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Former Pride grand marshal: Manning is LGBT hero, Board action ‘height of stupidity’

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Former Pride grand marshal: Manning is LGBT hero, Board action ‘height of stupidity’

“I was one of the 15 former grand marshals on the electoral commission that voted for Bradley Manning,” Barry Saiff, former BiNet president, told me over the phone this morning from Washington, DC, about the Bradley Manning Pride grand marshalship controversy. (As one half of a bi-national queer couple, he lives most of the year in the Phillipines with his boyfriend, who is unable to come to the United States due to discriminatory immigration laws.)

To recap: An ‘electoral college’ of former grand marshals elected the jailed gay (possibly now transgender) whistleblower who provided Wikileaks with a huge dump of raw classified US government info. Someone announced the choice on Friday and the media went nuts. Then the Pride executive director issued this bizarre statement repudiating the decision and rescinding the honor, to the dismay of the electoral college and a huge swath of LGBT locals. A protest at Pride HQ is planned for today, 5pm at 1841 Market, SF.) 

“The list of nominees from the other board members was presented to me in March, and the instant I saw Bradley’s name on there I knew it was the right choice. Pride stands for justice, freedom, and an end to discrimination, and I feel Bradley represents all of these things — as well as complete honesty and bravery. What the Pride board did to repudiate that choice, especially in its official statement — to not be able to make the distinction between Manning’s necessary actions and way the government is denigrating our troops with these illegal and unjust wars — is the height of stupidity.

“They [the Pride board] are colluding in the giant ‘Support Our Troops’ hoax that says you must never question the leadership of the military. There is actually no contradiction between supporting our troops as individuals, including our LGBT folks in the armed services, and supporting Bradley Manning and what he did.

“Specifically, if we care about our troops, we should care that they are used by our military for just ends, for missions and goals that actually increase our security, rather than decrease it, and that they are dealt with honestly. And, regardless of how you feel about the rightness or wrongness of Manning’s actions, there is no question that it is both immoral and illegal under international law (the US is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture), that he was tortured by the USA. Bradley Manning is an American hero, and an LGBT hero. We can rightfully be proud of him. He will rightly be remembered long after his duplicitous superiors are forgotten.

“What the Pride Board should have done to respond to the critics of the nomination was to point out that they were failing to make a crucial distinction. That it is simply a point of logic that we can support our troops while being diametrically opposed to the ends to which they are used by our government. This is a crucial point for the LGBT movement to understand and promote. We should not allow ourselves to be divided by people who are committed to denying reality. We can agree to disagree on the military and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is no disagreement on this, it is a point of fact.”

What about the charge that Manning’s leaks endangered US troops?

“I say, ‘Bullshit.’ Of course that’s what the government says. Look, Manning did not act alone. He worked with some extremely savvy media people with this — Wikileaks, the New York Times — he didn’t just publish everything himself. Those organizations worked to edit what was put out there and protect peoples’ lives. To dump this all on him and call him a traitor is a mistake.”

How much of all this had to do with Manning’s queerness?

“Well, all things being equal, that’s what qualified him in the first place. But as I said, this fight has resonance with LGBT people in terms of freedom and justice. The fact that he’s gay may play into his situation in terms of military and former persecution.”

Were you ever given guidelines by the Pride board about who was qualified to be elected a grand marshall?  

“Not that I know of. I don’t know the bylaws off-hand, but every year, as the ‘electoral college,’ we’ve been able to elect one grand marshall and it’s never been a problem. We voted in March, although there may have been a period before the final decision was tallied. [Radical faerie elder and historian Joey Cain put forth the Manning nomination.] And that was the last I heard of it until Friday. I wasn’t contacted personally by [executive director] Lisa Williams or anybody else saying we had to change anything. It wasn’t until Friday that I found out about any controversy — in the news media, like everybody else. And I was outraged.”  

 

Reports of grenade-type devices used in West Oakland raid

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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A high profile police raid occurred last night in multiple East Bay locations, with most activity centered at the Acorn public housing complex in West Oakland. According to recent news reports, some 150 FBI agents and support staff carried out the raid, along with 120 Oakland police officers and other law enforcement officers from San Leandro, Hayward and Antioch.

OPD Chief Howard Jordan told reporters at a press conference that the raid targeted the Acorn gang of West Oakland, and that officers made five arrests, served 16 narcotics and weapons warrants, and seized firearms, heroin, cocaine and marijuana.  

An official statement attributed to OPD spokesperson Johnna Watson in a Chronicle report suggested that police did not use force during the operation. This suggests OPD does not consider deploying grenade-type devices (considered to be “less lethal weapons”) to be “use of force,” because residents living nearby the Acorn housing complex at Eighth and Adeline streets told the Guardian that they heard loud bangs, probably from flash grenades, go off when the operation was underway around 7:30 Wednesday night.

A neighbor who lives nearby the apartment complex, who asked not to be identified, had a partial view of the police activity from their West Oakland residence. The person described the operation as “like a military presence” due to the sheer number of officers, many outfitted in SWAT gear, and “very precise,” targeting a specific address and lasting roughly an hour and 15 minutes. The streets surrounding the apartment complex were closed off for the duration of the raid.

The neighbor estimated that the flash grenades (or similar devices) were used five times, but since the explosions produce echoes, there could have been fewer deployments. The observer wasn’t able to see how they were used because there wasn’t a clear view of the unit, but heard the bangs in sequence. An OPD officer could be heard addressing occupants inside one of the units on a loudspeaker, reading out the address, telling them they were surrounded, and then saying something like, “you in the suit, get down, get down on the ground.”

The neighbor said they observed three people being removed from the unit and taken into custody – a man who was wearing a suit, a person in a motorized wheelchair, and a tall, younger-looking man. The arrestees were cooperative. 

The West Oakland resident also reported seeing an armored vehicle parked at the scene. A host of official OPD vehicles were parked along the street, along with unmarked cars including SUVs and white vans. 

More details about the massive police operation, the targeted gang, and the criminal activity the cops zeroed in on are sure to come out. A lot of outstanding questions remain, of course, including why officers decided to use the grenade-type devices. So far, OPD hasn’t responded to our email or voice message, but we’ll post the department’s response if we receive one.

Hot Chip off the old block

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Hot Chip off the old block

Bands have hierarchies. James Murphy was essentially LCD Soundsystem, Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard are Hot Chip. If anyone knows this, it’s Al Doyle; the multi-instrumentalist was the guitarist for LCD before it disbanded in 2011, and continues to be a crucial member in Hot Chip.

“Joe and Alexis are a songwriting duo that works extraordinarily well, and no one else has written a song that Hot Chip has played,” Doyle said over the phone, on a bus somewhere en route to Palm Springs, getting ready for the first week of Coachella, where the UK group was slotted to play. Other members Felix Martin and Owen Clarke have made musical contributions along with him, but never whole songs. “Recently, we’ve been collaborating a little more closely, and it might get to the stage where Alexis and Joe feel that they can do a song that I’ve started or Felix has started, but that hasn’t happened so far.”

This probably says less about controlling or opposing personalities, as it does the overabundance of ideas currently in Hot Chip. Goddard released a joyously cuddly dance album with Raf Daddy as the 2 Bears, Taylor is collaborating with German producer Justus Köhnhke as Fainting By Numbers, and Doyle has his own distinct musical outlet in New Build, a project with Martin. “We were working on a few tracks at the same time the LCD thing was going on. The roots were me and Felix, but working in the studio with our engineer Tom Hopkins just seemed to make sense as he got more involved with the project, so it became the three of us.”

New Build’s first album, Yesterday Was Lived and Lost, pulls back from the densely layered production of Hot Chip’s recent albums, for a slightly rawer garage sound that’s more characteristic of Doyle’s LCD background. But much of the somber and tender emotion that typifies Hot Chip is still there. On “Finding Reasons” Doyle morosely recalls Peter Gabriel over a mechanical drum beat, with recurring apocalyptic apprehension. (“And the news is coming in / Of another city’s sad demise.”)

“I was feeling a lot of apathy around at the time I was writing those lyrics,” Doyle said. “Syria was on my mind around that time, and even now there’s a weariness with that kind of information coming through.”

At times, Doyle feels a need to be purposefully obscure as the principal songwriter in New Build. “I probably write a little bit more obliquely, than some of the Hot Chip songs, which are quite intensely personal to Joe and Alexis. When I feel myself getting too personal there’s a sense of paralysis. I can’t really sort of work like that, and often write a couple of steps removed from the original feeling.”

Occasionally things are playful, silly even. Take “The Third One.” Built around a “bleepy” piece by producer Hopkins, it’s got a bouncy rhythm, and some pointedly Prince-like guitar work by Doyle, as the lyrics get into the logic of fighting Nintendo bosses, who as everyone know always come in threes. “I still enjoy videos games,” Doyle said, “It’s something me and Felix do and try not to talk about it too much.”

Still, Doyle is showing through. He describes “Medication” as a curveball, a “straight-up attempt to write as pop-y song as you kind of could.” Over a funky bassline and buoyant beat, the sardonic lyrics recommend simple, chemical solutions to your problems, coming off like a pharmaceutical jingle written by Aldous Huxley. “Retrospectively having looked at that song, there’s a lot of mental illness in my family and it’s something that I tend to find myself thinking about now and again.”

New Build is using gaps in Hot Chip’s schedule (and the relative proximity of its equipment) to stage a West Coast tour. Following the expansive models Doyle is used to, the three members will increase to seven on the road. More expensive, as well, it might mean barely breaking even or going broke, but Doyle prefers the spectacle. “Lots of new bands, you like the music on the record, but then go see them play live and it’s a couple of guys with electronics, maybe one of them is playing guitars but doesn’t really need to, or playing a bit of completely extraneous percussion. I didn’t want it to feel like a tacked on thing, I wanted to feel like an experience.”

“We’re very lucky to find some amazing musicians. Ben Ubly plays bass guitar, and he is childhood friends with Tom, who was like ‘this guy can really play.” And we were like ‘Well, how good could he really be?’ But then he turns out to the one of the best musicians we’ve ever played with. Never been in any bands, literally just a bedroom player. Just stepped up and seems like he’s built for it.”

With New Build, Doyle has also stepped up and into the front. We’ll see how well he’s built, having spent over a decade in two international touring bands, and likely picking up a thing or two from Taylor, Goddard, and Murphy. “James was just able to really relax an audience and make them feel appreciated that’s just something he has as a person. I’d obviously love to try and emulate that sort of presence. I’m still learning how to do that a little bit.”

 

NEW BUILD

With No Ceremony///

Sun/28, 8pm, $17

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Care clash

Andrew Lam
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Care clash

The first week in April was a rough time for Connie Salguero. The Filipina nursing assistant, who says she would’ve been eligible to retire in two years, reported to her shift at the University of California San Francisco medical center at Mt. Zion on April 1 — and was told she was laid off. Two days after that, she was forced out of her home through an eviction, but fortuitously met an elderly Filipina woman who said Salguero could stay with her until she gets back on her feet.

“This manager said to me, Connie, come here, let’s talk,” and delivered the bad news, Salgeuro recounted, getting a little misty-eyed. Two other Filipina hospital assistants in her unit met with the same fate that day, she said.

“I’m trying to find a job,” Salguero said. “It’s very hard. But I will survive.” She projected a sense of resolve despite the whirlwind of sudden stress, which seemed fitting for someone whose job entailed feeding, bathing, and assisting up to ten bedridden patients at a time, many of them suffering from cancer.

Salguero said management told her the layoffs were necessary because of the most recent wave of federal budget cuts. But Cristal Java, lead organizer for UC patient care technical workers’ union, AFSCME 3299, interjected during an interview with the Bay Guardian to refute that explanation, calling it “total crap. They don’t want to tell workers the truth,” Java said, “which is that the hospitals are extremely profitable.”

UCSF ELIMINATES 300 POSITIONS

Salguero is one of about 25 UCSF certified nursing assistants whose recent layoffs prompted AFSCME to register a formal complaint with the Public Employee Relations Board, an agency that mediates labor disputes. The CNA layoffs hit in March and early April as part of a raft of cutbacks that eliminated a total of 300 full-time equivalent positions. Some of those positions were unfilled while other staffers were reassigned elsewhere or had their hours cut; a total of 75 individuals were laid off.

The cuts prompted union representatives to organize a protest at UCSF’s Parnassus Campus April 4, with San Francisco Sup. John Avalos and California Sen. Leland Yee turning out in support of the workers. Salguero was there too, waving a sign, and she wound up telling her story for an international broadcast by a Filipino news station. Things took a dramatic turn when police arrived on the scene, and Union President Kathryn Lybarger and some others were escorted off the premises in handcuffs.

Asked to explain the rationale behind the layoffs, UCSF spokesperson Karin Rush-Monroe responded, “We evaluated the impact of the Affordable Care Act, expected reductions in Medicare, MediCal and private insurance reimbursements,” as well as employee benefits and rising costs in drugs and medical supplies, and ultimately decided on a 4 percent labor budget cut. “We must make a ‘course correction’ if we are to maintain our resources to care for our patients,” Rush-Monroe said.

But the staffing cuts hit just weeks after AFSCME published a blistering report, titled “A Question of Priorities,” charging that UC has prioritized profit margins at its medical centers since 2009 while needlessly eliminating frontline staff positions, all to the detriment of patient care.

“It feels very much like they’re chasing down the Wall Street model of business,” Randall Johnson, an MRI technologist at UCSF Parnassus Campus who is active with Local 3299, told the Guardian. “We’re pressed to move faster and faster and faster. It’s more about profit than it is about patient care.”

Steve Montiel, spokesperson for UC Office of the President, told us that UCSF is “consistently ranked as one of the top hospitals in the country by U.S. News and World Report,” and pointed out that the AFSCME report coincided with an ongoing contract dispute concerning patient care technical workers, which may lead to a strike authorization in the next few weeks.

DANGEROUSLY LOW STAFFING LEVELS?

Billed as a “whistleblower report,” AFSCME’s 40-page publication portrays an internal environment throughout UC medical centers in which staffers — particularly frontline workers — are exhausted, overburdened, and dangerously likely to make mistakes.

Peppered with anecdotal horror stories describing things like dried blood observed on operating room tables at facilities where custodial staffing was cut to a bare minimum, or an incident in which a mentally altered patient was found on a window sill at a medical facility where harrowed nursing assistants’ attention was divided too many ways, the report portrays an unsafe environment that seems out of sync with the system’s reportedly healthy earnings derived from patient care.

“Bring it up at bargaining, and you get told to kick rocks,” said union spokesperson Todd Stenhouse. AFSCME has called upon state agencies and lawmakers to investigate UC policies on “cutting costs, reducing staff, and maximizing revenue.”

“We’ve been getting lots of reports about short staffing, and no coverage for breaks,” said Tim Thrush, a diagnostic sonographer who works with patients experiencing complications in pregnancy, and has worked at UCSF for years. “If you get a break or a lunch, it seems to be rare — even though it’s state law.” Thrush added. “It looks to us … that UC’s response to us raising concerns … is to say, OK well then let’s make it worse. Let’s lay off a whole bunch of people.

“It’s been very disappointing,” he said, “and it’s getting to be kind of scary.”

The report emphasizes California Department of Public Health findings of violations relating to bedsores from 2008 to 2012. The sores can occur if a patient stays in one position for too long, causing reduced blood flow and damage to skin tissue, and have been linked to infection.

Among those affected by the layoffs were “lift and turn team” members, including care workers tasked with turning immobilized patients to prevent bedsores.

Ironically, Rush-Monroe, the UCSF spokesperson, noted in response to a Guardian query that a $300,000 “incentive pay” bonus CEO Mark Laret received in 2011 was based on multiple “clinical improvement goals” that had to be satisfied in order to qualify for the 2011 compensation increase. One of these targets was a reduction in the number of hospital-acquired bedsores.

While the union report points to rising instances of bedsores, and the UCSF administration claims they were reduced to the extent that the CEO was monetarily rewarded for the accomplishment, a quick look at scores on hospital ranking website California Hospital Compare showed that pressure sore rankings at UCSF are almost exactly even with the statewide average.

Meanwhile, hospital rankings of patient safety indicators on Health Grades, an online consumer ranking website, didn’t reflect any dramatic differences between patient safety scores at UCSF, CPMC or Kaiser Permanente.

QUESTIONS RAISED

In the midst of these staffing cuts, AFSCME charges, the $6.9 billion system has enjoyed robust finances, with UCSF earning $100 million in net revenue last year. Between 2009 to 2012, management positions increased by 38 percent system-wide, while payroll costs for managers grew by 50 percent, with an additional $100 million a year allocated to administrative staffing.

