Politics

An extraordinarily good man

David Talbot
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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was 40 years ago this month that Walter Reuther died in a plane crash. Forty years. Yet the auto workers leader remains an important inspirational figure – a man whose life holds crucial lessons for those who are today seeking to revitalize the American labor movement.
 
I came upon him late in his career, and to me he seemed verbose, distant and a bit pompous: a do-gooder who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t wench; who did only good things, and always in the artfully arranged glare of publicity.
 
He couldn’t possibly be as good as those who had known the man for a long time claimed him to be. But they were right. Walter Reuther was an extraordinarily good man.
 
He was truly the conscience of organized labor – a crusader struggling very, very hard against the stagnation he found in a movement he had helped found, lead, and, finally, had tried to reform.
 
Reuther was the conscience as well of a lot of people who never paid union dues in their lives. I mean those who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes to change this imperfect society in ways that would better the lives of those at the bottom of its social, economic and political ladder.
 
It was Reuther, as much as any union leader, who brought dignity and economic security to the mass of Americans, expanding the country’s major concerns beyond the elementary economic concerns that preoccupied most people in the years before World War II.
 
Reuther’s specific contributions were many. There was the central role he played in establishing the United Auto Workers Union, over which he eventually presided.  There was his role in forging together the country’s industrial unions and in leading them, as president of the Congress of Industrial Organization – the CIO – in struggles for broad economic and social causes.
 
There was Reuther’s exceptional success in negotiating better wages, hours and working conditions for the auto workers that were pace-setting marks for workers in all industries and all occupations.
 
And there were Reuther’s many efforts to shift the labor movement in new directions.  His last attempt, and surely his boldest, came in 1969 when he led the United Auto Workers out of the AFL-CIO and into an “Alliance for Labor Action” with the then-unaffiliated Teamsters Union.
 
Reuther hoped the alliance of the country’s two largest unions could begin carrying out the programs he had suggested repeatedly to the AFL-CIO, only to be rebuffed by the former American Federation of Labor leaders who dominated the federation.
 
The alliance planned organizing drives among white-collar workers and other groups, particularly in the South, that the AFL-CIO had been neglecting. But the new organization hoped to go beyond organizing the unorganized, as important as that was.
 
The goals of the alliance were nothing less than a summary of the great needs of the country: Helping build low-cost housing, for instance; developing new job training programs; unifying the poor and minority groups; vastly improving education and health services; effectively attacking racial discrimination, poverty,  consumer fraud, and the particular problems of the young and the aged, and attacking urban decay, pollution and other environmental problems.
 
The alliance never really got going before Reuther’s death and dissolved shortly afterward.  Some of Reuther’s fellow labor leaders had scoffed, in any case, that it was actually nothing more than an attempt by Reuther to satisfy the ambitions for broad union leadership he had been unable to realize within the AFL-CIO.
 
“Walter,” they would tell you, “is just being Walter – all talk and no action.”
 
Well, they were right about one thing at least. The man could talk. Others were accustomed to it, after three decades of Reuther-watching, But he was new to me, and I marveled to see him hold audiences of thousands for an hour and more while speaking without a single note – strictly off the top of his head – and doing so with great and forceful eloquence.
 
I especially remember a talk he gave in 1966, in a dilapidated little auditorium in Delano, California, where vineyard workers led by Cesar Chavez just a few months before had begun the strike that someday would capture the attention of the entire country.
 
I played the sophisticate and smiled knowingly over Reuther’s wordy and dramatic promises to the farm workers. But then came the terrible news, four years later, of a plane down in Michigan, and I thought back to that cold December day in the grape country.
 
I remembered what those words had meant to the penniless, obscure and powerless band of farm workers who had gathered in the auditorium. There he was, one of the great leaders of America, promising to “stand with you until the end.”
 
I may have been fooled, but the farm workers were not fooled.  They knew that Walter Reuther meant exactly what he said.  He always did.
 
