they’re visual portents and analogues of his seasick crawl through the past. While his festival-circuit peers increasingly strive for transcendent realism, Maddin still slops on the Vaseline. Curiously, he ends up in the same place that they do, blurring lines of autobiography and fictional representation. To wit: after Maddin introduces his "sleep-chugging" city in voice-over, he sets in explaining his missive to reenact key episodes of his childhood with stand-in actors in his family home. This meta-"making of" is a wonderful joke on the psychologically overwrought status of the auteur, complete with inflated reminiscences and digressions (segments on Winnipeg’s spiritualists, 1919 labor strikes, and the National Hockey League’s conspiratorial malevolence stand as mini-movies of their own). Casting Ann Savage (the belligerent face of Vera in Edgar Ulmer’s 1945 noir Detour) as his mother renders the psychodrama of cinephilia with florid hilarity. Beneath all Maddin’s Oedipal goofing, there’s a serious reflection on the way that movies seen at an impressionable age — or rather our memories of them — can burnish real experiences with chiaroscuro drama. Maddin’s always deserving of kudos for his bricolage assortments of essay, silent film, lantern show, melodrama, and papier-mâché, but My Winnipeg is a special specimen: his finest testament yet to memory and imagination being a two-way street.
MY WINNIPEG opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.
Poultrygeist
WINGIN’ IT Veteran filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman spoke to me from Troma Entertainment’s Long Island City, N.Y., headquarters about Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead — a scathing and explosive (as in "explosive diarrhea") look at the fast-food industry. He calls this hilarious, stomach-turning epic "the first chicken-Indian-zombie movie that has singing and dancing." He also had quite a bit to say about the state of the media and cinema today. (Cheryl Eddy)
LLOYD KAUFMAN "The biggest misconception [about Troma films] is that people who haven’t seen them assume that we make these movies formulaically — that we just throw together some gyno-Americans in bikinis, slap some ketchup on ’em, and have ’em run through the woods. Troma is a 35-year-old company, and we wouldn’t be around if that was all we did. The problem is, most people who dismiss us are too busy taking [in] the Burger King advertisement called Iron Man. The Village Voice has a conglomerate — the so-called ‘alternative newspaper,’ the LA Weekly, the New Times — they don’t even have the interest in reviewing [Poultrygeist]. They have some idiot review it in New York who, in my opinion, didn’t even look at the movie, and says that Trey Parker is in Poultrygeist and gives it a cursory review. I can’t imagine how they could have seen the movie if they think Trey Parker is in the movie. Somebody put it up on imdb.com because Trey Parker was discovered by Troma, and because Trey Parker has acted in other Troma movies. Some fan put it [on the Internet]. And this has been repeated by other critics — critics! who are supposed to be reviewing the movie. So if the alternative media is a disgrace like the LA Weekly, if they’re just vomiting out an inaccurate, uninspired reviews, if this is the alternative media that’s supposed to be embracing art and embracing independent art, we don’t have a chance. When Toxic Avenger came out in 1983, Vincent Canby — the lead reviewer for the New York Times — chose to review it when it came out. He cared, he was interested. That’s gone. It’s over.
"All of us independents have got to fight for the future of art. The big hope is that [independent filmmakers] come out swinging: that they be aggressive and not be afraid to whore for their art. I think too many talented directors feel that doing what Lloyd Kaufman does is low-class, going out there and promoting the film — like, ‘I don’t wanna get my hands dirty doing that.’ As long as you don’t compromise your art, as long as you don’t try to remake Pulp Fiction 10 times, as long as you’re doing something you believe in once it’s finished — as long as you’re not breaking any laws or hurting people — what is wrong if I wear a clown suit and go to Cannes and throw blood on people? Why is that wrong?"
POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD opens Fri/18 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock for showtimes.
The gruesome twosome
HORROR SEQUEL If you know Monsturd, you love Monsturd. If you don’t know the 2003 horror comedy by San Francisco filmmakers Rick Popko and Dan West, imagine a tiny town menaced by a mad scientist-created shit monster, with clueless cops, a no-nonsense FBI agent, and a climax that unfolds around a chili cook-off.