According to a 2013-14 budgetary report prepared at the UC level, the system’s network of public universities have suffered deep financial cuts while its five medical centers “have continued to flourish and grow,” and “enjoy robust earnings.”

A revenue breakdown in the UC budget report shows that 62 percent of medical center earnings system-wide were derived from private health care plan reimbursements, while about a third came from Medicare and MediCal, funded by the federal and state government.

Meanwhile, ASCFME’s report has raised eyebrows in the California Senate. Sen. Ed Hernandez, who represents part of Los Angeles County and chairs the Senate Health Committee, “has expressed an interest in looking at it further,” according to committee consultant Vincent Marchand. “We may decide to call a hearing” sometime in May to see if further action is warranted, he added.

Sen. Yee lambasted the UC system for what he called “blatant disregard for the working staff.” Yee said the layoffs raised concerns about the quality of patient care, saying, “How do you lay off 300 individuals and think that it’s not going to compromise patient care?”

Yee added that he thought the UC budget ought to be scrutinized when it goes before the Senate. “Although the Constitution gives the UCs of California tremendous autonomy via the Board of Regents, ultimately we in the Legislature still allocate dollars … so there is a legislative and moral responsibility that we need to exercise,” he said. “Are the dollars within UC being used appropriately to take care of patients and in ensuring their safety?”

CONSTRUCTION, COMPENSATION AND VIPS

In early 2015, UCSF will open its new Mission Bay complex, a 289-bed facility featuring a children’s hospital with an urgent/emergency care unit and an adult care unit for cancer patients. The estimated price tag for the project is about $1.5 billion, and construction costs associated the project were referenced in an Oct. 12 letter Laret, UCSF’s CEO, issued to hospital staff announcing the pending staffing cuts.

Thrush questions decisions made at the highest administrative levels. Laret is “eliminating 300 jobs, and we’re opening a new facility, and he’s getting a $300,000 bonus,” he said, referring to a “retention bonus” expected to be awarded this year, which could be followed by a $400,000 bonus in 2014. “Why is he getting a huge bonus if we’re having to lay off so much staff?”

With a total compensation of around $1.2 million in 2011, Laret’s salary seems excessive in comparison with that of frontline workers — and it is. At the same time, it seems to be within the realm of a CEO of a major medical facility, a quick Internet search reveals.

ACSFME’s report targets Laret specifically, saying he repeatedly emphasized to hospital staff, “When you see patients, you should see dollar signs.” Johnson, the MRI technician, told the Guardian he heard Laret make this statement years ago, when he first came on as CEO. “I know that some physicians were outraged by it,” he said. “I heard that the physicians told him to stop, and he stopped saying it.” UCSF did not respond to Guardian requests for a comment on this allegation.

The report also focuses on a practice of so-called “VIPs” — patients connected with the UC Regents or other influential persons — receiving preferential care. “I got called in on a Sunday to take care of a celebrity, because they had a headache,” said Johnson. “I’ve seen patients have to be on hold so we can scan the [VIPs]. They definitely get preference. I’ve been told, if one of those VIPs comes in, we have to get them on the scanner.” UCSF didn’t respond to Guardian questions concerning VIP patient treatment, either.

LABOR DISPUTE

Montiel, the media relations director for the UC system, responded to a Guardian query with a wholesale rejection of the detailed 40-page report, without directly addressing any of the allegations. Instead, he said the whole controversy arose from a labor rift over pension reform.

“These claims by AFSCME coincide with a bargaining impasse, and the scheduling of a strike vote by its patient care technical workers,” Montiel wrote in an email. “Quality of care is not the issue. The real issue is pension reform. AFSCME has resisted pension reforms that eight unions representing 14 other UC bargaining units have agreed to. The reforms also apply to UC faculty and staff not in unions.”

AFSCME recently announced that its membership would begin voting on April 30 over whether to authorize a strike, following months of stalled negotiations over a contract that expired last September. Stenhouse, the union spokesperson, called it “the impasse of impasses” yet suggested to the Guardian that the strike authorization vote was a side issue from the concerns raised in the whistleblower report. The workers are there to “provide patient care,” he told the Guardian. “They’re not making Buicks.”

“This report is about something much bigger than our members’ livelihoods,” Lybarger stated when the report was released. “It’s about whether the UC is prioritizing quality care for the millions of Californians who put their lives in our hands.”

Solomon: It’s time to renounce the “war on terror”

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Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

As a perpetual emotion machine — producing and guzzling its own political fuel — the “war on terror” continues to normalize itself as a thoroughly American way of life and death. Ongoing warfare has become a matter of default routine, pushed along by mainline media and the leadership of both parties in Washington. Without a clear and effective upsurge of opposition from the grassroots, Americans can expect to remain citizens of a war-driven country for the rest of their lives.

Across the United States, many thousands of peeling bumper stickers on the road say: “End this Endless War.” They got mass distribution from MoveOn.org back in 2007, when a Republican was in the White House. Now, a thorough search of the MoveOn website might leave the impression that endless war ended with the end of the George W. Bush presidency.

MoveOn is very big as online groups go, but it is symptomatic of a widespread problem among an array of left-leaning organizations that have made their peace with the warfare state. Such silence assists the Obama administration as it makes the “war on terror” even more resolutely bipartisan and further embedded in the nation’s political structures — while doing immense damage to our economy, siphoning off resources that should go to meet human needs, further militarizing society and undermining civil liberties.

Now, on Capitol Hill, the most overt attempt to call a halt to the “war on terror” is coming from Rep. Barbara Lee, whose bill H.R. 198 would revoke the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress approved three days after 9/11. Several months since it was introduced, H.R. 198 only has a dozen co-sponsors. (To send your representative and senators a message of support for Lee’s bill, click here.)

Evidently, in Congress, there is sparse support for repealing the September 2001 blanket authorization for war. Instead, there are growing calls for a larger blanket. Bipartisan Washington is warming to the idea that a new congressional resolution may be needed to give War on Terror 2.0 an expansive framework. Even for the law benders and breakers who manage the executive branch’s war machinery, the language of the September 2001 resolution doesn’t seem stretchable enough to cover the U.S. warfare of impunity that’s underway across the globe . . . with more on the drawing boards.

On Tuesday afternoon, when a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on “targeted killing,” the proceedings underscored the great extent of bipartisan overlap for common killing ground. Republican super-hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham lauded President Obama for “targeting people in a very commander-in-chief-like way.” And what passed for senatorial criticism took as a given the need for continuing drone strikes. In the words of the subcommittee’s chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, “More transparency is needed to maintain the support of the American people and the international community” for those attacks.

This is classic tinkering with war machinery. During the first several years of the Vietnam War, very few senators went beyond mild kibitzing about how the war could be better waged. In recent years, during President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan that tripled the U.S. troop levels in that country, senators like John Kerry (now secretary of state) kept offering their helpful hints for how to fine tune the war effort

The “war on terror” is now engaged in various forms of military intervention in an estimated two-dozen countries, killing and maiming uncounted civilians while creating new enemies. It infuses foreign policy with unhinged messages hidden in plain sight, like a purloined letter proclaiming “What goes around won’t come around” and telling the world “Do as we say, not as we do.”

Political ripple effects from the Boston Marathon bombings have only begun. While public opinion hasn’t gotten carried away with fear, much of the news media — television in particular — is stoking the fires of fear but scarcely raising a single question that might challenge the basic assumptions of a forever “war on terror.”

After a city has been traumatized and a country has empathized, a constructive takeaway would be that it’s terribly wrong to set off bombs that kill and maim. But that outlook is a nonstarter the moment it might be applied to victims of U.S. drones and cruise missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. The message seems to be that Americans should never be bombed but must keep bombing.

The death of Richie Havens days ago is a loss and reminder. Each of us has only so many days ahead. We may as well live them with deeper meaning, for peace and social justice. To hear Havens performing the song “Lives in the Balance” written by another great musician, Jackson Browne, is to be awakened anew:

I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die

And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

   

 

   
 

 

420 trip(tych)

Andrew Lam
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420 trip(tych)

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN Snoop wore rhinestone-dripping dichotomy to his 420 concert at the Fillmore. Trust, I was stoned enough to come up with theories based around it.

This year’s preposterous stoner holiday weekend in San Francisco featured a Haight Street-Hippie Hill clusterfuck that snarled traffic lanes for those hoping to flee the THC clouds for lands with slightly more manageable level of good vibes. Down South in Santa Cruz, cops confiscated a two-pound joint stuffed with an estimated $6,000 worth of Cali green from the traditional festivities in the hinterlands of the town’s UC campus.

I stayed far from such daytime fray, though we did manage to snap some photos of Hill-bound bridge-and-tunnelers seeking the 71 bus in their UNIF “Weed Be Good Together” tank tops (available, of course, at Urban Outfitters for some astronomical sum.) They seemed nice enough. I hope they weren’t the ones who left Golden Gate Park trashed with 10,000 pounds of garbage. Yes, that’s an actual park worker estimate.

Not mad at tasteful stoner styling. All park photos by Caitlin Donohue 

My camera and I opted for the slightly more local version of 420 at Dolores Park, where neon Spring Breakers fashion trumped pot leaves and the gentleman proudly sporting a Rastafarian flag as a cape was the exception, rather than the bleary eyed rule to the sunburning throngs. Capturing flicks of various, impressively large picnic buffets, I was proud of my fellow stoners for the most part. Has weed culture progressed to the point where we need not don fake dreadlocks or shiny plastic leaf necklaces to proclaim our affinity to legalization? Down.

Cool cape, breh.

So many snacks. Ladies came prepared. For more DP style, click

KNUCKLE PIECE

Later that evening, after clearing the multi-layered gauntlet of security at the Fillmore (I don’t remember there being metal detectors the last time I came through for a hip-hop show, granted that was for Macklemore) and waiting for his hour-late, $75-ticket appearance, Snoop Dogg put on a predictably fun show. “Classic smash hits” were performed, as promised by the show’s promotional materials. Nate Dogg was piped in for choruses, back from the dead. The crowd sang along to each song, unchallenged by the repertoire of a man as familiar to the world’s hip-hop fans as the MTV logo. He covered “Jump Around,” but even this seemingly unnecessary riff seemed in keeping with much of the first half of the show’s reliance on material from eras gone by.

All Snoop photos by Matthew Reamer

But pacifist, Bunny Wailer-blessed Snoop Lion and his Major Lazer-produced album Reincarnated was entirely absent. Perhaps I was the only one harboring hopes of a surprise appearance by tween daughter Cori B. — whose turn on the hook for “No Guns Allowed” I like to imagine as payback from Daddy for the time those cops found firearms in the family home.

You could see it in his bling, this lack of commitment to his new persona. Though a rhinestone lion swung from Snoop’s slim neck, far more apparent was the garish fist-covering knuckle “Snoop Dogg” piece, which partially obscured his microphone. One wonders if the Lion persona will stick around long enough for Snoop to compile an impressive, be-maned collection of accessories. Maybe not — much of the shtick seems redundant for a rapper already famous for smoking more weed than federal agent bonfires in Humboldt County.

But old school the entirety of the set was not. Singles by Katy Perry and Bruno Mars in which Snoop guest-raps each made the hip-hop purists in the crowd spit. Despite the overwhelming scorn around me, I bopped to Perry’s “California Girls” — but even I couldn’t stomach the aging rapper juxtaposed with the chorus of Mars’ “Young, Wild, and Free”. I wondered if he could be convinced that “No Guns Allowed” ventures far closer to “classic good hit” arena than pop prince crossovers ever will.

MILE HIGH

Uhhhh, like, what else happened? Oh right, there was a shooting at Denver’s massive 420 celebration, the first since Colorado legalized the stuff for recreational use. The news would have been a bummer, had I not gotten to catch up with my girl Coral Reefer, who was a speaker on the Cannabis Cup’s first panel discussion about social media and weed.

“It has been amazing,” said the chipper Reefer, who runs a near 24/7 train of political information and nug glamour shots on her various social networks and Stoney Sunday YouTube potcasts. “Colorado’s been so hospitable and generous.”

News of the shooting — which left two attendees at Denver’s Civic Center Park with non-life-threatening injuries and several with injuries sustained while being trampled during the ensuing chaos amid the estimated 80,000 crowd — didn’t reach attendees at the Cup until a few hours later, Reefer said.

“It was complete sadness. Everyone I spoke to was so disappointed that we had experienced such a great day of community and positive vibrations, and a few miles away something so terrible had happened.”

But at the Cup itself, peace reigned, with the possible exception of the grumblers stuck in the at-times hours-long wait to get in. Reefer says the sophistication of marijuana concentrates continues to improve at these mega-events, and the variety of pot accoutrements — like local brands of vape pens — is impressive. “There’s so much issue with crossing state lines with cannabis products, it seems like each state has developed their own economy when it comes to cannabis goods.”

For Reefer, even the chaotic Civic Center scene signified a growing interest in marijuana she sees as positive. “We need to understand there are millions of people on our side and we need to be prepared when they come to us,” she said.

She also wanted to reinforce that this is one party the Golden State wants in on. “More and more people are celebrating cannabis in Colorado. California needs to step up and legalize, because it’s getting really fun out here.”

Perhaps — a la Snoop’s schizophrenic accessories — someday no one will feel the urge to don crocheted red-yellow-and-green beanies, or make a reggae album, merely to proclaim allegiance to marijuana. Dear government, if we drop the culturally derivative stoner trappings, will you accept that weed has been a part of us all along?

Covering the Boston bombing

Zelda Bronstein
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Covering the Boston bombing

Ever since the horrible, awful bombing at the Boston Marathon, I’ve been doing what every crazy newshound does and spending far too much time on the Internet trying to get the latest scrap of information. This morning, none of us could drag ourselves away from the developing story.

And I have to say: There are thousands of web sites covering this, mostly be aggregating other people’s content. But the real work of finding and reporting news has been done by the old-fashioned traditional mainstream media that we all so freely dismiss as dinosaurs.  The New York Times and The Boston Globe have done an exceptional job, as has the Associated Press. That’s in large part because they still employ significant numbers of staff reporters, with the experience and contacts to accurately cover this kind of story.

The MSM screws up a lot, and allows politicians to avoid accountability, and has all sorts of biases. But nobody else has the ability to cover a tragedy and disaster like this.

Of course, not all is perfect. The New York Daily News and CNN have screwed up badly. The rightwingosphere is so obsessed with Muslim Terrorists that it’s seeing them everywhere, creating them out of paranoid visions if necessary.

But if there weren’t newspapers and broadcast outlets with old-fashioned reporting staff, we’d be far less informed and more reliant on official law-enforcement sources. The old business model is falling apart, but there’s still a need for actual news outlets.

And for my money, the absolute best source of accurate, fair, complete, and insightful coverage has been that very, very old medium — raido — and that old goverment-funded institution, NPR.

Something to think about when a real major news event happens.

Solomon: The Orwellian warfare state of carnage and doublethink

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By Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country’s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion — and reflexive “doublethink,” which George Orwell described as willingness “to forget any fact that has become inconvenient.”

In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday’s front page: “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say.” The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, “rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.”

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of “combined effects munitions” when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.

One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. “The bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia’s third-largest city with shrapnel,” a dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 8, 1999.

And: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”

Pointing out that cluster bombs “explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius,” BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

Savage did not preclude usage. As a matter of fact, to Commander in Chief Bill Clinton and the prevailing military minds in Washington, savage was bound up in the positive attributes of cluster bombs. Each one could send up to 60,000 pieces of jagged steel shrapnel into what the weapon’s maker described as “soft targets.”

An unusually diligent reporter, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia: “During five weeks of airstrikes, witnesses here say, NATO warplanes have dropped cluster bombs that scatter smaller munitions over wide areas. In military jargon, the smaller munitions are bomblets. Dr. Rade Grbic, a surgeon and director of Pristina’s main hospital, sees proof every day that the almost benign term bomblet masks a tragic impact. Grbic, who saved the lives of two ethnic Albanian boys wounded while other boys played with a cluster bomb found Saturday, said he had never done so many amputations.”

The LA Times article quoted Dr. Grbic: “I have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs.” He added: “They are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It’s awful, awful.”

The newspaper account went on: “Pristina’s hospital alone has treated 300 to 400 people wounded by cluster bombs since NATO’s air war began March 24, Grbic said. Roughly half of those victims were civilians, he said. Because that number doesn’t include those killed by cluster bombs and doesn’t account for those wounded in other regions of Yugoslavia, the casualty toll probably is much higher, he said. ‘Most people are victims of the time-activated cluster bombs that explode some time after they fall,’ he said.”