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

More on the new cuddle porn: Jesse from “I Want Your Love”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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More on the new cuddle porn: Jesse from “I Want Your Love”

A while back, I spoke to filmmaker Travis Mathews about his feature-length project, I Want Your Love. (While tha film is still in development, a demo clip is available for online viewing). In an effort to get another perspective on I Want Your Love, I spoke to Jesse, who appears in the film and in Travis’ other ongoing project, In Their Room. Jesse offered candid reflections and insight into pornography, sex in film, and staying hard throughout a shoot. Spoiler alert: “penis drugs.”

SF Bay Guardian: Before I Want Your Love, you worked with Travis on the intimate In Their Room project. How did you first get together?

Jesse: Travis asked me to do In Their Room, basically because we knew each other through a mutual friend. I remember he approached me and said he was looking for people who were just comfortable getting super expose about themselves in their own space. I’m a performance maker, anyway—it’s what I do. So I guess he just assumed that I would be comfortable with that.

SFBG: When he asked you to do I Want Your Love, were you at all apprehensive or was it something you wanted to do right away? It’s obviously a lot more explicit than In Their Room.

J: Well, it’s funny. It falls on two sides. On the one hand, I was not at all hesitant, because the project itself and the way it was pitched to me and the way Travis has been thinking about this project, is like a whole set of theories around the way sex operates in film that I’m super behind. Travis has this whole kind of sociosexual idea about their being a savvy and discerning audience that’s ready to see sex integrated naturally into the narratives that they see in film. You can see that more in European avant garde filmmaking, but not so much in the States for all sorts of systemic reasons. The reason why Travis set out to do this project was really interesting and fascinating to me, and I actually thought the story sounded really beautiful. The story of the feature is kind of this person who takes this big, intense, emotional inventory of his life in San Francisco because he’s forced to leave for any number of reasons. And that resonates with me. I’ve moved around a lot and I have a really sentimental connection to place. Place is a really big thing for me. So all that stuff was really great.

In terms of being hesitant about it being more explicit, the jury’s still out. I don’t think I really have a concept of what it means for me to be having sex on film. As a performing artist—I’m a choreographer in San Francisco, and my work is very curious about bodies and curious about bodily functions and responses and fatigue and posture and all these raw physical states. And so I work with nudity fairly frequently. So this to me is just one step further, in a sense. It’s just another exploration of the physical state. And I think I see it as that. But what I’m learning, especially with the release of the trailer for I Want Your Love, is that the way that I make something and that how it’s received by all these people who are seeing this are two very different things. And I think I might find reason to be worried in the future, but so far, I’m just kind of, deer in headlights. I don’t think I really have a concept of what it means for me to be doing this kind of work. I’ve never done it before.

Jesse from I Want Your Love

SFBG: You touched on a few things I wanted to talk about. But before we go into sex in film, I wanted to just focus on porn. What’s your take on the current state of pornography?

J: I have a lot of respect for an industry that employs as many people as it does and that, in a lot of ways, is transgressive and sex-positive. I think, especially in San Francisco, there are a lot of porn companies who are doing things that are not just about getting off, that are actually reshaping the way people think about sex. I mean, Kink.com has incredible politics. There are a lot of companies that have really great politics. But at the same time, I say I have a lot of respect for them because truthfully I don’t know a whole lot about the infrastructure of porn companies.

In terms of what I see when I’m watching porn and how it relates to Travis’ work, I don’t know if there’s a need for Travis’ work as pornography. I don’t know whether people want to keep their porn dirty and their films deep. I’m not really sure what people’s response to that will be. Apparently there’s been a response from a lot of people that I Want Your Love is like a very different and more full-bodied turn-on for them, because there’s something familiar and humble and flawed about the whole thing. But as it relates to contemporary porn, I don’t know. I’ve always just kind of seen porn as what it is, and it’s kind of like a fantasy place. I’ve never really wanted porn to be more realistic than it is for me, as a voyeur of porn. I guess it is what it is. I feel like my sexual relationships and my sexual partners and the world I’ve created there is very satisfying for me, in terms of reality. So I don’t really seek out reality. But there is a weird thing where people are projecting a lot of reality onto I Want Your Love. A lot of the comments on Butt are like, “Oh, it’s just so real. It’s like I know them. I’m in love with them.” It’s funny because, stylistically I understand that this is a little bit of a trick to make it seem more real. But there’s nothing more real about I Want Your Love than any other porn that you see, although I don’t know if we’re calling it porn.