Doesn’t appeal? Don’t read on. But fans of homespun exploito-stravaganzas will want to know that Popko and West have finally finished Monsturd‘s sequel (the making of which I chronicled in "Blood Brothers," [05/30/06]). It’s called Retardead, and it returns to that same tiny town soon after the events of Monsturd. This time, the stakes are both higher (zombies!) and lower (zombies spawned from special education students!), and there’s way more of everything: gore, off-color jokes, cursing, and totally random moments, like an LSD freak-out scene, an exploding helicopter, second-unit footage contributed by horror fans across the country, a saucy appearance by dance theatre troupe the Living Dead Girlz, and a cameo by Jello Biafra.
Popko and West, who reprise their Monsturd roles as goofy deputies, realize they’ve created something rather crazy — and with all the technical problems they encountered in Retardead‘s post-production (from editing on outdated software to the disasters they overcame while working on the film’s first batch of DVDs), are now a little crazy themselves.
"The movie’s cursed — I think it’s karma because of the title," Popko theorized. "The karma gods are like, we’re gonna let you have this movie, but it’s gonna cost you in terms of pain and suffering all the way through till the very end. Monsturd took us two years, and we thought that was forever. And here we are five years after starting Retardead, and we’re finally seeing the end of the tunnel."
Though the movie is completed, "we’re still kind of shell-shocked," West said. "We still have the premiere to go through, and we don’t trust this thing. If it can fuck with us, it will fuck with us. It’s like the Frankenstein monster that has its own life, and we’re its bitch."
For better or worse, the monster is at last ready to terrorize audiences. West is excited: "The movie’s good. I love the movie. It’s weird, it’s 10 times better than Monsturd — cinematically, it’s much better. The special effects are just insane. We love the weird factor of this one. We were able to get our sense of humor and get a lot of non sequiturs in there. We love that stuff."
"I love how different it is," Popko agreed. "Dan and I are big fans of the horror genre, and the comedy genre, and there are a million friggin’ zombie movies out there. We didn’t want to fall into that trap of just being another zombie flick. So the thing I’m most proud of with Retardead is that this is gonna be a different experience. Yes, it is a zombie movie, but it’s like no other zombie movie that has ever been made before."
After the premiere — at which they’ll pass out barf bags in homage to their idol, Herchell Gordon Lewis, who did the same for 1963’s Blood Feast — the duo hopes to self-distribute their film over the Internet. They are also already planning a third collaboration, "a movie about making a sequel," West revealed, which will likely include pirates, Satanists, space vampires, "a werewolf thing," and more Biafra.
In the meantime, the pair hopes to greet a raucous crowd this weekend at the Victoria Theatre. "Ideally we’d like to see audiences going wild and crazy at a few of these key scenes that we’ve got in there that will hopefully surprise and shock people," Popko said.
"Specifically, that vomit scene," West chimed in, and the codirectors chuckled with delighted pride.
RETARDEAD
Fri/11–Sat/12, 7 and 9:30 p.m.; Sun/13, 5:30 and 7:30 p.m., $10
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th St., SF
(415) 863-7576
Fast Computers send us into hyperdrive
By Jen Snyder
What’s the deal with the West Coast and the vast dichotomy that divides the north and south? I think that the Bay Area has become increasingly unaware of it because we rest so literally in the middle of it all – nestled in, far away from Los Angeles and Seattle. It’s like we get the best of both worlds. Down south, the arts are a real industry: movies, photography, and music are more synonymous with Hollywood, Cobrasnake, and MTV, while the cities to the north of California are considerably quieter about their feats. And while LA often pumps out artists and movies that only stay hot for as long as SF’s summer, I find you get more for your buck when you actually get to see a band from our boreal brothers. That said, the Fast Computers, hailing from Portland, Ore., really knocked me out Sunday, June 29, at Kimo’s Penthouse Lounge.
Every other Sunday Kimo’s presents Club Unsolved Melody, which, every time I’ve attended, has been really excellent and not nearly as populated as it should be. I’ve seen book readings there, comedy nights, acoustic shows, and even a gypsy klezmer band, and every time I went home happy. This night was no different.
The Fast Computers, who I’ve seen in SF at Hemlock Tavern, played to an intimate and enchanted group of viewers who seemed more like friends of the other bands or promoters than showgoers. However, even though the FC name was unfamiliar and the end of Pride weekend was heavy on the crowds’ shoulders, more than one person got up to dance.