Later, during invasions and initial periods of occupation, the U.S. military dropped cluster bombs in Afghanistan and fired cluster munitions in Iraq.

Today, the U.S. State Department remains opposed to outlawing those weapons, declaring on its official website: “Cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility. Their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk.”

The State Department position statement adds: “Moreover, cluster munitions can often result in much less collateral damage than unitary weapons, such as a larger bomb or larger artillery shell would cause, if used for the same mission.” Perhaps the bomber(s) who stuffed nails and ball bearings into pressure cookers for use in Boston had a similarly twisted rationale.

But don’t expect explorations of such matters from the USA’s daily papers or commercial networks — or from the likes of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” or the PBS “NewsHour.” When the subject is killing and maiming, such news outlets take as a given the presumptive moral high ground of the U.S. government.

In his novel 1984, Orwell wrote about the conditioned reflex of “stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought . . . and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”

The doublethink — continually reinforced by mass media — remains within an irony-free zone that would amount to mere self-satire if not so damaging to intellectual and moral coherence

Every news report about the children killed and injured at the finish line in Boston, every account of the horrific loss of limbs, makes me think of a little girl named Guljumma. She was seven years old when I met her at an Afghan refugee camp one day in the summer of 2009

At the time, I wrote: “Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

In the refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, where several hundred families were living in squalid conditions, the U.S. government was providing no help. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when it bombed them.

War thrives on abstractions, but Guljumma was no abstraction. She was no more or less of an abstraction than the children whose lives have been forever wrecked by the bombing at the Boston finish line.

But the same U.S. news media that are conveying the preciousness of children so terribly harmed in Boston are scarcely interested in children like Guljumma.

I thought of her again when seeing news reports and a chilling photo on April 7, soon after 11 children in eastern Afghanistan were even more unlucky than she was. Those children died from a U.S./NATO air strike. For mainline American journalists, it wasn’t much of a story; for American officials, it was no big deal.

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip,” Orwell observed, “but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.

Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles
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Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

Macca, Hall and Oates, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails – what is this, 1976, or ’99? I kid; the Outside Lands 2013 lineup is again a meaty mix of nostalgic, revived, and shiny new acts. There’s the initial punch of a former Beatle slotted alongside NIN, RHCP, plus Jurassic 5, and Willie Nelson, then French synth-pop Phoenix, classic indie darlings Grizzly Bear, the National, Vampire Weekend, and up-and-comers King Tuff, Surfer Blood, the Growlers, along with inspired picks like D’Angelo and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Tickets are on sale Thu/18 here.

While the release of the lineup is exciting news, that fest isn’t ’till the end of foggy summer (Aug. 9-11); so focus on the sunny days ahead, the bands that are here now: a reunited King Khan and BBQ Show, the Bay Area debut of both Savages and Lady, plus Night Beats, the 2 Bears, and locals Life Coach and Dreamdate’s Anna Hillburg.

Also, a non sequitur reminder that Record Store Day is this Sat/20. Check a list of supporting shops here. And don’t forget to patronize your local brick and mortar vinyl vendors year-round.

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:

Night Beats
“Seattle’s Night Beats has all of the fixings of a good psych-garage act; the lo-fi recordings, the raspy vocals with punctuated yelps, and the noisily manipulated guitar. But the band, which takes its name from Sam Cooke’s best record, has a direct link to the more soulful breeds of music the title suggests, such as R&B. “Dial 666” is simple, 12-bar blues, “High Noon Blues” borrows sentiment and structure from that genre, and “Puppet on a String” seems to call for some old-fashioned dance moves.” — Laura Kerry
With Cool Ghouls, Primitive Hearts, Big Drag
Wed/17, 9pm, $10
Brick and Mortar
1710 Mission, SF
(415) 800-8782
www.brickandmortarmusic.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=545oNrQqgNY

The 2 Bears
“I don’t need caffeine. My computer just starts playing “Work” by the 2 Bears at 7am, complete with rising organ, a pulsing groove, and motivational chorus: “We’ve got to work harder, for the future, my love we got to work.” It might not even be the best song on Be Strong from the 2 Bears (Hot Chips’s Joe Goddard and the Raf Daddy), as it faces stiff competition from hilarious, cuddly club anthem “Bear Hug” and the uplifting, romantic space dub on “Church.” But, it does the job of getting me moving, and by the time the disco queen vocals kick in I’m likely showered and downstairs having breakfast.” — Ryan Prendiville
With Sleazemore, Richie Panic (Lights Down Low)
Wed/17, 10pm, $15 presale
1015 Folsom, SF
www.1015.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxI8QliBOKs

Savages
When all-female British post-punk group Savages hit the East Coast last year for the annual CMJ conference, the word spread quickly to the West: this blistering quartet is one to watch. All these anxious months later, this headlining show will be Savages’ first SF appearance, on the heels of a “spine-tingling” Coachella appearance with “heavy vocals and a fast-paced set that had the crowd cheering in appreciation.”
Thu/18, 8pm, $15
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
www.theindependentsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y-cVzbBBQ8

Anna Hillburg
You may already know Anna Hillburg’s sonic touch, without knowing you know her. The Bay Area trumpet player has guested on Dodos and Fresh and Onlys records, and she’s one-third of power-pop girl group, Dreamdate. As she puts it, she’s hella local. Get to know her more intimately on her new self-titled solo album — released on vinyl, March 25 on California Clap. Left to her own devices, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hops genre barriers and eras over the course of 13 tracks, mixing classic ’60s pop with girl group harmonies, cry-ing-over-you ballads and dreamy whispers to forlorn lovers, with hat tips to fuzzy ’70s folk, Joni Mitchell, and the like. The only constant is Hillburg’s pleasant and confident crooning. Also, can we talk about this album cover? Perfection.
With Luke Sweeney, Garrett Pierce.
Thu/18, 9pm, $10
Eagle Tavern
398 12th St., SF
Facebook: SFEagle

King Khan and BBQ Show
And they said it wouldn’t happen. Remember all the way back in ’10, when sloppy doo-wop masters King Khan (Arish Khan) and BBQ Show (Mark Sultan) imploded over a series of on-stage arguments on an ill-fated tour? The Canadian garage punk duo has since mended,and has been patching things up with fresh songs and a few short tours. This is Khan and Sultan’s first time back in SF together since the break.
With Sir Lord Von Raven, Wild Eyes SF.
Fri/19, 9pm, $16
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
www.slimspresents.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ellItasoK2s

Life Coach
Phil Manley was a founding member of influential DC post-rock trio Trans Am, and has played with the Fucking Champs and Oneida. He’s produced albums for Wooden Shjips, Grass Widow, Date Palms, and Golden Void. And most recently, he released a textured, guitar-heavy drone rock album called Alphawaves (April 16, Thrill Jockey) with his new band, Life Coach. The release show for which is tonight.
Sat/20, 9:30pm, $8
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
www.hemlocktavern.com
http://vimeo.com/63207718

Lady
Yet another SF debut tonight – this one from super-smooth vocalists Terri Walker and Nicole Wrap, a.k.a., the soul duo known as Lady. The London and Atlanta based singers have individually performed alongside the likes of Mos Def, Q-Tip, Missy Elliot, the Black Keys, and Kid Cudi. They paired up over a love vintage soul, recorded an album that’s also called Lady for Truth and Soul Records, and are currently on tour opening for funky R&B-blues headliners Lee Fields and the Expressions.
Sun/21, 8pm, $25
Bimbo’s
1025 Columbus , SF
www.bimbos365club.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3IMPYJ7MiY

When conservatives love Leno

Zelda Bronstein
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When conservatives love Leno

State Sen. Mark Leno is used to facing opposition. His efforts to regulate chemicals, end gender discrimination in insurance, and force cell-phone makers to come clean about radiation levels put him up against some of the most powerful interest groups in the state. He’s fought with Republicans over state spending and taxes.

He’s not used to getting support from right-wing media.

Yet that’s what’s happening now: In an odd political reversal, Leno’s (eminently reasonable) bill to allow cities to explore extending drinking hours is getting flak from progressive groups like Alcohol Justice — and support from the Orange County Register and Fox News.

The Register, which hates all forms of regulation, ran an editorial endorsing Leno’s bill on the grounds that it makes perfect sense for a world where people no longer always work 9-5. (Oh, and it makes sense because there are two many damn laws anyway and we should let people drink when they want.)

Neil Cavuto of Fox News interviewed Leno recently, and his only complaint about the bill was that the procedure for actually getting a late-hours license would be so complicated that even hearing about it was driving him to drink.

That’s the thing: Leno’s bill doesn’t force anyone to do anything. It just sets up a long, complicated process that might, in the end, after extensive public input on the state and local level, allow a couple of bars in a few limited areas (in cities that want to pursue this) to stay open until 4am, as bars in many civilized states already do.

So while Bruce Livingston, who is a decent guy and usually works on good issues, is running around the state trying to get progressives to oppose the Leno bill, the conservatives who usually vote against everything Leno does might wind up on board.

And wouldn’t that be an odd way to get a good bill passed?

 

 

Save the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s summer season!

Sue Vaughan
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Save the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s summer season!

All the world may be a stage, but as San Francisco Mime Troupe fans are finding out, it’s not a free one.

Even as we gleefully contemplate a Fleet Week sans Blue Angels, truly the silver lining of sequestration, the news that the San Francisco Mime Troupe is facing an immediate financial crisis reminds us of its downsides as well. After several anticipated grants failed to be awarded to the acclaimed theatrical collective, including one from longtime funders the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mime Troupe announced that it needs to raise $40,000 by the end of April in order to mount its summer tour of a show about natural resources and climate change tentatively entitled Oil and Water.

By no means is the Mime Troupe alone in facing financial difficulties. Securing arts funding has always been a precarious proposition at best for small theater companies, but one thing that sets the Mime Troupe conspicuously apart from most of their peers is their commitment to providing all of their shows for free  — reaching thousands of people with their often tongue-in-cheek, issue-motivated musicals in public parks across the Bay Area each year.

“I don’t think it’s totally sequester-based but I’m sure that hasn’t helped,” Mime Troupe general manager and collective member Ellen Callas says via email. “Money for arts is not a congressional priority, particularly among the GOP.”

In response to its immediate financial crisis, the Mime Troupe has spoken of downsizing the length of its tour this summer as well as cutting back on its overall production costs, shrinking its carbon footprint as it tightens its belt.

It’s not the first time the Mime Troupe has had to scale back dramatically. After broadly-implemented cuts on the NEA and the California Arts Council in the 1990s, support for the cross-country touring the Mime Troupe specialized in was lost for good, and the company confined itself thereafter to the boundaries of the Bay Area, losing the opportunity to reach out to a national audience, once so central to its mission. The upside to this forced localization, though, has manifested itself in the Mime Troupe’s ability to reach out to its more immediate community, particularly in terms of its youth programs and internships, which are also provided free to participants.

With the summer season in jeopardy, so too are the various youth (and working actor) opportunities to be part of the action, something that Callas makes sure to mention in our correspondence. But she remains optimistic in regards to the Troupe’s reinvigorated commitment to grassroots fundraising, having (at the time of this writing) already raised $15,000, money which will be used to reshape the collective into the “leaner and greener” organization that will be better able to withstand the financial crises of the future.

”We’re seeing this as an opportunity to re-tool our business model so that we can sustain ourselves in the new economy,” promises Callas.

Donate to the San Francisco Mime Troupe at www.sfmt.org.

Film listings

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

OPENING

The Company You Keep In this political thriller, a young journalist (Shia LaBeouf) pursues a scoop that uncovers the secret identity of a Weather Underground activist (Robert Redford, who also directs). (2:05) Albany.

Disconnect Ensemble drama about the darker effects of technology starring Jason Bateman, Hope Davis, Andrea Riseborough, and Alexander Skarsgard. (1:55)

42 Biopic about baseball great and civil rights hero Jackie Robinson (played by TV actor Chadwick Boseman); also stars Harrison Ford and John C. McGinley. (2:08) Marina, Vogue.

The Mafu Cage and The Witch Who Came from the Sea Don’t miss this Roxie double-bill of two neglected but fascinating 1970s psychological horrors about craaaaaazy women. Karen Arthur’s 1978 The Mafu Cage has Lee Grant and Carol Kane are sisters who were raised by an eccentric anthropologist father in Africa. Grant, the older, "normal" one, is now a professional astronomer who resists romantic overtures from her nice coworker (James Olson) because she has a "secret" life — care taking the wildly unstable Kane, who never leaves their house and appears to have been warped beyond salvage by their bizarre childhood. She keeps pet apes, acts like them, and in occasional rages kills them. When Grant goes away for a few days, all hell breaks loose as Kane goes "savage" — and unfortunately, she finds a human quarry to put in the ape cage. The performances are terrific (Kane is electrifying here), the situation farfetched yet very credibly drawn, and the whole atmosphere both suspenseful and strangely poignant. Italian director Matt Cimber’s 1976 Witch — a bizarre, disorienting psycho chiller-cum-suspense-drama — was little-seen when it first came out, and has been very hard to find since. Millie Perkins (of 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank and Monte Hellman’s cult classics) plays Molly, a cocktail waitress in a Santa Monica dive bar who lives with her two young nephews and sad-sack welfare-mother sister. No one seems to be paying attention, but Molly is going quite insane, apparently the result of childhood molestation by the father she claims was "lost at sea" (the truth, we discover, is a lot more sordid). Prone to irrational rages, blackouts, drinking binges, and indiscriminate pill-popping, plus the occasional homicide, Molly has increasing trouble separating fantasy from reality … and so do we, since the movie deploys distortive sound/visuals and unclear time progression to convey her slippery sanity. With its very thorny protagonist and depressing view of LA’s "fringe" life, Witch is moody, creepy, and unique. Roxie. (Harvey)

My Brother the Devil Though its script hits some unsurprising beats, Sally El Hosaini’s drama is buoyed by authentic performances and a strong command of its setting: diverse London ‘hood Hackney, where sons of Egyptian immigrants Rashid (James Floyd) and Mo (Fady Elsayed) stumble toward maturity. After his best friend is killed in a gang fight, older "bruv" Rashid turns away from a life of crime, but dropping his tough-guy façade forces him to explore feelings he’s been desperately trying to deny, especially after he meets photographer Sayyid (Saïd Taghmaoui). The only thing he knows for certain is that he doesn’t want his little brother to start running with the drug-dealing crew he’s lately abandoned. The less-worldly Mo, already dealing with a tidal wave of typical teenage emotions, idolizes his brother — until he finds out Rashid’s secret, and reacts … badly, and the various conflicts careen toward a suspenseful, dread-filled, life-lessons-learned conclusion. Added bonus to this well-crafted film: sleek, vibrant lensing, which earned My Brother the Devil a cinematography prize at Sundance 2012. (1:51) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

No Place on Earth "Every cave I enter has a secret," muses caver Chris Nicola in his clipped New York accent at the start of No Place on Earth. An interest in his family’s Eastern Orthodox roots brought him to the Ukraine soon after the Soviet Union dissolved; while exploring one of the country’s lengthy gypsum caves, he literally stumbled over what he calls "living history:" artifacts (shoes, buttons) that suggested people had been living in the caves in the not-too-distant past. Naturally curious, Nicola investigated further, eventually learning that two families of Ukrainian Jews (including young children) hid in the caves for 18 months during World War II. Using tasteful re-enactments and interviews with surviving members of the families, as well as narration taken from memoirs, director Janet Tobias reconstructs an incredible tale of human resilience and persistence; there are moments of terror, literally hiding behind rocks to escape roaming German soldiers, and moments of joy, as when a holiday snowfall enables precious outdoor playtime. Incredibly, the film ends with now-elderly survivors — one of whom lived just seven miles from Nicola in NYC — returning to "say thank-you to the cave," as one woman puts it, with awed and grateful grandchildren in tow. (1:24) Elmwood, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Scary Movie 5 Not to be confused with A Haunted House, which came out earlier this year and also spoofed the Paranormal Activity series — but did not feature cameos by Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. (1:35)

To the Wonder See "Rambling Man." (1:53) California, Embarcadero.