Jesse and Brenden in I Want Your Love

SFBG: You talked about being new to this kind of exposure. What kind of response have you gotten? Between I Want Your Love and In Their Room, are you getting recognized by any strangers?

J: I mean, this probably touches on a lot of my personally psychology and insecurity, but I’ve had a really weird shadowy presence on both of these projects, which is very interesting to me. I was fascinated because on In Their Room, I received less attention or shout-outs or comments than almost anyone else in the film. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s a reflection of me being, like, a not attractive or not desirable figure in the movie, but there were a couple things I was curious about. One is that I had a much more sexually explicit scene than anyone else in the film. And I wondered if it was this kind of archaic idea of giving it up too soon, that I was damaged goods or something. Because it’s really interesting. I did receive notably less press or attention than almost anyone else in the film, which is funny.

And then the same goes for I Want Your Love. I mean, my scene partner in I Want Your Love, I think is a very cute, very prototypically attractive guy. For both of these films, I’ve actually been able to kind of—I don’t know if it’s a curse or a blessing. I don’t know if I should feel ugly, or how I’m supposed to feel. [laughs] But I have not actually been approached, talked about, blogged about really individually all that much. It’s always the other guys. I seem to be very neutral or unexciting. I don’t know. I just go into the studio and do what Travis asks me to do. But according to the discerning public, it’s always the others that are more interesting. [laughs]

SFBG: Let’s talk about your co-star a bit. Where do you begin building that rapport and chemistry when you’re filming an unsimulated sex scene with someone?

J: With Brenden, Brenden was someone that I was already having sex with. There was a really great, excited, very honeymoon-y chemistry between us. It was very distinctively sexually. We weren’t dating or anything like this. … Every time we would sit down and talk about new guys, it would be like, “Yeah, but honestly, I could fuck Brenden’s brains out right now and be thrilled about it.” There’s very raw, obvious chemistry. We already wanted to fuck—really, really badly.

SFBG: Well, do you think that adds to the realism people are talking about? Could they be picking up on the history between you guys?

J: Yeah, I guess so. Which makes me think about real porn and how they walk into a studio having never met their partner, and they have to just have it ready. Which then, brings up the idea of the penis drugs. Because Brenden and I, we totally have boners for each other, but then we took the penis drugs, because for a shoot, you have to do extraordinary things with your penis that you’ve never had to do in your entire life. And so, I wonder if it had been someone else, maybe I just could’ve taken a penis drug and I would have been fine.

SFBG: I wanted to touch back on the point you were making about sex in film and how that’s something you see more in European productions. Do you think American audiences are ready for this? Is it going to take more independent movies like Travis’ to push them in that direction?

J: I would say it’s difficult to comment on a question like that in the incubator that is San Francisco. We’re so colored by what the reality of the pervasive national idea is. That said, I think that we are moving toward being more ready for it. I think people need to see specific social cues of independent filmmaking in order to feel comfortable with this. I think if you hold their hand and show them things that make them feel like they’re watching—I can’t even think of an example right now. But if you give them little social cues in this work that remind them that they’re watching something that they would see at the Embarcadero Center or at YBCA—you know, people like to feel like they’re watching art. They like to feel like they’re there and they’re experiencing this thing, and they were a witness to this piece of art. So if you provide little ways for them to feel this way, I think they’ll swallow the medicine a little easier. A spoonful of sugar kind of thing.

King Z

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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King Z

FILMMAKER INTERVIEW In the event of an actual zombie outbreak, legendary horror director George A. Romero would no doubt survive. For one thing, he stands an imposing six-feet, five inches, and happens to maintain an anti-zombie stronghold — er, getaway — in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he’d just been vacationing before the press tour for the sixth film in his "Dead" series, Survival of the Dead. Plus, Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, meaning Romero has more than 40 years of experience wrangling the undead. I asked him about that, and more, on his recent visit to San Francisco.

SFBG Did you ever think in 1968 that you’d still be making zombie movies in 2010?