Scott Wells and Dancers
PREVIEW Watching dancers launch themselves into space is every bit as exciting as the sparks and explosions that fill traditional July 4 celebrations. Take, for example, the frequently airborne Scott Wells and Dancers. The company’s Last Call show will be every bit as full of surprises as a fireworks display, only more environmentally friendly and weather independent. If you’re not familiar with this masterful artist, Wells is a super free spirit who has been setting up frameworks for contact improvisation pieces for the past 16 years. Many choreographers create works that use contact improvisation as a starting point for generating ideas that then get formalized. But Wells offers the real thing: the experience that there is only one moment, and it’s now. He also chooses music wisely and uses it beautifully. Two things strike you when you watch these dancers/athletes tumble, fly, and roll: the trust is absolute, and so is the fun. For Last Call, the company is bringing back — for the last time, Wells says — Home Again, the riotous 1991 encounter of man-meets-furniture. I am no great sports fan, but when Wells mounts Gym Mystics, his 2007 take on gymnastics, I’ll join the club. Also on the schedule is the world premiere of West Side Story, staged for 11 performers to Leonard Bernstein’s legendary score. Independence Day festivities include a 5 p.m. party prior to the performance with food, drinks, movies, and a guest artist.
SCOTT WELLS AND DANCERS Fri/4, 7 p.m. (party, 5 p.m.); Sat/ 5 and July 10–12, 8 p.m. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. $18–$22. (415) 863-9834, www.artaud.org
“Jim Campbell: Home Movies”
REVIEW The West Coast electronic artist Jim Campbell returns to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum to reprise his popular 2006 installation "Home Movies," a screening of amateur, low-resolution family films projected through a tapestry of LED lights. Strung from ceiling to floor, the highly pixilated reflections of quotidian family life become nothing less than digital simulacra when magnified to such extremes. Building on the conceptual linkages of his Illuminated Averages (2001-03) and Ambiguous Icons (2000-03) series, the technophile artist has arrived at a startling depiction of memory and magic. Campbell’s explorations of communications apparatuses since the mid-1980s largely mirrors the hypermodernist theories of Jean Baudrillard — problematizing rather than simply fetishizing the digital domain — and rejects the scientific utopianism of Bergsonian temporality for the more radical slippages of personalized memories and nostalgia. For Campbell, the question surely remains whether digital perception has elevated or mutated our inscriptions of the past.
The answer, of course, is far from conclusive and further still from novel. In fact, "Home Movies" is reminiscent of cinema’s magical roots in the 18th century Fantasmagorie shows, which posed similar concerns in their embrace of new technologies. Spectral and hypnotic in their visual imperfections, these magical lantern exhibitions introduced the sublime moment when the still painting became animate, reaching out from its crypt of secrets to grab hold of the spectator in a living darkness. The Fantasmagorie often thrived on intimate family images, using projected portraits of recently deceased ancestors to unsettle or mesmerize the audience. In his brilliance, Campbell has recognized a similar power in manipuutf8g the iconography of America’s recent past, using the omnipresent home movie as a prop of sorts for his own digital legerdemain.
Historical and aesthetic precedents aside, "Home Movies" is a supreme cinematic delight, re-presenting the primal pleasures of film-going but refracting this nostalgic glow through a matrix of increasing digital deconfiguration.
JIM CAMPBELL: HOME MOVIES Through Aug. 1. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs.). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Dirty girl!
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
My girlfriend is into degradation during sex. It turns me on too, so I’m not worried about damaging our great relationship. I would like to explore more but am not sure where/how to start. Is there somewhere I can learn to be more degrading to my girl?
Love,
Earnest Student
Dear Earnest:
Heh. It’s not easy being mean, is it? People who enjoy abusing the comparatively powerless require no instruction on how better to be beastly. There are no books, for instance, on being rude to your waiter, or dog-kicking for fun and profit. Sadly, though, while recreational malevolence may not come easily to the naturally nice, no one has yet noted and attempted to fill the obvious market niche. There are classes and books on dominance and submission (you should attend or buy some) and quite a few on how to talk dirty, but none dedicated to lists of synonyms for bitch and whore or handy degradation scripts you can print out and tape to the wall behind the bed.