Trance Where did Danny Boyle drop his noir? Somewhere along the way from Shallow Grave (1994) to Slumdog Millionaire (2008)? Finding the thread he misplaced among the obfuscating reflections of London’s corporate-contempo architecture, Boyle strives to put his own character-centered spin on the genre in this collaboration with Grave and Trainspotting (1996) screenwriter John Hodge, though the final product feels distinctly off, despite its Hitchcockian aspirations toward a sort of modern-day Spellbound (1945). Untrustworthy narrator Simon (James McAvoy) is an auctioneer for a Sotheby’s-like house, tasked with protecting the multimillion-dollar artworks on the block, within reason. Then the splashily elaborate theft of Goya’s Witches’ Flight painting goes down on Simon’s watch, and for his trouble, the complicit staffer is concussed by heist leader Franck (Vincent Cassel). Where did those slippery witches fly to? Simon, mixed up with the thieves due to his gambling debts, cries amnesia — the truth appears to be locked in the opaque layers of his jostled brain, and it’s up to hypnotherapist Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to uncover the Goya’s resting place. Is she trying to help Simon extricate himself from his impossible situation, seduce Franck, or simply help herself? Boyle tries to transmit the mutable mind games on screen, via the lighting, glass, and watery reflections that are supposed to translate as sleek sophistication. But devices like speedy, back-and-forth edits and off-and-on fourth-wall-battering instances as when Simon locks eyes with the audience, read as dated and cheesy as a banking commercial. The seriously miscast actors also fail to sell Trance on various levels — believability, likeability, etc. — as the very unmesmerized viewer falls into a light coma and the movie twirls, flaming, into the ludicrous. (1:44) Piedmont, Shattuck. (Chun)

Upstream Color See "Stop Making Sense." (1:35) Elmwood, Roxie.

ONGOING

Admission Tina Fey exposes the irritating underbelly of the Ivy League application process as Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan. When her school falls to number two in U.S. News and World Report‘s annual ranking, Portia and her colleagues are tasked by their boss (Wallace Shawn) with boosting application numbers to bring the university back into the lead. Alterna-school headmaster John Pressman (Paul Rudd) has one more applicant to add to the pile: a charmingly gawky autodidact named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), who John is convinced is the child Portia gave up for adoption back when they were both students at Dartmouth. Stuck in a dreary 10-year relationship with an English professor (Michael Sheen) whose bedtime endearments consist of absentmindedly patting her on the head while reading aloud from The Canterbury Tales, and seeming less than thrilled with the prospect of another season of sifting through the files of legacies and overachievers, Portia is clearly ripe for some sort of purgative crisis. When it arrives, the results are fairly innocuous, if ethically questionable. Directed by Paul Weitz, the man responsible for bringing Little Fockers (2010) into the world, but About a Boy (2002) as well, Admission is sweet and sometimes funny but unmemorable, even with Lily Tomlin playing Portia’s surly, iconoclast mother. (1:50) Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Call (1:34) SF Center.

The Croods (1:38) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Evil Dead "Sacrilege!" you surely thought when hearing that Sam Raimi’s immortal 1983 classic was being remade. But as far as remakes go, this one from Uruguayan writer-director Fede Alvarez (who’d previously only made some acclaimed genre shorts) is pretty decent. Four youths gather at a former family cabin destination because a fifth (Jane Levy) has staged her own intervention — after a near-fatal OD, she needs her friends to help her go cold turkey. But as a prologue has already informed us, there is a history of witchcraft and demonic possession in this place. The discovery of something very nasty (and smelly) in the cellar, along with a book of demonic incantations that Lou Taylor Pucci is stupid enough to read aloud from, leads to … well, you know. The all-hell that breaks loose here is more sadistically squirm-inducing than the humorously over-the-top gore in Raimi’s original duo (elements of the sublime ’87 Evil Dead II are also deployed here), and the characters are taken much more seriously — without, however, becoming more interesting. Despite a number of déjà vu kamikaze tracking shots through the Michigan forest (though most of the film was actually shot in New Zealand), Raimi’s giddy high energy and black comedy are replaced here by a more earnest if admittedly mostly effective approach, with plenty of decent shocks. No one could replace Bruce Campbell, and perhaps it was wise not to even try. So: pretty good, gory, expertly crafted, very R-rated horror fun, even with too many "It’s not over yet!" false endings. But no one will be playing this version over and over and over again as they (and I) still do the ’80s films. (1:31) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

From Up on Poppy Hill Hayao (dad, who co-wrote) and Goro (son, who directed) Miyazaki collaborate on this tale of two high-school kids — Umi, who does all the cooking at her grandmother’s boarding house, and Shun, a rabble-rouser who runs the school newspaper — in idyllic seaside Yokohama. Plans for the 1964 Olympics earmark a beloved historic clubhouse for demolition, and the budding couple unites behind the cause. The building offers a symbolic nod to Japanese history, while rehabbing it speaks to hopes for a brighter post-war future. But the past keeps interfering: conflict arises when Shun’s memories are triggered by a photo of Umi’s father, presumed lost at sea in the Korean War. There are no whimsical talking animals in this Studio Ghibli release, which investigates some darker-than-usual themes, though the animation is vivid and sparkling per usual. Hollywood types lending their voices to the English-language version include Jamie Lee Curtis, Christina Hendricks, Ron Howard, and Gilllian Anderson. (1:31) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

GI Joe: Retaliation The plot exists to justify the action, but any fan of badass-ness will forgive the skimpy storyline for the outlandish badassery in GI Joe: Retaliation. Inspired by action figures and tying loosely to the first flick, Retaliation starts with a game of "secure the defector," followed by "raise the flag," but as soon as the stakes aren’t real, the Joes outright suck. They don’t have "neutral," which is maybe why a mission to rescue and revive the Joes as a force is the most ferocious fight that ever pit metal against plastic. The set pieces are stunning: a mostly silent sequence with Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Jinx (Elodie Yung) on a mountainside will leave the audience gaping in its high speed wake, and a prison break featuring covert explosives is nonstop amazing. You’ll notice an emphasis on chain link fences and puddles (terra nostra for action figures) and set pieces conceived as if by kids who don’t have a concept of basic irrefutable truths like gravity. It’s just that kind of imagination and ardor and limitlessness that makes this Joe incredible, memorable, and a reason to crack out your toys again. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

Ginger and Rosa It’s the 1960s, nuclear war is a real possibility, and nuclear-family war is an absolute certainty, at least in the London house occupied by Ginger (Elle Fanning), her emotionally wounded mother (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks), and her narcissistic-intellectual father (Alessandro Nivola). In this downbeat coming-of-age tale from Sally Potter (1992’s Orlando), Ginger’s teenage rebellion quickly morphs into angst when her BFF Rosa (Beautiful Creatures‘ Alice Englert) wedges her sexed-up neediness between Ginger’s parents. Hendricks (playing the accordion — just like Joan!) and Annette Bening (as an American activist who encourages Ginger’s political-protest leanings) are strong, but Fanning’s powerhouse performance is the main focus — though even she’s occasionally overshadowed by her artificially scarlet hair. For an interview with writer-director Potter, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:30) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Host (2:01) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Steve Carell dips into the men-at-work comic genre so associated with Will Ferrell: he’s Burt Wonderstone, who starts out as a picked-on kid discovering his powers via a kit by Las Vegas magician Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). The ensuing years have not been kind to Burt, a relatively decent guy struggling to shed the douchey buildup of ego, corn, and dated moves à la David Copperfield (ta-da, who magically appears), while working for benevolently threatening casino boss Doug Munny (James Gandolfini) with his childhood best friend Anton (Steve Buscemi, reviving the naifitude of The Big Lebowski‘s Donny) and side fox Jane (Olivia Wilde). The shot of adrenalin to the moribund heart of Burt and Anton’s act: Jim Carrey’s "Brain Rapist," who aims to ream his colleagues by cutting playing cards from his flesh and going to bed on fiery coals. How can the old-schoolers remain relevant? Hard work is key for Carell, who rolls out the straight-man sweetness that seem to make him a fit for romantic comedies — though his earnestness and need to be liked, as usual, err on the side of convention, while taking for granted the not-quite-there chemistry with, in this instance, Wilde. Fortunately whatever edge is lacking materializes whenever Carrey’s ridiculously ombré-tressed daredevil is on screen. Using his now-battered, still-malleable features to full effect, he’s a whole different ball of cheese, lampooning those who will go to any lengths — gouging, searing, and maiming — to entertain. (1:40) Metreon. (Chun)

Jack the Giant Slayer (1:55) Metreon.

Jurassic Park 3D "Life finds a way," Jeff Goldblum’s leather-clad mathematician remarks, crystallizing the theme of this 1993 Spielberg classic, which at its core is more about human relationships than genetically manufactured terrors. Of course, it’s got plenty of those, and Jurassic Park doesn’t really need its (admittedly spiffy) 3D upgrade to remain a thoroughly entertaining thriller. The dinosaur effects — particularly the creepy Velociraptors and fan-fave T. rex — still dazzle. Only some early-90s computer references and Laura Dern’s mom jeans mark the film as dated. But a big-screen viewing of what’s become a cable TV staple allows for fresh appreciation of its less-iconic (but no less enjoyable) moments and performances: a pre-megafame Samuel L. Jackson as a weary systems tech; Bob Peck as the park’s skeptical, prodigiously thigh-muscled game warden. Try and forget the tepid sequels — including, dear gawd, 2014’s in-the-works fourth installment. This is all the Jurassic you will ever need. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

No Long before the Arab Spring, a people’s revolution went down in Chile when a 1988 referendum toppled the country’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, thanks in part to an ad exec who dared to sell the dream to his countrymen and women — using the relentlessly upbeat, cheesy language of a Pepsi Generation. In No‘s dramatization of this true story, ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is approached by the opposition to Pinochet’s regime to help them on their campaign to encourage Chile’s people to vote "no" to eight more years under the brutal strongman. Rene’s well-aware of the horrors of the dictatorship; not only are the disappeared common knowledge, his activist ex (Antonia Zegers) has been beaten and jailed with seeming regularity. Going up against his boss (Alfredo Castro), who’s overseeing the Pinochet campaign, Rene takes the brilliant tact in the opposition’s TV programs of selling hope — sound familiar? — promising "Chile, happiness is coming!" amid corny mimes, dancers, and the like. Director-producer Pablo Larrain turns out to be just as genius, shooting with a grainy U-matic ’80s video camera to match his footage with 1988 archival imagery, including the original TV spots, in this invigorating spiritual kin of both 2012’s Argo and 1997’s Wag the Dog. (1:50) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Chun)

Olympus Has Fallen Overstuffed with slo-mo shots of the flag rippling (in breezes likely caused by all the hot air puffing up from the script), this gleefully ham-fisted tribute to America Fuck Yeah estimates the intelligence of its target audience thusly: an establishing shot clearly depicting both the Washington Monument and the US Capitol is tagged "Washington, DC." Wait, how can you tell? This wannabe Die Hard: The White House follows the one-man-army crusade of secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), the last friendly left standing when the President (Aaron Eckhart) and assorted cabinet members are taken hostage by North Korean terrorists. The plot is to ridiculous to recap beyond that, though I will note that Morgan Freeman (as the Speaker of the House) gets to deliver the line "They’ve just opened the gates of hell!" — the high point in a performance that otherwise requires him to sit at a table and look concerned for two hours. With a few more over-the-top scenes or slightly more adventurous casting, Olympus Has Fallen could’ve ascended to action-camp heights. Alas, it’s mostly just mildly amusing, though all that caked-on patriotism is good for a smattering of heartier guffaws. (2:00) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

On the Road Walter Salles (2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries) engages Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera to adapt Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic; it’s translated to the screen in a streamlined version, albeit one rife with parties, drugs, jazz, danger, reckless driving, sex, philosophical conversations, soul-searching, and "kicks" galore. Brit Sam Riley (2007’s Control) plays Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise, observing (and scribbling down) his gritty adventures as they unfold. Most of those adventures come courtesy of charismatic, freewheeling Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund of 2010’s Tron: Legacy), who blows in and out of Sal’s life (and a lot of other people’s lives, too, including wives played by Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst). Beautifully shot, with careful attention to period detail and reverential treatment of the Beat ethos, the film is an admirable effort but a little too shapeless, maybe simply due to the peripatetic nature of its iconic source material, to be completely satisfying. Among the performances, erstwhile teen dream Stewart is an uninhibited standout. (2:03) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Place Beyond the Pines Powerful indie drama Blue Valentine (2010) marked director Derek Cianfrance as one worthy of attention, so it’s with no small amount of fanfare that this follow-up arrives. The Place Beyond the Pines‘ high profile is further enhanced by the presence of Bradley Cooper (currently enjoying a career ascension from Sexiest Man Alive to Oscar-nominated Serious Actor), cast opposite Valentine star Ryan Gosling, though they share just one scene. An overlong, occasionally contrived tale of three generations of fathers, father figures, and sons, Pines‘ initial focus is Gosling’s stunt-motorcycle rider, a character that would feel more exciting if it wasn’t so reminiscent of Gosling’s turn in Drive (2011), albeit with a blonde dye job and tattoos that look like they were applied by the same guy who inked James Franco in Spring Breakers. Robbing banks seems a reasonable way to raise cash for his infant son, as well as a way for Pines to draw in another whole set of characters, in the form of a cop (Cooper) who’s also a new father, and who — as the story shifts ahead 15 years — builds a political career off the case. Of course, fate and the convenience of movie scripts dictate that the mens’ sons will meet, the past will haunt the present and fuck up the future, etc. etc. Ultimately, Pines is an ambitious film that suffers from both its sprawl and some predictable choices (did Ray Liotta really need to play yet another dirty cop?) Halfway through the movie I couldn’t help thinking what might’ve happened if Cianfrance had dared to swap the casting of the main roles; Gosling could’ve been a great ambitious cop-turned-powerful prick, and Cooper could’ve done interesting things with the Evel Knievel-goes-Point Break part. Just sayin’. (2:20) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. "This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!" she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Reality Director Matteo Garrone’s Cannes Grand Prix winner couldn’t be more different from his 2008 Gomorrah, save one similarity: that film was about organized crime, and dark comedy Reality stars Aniello Arena, a former gangster who was allowed out of prison to shoot his scenes. All things considered, he’s rather winning as Neapolitan everyman Luciano, whose daily life slinging fish can’t compete with his big dreams of appearing on the Italian version of Big Brother. He makes it through the second round of auditions — and soon starts believing he’s being watched by casting agents considering whether to put him on the show. His level-headed wife (Loredane Simioli) suspects he’s being paranoid (as does the audience, before long), though he’s told "never give up!" by cheesy-sleazy Big Brother vet Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a character clearly designed to comment on reality TV’s own peculiar brand of insta-fame. Nobody who’s ever watched reality TV will be surprised at the film’s ultimate messages about the hollow rewards of that fame, but Arena’s powerful performance makes the journey worthwhile. (1:55) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Renoir The gorgeous, sun-dappled French Riviera setting is the high point of this otherwise low-key drama about the temperamental women (Christa Theret) who was the final muse to elderly painter Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), and who encouraged the filmmaking urges in his son, future cinema great Jean (Vincent Rottiers). Cinematographer Mark Ping Bin Lee (who’s worked with Hou Hsiao-hsein and Wong Kar Wai) lenses Renoir’s leafy, ramshackle estate to maximize its resemblance to the paintings it helped inspire; though her character, Dédée, could kindly be described as "conniving," Theret could not have been better physically cast, with tumbling red curls and pale skin she’s none too shy about showing off. Though the specter of World War I looms in the background, the biggest conflicts in Gilles Bourdos’ film are contained within the household, as Jean frets about his future, Dédée faces the reality of her precarious position in the household (which is staffed by aging models-turned-maids), and Auguste battles ill health by continuing to paint, though he’s in a wheelchair and must have his brushes taped to his hands. Though not much really happens, Renoir is a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes experience. (1:51) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Revolutionary Optimists If the children, as someone once sang, are our future, the inspiring work done by youth activists living in the slums of Kolkata, India hints that there might be brighter days ahead for some of the poorest communities in the world. Under the guidance of Amlan Ganguly and his non-profit, Prayasam, kids whose daily struggles include lacking easy access to drinking water, having to work backbreaking long hours at the local brick field, and worrying that their parents will marry them off as soon as they turn 13, find hope via education and artistic expression. Sensitively directed over the span of several years by Nicole Newnham (who made the excellent 2006 doc The Rape of Europa) and Maren Grainger-Monsen, The Revolutionary Optimists shows stories of both success (12-year-old sparkplug Salim speaks before Parliament about bringing water to his neighborhood) and failure (16-year-old Priyanka is forced into an abusive marriage, ending her dreams of becoming a dance teacher). With harsh reality keeping its stories firmly grounded, the film — which is, of course, ultimately optimistic — offers a look at how the youngest members of a community can help effect real change. (1:23) Marina. (Eddy)