George A. Romero Never. And I never thought of it as a series — it was a film. I didn’t want to make another one, especially after [Night] got "discovered." I said, I really can’t do another one unless I have a strong idea. Ten years later, I knew the people who were developing the first indoor shopping mall that any of us had ever seen, near Pittsburgh. I went out to visit it before it was even open, and the trucks were bringing in all this stuff, and I said, "Jesus Christ, it’s like this Taj Mahal to consumerism" — and then I said, "Ok, this might serve."

Completely serendipitously, I got a call from [Italian horror filmmaker] Dario Argento, and he said, "George, please, you must make another." He flew me over to Rome, stuck me in a little apartment, and told me to write the script [for 1978’s Dawn of the Dead]. That’s when I first started to think, "Boy, I could have fun with this." I could express myself, express my politics a little bit, poke a finger at society, and bring the zombies out every once in a while. The first four [Dead movies] were more than 10 years or more apart from each other. And I liked the idea that they were snapshots of different decades, stylistically and everything else.

After Land of the Dead (2005) — which was the first sort of big one, and I’m not sure I should have studio’d it up, if you know what I mean — I wanted to do something about emerging media and citizen journalism, so I had this idea to go back to Night [for 2007’s Diary of the Dead], go back to the roots, do it real guerrilla-style. Just like with Night, I thought it would be a one-shot deal: "I’m gonna take this little sidebar now, and try to have fun while I’m at it." [The company that financed the film] gave me final cut, creative control — first time since the very early films that I made — and [since] I stayed within a certain budget range, even though it had a limited distribution, it wound up making a lot of money. That’s why [Survival of the Dead] is here.

SFBG Survival of the Dead spins off a minor character from Diary of the Dead. Did you have that story line in mind while you were making Diary?

GAM When [the financers] said, "Well, we made so much money, we gotta do it again," I said, "OK, what if we do it again, and it makes a lot of money? You’re gonna want to do it again. So why don’t we go in thinking of a plan? I could take these characters from Diary, I had ’em all picked out — we could make three films, and I know exactly where they’re gonna go. And I will interweave the stories and introduce plot elements that recur, and characters that meet each other again." Which is something I always wanted to do, but I couldn’t with the first four films because they’re all owned by different people. So I said, we’ll take a broader topic like war, enmities that don’t die, and do this sort of structured set piece. Small budget but bigger scope. Then I thought, well, let’s play around with style too. So I got the idea for doing it like a Western, which came from an old William Wyler film called The Big Country (1958) — it’s the same two old farts shooting at each other. The next one, if we do it, I’d love to do it noir.

SFBG The zombie attack is already underway when Survival begins. The human survivors are almost jaded by their presence — the undead take a back seat to the human conflict more often than not.

GAM Yes, in this film, more than any of the other ones that I’ve done. In a way, if you think of it, my stories are all about the humans, because the zombies could be almost any disaster — it’s just that zombies are more fun for me and for horror fans. But in this one, they’re almost just an annoyance, like mosquitoes. Also, except for Night and Diary, they’ve always started with the thing well underway. I think there’s also a horror tradition there, too — from the second Godzilla movie on, it’s, "Oh, it’s just Godzilla."

SFBG Zombies seem to be enjoying a particularly high pop culture profile these days. What do you think is the reason behind their neverending popularity?

GAM I think video games really popularized them. There’s only been one real blockbuster zombie film, Zombieland (2009), and that’s very recent. It started with Resident Evil, House of the Dead. Now there’s this huge thing, Left 4 Dead. Zombies are perfect targets for a first-person shooter — they’re like the coyotes of monsterland. It’s fun to see them eat a stick of dynamite. But zombie walks — I’ve had my voice piped into Budapest for a zombie walk. What? Thousands of people coming out and doing this. It’s sort of a happening — go out and get drunk. It’s cheap costuming — smear up your clothes, slap some goop on your face, and go stumbling out. Even if you’re drunk, you can still stumble.

SFBG Do you watch the new zombie movies, like Zombieland?