If what you’re looking for is vocab homework, you could try some of the abundant movies and stories out there in which one person degrades the other viciously but all in good fun. Why not rent some DVDs or surf the Web for ideas? It does occur to me, though, that if your girlfriend has watched or read the same stuff, she may recognize your cribbed dialogue and end up laughing at you. Nothing breaks the mood like your sub helplessly giggling at your attempts to be brutal. All you really need, anyway, is to work on your attitude. It doesn’t much matter if you call her "squealing little slut-pig" or "daddy’s little cum bucket" or whatever; it’s all in the delivery. You will gain confidence with practice, and if it’s working for her, she won’t be rating you on the originality of your epithets.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’ve yet to come across something in your column similar to what I recently experienced (and was grossed out by), and I’m wondering what makes certain people desire what they do.
Several months ago I went out with a good-looking guy I’d met before. I was in the mood, so we ended up at his place for sex. The foreplay was great, and I was getting into it. While I was straddling his face as he performed cunnilingus, he suddenly asked me if I would defecate (not his word) on his face. He seemed to get excited after he said it but did not take note of my reaction and tried to put his mouth over my anal area. I had to get out of there right away.
I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I was dressed and gone in less than five minutes, I think. Have you heard of this desire, and how prevalent do you think it is? What could possibly cause someone to want that? Maybe I don’t want to know.
Love,
Don’t Tell Me!
Dear Don’t:
I don’t know where you’ve been looking (I most certainly have written about it before), but if you’d entered "scat" into Google (on second thought, do not enter "scat" into Google), you would’ve been deluged with information, far more information than you could possibly have wanted.
Oddly, the answer to the question why people "want that" won’t be found in the above-mentioned deluge, because nobody actually knows. Most attempted explanations will say something about flouting taboos or being dirty (there’s nothing dirtier, really, is there?) or perhaps rebellion against the tyranny of toilet-training. These sound good, but you don’t have to be very clever to imagine that the desire to play with shit has something to do with bad toilet-training, do you? Doesn’t mean it’s true.
All we know for sure is that there are (some, few) people who fantasize about playing with shit and (some, fewer) people who actually do it. Most of those who only fantasize have no wish to follow through, but I’ll also wager that inability to find a willing partner keeps some in the fantasy-only camp. If one of them wrote me (oh, they have, they have) wondering how to broach the subject with a would-be partner, I’d probably say, "Whatever you do, don’t do what Don’t Tell Me’s date did." It’s hard to imagine a clumsier approach than blurting out "Shit on me!" in the midst of passion, without so much as a "by your leave." Well, actually shitting on a person, all spontaneous-like, would be worse, but let’s not even speak of that.
I don’t think that someone having a disgusting desire is in and of itself so terrible. One can always say, "No, thank you" and no harm done, after all. Not realizing that most young ladies won’t take kindly to such a demand, however, demonstrates such a profound emotional tone deafness that I really must wonder about your new boyfriend. Or rather, your ex–new boyfriend. Spontaneity is nice, but some subjects require a more formal introduction.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.
Editor’s note: This column originally ran on Dec. 28, 2004.
A different light
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THE QUEER ISSUE It’s best to begin at the edge. Gay urban photography has a fleeting yet reliably revelatory home at those places where water laps up against land. On the East Coast, from 1975 through 1986, Alvin Baltrop explored the Hudson River side of Manhattan, capturing black-and-white visions of sex, murder, and architecture by cruising the piers as a peer rather than as an exploitative outsider. On the West Coast, during the ’50s and ’60s, Denny Denfield used Baker Beach and its nearby wooded areas to invent an Adam-only Eden best glimpsed solo through 3-D. And around the same time in Montreal, Alan B. Stone was hiding in a shed, looking through a shutter at the dock-working men and sunbathing boys who populated the city’s port. In the zone known as the city’s historical heart, his camera cautiously hinted at desires that could lead to prison time.
Curated by David Deitcher, the SF Camerawork exhibition "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" proves Stone’s photographic versatility ranged from a low-key form of William Klein–like typographic artistry to extremely subversive pastoral romanticism — in commissioned Boy Scout photos — to the candid portraiture of the beefcake genre. Such a showcase isn’t Deitcher’s intent, though — he’s structured the show (and written about it, in an autobiographical essay) to foreground a specifically gay vision and experience of Montreal from a time when men were arrested and publicly vilified in newsprint for being homosexual. Stone provides the nuanced vision; Deitcher identifies its facets and identifies with it. His analysis of Montreal through Stone’s camera takes on special resonance when placed next to Douglas Crimp’s look at post-Stonewall New York through Baltrop’s camera in a February 2008 Artforum piece.