The Sapphires The civil rights injustices suffered by these dream girls may be unique to Aboriginal Australians, but they’ll strike a chord with viewers throughout the world — at right about the same spot stoked by the sweet soul music of Motown. Co-written by Tony Briggs, the son of a singer in a real-life Aboriginal girl group, this unrepentant feel-gooder aims to make the lessons of history go down with the good humor and up-from-the-underdog triumph of films like The Full Monty (1997) — the crucial difference in this fun if flawed comedy-romance is that it tells the story of women of color, finding their voices and discovering, yes, their groove. It’s all in the family for these would-be soul sisters, or rather country cousins, bred on Merle Haggard and folk tunes: there’s the charmless and tough Gail (Deborah Mailman), the soulful single mom Julie (Jessica Mauboy, an Australian Idol runner-up), the flirty Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and the pale-skinned Kay (Shari Sebbens), the latter passing as white after being forcibly "assimilated" by the government. Their dream is to get off the farm, even if that means entertaining the troops in Vietnam, and the person to help them realize that checkered goal is dissolute piano player Dave (Chris O’Dowd). And O’Dowd is the breakout star to watch here — he adds an loose, erratic energy to an otherwise heavily worked story arc. So when romance sparks for all Sapphires — and the racial tension simmering beneath the sequins rumbles to the surface — the easy pleasures generated by O’Dowd and the music (despite head-scratching inclusions like 1970’s "Run Through the Jungle" in this 1968-set yarn), along with the gently handled lessons in identity politics learned, obliterate any lingering questions left sucking Saigon dust as the narrative plunges forward. They keep you hanging on. (1:38) Albany, Piedmont, SF Center. (Chun)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The Silence Maybe "fun" is a tasteless way to describe The Silence, which hinges on pederasty and child murder — though in the end this is more an intelligent pulp thriller than serious address of those issues, uneasily as it straddles both at times. In 1986 two men abduct an 11-year-old girl — one the initially excited, then horrified observer to the second’s murderous sexual assault. Twenty-three years later, another young girl disappears in the same place under disturbingly identical circumstances. This event gradually pulls together a large cast of characters, many initial strangers — including the original victim’s mother (Katrin Sass) and the just-retired detective (Burghart Klaubner) who failed to solve that crime; parents (Karoline Eichhorn, Roeland Wiesnekker) of the newly disappeared teen, who experience full-on mental meltdown; a solidly bourgeoise husband and father of two girls (Wotan Wilke Möhring), inordinately distressed by this repeat of history; and the erstwhile friend he hasn’t contacted in decades, an apartment-complex handyman with a secret life (Ulrich Thomsen). Part procedural, part psychological thriller, part small-town-community portrait, director-scenarist (from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel) Baran bo Odar’s The Silence is just juicy and artful enough to get away with occasional stylistic hyperbole. It’s a conflicted movie, albeit handled with such engrossing confidence that you might not notice the credibility gaps. At least until thinking it over later. Which, don’t. (1:59) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat "silver linings" philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) Metreon, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Spring Breakers The idea of enfant terrible emeritus Harmony Korine — 1997’s Gummo, 2007’s Mister Lonely, 2009’s Trash Humpers — directing something so utterly common as a spring break movie is head-scratching enough, even moreso compounded by the casting of teen dreams Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Ashley Benson as bikini-clad girls gone wild. James Franco co-stars as drug dealer Alien, all platinum teeth and cornrows and shitty tattoos, who befriends the lasses after they’re busted by the fun police. "Are you being serious?" Gomez’s character asks Alien, soon after meeting him. "What do you think?" he grins back. Unschooled filmgoers who stumble into the theater to see their favorite starlets might be shocked by Breakers‘ hard-R hijinks. But Korine fans will understand that this neon-lit, Skrillex-scored tale of debauchery and dirty menace is not to be taken at face value. The subject matter, the cast, the Britney Spears songs, the deliberately lurid camerawork — all carefully-constructed elements in a film that takes not-taking-itself-seriously, very seriously indeed. Korine has said he prefers his films to make "perfect nonsense" instead of perfect sense. The sublime Spring Breakers makes perfect nonsense, and it also makes nonsense perfect. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Starbuck Starbuck has a great (if not entirely original) comedic concept it chooses to play seriocomedically — i.e., less for the laughs it seldom earns than for the heart-tugging it eventually pretty much does. An ingratiatingly rumpled Patrick Huard (a major Quebec star best known for the mega-hit Les Boys series and 2006’s Good Cop, Bad Cop) plays David, erstwhile stellar contributor to a Montreal sperm bank in his salad days. Now older but no wiser, he finds himself confronted by the reality of 533 biologically fathered, now-grown offspring who’ve filed a class action lawsuit to discover his identity even as he deals with mob debt and an exasperated, pregnant semi-ex-girlfriend (Julie LeBreton). This is one of those "loser manboy must semi-grow up fast amid crisis, finding family values en route" scenarios tailor-fit for Adam Sandler. That said, the overlong, stubbornly endearing Starbuck is so much less insufferable than anything Sandler has made since … um, ever? Halfway through, this agreeable movie gets clever — as David stumbles into a meeting of his prodigious anonymous progeny — and remains reasonably so to the satisfyingly hard-won happy ending. It’s still got moments of contrivance, editorial fat (too many montages, for one thing), and more climactic hugs than any self-respecting dramedy needs to get the redemptive point across. Yet it’s also got something few comedies of any national origin have today: a lovely, distinctive, bright yet non-cartoonish widescreen look. (1:48) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (2:06) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Kink.com beloved in Pope land! Local porn site among top downloaded in Vatican City [UPDATED]

Andrew Lam
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Kink.com beloved in Pope land! Local porn site among top downloaded in Vatican City [UPDATED]

A local anti-BDSM porn activist emailed me tidings of Flash magazine’s Guatanamo-themed Coachella party this morning as proof that “Kink.com’ s influence is spreading, albeit interrupted by the sex-negative Philistines of Coachella.” Leaving aside the well-worth-it debate over the role art and nightlife have in political parody and the fact that torture in fact, existed well before Kink founder Peter Acworth (it wasn’t called the “Kinkquisition,” darling), I would say this is about 8,000 times more convincing proof that Kink.com is winning hearts and minds, should you need proof of such a thing.

According to Torrentfreak (and helpfully elaborated on by Fleshbot) the local BDSM site is responsible for two of the 13 most-pirated downloads in Vatican City. No, not top porn downloads, the most-pirated files, period.

Yes, for while Love Actually came in at #6, a scene featuring Lea Lexis and Krissy Lynn on “lezdom bondage” Kink site Whipped Ass followed close behind at #8, and #13 was occupied by Tiffany Starr and Sheena Shaw on the TS Pussyhunters site. 

We’re putting out the feelers to Kink to see how news of their influence in — and being robbed of revenue by — the world’s most flamboyantly attired country is being recieved by the company, stand by for post updates. 

UPDATE: Acworth has released a statement that implies the Vatican will espace legal action from the website:

While we don’t support theft of content, in this case we’re happy whoever he (or she) is is enjoying our movies. Our mission is to demystify BDSM and celebrate alternate sexuality. This is different from the Catholic Church’s mission which has (traditionally) been to shame anyone who deviates from a sexuality that isn’t procreative. We figure whoever is downloading these movies is feeling a fare amount of shame as it is, so we’ll let this one slide.

Read Acworth’s full statement here, featuring more Kink-Church comparisons like, “what is subspace if not a way to exorcise demons?” 


No progress in condo conversion standoff, despite the Chron’s spin

Sasha Cuttler
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Perhaps it was just an unfunny April Fool’s Day joke or some wishful political spin, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s April 1 article about how tenancy-in-common owners and their political supporters are pushing legislation that would allow them to bypass the condo conversion lottery seriously misrepresented the city’s biggest current political standoff.

Nevermind the article’s over-the-top bias in favor of those poor, hard-luck TIC owners, like the featured Pacific Heights couple forced to raise their baby in a closet when all they really want to do is flip the apartment they bought for a profit. Or how the Chron all-but-ignored the fact that these TICs were rent-controlled apartments in a city where two-thirds of citizens rent. That kind of top-down view of the world is pretty typical for the Chron, even in its news stories, despite the paper’s strained claim to “objectivity.”

No, the article’s real sin was to get the basic facts wrong on where this political stalemate now stands, presenting the wishful spin of one side as if it were the latest news. Between the headline, “Owners seeking condo conversions may have shot” and the first deckhead, “Making progress” (which plays off this paragraph. “’I think we’re making progress in our discussions and negotiations,’ said [sponsoring Sup. Mark] Farrell, while noting the talks with tenant advocates, TIC owners, and real estate interests are ‘far from the finish line.’”) the article leaves the impression current negotiations may produce a compromise.

But the problem is that there aren’t any current negotiations between the two sides, and there haven’t been for weeks, according to tenant and other involved sources. In fact, they say there’s been no movement in this standoff since almost a month ago when I last reported that tenant groups and progressive supervisors were preparing a set of hostile amendments to the legislation.

They would allow a one-time condo lottery bypass for the nearly 2,500 TIC owners in the pipeline in exchange to shutting down the lottery for many years and preventing any conversions of rent-controlled apartments into condos until city builds a comparable amount of new affordable housing, and then probably restricting condo conversions to smaller buildings after that to protect large rent-controlled apartment buildings from real estate speculators.

That proposed compromise, which the article barely mentions before letting Farrell say “his legislation poses no threat to rent control,” would help the poor Pacific Heights couple at the center of the article. But the real estate industry and its conservative allies don’t really care about that couple as much as they do maintaining the flow of rental units into the real estate market, which is why the negotiations have broken down.

Instead, the Chron has Sup. London Breed – who is indeed a swing vote of the issue, but not one that tenant groups are counting on given how close she is to Plan C and the landlord lobby – citing a compromise proposal that would prevent the new condo owners from selling their properties for five years to discourage real estate speculation.

Perhaps that’s something the TIC owners and real estate interests that the article relies on think is a realistic compromise, but it’s not something that has been seriously discussed with tenant groups, mediating Sup. David Chiu, or the other interests that would be needed to pass this legislation.

Sara Shortt, the token tenant activist that the Chron talked to for the article, confirmed to us that there is no real compromise deal in the works and preventing the creation of new condos from existing apartments is a bottom-line issue that unites everyone who is now opposed to this legislation.

“The Plan C/Realtor etc. won’t concede on our key issue: restriction on future conversions in exchange for the bypass. We have given as much as we can give and they have given virtually nothing in return,” Shortt, executive director of the Housing Right Committee, told us by email.

Even Sup. Scott Wiener, who co-sponsors the legislation with Farrell, told us there has been “no change from before,” when negotiations broke down. But the legislation is on the April 15 agenda for the Land Use and Economic Development Committee – for the fifth time, with most hearings canceled because of the lack of negotiating progress.

If the Realtors and Plan C (which is dominated by real estate and banking interests) stick to their intransigent position – hurting this poor Pac Heights couple in the process, which the Chron fails to note – then tenants and progressive supervisors are likely to amend the legislation and call the bluff of those who claim this issue is simply about poor TIC owners stuck with shared mortgages.

Film listings

Andrew Lam
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0

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

OPENING

Evil Dead Yep, they remade it. But before you grab your chainsaw in anger, know this: early buzz is actually pretty positive. (1:31)

Gimme the Loot Biggie Smalls’ track is just a smart starting point for this streetwise, hilarious debut feature by Adam Leon. Young graf artists Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are hustling hard to get paid and fund a valiant effort to tag the Mets’ Home Run Apple to show up rival gang-bangers. The problem lies in raising the exorbitant fee their source demands, either by hook (selling pot to seductive, rich white girls) or crook (offloading cell phone contraband). The absurdity of the pair’s situation isn’t lost on anyone, especially Leon. But their passion to rise above (sorta) and yearning for expression gives the tale an emotional heft, and Gimme the Loot stays with you long after the taggers have moved onto fresh walls. (1:21) (Chun)

Jurassic Park 3D Because Velociraptors and Jeff Goldblum are even more awesome in 3D. (2:07)

The Place Beyond the Pines Powerful indie drama Blue Valentine (2010) marked director Derek Cianfrance as one worthy of attention, so it’s with no small amount of fanfare that this follow-up arrives. The Place Beyond the Pines‘ high profile is further enhanced by the presence of Bradley Cooper (currently enjoying a career ascension from Sexiest Man Alive to Oscar-nominated Serious Actor), cast opposite Valentine star Ryan Gosling, though they share just one scene. An overlong, occasionally contrived tale of three generations of fathers, father figures, and sons, Pines‘ initial focus is Gosling’s stunt-motorcycle rider, a character that would feel more exciting if it wasn’t so reminiscent of Gosling’s turn in Drive (2011), albeit with a blonde dye job and tattoos that look like they were applied by the same guy who inked James Franco in Spring Breakers. Robbing banks seems a reasonable way to raise cash for his infant son, as well as a way for Pines to draw in another whole set of characters, in the form of a cop (Cooper) who’s also a new father, and who — as the story shifts ahead 15 years — builds a political career off the case. Of course, fate and the convenience of movie scripts dictate that the mens’ sons will meet, the past will haunt the present and fuck up the future, etc. etc. Ultimately, Pines is an ambitious film that suffers from both its sprawl and some predictable choices (did Ray Liotta really need to play yet another dirty cop?) Halfway through the movie I couldn’t help thinking what might’ve happened if Cianfrance had dared to swap the casting of the main roles; Gosling could’ve been a great ambitious cop-turned-powerful prick, and Cooper could’ve done interesting things with the Evel Knievel-goes-Point Break part. Just sayin’. (2:20) (Eddy)

Reality Director Matteo Garrone’s Cannes Grand Prix winner couldn’t be more different from his 2008 Gomorrah, save one similarity: that film was about organized crime, and dark comedy Reality stars Aniello Arena, a former gangster who was allowed out of prison to shoot his scenes. All things considered, he’s rather winning as Neapolitan everyman Luciano, whose daily life slinging fish can’t compete with his big dreams of appearing on the Italian version of Big Brother. He makes it through the second round of auditions — and soon starts believing he’s being watched by casting agents considering whether to put him on the show. His level-headed wife (Loredane Simioli) suspects he’s being paranoid (as does the audience, before long), though he’s told "never give up!" by cheesy-sleazy Big Brother vet Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a character clearly designed to comment on reality TV’s own peculiar brand of insta-fame. Nobody who’s ever watched reality TV will be surprised at the film’s ultimate messages about the hollow rewards of that fame, but Arena’s powerful performance makes the journey worthwhile. (1:55) (Eddy)

Renoir The gorgeous, sun-dappled French Riviera setting is the high point of this otherwise low-key drama about the temperamental women (Christa Theret) who was the final muse to elderly painter Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), and who encouraged the filmmaking urges in his son, future cinema great Jean (Vincent Rottiers). Cinematographer Mark Ping Bin Lee (who’s worked with Hou Hsiao-hsein and Wong Kar Wai) lenses Renoir’s leafy, ramshackle estate to maximize its resemblance to the paintings it helped inspire; though her character, Dédée, could kindly be described as "conniving," Theret could not have been better physically cast, with tumbling red curls and pale skin she’s none too shy about showing off. Though the specter of World War I looms in the background, the biggest conflicts in Gilles Bourdos’ film are contained within the household, as Jean frets about his future, Dédée faces the reality of her precarious position in the household (which is staffed by aging models-turned-maids), and Auguste battles ill health by continuing to paint, though he’s in a wheelchair and must have his brushes taped to his hands. Though not much really happens, Renoir is a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes experience. (1:51) Clay. (Eddy)

The Revolutionary Optimists If the children, as someone once sang, are our future, the inspiring work done by youth activists living in the slums of Kolkata, India hints that there might be brighter days ahead for some of the poorest communities in the world. Under the guidance of Amlan Ganguly and his non-profit, Prayasam, kids whose daily struggles include lacking easy access to drinking water, having to work backbreaking long hours at the local brick field, and worrying that their parents will marry them off as soon as they turn 13, find hope via education and artistic expression. Sensitively directed over the span of several years by Nicole Newnham (who made the excellent 2006 doc The Rape of Europa) and Maren Grainger-Monsen, The Revolutionary Optimists shows stories of both success (12-year-old sparkplug Salim speaks before Parliament about bringing water to his neighborhood) and failure (16-year-old Priyanka is forced into an abusive marriage, ending her dreams of becoming a dance teacher). With harsh reality keeping its stories firmly grounded, the film — which is, of course, ultimately optimistic — offers a look at how the youngest members of a community can help effect real change. (1:23) (Eddy)

ONGOING

Admission Tina Fey exposes the irritating underbelly of the Ivy League application process as Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan. When her school falls to number two in U.S. News and World Report‘s annual ranking, Portia and her colleagues are tasked by their boss (Wallace Shawn) with boosting application numbers to bring the university back into the lead. Alterna-school headmaster John Pressman (Paul Rudd) has one more applicant to add to the pile: a charmingly gawky autodidact named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), who John is convinced is the child Portia gave up for adoption back when they were both students at Dartmouth. Stuck in a dreary 10-year relationship with an English professor (Michael Sheen) whose bedtime endearments consist of absentmindedly patting her on the head while reading aloud from The Canterbury Tales, and seeming less than thrilled with the prospect of another season of sifting through the files of legacies and overachievers, Portia is clearly ripe for some sort of purgative crisis. When it arrives, the results are fairly innocuous, if ethically questionable. Directed by Paul Weitz, the man responsible for bringing Little Fockers (2010) into the world, but About a Boy (2002) as well, Admission is sweet and sometimes funny but unmemorable, even with Lily Tomlin playing Portia’s surly, iconoclast mother. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Amour Arriving in local theaters atop a tidal wave of critical hosannas, Amour now seeks to tempt popular acclaim — though actually liking this perfectly crafted, intensely depressing film (from Austrian director Michael Haneke) may be nigh impossible for most audience members. Eightysomething former music teachers Georges and Anne (the flawless Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are living out their days in their spacious Paris apartment, going to classical concerts and enjoying the comfort of their relationship. Early in the film, someone tries to break into their flat — and the rest of Amour unfolds with a series of invasions, with Anne’s declining health the most distressing, though there are also unwanted visits from the couple’s only daughter (an appropriately self-involved Isabelle Huppert), an inept nurse who disrespects Anne and curses out Georges, and even a rogue pigeon that wanders in more than once. As Anne fades into a hollow, twisted, babbling version of her former self, Georges also becomes hollow and twisted, taking care of her while grimly awaiting the inevitable. Of course, the movie’s called Amour, so there’s some tenderness involved. But if you seek heartwarming hope and last-act uplift, look anywhere but here. (2:07) New Parkway. (Eddy)

The Call (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, SF Center.