GAM I don’t like them very much. As I said, I think it all started with video games — they have to move fast in video games to make the game fun. So filmmakers like Zack [Snyder], when he did the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), made the zombies run. I thought that was crazy. That whole evolution seems to have just warped it. To me, zombies should be like my guys, kind of stupidly stumbling along, and only have power in numbers or when people make mistakes.

SFBG Final question. Do you ever get tired of talking about zombies?

GAM [Laughs] Yeah! *

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

On the Cheap Listings

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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 26

“Meet the Change” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-ARTS. 6pm, $5-15 sliding scale. Meet David Evan Harris, founder of the Global Lives Project which is currently on exhibition at the YBCA. Hear some lessons from his work, insights about our globalized world, and go on a guided tour of the exhibit, featuring 24 hours in the lives of people from around the world.

“SEX sells” 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF; (415) 974-1719. 5pm, free. Attend this opening and cocktail party for the new exhibit, “SEX sells,” featuring photographic work by Michelle Tholen, Timothy D. Williamson, Lindsay Garvey, and George Mead that portrays suggestively sexual imagery in advertising.

THURSDAY 27

Coalition on Homelessness Karaoke Party Mint Karaoke Lounge, 1942 Market, SF; (415) 346-3740. 5:30pm; $5-$20 suggested donation, no one turned away. Sing songs in solidarity with the Coalition on Homelessness at this karaoke party and fundraiser for the campaign to fight against the proposed sit/lie ordinance in San Francisco. Featuring a raffle to win a mystery prize at 7:30pm.

Full Moon Celebration McLaren Park, Visitation and Mansell, SF; www.phases.org. 8pm, free. Celebrate the passing of the moon phases with dancing, drumming, singing, the passing on of traditions, readings, performances, community, and friends. Participation from all ages is welcome.

Remaking Citizenship Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia, SF; www.mtbs.com. 7pm, free. Attend this book launch party for Kathleen Coll’s new book, Remaking Citizenship: Latina Immigrants and New American Politics, which looks at the impact that anti-immigration legislation has had on the lives of Mexican and Central American women and the grassroots political organizing that followed. Ten percent of book sales will be donated to Mujeres Unidas y Activas, in celebration of their 20th anniversary.

FRIDAY 28

Blue Stars Blue Apples The Spare Room Project, 270 Anderson, SF; http://thespareroomproject.net. 7pm, free. Attend this one night only convergence of the arts curated by Vanessa Norton and featuring a poetry reading by Eliza Rotterman, fiction readings by Jeremy Simmons and Vanessa Norton, and an exhibition of prints by Neal Pitak.

“Making Visible” Marina Abramovic Institute West, 575 Sutter, SF; http://marinaabramovicinstitute.org. Fri. and Sat. 4:30pm-8:30pm, Sun.-Mon. 12:30pm-4:30pm; free. Be a part of this unique installation and performance, where SF Ballet dancers Damian Smith and Muriel Maffre, choreographer Folawole, and composer Paul Dooley will make their creative process visible to the public. Audiences will be invited to observe, make recordings ask questions, and contribute to the overall project.

SATURDAY 29

Burger Queen Social Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia, SF; www.mtbs.com. 5:30pm, free. Connect with wildly queer, deviously radical queers at this fun social event, perfect for insighting political witchery and great discussion.

Carnaval Festival Harrison between 16th and 22nd St., SF; www.sfcarnaval.com. Sat.-Sun. 10am-6pm, free. Celebrate the spirit of Latin American and Caribbean culture at this two-day Carnaval festival featuring food, live music, dance performances, salsa dance lessons, art, crafts, activities, and much more, including a “Niñolandia” section for kids.

San Francisco Really Really Free Market Dolores Park, 18th St. at Dolores, SF; www.reallyreallyfree.org. Noon, free. Bring usable items, food, skills, and talents for the sake of giving and because if we share, there really is enough for everyone. No one should have to go without food, shelter, entertainment, and community.

Walk the Wiggle Meet at Oasis Café, 901 Divisadero, SF; RSVP to thinkwalks@earthlink.net or call (415) 505-8255. 1pm; free, donations encouraged. Before San Francisco was a hub for cyclists, “the Wiggle” was a foot trail used to avoid the same hills. Change the way you look at the landscape on this guided walking tour where you will learn about art, bike politics, floods, lakes, and native societies.