The difference between the liberated time of Baltrop and the closeted era of Stone is evident in their views of waterfront lazy sunbathers. Perhaps the brightest — in tone and in quality of light — of the Baltrop photos showcased in Artforum (also on view at www.baltrop.org) gazes from a few hundred feet away at a half-dozen naked men as they soak up the sun, converse, and dangle their feet off the edge of a pier. The gay-lib visibility inherent to the men’s affectionate nudity is doubly emphasized by Baltrop’s distanced yet full-frontal perspective. In contrast, Stone’s 1954 photo Untitled (Lachine Canal) glimpses the back of a boy in a swimsuit seated at the Port of Montreal’s shoreline — the identity of his solitary subject remains poignantly invisible to the photographer, who, as Deitcher notes, was stricken with arthritis at an early age.
There’s a similar echo to a pair of photos — one by Stone, one by Baltrop — that depict men standing at the sunlit thresholds of waterfront warehouses. Stone’s 1954 Untitled (Dock Workers, Port of Montreal) is a furtive from-behind vision of a shirtless, assumedly heterosexual dockworker. One image from Baltrop’s "Pier Photographs, 1975-1986" glances at a shirtless man, also from behind, but from a much nearer vantage point. Attired in tight jeans and black boots, he’s the painter Alva, at work on a large piece of sexually explicit graffiti. The picture’s dominant darkness and the roughness of its lit threshold — a window-size hole in a warehouse wall — suggest an edge of menace that Baltrop’s photos of body bags make plain. An unauthorized space for gay sexuality in a bombed-out urban zone, the piers were rife with dangers unknown.
Stone’s and Baltrop’s photographs could form chapters within an imagined monograph about the changing relationship between gay sex and the city. Such a book could venture into the garishly colorful Times Square seen in Gary Lee Boas’ 2003 book New York Sex, 1979-85 (Gallerie Kamel Mennour) — the title alone prompts comparisons to Baltrop’s equally unsentimental vision of a different space within pre-Giuliani, pre-Disney Manhattan. It could draw from David L. Chapman’s and Thomas Waugh’s recent San Francisco–set monograph Comin’ At Ya!: The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield (Arsenal Pulp), to show the California-dreaming answer to New York grime, and to further reveal — through the inherent solitude of the 3-D stereoview process — the inner recesses of a pre-gay lib experience far from Baltrop’s and Boas’ sights and sites of group sexuality.
Such a book could open into film as well, since movies such as João Pedro Rodrigues’ O Fantasma (2000), Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2002), Tsai Ming-liang’s The River (1997) and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), and William E. Jones’ V.O. (2007) foreground age-old connections between the edges of urban society and sexuality. The portrait of Montreal that emerges from "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" hints at the possibilities of such a project — and leaves one wondering about the worlds of desire that can exist outside computer screens today.
ALAN B. STONE AND THE SENSES OF PLACE
Through Aug. 23
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, second floor, SF
(415) 512-2020
Have another Soju
Drinking with Hong Sang-soo is an intense experience. Supremely awkward conversations transpire over tables littered with empty soju bottles. The primary topic is sex — and the details quickly get personal. It’s exactly like a scene from one of his films. Or so it seemed during a group dinner honoring Hong at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Drinks vanished. Secrets were told. And all present tried to forget about it by the next day.
Scenes of clumsy inebriation are the essence of Hong’s cinema, and 2006’s Woman on the Beach is no exception. Over the course of seven movies (excluding the new Night and Day), Hong has repeatedly examined the complicated romantic entanglements of heterosexual Koreans. His scenes often take place in restaurants or domestic parlors, as people sit, drink, talk, and ultimately either seduce or reject each other during extremely long takes. Reportedly, Hong gets his actors drunk before shooting these scenes.
Invariably, Hong’s films focus on a male protagonist trying to bed a woman. These men are always artists; frequently they are film directors. In these respects, Woman on the Beach is quintessential Hong. It also revives his focus on troubled Seoul-dwellers who leave the city for peace of mind. But there’s an essential shift in emphasis: the woman in the story ends up as complex a creation as the men. A female musician pursued by a film director and his set designer, she’s no virgin stripped bare by her bachelors.