The Croods (1:38) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Emperor This ponderously old-fashioned historical drama focuses on the negotiations around Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While many on the Allied side want the nation’s "Supreme Commander" Emperor Hirohito to pay for war crimes with his life, experts like bilingual Gen. Bonners Fellers (Matthew Fox) argue that the transition to peace can be achieved not by punishing but using this "living god" to wean the population off its ideological fanaticism. Fellers must ultimately sway gruff General MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) to the wisdom of this approach, while personally preoccupied with finding the onetime exchange-student love (Kaori Momoi) denied him by cultural divisions and escalating war rhetoric. Covering (albeit from the U.S. side) more or less the same events as Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2005 The Sun, Peter Webber’s movie is very different from that flawed effort, but also a lot worse. The corny Romeo and Juliet romance, the simplistic approach to explaining Japan’s "ancient warrior tradition" and anything else (via dialogue routinely as flat as "Things in Japan are not black and white!"), plus Alex Heffes’ bombastic old-school orchestral score, are all as banal as can be. Even the reliable Jones offers little more than conventional crustiness — as opposed to the inspired kind he does in Lincoln. (1:46) Vogue. (Harvey)

From Up on Poppy Hill Hayao (dad, who co-wrote) and Goro (son, who directed) Miyazaki collaborate on this tale of two high-school kids — Umi, who does all the cooking at her grandmother’s boarding house, and Shun, a rabble-rouser who runs the school newspaper — in idyllic seaside Yokohama. Plans for the 1964 Olympics earmark a beloved historic clubhouse for demolition, and the budding couple unites behind the cause. The building offers a symbolic nod to Japanese history, while rehabbing it speaks to hopes for a brighter post-war future. But the past keeps interfering: conflict arises when Shun’s memories are triggered by a photo of Umi’s father, presumed lost at sea in the Korean War. There are no whimsical talking animals in this Studio Ghibli release, which investigates some darker-than-usual themes, though the animation is vivid and sparkling per usual. Hollywood types lending their voices to the English-language version include Jamie Lee Curtis, Christina Hendricks, Ron Howard, and Gilllian Anderson. (1:31) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

GI Joe: Retaliation The plot exists to justify the action, but any fan of badass-ness will forgive the skimpy storyline for the outlandish badassery in GI Joe: Retaliation. Inspired by action figures and tying loosely to the first flick, Retaliation starts with a game of "secure the defector," followed by "raise the flag," but as soon as the stakes aren’t real, the Joes outright suck. They don’t have "neutral," which is maybe why a mission to rescue and revive the Joes as a force is the most ferocious fight that ever pit metal against plastic. The set pieces are stunning: a mostly silent sequence with Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Jinx (Elodie Yung) on a mountainside will leave the audience gaping in its high speed wake, and a prison break featuring covert explosives is nonstop amazing. You’ll notice an emphasis on chain link fences and puddles (terra nostra for action figures) and set pieces conceived as if by kids who don’t have a concept of basic irrefutable truths like gravity. It’s just that kind of imagination and ardor and limitlessness that makes this Joe incredible, memorable, and a reason to crack out your toys again. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

Ginger and Rosa It’s the 1960s, nuclear war is a real possibility, and nuclear-family war is an absolute certainty, at least in the London house occupied by Ginger (Elle Fanning), her emotionally wounded mother (Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks), and her narcissistic-intellectual father (Alessandro Nivola). In this downbeat coming-of-age tale from Sally Potter (1992’s Orlando), Ginger’s teenage rebellion quickly morphs into angst when her BFF Rosa (Beautiful Creatures‘ Alice Englert) wedges her sexed-up neediness between Ginger’s parents. Hendricks (playing the accordion — just like Joan!) and Annette Bening (as an American activist who encourages Ginger’s political-protest leanings) are strong, but Fanning’s powerhouse performance is the main focus — though even she’s occasionally overshadowed by her artificially scarlet hair. For an interview with writer-director Potter, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:30) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Host (2:01) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Identity Thief America is made up of asshole winners and nice guy losers — or at least that’s the thesis of Identity Thief, a comedy about a crying-clown credit card bandit (Melissa McCarthy) and the sweet sucker (Jason Bateman) she lures into her web of chaos. Bateman plays Sandy, a typical middle-class dude with a wife, two kids, and a third on the way. He’s always struggling to break even and just when it seems like his ship’s come in, Diana (McCarthy) jacks his identity — a crime that requires just five minutes in a dark room with Sandy’s social security number. Suddenly, his good name is contaminated with her prior arrests, drug-dealer entanglements, and mounting debt; it’s like the capitalist version of VD. But as the "kind of person who has no friends," Diana is as tragic as she is comic, providing McCarthy an acting opportunity no one saw coming when she was dispensing romantic advice on The Gilmore Girls. Director Seth Gordon (2011’s Horrible Bosses) treats this comedy like an action movie — as breakneck as slapstick gets — and he relies so heavily on discomfort humor that the film doesn’t just prompt laughs, it pokes you in the ribs until you laugh, man, LAUGH! While Identity Thief has a few complex moments about how defeating "sticking it to the man" can be (mostly because only middle men get hurt), it’s mostly as subtle as a pratfall and just as (un-)rewarding. (1:25) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Steve Carell dips into the men-at-work comic genre so associated with Will Ferrell: he’s Burt Wonderstone, who starts out as a picked-on kid discovering his powers via a kit by Las Vegas magician Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). The ensuing years have not been kind to Burt, a relatively decent guy struggling to shed the douchey buildup of ego, corn, and dated moves à la David Copperfield (ta-da, who magically appears), while working for benevolently threatening casino boss Doug Munny (James Gandolfini) with his childhood best friend Anton (Steve Buscemi, reviving the naifitude of The Big Lebowski‘s Donny) and side fox Jane (Olivia Wilde). The shot of adrenalin to the moribund heart of Burt and Anton’s act: Jim Carrey’s "Brain Rapist," who aims to ream his colleagues by cutting playing cards from his flesh and going to bed on fiery coals. How can the old-schoolers remain relevant? Hard work is key for Carell, who rolls out the straight-man sweetness that seem to make him a fit for romantic comedies — though his earnestness and need to be liked, as usual, err on the side of convention, while taking for granted the not-quite-there chemistry with, in this instance, Wilde. Fortunately whatever edge is lacking materializes whenever Carrey’s ridiculously ombré-tressed daredevil is on screen. Using his now-battered, still-malleable features to full effect, he’s a whole different ball of cheese, lampooning those who will go to any lengths — gouging, searing, and maiming — to entertain. (1:40) Metreon, Vogue. (Chun)

Jack the Giant Slayer (1:55) Metreon.

Mental Toni Collette is a batshit Mary Poppins in this side-splitting comedy about one family and Australia’s identity as the world’s Island of Misfit Toys. According to Shaz (Collette), she and her pit bull Ripper (pronounced "Reippah") came to the town of Dolphin Head to fulfill their destiny. It’s there philandering Mayor Moochmore (a brilliant Anthony LaPaglia) employs her informally as a "babysitter" (the film’s biggest plot hole). Moochmore’s a pathetic excuse for a dad but he needs someone to take care of his five daughters, since he’s finally pushed his wife into nervous-breakdown mode. Everything in Dolphin Head exists on a fulcrum: when Shaz takes the girls to climb a mountain one asks, "What’s the point of climbing to the top?", and Shaz answers, "Not being at the bottom." Mental is not a far cry from the director’s last big import, Muriel’s Wedding, the 1994 film that made Collette a star. Everyone’s nuts here, the message goes, but if we’re confident enough in ourselves, we can sway the rest into seeing how our insanity is better than theirs — or at least strong enough to withstand sharks, knife fights, and pit bulls. Good times, mate, good times. (1:56) Sundance Kabuki. (Vizcarrondo)

Olympus Has Fallen Overstuffed with slo-mo shots of the flag rippling (in breezes likely caused by all the hot air puffing up from the script), this gleefully ham-fisted tribute to America Fuck Yeah estimates the intelligence of its target audience thusly: an establishing shot clearly depicting both the Washington Monument and the US Capitol is tagged "Washington, DC." Wait, how can you tell? This wannabe Die Hard: The White House follows the one-man-army crusade of secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), the last friendly left standing when the President (Aaron Eckhart) and assorted cabinet members are taken hostage by North Korean terrorists. The plot is to ridiculous to recap beyond that, though I will note that Morgan Freeman (as the Speaker of the House) gets to deliver the line "They’ve just opened the gates of hell!" — the high point in a performance that otherwise requires him to sit at a table and look concerned for two hours. With a few more over-the-top scenes or slightly more adventurous casting, Olympus Has Fallen could’ve ascended to action-camp heights. Alas, it’s mostly just mildly amusing, though all that caked-on patriotism is good for a smattering of heartier guffaws. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

On the Road Walter Salles (2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries) engages Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera to adapt Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic; it’s translated to the screen in a streamlined version, albeit one rife with parties, drugs, jazz, danger, reckless driving, sex, philosophical conversations, soul-searching, and "kicks" galore. Brit Sam Riley (2007’s Control) plays Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise, observing (and scribbling down) his gritty adventures as they unfold. Most of those adventures come courtesy of charismatic, freewheeling Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund of 2010’s Tron: Legacy), who blows in and out of Sal’s life (and a lot of other people’s lives, too, including wives played by Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst). Beautifully shot, with careful attention to period detail and reverential treatment of the Beat ethos, the film is an admirable effort but a little too shapeless, maybe simply due to the peripatetic nature of its iconic source material, to be completely satisfying. Among the performances, erstwhile teen dream Stewart is an uninhibited standout. (2:03) Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Oz: The Great and Powerful Providing a backstory for the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi gives us a prequel of sorts to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Herein we follow the adventures of a Depression-era Kansas circus magician named Oscar (James Franco) — Oz to his friends — as he cons, philanders, bickers with his behind-the-scenes assistant Frank (Zach Braff), and eventually sails away in a twister, bound for a Technicolor land of massively proportioned flora, talking fauna, and witches ranging from dazzlingly good to treacherously wicked. From one of them, Theodora (Mila Kunis), he learns that his arrival — in Oz, just to clarify — has set in motion the fulfillment of a prophecy: that a great wizard, also named Oz, will bring about the downfall of a malevolent witch (Rachel Weisz), saving the kingdom and its cheery, goodhearted inhabitants. Unfortunately for this deserving populace, Oz spent his last pre-twister moments with the Baum Bros. Circus (the name a tribute to L. Frank Baum, writer of the Oz children’s books) demonstrating a banged-up moral compass and an undependable streak and proclaiming that he would rather be a great man than a good man. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this theme is revisited ad nauseam as Oz and the oppressively beneficent witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) — whose magic appears to consist mainly of nice soft things like bubbles and fog — stand around debating whether he’s the right man for the task. When the fog clears, though, the view is undeniably pretty. While en route to and from the Emerald City, Oz and his companions — among them a non-evil flying monkey (voiced by Braff) and a rather adorable china doll (Joey King) — wander through a deliriously arresting, Fantasia-esque landscape whose intricate, inventive construction helps distract from the plodding, saccharine rhetoric and unappealing story line. (2:07) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Quartet Every year there’s at least one: the adorable-old-cootfest, usually British, that proves harmless and reassuring and lightly tear/laughter producing enough to convince a certain demographic that it’s safe to go to the movies again. The last months have seen two, both starring Maggie Smith (who’s also queen of that audience’s home viewing via Downton Abbey). Last year’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which Smith played a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself in India, has already filled the slot. It was formulaic, cute, and sentimental, yes, but it also practiced more restraint than one expected. Now here’s Quartet, which is basically the same flower arrangement with quite a bit more dust on it. Smith plays a bitchy old spinster appalled to find herself forced into spending her twilight years at a home for the elderly. It’s not just any such home, however, but Beecham House, whose residents are retired professional musicians. Gingerly peeking out from her room after a few days’ retreat from public gaze, Smith’s Jean Horton — a famed English soprano — spies a roomful of codgers rolling their hips to Afropop in a dance class. "This is not a retirement home — this is a madhouse!" she pronounces. Oh, the shitty lines that lazy writers have long depended on Smith to make sparkle. Quartet is full of such bunk, adapted with loving fidelity, no doubt, from his own 1999 play by Ronald Harwood, who as a scenarist has done some good adaptations of other people’s work (2002’s The Pianist). But as a generator of original material for about a half-century, he’s mostly proven that it is possible to prosper that long while being in entirely the wrong half-century. Making his directorial debut: 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman, which ought to have yielded a more interesting final product. But with its workmanlike gloss and head-on take on the script’s very predictable beats, Quartet could as well have been directed by any BBC veteran of no particular distinction. (1:38) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Sapphires The civil rights injustices suffered by these dream girls may be unique to Aboriginal Australians, but they’ll strike a chord with viewers throughout the world — at right about the same spot stoked by the sweet soul music of Motown. Co-written by Tony Briggs, the son of a singer in a real-life Aboriginal girl group, this unrepentant feel-gooder aims to make the lessons of history go down with the good humor and up-from-the-underdog triumph of films like The Full Monty (1997) — the crucial difference in this fun if flawed comedy-romance is that it tells the story of women of color, finding their voices and discovering, yes, their groove. It’s all in the family for these would-be soul sisters, or rather country cousins, bred on Merle Haggard and folk tunes: there’s the charmless and tough Gail (Deborah Mailman), the soulful single mom Julie (Jessica Mauboy, an Australian Idol runner-up), the flirty Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and the pale-skinned Kay (Shari Sebbens), the latter passing as white after being forcibly "assimilated" by the government. Their dream is to get off the farm, even if that means entertaining the troops in Vietnam, and the person to help them realize that checkered goal is dissolute piano player Dave (Chris O’Dowd). And O’Dowd is the breakout star to watch here — he adds an loose, erratic energy to an otherwise heavily worked story arc. So when romance sparks for all Sapphires — and the racial tension simmering beneath the sequins rumbles to the surface — the easy pleasures generated by O’Dowd and the music (despite head-scratching inclusions like 1970’s "Run Through the Jungle" in this 1968-set yarn), along with the gently handled lessons in identity politics learned, obliterate any lingering questions left sucking Saigon dust as the narrative plunges forward. They keep you hanging on. (1:38) SF Center. (Chun)