BAY AREA

Himalayan Fair Live Oak Park, 1301 Shattuck, Berk.; www.himalayanfair.net. Sat. 10am-7pm, Sun. 10am-5:30pm; free. Enjoy Himalayan cuisine, including special momo’s made every year specifically for this event by the Tibetan Association of Northern California and the Nepalese Association of Northern California, check out vendors selling art, jewelry, clothing, antiques and collectables from Nepal, India, Tibet, Pakistan and Afghanistan, enjoy Himalayan entertainment, and more. Free bicycle parking available.

SUNDAY 30

Carnaval Parade Begins at Bryant and 24th St. and proceeds down Mission to 17th St., SF; www.sfcarnaval.com. 9:30a.m., free. Enjoy this multi-cultural parade in the tradition of cultures from around the world, filled with spectacular floats, music, costumes, dance, other performances, and more.

TUESDAY 1

Out and Off the Margins SF Public Library Main Branch, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4400. 6pm, free. Kick-off San Francisco Pride season at this panel discussion featuring Cleis Press authors Ann Bannon, Jon Ginoli, Rob Rosen, Rachel Pepper, Carol Queen, and Felice Newman weighing in on how LGBT writing has changed as the margins of sexual identity have widened and shifted.

Film Listings

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

OPENING

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

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

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

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Jake Gyllenhaal stars as the titular hero this video game adaptation. (2:10) California, Presidio.

Sex and the City 2 Oh my god, (more) shoes. (2:24) Castro, Cerrito, Marina, Presidio, Shattuck.

Survival of the Dead See Trash. (1:30) Lumiere, Shattuck.

ONGOING

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

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in SF’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out big time. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Albany, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

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

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

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

*Dirty Hands The 1990s-ish iconoclastic, workaholic breed of Asian hipster is obsessively worked by David Choe in Dirty Hands. Exhaustively documenting the Los Angeles-born artist for eight years as he matures before our eyes, director Harry Kim charts the growth spurts: from mischievous tot to shoplifter and graf artist to porn illustrator to street-art superstar to spiritual penitent after a stint in a Tokyo jail. The filmmaker doesn’t seem to know quite when to stop, but then neither does his subject: an obviously intelligent, playful talent who specializes in compulsively analyzing himself and pushing himself to the limits of the law, his work, and his own (r)evolution as a human being. So driven in his pursuit of edge-skating experiences that he comes off as less hipster than haunted, Choe and his Bukowskian tendencies, Vice aesthetics, and “deep” thoughts rivet long after the bodily fluids and sensory overload murals congeal. (1:33) Roxie. (Chun)

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

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

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

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

How to Train Your Dragon (1:38) 1000 Van Ness.

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

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

Just Wright (1:51) 1000 Van Ness.

*Kick-Ass Based on a comic book series by Mark Millar, whose work was also the model for 2008’s Wanted, Kick Ass is a similarly over-the-top action flick that plays up its absurdity to even greater comedic effect. High school nerd Dave (Aaron Johnson) decides to become the world’s first real superhero. Donning a green wetsuit he bought on the internet and mustering some unlikely courage, he takes to the streets to avenge wrongdoing. Unsurprisingly, Dave is immediately beaten almost to death because he’s just a kid who has no idea what he’s doing, but Kick-Ass‘ greatest achievement is knowing exactly how to subvert audience expectations. Scenes that marry the film’s innocent story with enormously exaggerated violence enhance the otherwise Superbad-lite high-school comedy unfolding around them, and a parallel plot-line involving Nicolas Cage instructing his 12-year-old daughter to commit grievous murders will probably end up being the most gratifying aspect of the film. Though too much set-up and spinning gears mars the middle act, it’s hard to fault the film for competently setting up one of the most crowd-pleasing endings in recent memory. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness. (Galvin)

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

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) Elmwood, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