Woman on the Beach isn’t as formally rigorous as Hong’s previous films, and it spells out matters that might have been implicit in an earlier work. But this should only matter to hardcore Hong-heads. The biting observations remain, and they’ve never been funnier.
The woman at the center of Woman on the Beach says she "[doesn’t] respect Korean men too much." Hong’s male characters are indeed selfish, unreliable drunks. But they’re bastards with charm.
WOMAN ON THE BEACH
Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
Frameline 32: Anti-pity party
Films about people dealing with serious diseases are often hard to watch and frequently difficult to criticize. They make for rough viewing because of the empathy a viewer has for the suffering subject. Perhaps due to this same sense of compassion, admitting that such movies are cheesy — as they sometimes are — is sort of taboo.
Feminist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer bypasses such niceties and constraints with A Horse Is Not a Metaphor. The title of Hammer’s movie might have ties to Susan Sontag’s writings on illness, but it also connects to the dreamlike imagery of horses that she mixes with footage of her stay in a hospital. Structurally, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor‘s chapters correspond to the stages of ovarian cancer treatment. Hammer reinforces all these elements with the magnificently strange music of Meredith Monk to create a very personal retelling of her experience. Her movie is a highly relatable testimony of feelings that rage from sheer darkness to happiness and hope.
Horse‘s visceral quality makes it a different and almost cathartic response to the subject of disease. Each ingredient conveys a desire to connect with the physical and emotional world on a basic sensory level. In doing so, Hammer and her movie relinquish pity and fear.
A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR
June 27, 7 p.m.
Roxie
Frameline 32:That’s us
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Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him. That’s the highest praise I can think of for Matt Wolf’s movie about the composer and musician, who died of AIDS in 1992. Clearly enamored with Russell’s wonderful and unique world of echoing sound, Wolf breaks free from the all-too-familiar generic commercial tropes of music documentaries to try a little tenderness. The gesture of affection is more than fitting: though Russell wasn’t a pop sentimentalist, he was capable of writing entire songs (such as "A Little Lost" and "Lucky Cloud" from the 1994 album Another Thought) about equally entire days spent thinking about his lips pressing against those of his beloved. As he sang, "Kissing I go overboard."
That beloved is Russell’s boyfriend Tom Lee, whose generous intimacy while being interviewed is one of the qualities that makes Wild Combination special. Though the Talking Heads are mentioned more than once as Wolf’s movie follows Russell’s idiosyncratic paths through the creative spots of downtown ’80s New York, the film’s chorus of commentators never falls into the kind of talking-heads detachment one associates with documentaries. There is a rare, moving intimacy to the camera’s rapport with Lee and with Russell’s Iowan parents, Chuck and Emily. That rapport only builds in the emotionally powerful final moments, yielding a story about love and family that, through sheer openhearted understatement, is a revelation. Think of it as a nonfiction answer to Brokeback Mountain: more shattering, nuanced, and hopeful because it is based in a commitment to creative life rather than manufactured myth.
"I’m watching out of my ear," Russell’s voice declares, with characteristic quiet softness, as Wild Combination first flickers onto the screen. This synesthetic intuitiveness seems to guide the film as it simultaneously travels his life story and communes with his spirit. The cinematography of Jody Lee Lipes passes like wind through the corn fields of Russell’s youth and the New York piers of his adult life, both of which provided lyrical inspiration. By simply tapping into Russell’s relaxed and meditative creativity (at least when Russell was working solo), Wolf makes the film’s charm and depth seem so easy. But subtly potent structural corollaries emerge, as when Chuck Russell’s remembrance of a physical fight with his gentle yet maddening son is mirrored — same words, but a recollection of a different situation — by musician and friend Ernie Brooks.
Wild Combination is the first feature film by the 25-year-old Wolf, whose Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of gay sensibility and whose early short films suggested an affinity for this kind of project. Wolf has already made a short fictive documentary about the late artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, a contemporary of Russell’s — in a Guardian article on Russell (see "Prince Arthur, 03/04/04), I compare the two — who followed similar paths. That 2003 film, Smalltown Boys, possesses the acutely critical parodic imagination of early Todd Haynes movies, a rare characteristic. But Wolf has since graduated from Haynes’ academic tendencies. He’s soulfully true to Russell, whose idiosyncratic gifts and personality led him to butt heads with avant-garde heartlessness and dance through underground discos. While alive, Arthur Russell never found a creative home outside of himself and those he loved. But in Wild Combination, Wolf proves those homes are more than enough. *
WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL
Sat/21, 9:45 p.m.