Side Effects Though on the surface Channing Tatum appears to be his current muse, Steven Soderbergh seems to have gotten his smart, topical groove back, the one that spurred him to kick off his feature filmmaking career with the on-point Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and went missing with the fun, featherweight Ocean’s franchise. (Alas, he’s been making claims that Side Effects will be his last feature film.) Here, trendy designer antidepressants are the draw — mixed with the heady intoxicants of a murder mystery with a nice hard twist that would have intrigued either Hitchcock or Chabrol. As Side Effects opens, the waifish Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), whose inside-trading hubby (Tatum) has just been released from prison, looks like a big-eyed little basket of nerves ready to combust — internally, it seems, when she drives her car into a wall. Therapist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who begins to treat her after her hospital stay, seems to care about her, but nevertheless reflexively prescribes the latest anti-anxiety med of the day, on the advice of her former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Where does his responsibility for Emily’s subsequent actions begin and end? Soderbergh and his very able cast fill out the issues admirably, with the urgency that was missing from the more clinical Contagion (2011) and the, ahem, meaty intelligence that was lacking in all but the more ingenious strip scenes of last year’s Magic Mike. (1:30) New Parkway, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Silence Maybe "fun" is a tasteless way to describe The Silence, which hinges on pederasty and child murder — though in the end this is more an intelligent pulp thriller than serious address of those issues, uneasily as it straddles both at times. In 1986 two men abduct an 11-year-old girl — one the initially excited, then horrified observer to the second’s murderous sexual assault. Twenty-three years later, another young girl disappears in the same place under disturbingly identical circumstances. This event gradually pulls together a large cast of characters, many initial strangers — including the original victim’s mother (Katrin Sass) and the just-retired detective (Burghart Klaubner) who failed to solve that crime; parents (Karoline Eichhorn, Roeland Wiesnekker) of the newly disappeared teen, who experience full-on mental meltdown; a solidly bourgeoise husband and father of two girls (Wotan Wilke Möhring), inordinately distressed by this repeat of history; and the erstwhile friend he hasn’t contacted in decades, an apartment-complex handyman with a secret life (Ulrich Thomsen). Part procedural, part psychological thriller, part small-town-community portrait, director-scenarist (from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel) Baran bo Odar’s The Silence is just juicy and artful enough to get away with occasional stylistic hyperbole. It’s a conflicted movie, albeit handled with such engrossing confidence that you might not notice the credibility gaps. At least until thinking it over later. Which, don’t. (1:59) (Harvey)

Silver Linings Playbook After guiding two actors to Best Supporting Oscars in 2010’s The Fighter, director David O. Russell returns (adapting his script from Matthew Quick’s novel) with another darkly comedic film about a complicated family that will probably earn some gold of its own. Though he’s obviously not ready to face the outside world, Pat (Bradley Cooper) checks out of the state institution he’s been court-ordered to spend eight months in after displaying some serious anger-management issues. He moves home with his football-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and worrywart mother (Jacki Weaver of 2010’s Animal Kingdom), where he plunges into a plan to win back his estranged wife. Cooper plays Pat as a man vibrating with troubled energy — always in danger of flying into a rage, even as he pursues his forced-upbeat "silver linings" philosophy. But the movie belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, who proves the chops she showcased (pre-Hunger Games megafame) in 2010’s Winter’s Bone were no fluke. As the damaged-but-determined Tiffany, she’s the left-field element that jolts Pat out of his crazytown funk; she’s also the only reason Playbook‘s dance-competition subplot doesn’t feel eye-rollingly clichéd. The film’s not perfect, but Lawrence’s layered performance — emotional, demanding, bitchy, tough-yet-secretly-tender — damn near is. (2:01) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Somebody Up There Likes Me A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and contrastly nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. (1:24) Roxie. (Harvey)

Spring Breakers The idea of enfant terrible emeritus Harmony Korine — 1997’s Gummo, 2007’s Mister Lonely, 2009’s Trash Humpers — directing something so utterly common as a spring break movie is head-scratching enough, even moreso compounded by the casting of teen dreams Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Ashley Benson as bikini-clad girls gone wild. James Franco co-stars as drug dealer Alien, all platinum teeth and cornrows and shitty tattoos, who befriends the lasses after they’re busted by the fun police. "Are you being serious?" Gomez’s character asks Alien, soon after meeting him. "What do you think?" he grins back. Unschooled filmgoers who stumble into the theater to see their favorite starlets might be shocked by Breakers‘ hard-R hijinks. But Korine fans will understand that this neon-lit, Skrillex-scored tale of debauchery and dirty menace is not to be taken at face value. The subject matter, the cast, the Britney Spears songs, the deliberately lurid camerawork — all carefully-constructed elements in a film that takes not-taking-itself-seriously, very seriously indeed. Korine has said he prefers his films to make "perfect nonsense" instead of perfect sense. The sublime Spring Breakers makes perfect nonsense, and it also makes nonsense perfect. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Starbuck Starbuck has a great (if not entirely original) comedic concept it chooses to play seriocomedically — i.e., less for the laughs it seldom earns than for the heart-tugging it eventually pretty much does. An ingratiatingly rumpled Patrick Huard (a major Quebec star best known for the mega-hit Les Boys series and 2006’s Good Cop, Bad Cop) plays David, erstwhile stellar contributor to a Montreal sperm bank in his salad days. Now older but no wiser, he finds himself confronted by the reality of 533 biologically fathered, now-grown offspring who’ve filed a class action lawsuit to discover his identity even as he deals with mob debt and an exasperated, pregnant semi-ex-girlfriend (Julie LeBreton). This is one of those "loser manboy must semi-grow up fast amid crisis, finding family values en route" scenarios tailor-fit for Adam Sandler. That said, the overlong, stubbornly endearing Starbuck is so much less insufferable than anything Sandler has made since … um, ever? Halfway through, this agreeable movie gets clever — as David stumbles into a meeting of his prodigious anonymous progeny — and remains reasonably so to the satisfyingly hard-won happy ending. It’s still got moments of contrivance, editorial fat (too many montages, for one thing), and more climactic hugs than any self-respecting dramedy needs to get the redemptive point across. Yet it’s also got something few comedies of any national origin have today: a lovely, distinctive, bright yet non-cartoonish widescreen look. (1:48) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (2:06) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

Warm Bodies A decade and a half of torrid, tormented vampire-human entanglements has left us accustomed to rooting for romances involving the undead and the still-alive. Some might argue, however, that no amount of pop-cultural prepping could be sufficient to get us behind a human-zombie love story for the ages. Is guzzling human blood really measurably less gross than making a meal of someone’s brains and other body parts? Somehow, yes. Recognizing this perceptual hurdle, writer-director Jonathan Levine (2011’s 50/50, 2008’s The Wackness) secures our sympathies at the outset of Warm Bodies by situating us inside the surprisingly active brain of the film’s zombie protagonist. Zombies, it turns out, have internal monologues. R (Nicholas Hoult) can only remember the first letter of his former name, but as he shambles and shuffles and slumps his way through the terminals of a postapocalyptic airport overrun by his fellow corpses (as they’re called by the film’s human population), he fills us in as best he can on the global catastrophe that’s occurred and his own ensuing existential crisis. By the time he meets not-so-cute with Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young woman whose father (John Malkovich) is commander-in-chief of the human survivors living in a walled-off city center, we’ve learned that he collects vinyl, that he has a zombie best friend, and that he doesn’t want to be like this. We may still be flinching at the thought of his and Julie’s first kiss, but we’re also kind of rooting for him. The plot gapes in places, where a tenuous logic gets trampled and gives way, but Levine’s script, adapted from a novel by Isaac Marion, is full of funny riffs on the zombie condition, which Hoult invests with a comic sweetness as his character staggers toward the land of the living. (1:37) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Wrong Poor Dolph Springer. His life’s already oozing downhill — he’s been unemployed for months and yet continues to show up at his old job, to the white-hot annoyance of his former co-workers — when his beloved dog, Paul, goes missing. His favorite backyard palm tree is suddenly a pine tree. His alarm clock flips from 7:59 to 7:60 every morning. Pretty much everyone he meets, from a pretty pizza-restaurant cashier to a traffic cop to the "top-level detective" who gets drawn into the search for Paul, behaves precisely the opposite of whatever normal would seem to be. What’s a lonely man living in a permanent state of mindfuck to do? Wrong is the latest surreal-absurdist-subversive comedy from writer-director-cinematographer-editor Quentin Dupieux, who rightly earned a cult following for 2010’s wickedly funny Rubber (about a tire that goes rogue after summoning Carrie-like powers of destruction). The French filmmaker — also known by his musical pseudonym, Mr. Oizo — attempts a slightly more conventional tale with Wrong; Rubber‘s Jack Plotnick stars as the hapless Dolph. Unfortunately, for all its deadpan weirdness, Wrong contains nothing so genius as that diabolical tire. (1:34) Roxie. (Eddy)

CAREERS AND ED: Learn to eat

Andrew Lam
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CAREERS AND ED: Learn to eat

caitlin@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED Don’t tell me you’ve been eating your whole life and you don’t need any lessons on food. Hardy har har, how’s your waist line? Energy level? Food budget? You can always learn more about how to make your diet healthier, cheaper, and above all, more sustainable. The Bay Area has to be one of the best places in the world to learn about how to eat well, and the institutions that put on each of these course offerings are phenomenal places to start dabbling in the area. No more plastic-wrapped sandwiches, ill-informed beer purchases, or factory farm chicken for you, boo boo.

“GROW YOUR OWN FOOD”

No excuses: you can garden in San Francisco year-round, and that doesn’t matter anyway because we’re in the rosy pink of spring, when even your uncle up in Minneapolis is turning his thoughts to sprouts and soil. Garden for the Environment has a host of classes dedicated to greening that fat lil’ digit of yours, but today’s offering is particularly salient for snackers. Organic gardening instructor Carey Craddock will take charge among the rows today, teaching you what plants are perfect for April, and how to get your space ready to raise edible flora.

April 13, 10am-2pm, $25. Garden for the Environment, Lawton and Seventh Ave., SF. www.gardenfortheenvironment.org

“BUILD A CHICKEN COOP”

At the end of the day in this urban chickenry class, you’ll have not only witnessed but aided in the construction of a “Garden Ark” portable chicken coop. Carpenter Joan Weir has designed this one-off course to be of maximum service to the community — you’ll learn coop-building skills, and Rosa Parks Elementary School will score a brand-new home for its feathered flock.

April 14, 10am-5pm, $50. Rosa Parks Elementary School, 920 Allston, Berk. www.biofueloasis.com

“DEBUNKING THE MYTHS OF VEGANISM”

The talk is actually part of Oakland Veg Week (April 22-28), which includes tons of free veg and vegan cooking classes, lectures on sustainable eating, a screening of the plant-based diet booster Forks Over Knives (April 25), bus trip to a Grass Valley animal sanctuary (April 27), and grand finale buffet at the Lake Merritt Sailboat House (April 28). But start here, with Colleen “The Compassionate Cook” Patrick-Goudreau’s presentation that addresses all the excuses that fly about for not going veg. No time to be meat-free? Not enough protein in greens? She’ll set you straight.

April 23, 6:30pm, free. Oakland Library, Temescal branch, 5205 Telegraph, Oakl. www.oaklandveg.com

“BREW LAB: HOMEBREW AND BEYOND”

Brew and bottle two batches of your very own suds in this three-class seminar, billed as the most comprehensive homebrew 101 in town that doesn’t require any investment in equipment, for all you newbies to the brew scene. Mission Gastroclub (www.missiongastroclub.org) founder Eric Denman is the instructor, which means you can expect delicious bites at each session, happily crucial in your quest to understand the flavors of your beer.

April 23, 30, and May 14, 7-9pm, $160. 18 Reasons, 1874 18th St., SF. www.18reasons.org

“COTTAGE LAW 101”

Huzzah for the California Homemade Food Act! Recently signed into law, it allows small producers to make low-risk foods like candy, empanadas, baked goods, and dried teas in their home, without renting a spendy commercial kitchen space. If the news has you itching to start a homemade chocolate stand, stop off at ForageSF’s class first. It’s a primer on the law’s ins and outs, perfect for those looking to join the ranks of Forage’s lauded Underground Market artisans. Bring a plate to share with 20 people and get a discount on your tuition.

April 27, $30 if you bring a dish to share, $50 without. SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF. www.somarts.org

DA’s office makeover may have skirted the rules

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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DA’s office makeover may have skirted the rules

In a San Francisco Chronicle article published March 31, District Attorney George Gascon was quoted as saying he would not “even bother to defend” his decision to accept payments and in-kind donations for office furniture, valued at $26,445, from a roster of influential donors.

Although San Francisco’s top law enforcement official minimized the issue when questioned by reporters, it appears the DA may not have followed a number of state disclosure regulations when he accepted and reported the donation, which consists of a new glass-top desk and other trimmings to spruce up his executive office and the DA’s victim services lounge.

And the Guardian has learned that a formal complaint will be filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission, a government accountability agency, alleging violations.

Charles Marsteller, a public ethics advocate and former co-coordinator of San Francisco Common Cause, sent the Guardian a copy of a complaint he intends to file with the FPPC, charging that Gascon either failed to properly disclose political contributions, or violated a gift limit imposed by state law.

“The District Attorney appears to be actively disregarding the applicable state law regarding the furniture payments,” a statement attached to Marsteller’s complaint notes.

Thirteen well-connected donors contributed payments toward the office set, with billionaire angel investor Ron Conway outspending the rest with a monetary contribution just shy of $10,000.

Other contributors, who gave between $1,000 and $2,000, included the Nibbi Brothers Contractors, who have worked on public housing renovations and other residential housing projects within San Francisco; Victor Makras, a member of the San Francisco Employees Retirement System board; Pius Lee, who previously served on the Police Commission; Charlotte Schultz, who holds the position of San Francisco’s Chief of Protocol, and Ryan Brooks, who formerly served on the city’s Public Utilities Commission.

The kind of disclosure form Gascon filed to report the new furniture, known as a behested payment report, is filed in cases where an elected official solicits a donation to a nonprofit entity or a government agency, and successfully secures a payment exceeding $5,000. In the case of governmental agencies, behested payments benefit a department as a whole, rather than any particular individual.

The fact that the donation was reported on a behested payment report, rather than a gift disclosure form, suggests that the new office furniture arrived only after Gascon requested it specifically, to benefit the DA office as a whole. But Marsteller’s complaint charges: “Since the furniture payments at issue were made for the benefit of Gascon’s own use, they would not constitute a behested payment that must be reported on Form 803.”

The complaint goes on to state that payments for Gascon’s furniture should either be counted as “contributions” or “gifts,” but not “behested payments.”

According to a memo prepared by the San Francisco City Attorney in 2008, department heads must obtain Board approval before accepting donations made to public agencies.

“Generally, the Board of Supervisors must approve, by resolution, any gift with a value greater than $10,000 before a City agency or department accepts such a gift,” according to a 2008 memo drafted by San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Jon Givner. The total value of the new office furniture is $26,445, but the funding was divided up among numerous donors, with payments submitted over the course of several months. Conway contributed $9,999 – exactly one dollar under the $10,000 disclosure threshold.

However, Gascon did not solicit Board approval before accepting the furniture payments. Instead, he submitted a resolution and memo to the Clerk of the Board on March 19, to be introduced at the April 2 Board meeting, seeking retroactive approval.

“Apparently, Gascon decided that he should seek to sanitize any violation of San Francisco’s Charter provision regarding acceptance of gifts by requesting retroactive approval,” Marsteller’s complaint suggests.

Reached on his cell phone and asked to comment for this story, Gascon told the Guardian that he was unable to answer questions at that time because a family member was undergoing surgery.

The 2008 memo from the City Attorney also states that city agencies “must report gifts worth more than $100 on the department’s website.” Visitors to the DA’s website will find a section on the “About” page, titled “Supporters of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office,” which links to a PDF disclosing the donors’ names and individual gift amounts. However, a search on the Wayback Machine, a historical webpage snapshot service provided by the Internet Archive, shows that as of March 12, that disclosure section had not yet been created.

It’s possible that it was created as a result of questions raised. Larry Bush, who maintains a government watchdog news site called CitiReport, told the Guardian he began raising questions about the gift in March. Marsteller’s complaint is endorsed by Friends of Ethics, an ad hoc government accountability group that has also been scrutinizing the furniture payments.