Roxie
FRAMELINE
The 32nd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 19–29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $10) are available at www.frameline.org.
Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston interviews Matt Wolf. Plus: an Arthur Russell discography and short Frameline reviews
The wonderful politics of gay marriage
I was listinging to Forum this morning on my way to work and although a few complete idiots called in, most of the talk was about how great it is that California now has legal same-sex marriage. I was struck by one caller who announced, with a kind of bemused confidence, that the protests and acrimony are really old news and will soon by ancient history.
The man, who identified himself as straight and 30 years old, said that when his generation takes control of this country, same-sex marraige will be legal, accepted and no longer an issue at all.
Michael Krasny, the host, pointed out that there are stil some young, religious types who oppose gay marriage, but the called shrugged that off. Sure, there are a few, and there will always be a few bigots and nuts around, but in fact, even the young religious types aren’t as adamant about this issue. When you grow up exposed to something as part of your culture, you come to accept it, the man said.
Yeah, I know, when I was in college I thought that when my generation took control, pot would be legal and war would be outlawed, but this guy is right. The wonderful politics of same-sex marraige is that fact that the battle is over, and we’ve won.
When two 80-year-olds who had fought all their lives for basic human rights and dignity took their vows from a mayor about half a century younger than them, it was both a victory celebration and a passing of the torch. Thanks to older queer pioneers like Lyon and Martin, and the generation that followed them, homosexuality is now a part of mainstream American society. Queers are everywhere, literally — on TV, in the movies, in magazines, in comedy, in popular music, in professional sports, going to high-school proms … and that’s never going to change.
So the religious right can make a last gasp attempt to overturn the Supreme Court decision, but that’s going to fail. The tide has turned.
Mr. Miserabilism
Some of Michael Haneke’s early made-for-TV movies are showcased in the aptly titled mini-retrospective "Bitter Pills" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In them, Haneke’s now-characteristic austerity — long static takes, cryptic narrative omissions — is yet undeveloped. But his nihilistic take on society is already present.
The four-hour 1979 Austrian miniseries Lemmings maps out disillusions among the embittered, hypocritical generation of Austrians who "lost" World War II and their suffocated teen offspring. Parent-child relations are toxic. Bonds between peers are no less fucked. Encompassing suicide, infidelity, auto-abortion, vandalism, and joyless full-frontal nudity, Lemmings‘ tragic first part, set in the 1950s, is self-contained. The second part, which takes place years later, finds new ways to rain consequence on its cheerless protagonists and their children.
Black-and-white and Fassbinderesque, 1984’s Fraulein coughs up another fine mess. A German soldier returned from a lengthy Russian POW camp internment finds his family members have long since embarked on brave new paths which range from sell-out capitalism to Elvis-imitative juvenile delinquency. The overall picture is surprisingly quasi-lurid. Today’s Haneke would never allow his miserablism to be diluted by such relative zest.
Adapted from a novel by Joseph Roth, 1993’s The Rebellion is quite different. Mixing archival footage with new material in color and faux-distressed sepia, it chronicles the downward spiral of a one-legged WWI veteran (Branko Samarovski). The whole thing is a classic Teutonic tale of a naive hero efficiently destroyed by the system. Then, as now, Haneke had a gift for making even the bitterest life-lesson pills curiously, even compulsively edible.
BITTER PILLS: MICHAEL HANEKE MADE-FOR-TELEVISION
Thurs/12 through June 19, $6–$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787
Christophe Honoré on liberty and Love Songs
By Johnny Ray Huston
In this week’s Guardian I write about Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs. Honoré recently answered some questions about the film via email. Dive below for thoughts on cross-dressing and Jacques Demy, and also a contemporary booklist for young gay men who read.
SFBG: Gaël Morel has a brief Hitchcock-like cameo early on in Love Songs. Was this born from your experience working together?