Reached by phone, City Attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey said he was unable to offer an official comment on the matter. “I wouldn’t be able to comment on, or even acknowledge whether, we gave advice or were asked for advice,” Dorsey told the Guardian.

Bow down to the robo-proletariat!

Sue Vaughan
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Bow down to the robo-proletariat!

 
Radically refashioning a host of reactionary fashions, La Pocha Nostra Live Art Laboratory puts all borders up for grabs. The international performance art troupe returns to San Francisco Sat/30 for the US premiere of La Pocha Nostra’s latest creation, Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat.
 
A performance project by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Erica Mott (with LPN associates Brittany Chavez, Rico Martin, Marcos Nájera, Esther Baker Tarpaga, and Allison Wyper), Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat asks the time-old question: What might you discover at the intersection of “an aging deviant shaman, a Neo-Aztec priest making romantic religious tableaux with a goat, a flamenco drag king, and an Oil Spill Madonna”?


 Audience members are invited to help figure this one out, in corporeal dialogue with the performers, in what LPN calls a “wonderfully clumsy but efficient form of radical democratic practice.” The piece will also be an exactingly strange multidisciplinary exploration of the forms ideology and power take on and through the body. LPN’s exuberant Chicano cyborg/cyberpunk sensibilities brilliantly limn the boundary lines defining the (secretly amorphous) “truths” and “identities” of masscult’s virtual reality show — those hipster beards concealing the voracious colonial maw of capitalist society.
 
In related news: In coming back from Mexico City to home-base San Francisco, LPN’s artistic director — artist/intellectual and border-crosser extraordinaire, Gómez-Peña — returns too from the border town of illness, from whence he is steadily extricating himself and about which he has written powerfully and eloquently here.

Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat

Sat/30th, 8pm, $15-20

435 23rd St, SF

http://theperformanceartinstitute.org, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/350355

 
 

Mind-doggling

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Mind-doggling

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Poor Dolph Springer. His life’s already oozing downhill — he’s been unemployed for months and yet continues to show up at his old job, to the white-hot annoyance of his former co-workers — when his beloved dog, Paul, goes missing. His favorite backyard palm tree is suddenly a pine tree. His alarm clock flips from 7:59 to 7:60 every morning. Pretty much everyone he meets, from a pretty pizza-restaurant cashier to a traffic cop to the “top-level detective” who gets drawn into the search for Paul, behaves precisely the opposite of whatever normal would seem to be. What’s a lonely man living in a permanent state of mindfuck to do?

Wrong is the latest surreal-absurdist-subversive comedy from writer-director-cinematographer-editor Quentin Dupieux, who rightly earned a cult following for 2010’s wickedly funny Rubber (about a tire that goes rogue after summoning Carrie-like powers of destruction). The French filmmaker — also known by his musical pseudonym, Mr. Oizo — attempts a slightly more conventional tale with Wrong; Rubber‘s Jack Plotnick stars as the hapless Dolph. Unfortunately, for all its deadpan weirdness, Wrong contains nothing so genius as that diabolical tire.

However, few movies do, and for every element that telegraphs forced quirk (rain pours down indoors at Dolph’s office, because … why?), there are several that actually do work. As Dolph’s gardener, Victor, French comedian Eric Judor mixes his thick accent with hilariously dry line readings, and the detective character (Eastbound & Down‘s Steve Little) dresses exactly like Indiana Jones for reasons unknown — which is just as nonsensical as the rain thing, but funnier for being more subtle.

The lost-pet narrative that propels the story is nothing original, though Dolph’s quest is perhaps more existential than, say, Diane Keaton’s in last year’s not-dissimilar (but much warm-fuzzier) Darling Companion. Both films put forth the idea that humans and dogs can communicate telepathically — though in Wrong, it’s made out to be hilariously literal. Soon after Paul vanishes, Dolph learns he’s been pooch-napped by one Master Chang (William Fichtner, sporting a rat tail), a Zen-ish self-help guru who steals other peoples’ pets at random to make sure they’re being properly appreciated. Traditionally, he returns the animals once everyone’s attitude has been properly realigned, but there’s been, uh, a complication with Paul, who is now well and truly MIA.

As Dolph rightfully freaks out — amid even more bad news, like when his boss (who already fired him once) tells him he really needs to stop hanging around, or when the pizza clerk turns shrill and decides that Dolph is her destiny — the Master tries to soothe him. See, he happens to be the author of a two-volume series, My Life, My Dog, My Strength, featuring clip-art illustrations (“Diagram 13-D: Mind Link”) that instruct humans on making psychic connections with their canines. Just mind-link with Paul, and he’ll be found!

If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is. I didn’t even get to the subplot about Dolph’s neighbor who goes jogging every morning, but has a mental block against admitting it. (This “joke” is made more than once.) Though Wrong is a mere 90-something minutes, its deliberately slow pace and frustratingly even keel can be off-putting. Clever touches, like the use of ominous sound flourishes at seemingly innocuous moments, enhance the film’s overall bizarro-world milieu. But its overall success likely depends not on Dupieux’s artistic choices, but on the individual viewing it — and whether or not he or she finds its details tedious, twee, or transcendent. Me, I miss the tire. *

 

WRONG opens Fri/29 at the Roxie.

Stage listings

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

THEATER

OPENING

The Bus New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $32-45. Previews Wed/27-Fri/29, 8pm. Opens Sat/30, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 28. NCTC performs James Lantz’s tale of two young men whose meeting place for their secret relationship is a church bus.

The Happy Ones Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $22-62. Previews Wed/27-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/31, 2:30pm; Tue/2, 7pm. Opens April 3, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2:30pm; no matinee April 20); Sun, 2:30pm; Tue, 7pm. Through April 21. An Orange County appliance store owner finds his life turned upside down in Julie Marie Myatt’s drama at Magic Theatre.

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Previews Wed/27-Fri/29, 8pm. Opens Sat/30, 8pm. Runs Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through May 11. San Francisco Playhouse’s tenth season continues with Neil LaBute’s romantic drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Previews Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. Opens April 4, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers’ sixth annual Theatre of the Ridiculous Revival presents a restored version of the Cockettes’ 1971 Art Deco-inspired musical extravaganza.

BAY AREA

The Whipping Man Marin Theatre Center, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $36-57. Previews Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/31, 7pm. Opens Tue/2, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (also April 6 and 20, 2pm; April 11, 1pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 21. Marin Theatre Company performs the Bay Area premiere of Matthew Lopez’s Civil War drama.

ONGOING

Assistance NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.opentabproductions.com. $20. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. Over the past three years, things we’ve come to expect from plucky OpenTab Productions — whose annual offerings deal in aggressively contemporary themes such as media spin, business fraud, and job (in)security — include tight ensemble acting, minimal tech, and snappy direction, and in all these regards, Assistance does not disappoint. A crew of desperate office drones whose lives basically revolve around the abuse dished out by their unseen employer, Daniel Weisinger (who may or may not resemble playwright Leslye Headland’s old boss, Harvey Weinstein), hold down their airless fort, fielding calls at 11 p.m. and shirking responsibility whenever possible. Though Headland doesn’t do much to make her emotionally and professionally stunted characters palatable, the capable cast and director Ben Euphrat do manage to wring something resembling humanity out of them. From Nick (Tristan Rholl,) the frustrated slacker supervisor, to Nora (Melissa Keith), the-new-girl-turned-cynical-old-hand, to Justin (Nathan Tucker), the unctuous winner of the title of "last man standing," to Jenny (Michelle Drexler) a pragmatic yet annoyingly bubbly Brit, what stands out in each performance are the perfectly captured quirky nuances and barely-concealed neuroses of people caught in the process of losing their souls. Nothing about Assistance is likely to change your view of the business world, but if you’ve yet to experience the frenetic fun of an OpenTab show, it’s a perfect primer to the madness behind their method. (Gluckstern)

The Chairs Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $20-45. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Extended through April 7. In Rob Melrose’s new translation of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, an elderly couple sit in the austere parlor of their lonely lighthouse, chortling over a spate of private wordplay and reminiscing of sprightlier times, until their initially frantic and disjointed dialogue settles into a smooth flow, well-polished by decades of endearments and gentle bickering. Possibly the last two survivors of a not entirely explained apocalypse, the isolated nonagenarians (magnificently played by David Sinaiko and Tamar Cohn) nevertheless make it known that important guests are expected to arrive at any moment in order to hear a hired orator (Derek Fischer) deliver the Old Man’s "message," which he has spent a lifetime honing. As the doorbell begins to ring, a jarring squall, and invisible guests and dozens of mismatched chairs begin to crowd their peaceable empire in claustrophobia-inducing numbers, their companionable seclusion is shattered for good. Director Annie Elias manages to coax both gravitas and decorum out of this little-produced, yet influential absurdist relic, imbuing her protagonists with a depth of character that belies their farcical circumstances, while Theodore J.H. Hulsker’s murmuring sound design of crashing waves, angry winds, and the strident doorbell could almost be another character in the play, so thoroughly does it set the tone in ways that Ionesco might not have approved of, but is all the better for. (Gluckstern)

The Couch Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.3girlstheatre.org. $30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun/31, 4pm; April 7, 2pm. Extended through April 7. As the centerpiece of its second annual festival of plays in honor of Women’s History Month, 3Girls Theatre, devoted to Bay Area women playwrights, revives Lynne Kaufman’s fitful but enjoyable 1985 dramatic comedy about the inception of the famous sexual and psychiatric triangle between Carl Jung (Peter Ruocco), wife Emma Jung (Courtney Walsh), and his mistress and analysand Toni Wolff (Maggie Mason). In this, her first play, Kaufman (whose most recent play, Acid Test, explores the life of Ram Dass) folds in Carl’s critical 1912 break with mentor Sigmund Freud (Louis Parnell) for an action-packed day Chez Jung. (Also on the scene is the Jung’s precocious daughter Katherine, played by a sure and animated Hattie Rose Allen Bellino). Amy Glazer directs a solid cast who convincingly blends the farcical aspects of the dialogue with its meatier and more dramatic ones, as new ties and power dynamics are sometimes roughly, other times genteelly negotiated. The former is usually the stuff of high comedy, as when Freud goes apoplectic upon learning Jung is not necessarily the disciple and "son" he had thought him to be. And Jung’s (proto-) New Agey leanings only add fuel to the fire: When Carl turns to the I Ching to decide on the best course of action for his career going forward, Freud erupts, "You idiot! You’re playing tiddlywinks with the human race!" But it is ultimately the politics of love and the household that take center stage, with Walsh’s vulnerable yet ever dignified Emma emerging as, if not the greatest psychiatrist, perhaps the greatest strategist of them all. (Avila)

Eurydice Gough Street Playhouse, 1622 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $25-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm (no shows Thu/28-Fri/29); Sun, 7pm. Through April 14. Custom Made Theatre Co. performs Sarah Ruhl’s inventive take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, exploring the story through the heroine’s eyes.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

God of Carnage Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. $38. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. Shelton Theater presents Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning comedy about upper-middle-class parents clashing over an act of playground violence between their children.

Just One More Game Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.tripleshotprodutions.org. $25. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. With the rise of the programmer as pop culture hero, it was probably inevitable that we’d start writing plays about them too. In local playwright Dan Wilson’s Just One More Game our programmer protagonist is Kent (Christopher DeJong) whose mission is to find love, and his co-player is Marjorie (Linda-Ruth Cardozo), who wields her own geek credentials like a Mortal Kombat wrath hammer. Where Wilson’s comedy excels is in the witty gamer banter that defines much of their attraction and commonality — references to Zork, Oregon Trail, Dungeons and Dragons, and The Secret of Monkey Island abound, while a series of meticulous video game animations (also Wilson’s) lend colorful counterpoint to the action on the stage. DeJong plays his role of emotionally-inhibited loner with a degree of laconic detachment that unfortunately eliminates all traces of chemistry between him and Cardozo, who is especially good at capturing the cheerfully aggressive awkward of a woman accustomed to being "one of the boys" because there was nothing about "the girls" she could relate to. Both the comedy and pace flag by the time the first NPCs (non-player characters) enter the room, broadly clichéd parents yammering for grandchildren and obnoxious college buddies armed with too many baby photos, who conspire to stunt the growth of Kent and Marjorie’s relationship and wind up stunting the growth of the play. If the quest for love is a game, as the title suggests, it’s one that could use a little more back-end development, and a much greater degree of playfulness. (Gluckstern)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50" plasma flat panel. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri/29, 8pm; Sat/30, 8:30pm. Starting April 4, runs Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18.

Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a "self" unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his "Better Than You" weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed "seminar" and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

The Voice: One Man’s Journey Into Sex Addition and Recovery Stage Werx Theater, 446 Valencia, SF; thevoice.brownpapertickets.com. $10-18. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through April 6. Ticket sales for David Kleinberg’s autobiographical solo show benefit 12-step sex addiction recovery programs and other non-profits.

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri/29, 8pm; Sat/30, 5pm. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar "doood" dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

BAY AREA

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage & Shipwreck Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Shipwreck previews Wed/27-Thu/28, 7pm; Fri/29, 8pm. Opens Sat/30, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through May 5. Voyage previews Wed/27, 7pm. Opens April 3, 3pm. Runs April 13, 20, 27, and May 4, 3pm. Shotgun Players perform the first two parts of Tom Stoppard’s revolutionary trilogy.

Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/31, 5pm. Central Works performs Gary Graves’ adaptation of the story-within-a-story from The Brothers Karamazov.

Fallaci Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-89. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through April 21. Berkeley Rep performs Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright’s new play about Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.

The Mountaintop Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $23-75. Wed/27, 7:30pm; Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm (also Sat/30, 2pm); Sun/31, 2pm. Starting April 3, runs Wed-Thu, 11am (also Thu, 8pm); Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 7. TheatreWorks performs Katori Hall’s play that re-imagines the events on the night before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

The Real Americans Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 6. Dan Hoyle shifts his popular show about small-town America to the Marsh’s Berkeley outpost.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.improv.org. $20. "Theatresports," Fri/29, 8pm. "Double Feature," Sat/30, 8pm.

"Dream Queens Revue" Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF; www.dreamqueensrevue.com. Wed/27, 9:30pm. Free (reservations suggested: dreamqueensrevue@gmail.com). Fab drag with Colette LeGrande, Diva LaFever, and more.

"Madame Ho" Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, 595 Market, Second Flr, SF; www.commonwealthclub.org. Mon/1, 6pm. Free. Magic Theatre’s 2013 Martha Heasley Cox Virgin Play Series concludes with this staged reading of Eugenie Chan’s Barbary Coast drama.

"Mission Position Live" Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

"New Works by Artists in Residence" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/28-Sun/31, 8pm. $20-30. With richien (Rowena Richie and Jennifer Chien) performing Twindependent, and Sense Object (Miriam Wolodarksi) performing Of Limb and Language.

"The News: Out of the Box with Bernadette Bohan of the Box Factory" SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF; www.thenewsperformance.eventbrite.com. Tue/2, 7:30pm. $5. SOMArts wraps up its experimental performance series.

"A Night of Utopian Gestures" Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Sat/30, 7-10pm. Free. Interactive celebration of exhibit "Without Reality There Is No Utopia," featuring Israeli artist Dana Yahalomi, Futurefarmers’ Michael Swaine, live music, and more.

"Picklewater Clown Cabaret Benefit for Judy Finelli" Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/1, 8pm. $15. Clowning for a good cause: SF School for Circus Arts co-founder Finelli, who has multiple sclerosis.

"The Romaine Event Comedy Show: Eight Year Anniversary Show" Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, SF; www.pacoromane.com. Wed/27, 8-10pm. $10. Celebrate with Ngaio Bealum, Paco Romane, Kaseem Bentley, David Gborie, and Anna Serengina, plus music by DJ Specific.

"San Francisco Magic Parlor" Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

"The Secret History of Love" Dance Mission Theater, 3316 16th St, SF; www.seandorseydance.com. Thu/28-Sun/31, 8pm (also Sat/30-Sun/31, 4pm). $10-25. Sean Dorsey Dance makes a local stop on the company’s 20-city national tour with this performance inspired by Dorsey’s work on the National LGBT Elders Oral History Project.

"Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar" Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/29, 7pm. $15-35. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence ring in the Sisters’ Annual Easter Weekend with this festive sing-along, plus the debut of the Chunky Jesus Contest.

BAY AREA

"The Divine Game" Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/1, April 15, and 29, 8pm. $20. First Person Singular and Shotgun Cabaret present this dramatic re-enactment of Nabokov teaching at Cornell in the 1950s.

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