Christophe Honoré: Gael and I regularly meet to talk about cinema and life. I co-wrote two of his movies, including Après lui. I found it funny to have him appear in the waiting line of a theater because he’s an avid filmgoer. Après lui is a film that keeps Gaël’s particular lyrical style, but this time and perhaps for the first time, it’s a more “adult” story, focused on Catherine Deneuve’s character. The script was closer to a thriller but I guess Gaël fell in love with Deneuve while shooting and made it more of a melodrama.
Louis Garrel and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet in Love Songs
SFBG: Love Songs is structured like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but elsewhere the similarities of spirit may not be obvious (or even exist). There is, to me, a bisexuality to Jacques Demy’s vision that one could say is extended or updated in your film. Would you agree?
CH: I do agree about the underlying homosexuality in Demy’s work. You could even say that his films deal mostly with cross-dressing. He always cast very handsome actors and filmed them in a way that made them look like icons. Love Songs is not an homage to Demy’s films but it definitely inherited something from them. And, of course, I can handle male sexuality as a filmmaker in a much more straightforward manner than what was possible in Demy’s time.
Demy more
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Jacques Demy’s raindrops keep falling on the heads of French filmmakers. While Jean-Luc Godard has to be the French new wave’s historical and critical favorite, the legacy of Demy has arguably inspired more imitation or homage. In the past decade, François Ozon (2002’s 8 Women) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (1998’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have mined or mimed Demy’s distinct use of color and musicality, though even Ozon’s bright red is blue-blooded, and the charms of Ducastel and Martineau’s effort don’t include Demy’s graceful staging and assured storytelling. Now, with his third feature Love Songs, new wave lover Christophe Honoré has forged an uneasy marriage. He’s set out to connect and update the romantic wisdom and classical dramatic structures of Demy with the arch political wit of ’60s Godard.
Love Songs proves few movies are entirely terrible or terrific. Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening. It begins well, because Honoré is attuned to the mood-setting power of well-deployed credits. Handsome, last-name-only opening titles are the first of the film’s textual nods to Godard, which continue when various books play cameo roles much as they do in Godard’s 1961 musical A Woman Is a Woman. Tomes by Henri Michaux and Hervé Guibert become effective shorthand for characters’ desires. But novelist and playwright Honoré’s sole moment of spine-chilling — as opposed to groan-inducing — wordplay takes place when he simply makes his protagonist Ismaël (Louis Garrel, attempting to channel Jean-Pierre Léaud) read the nighttime signs of the 10th Arrondissement.
Garrel’s character is the focal point of Love Songs, but the film’s hidden star is Honoré’s longtime musical collaborator Alex Beaupain, who appears in a pivotal scene, performing the lovely piano ballad "Brooklyn Bridge." Beaupain is stuck with the job of bringing Michel Legrand’s jazz-inflected pop orchestrations for Godard and Demy into the 21st century. Melodically, he’s up to the task, especially when evoking the neo-Gainsbourg rock of Benjamin Biolay. But he isn’t helped by Honoré’s libretto contributions, because Honoré seems to misinterpret the pop opera of 1964’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a basic copying of old Hollywood musical traditions, when in fact it was a radical yet classical revision. Honoré assumes the casual multigenre musicality of Love Songs is more contemporary, but that’s arguable.
In their previous film together, 2006’s Dans Paris, Honoré and Beaupain discovered naturalistic, inventive intersections between drama and music sequences. Love Songs is more traditional in form, saving its radical aspect for a view and presentation of sexuality that’s far more fluid than one finds in contemporary cinema, straight or gay. Honoré is out to disavow exactly those kinds of divisions, and if he’s not helped greatly by Garrel, he’s aided immeasurably by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, whose arrival in the film’s second half takes the story out of a tritely fatalistic ménage-a-trois realm. He’s also saved by Chiara Mastroianni. Her presence is Honoré’s ultimate invocation of Demy, since she’s the daughter of signature Demy star Catherine Deneuve. (She also brings the off-camera baggage of a recent breakup from chanson specialist Biolay to her part.) Her role might appear secondary, but her solo number signals the return of the melody at the film’s heart. Her melancholic understatement testifies that Honoré hasn’t lost the attraction to eroticism that inspired his brash attempt to bring Georges Bataille to the screen with 2004’s Ma mère. He’s just made it as pop as he possibly can by setting it to music.
LOVE SONGS
Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at sfbg.com