MacGruber Mudflaps, moptops, box-office flippity-flops, such is the sad transition Saturday Night Live skits make to the big screen. Handicapped as such MacGruber also has a very specific demographic in mind: the Gen-Xers who popularized the use of MacGyver as a verb and harbor a picture-tube-deep ironic affection for the lousy ’80s TV action shows of their youth. Does anyone younger — or older — than that population get MacGruber‘s interest in Howard Stern-style transgressive humor, its “Cunth”/dick/poop/butt jokes, and its shameful identification with badly dated hair styles? That said, MacGruber isn’t half bad if one keeps expectations nice ‘n’ low, much like its hero’s brow, and one enjoys a comic antihero who uses his buds as human shields and can’t MacGyver a weapon out of a tennis ball and rubber-band to save his life. Laughs can be had — as long as your bad Gen-X self is still in touch with your inner 13-year-old. MacGruber won’t make the Bay Area-born-and-bred Will Forte a superstar, but at least it gives Kristen Wiig fans another, if somewhat inexplicable, chance to glimpse their heroine in action, with little to do — someone get this smart, likable actress into a Nicole Holofcener comedy ASAP. (1:39) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media experiments

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Media experiments

news@sfbg.com

With traditional journalism outlets still struggling through the Great Recession and into an uncertain future, some interesting new media experiments have been popping in San Francisco, including much-anticipated The Bay Citizen, an initially well-funded newsroom that launches this week.

It will join a media landscape filled with a wide range of new ventures: general news websites ranging from the nonprofit SF Public Press to the theoretically for-profit SF Appeal; niche sites such as the popular SF Streetsblog; the Spot.us media funding experiment; and the MediaBugs accountability project. And it isn’t all online — McSweeney’s magazine put out the one-time San Francisco Panorama newspaper in December and SF Public Press plans to print a similar demonstration newspaper next month.

But for all the high hopes and talk of using strategic partnerships and new funding models to overcome economic and readership trends that have hobbled the San Francisco Chronicle and other big media companies, those who run The Bay Citizen and other start-ups still need to prove their worth and sustainability.

Whatever The Bay Citizen becomes, it will break new ground — nobody has ever put this level of money into creating a nonprofit, online-only daily newspaper in a major market, or had such significant media partners, ranging from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to The New York Times, which will run the newsroom’s content as its twice-weekly Bay Area section.

Some people think this is the future of journalism; San Francisco-based financier Warren Hellman, who provided the seed money, thinks it’s worth $5 million or more to get the project off the ground. But since there’s no model out there, the crew at The Bay Citizen will be making it up as they go along. And at this point, even with what most Web publications would consider a huge amount of money, it’s clear that The Bay Citizen will not be replacing the Chronicle any time soon.

Jon Weber, the publication’s editor, knows the world of mainstream daily journalism (he was a writer for the Los Angeles Times); the world of high-paced big-money startups (he ran the Industry Standard); and the world of low-budget fledgling operations (he founded the small online magazine New West). And the first thing he had to figure was exactly what this new online daily was going to look like.

With a staff of just six news writers — and a regional focus — The Bay Citizen can’t try to cover breaking news the way the Chronicle, Examiner, or even Bay City News Service do. So the publication will be different from a traditional daily, with more enterprise reporting and less of the types of features dailies typically offer.

There will, for example, be no daily sportswriter. “There won’t be stories on every game, every day,” Weber told me. “We’ll pick our spots with enterprise reporting.” The Bay Citizen won’t try to compete with the Chronicle on national or international stories, either: “It’s a Bay Area focused site,” Weber said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t cover national stories when they impact the Bay Area. But that’s not part of our beats.”

The reporters will cover land use and environmental issues; health and science; education and social issues; business and finance; crime; and government and politics. The politics reporter won’t be able to cover San Francisco City Hall every day, either — he or she (that’s the one slot still open) will have to stay on top of local and statewide issues.

But what could make the Bay Citizen truly unusual is the extent to which Weber plans to partner with existing local bloggers and nontraditional news outlets. “We hope we can be a supporter of the local media ecosystem,” he said.

That could eventually set The Bay Citizen apart — and provide a new model for daily journalism. The publication has pending agreements with a dozen local Web sites and bloggers, some of them well-established and funded, and some more homegrown efforts. It’s also working with New American Media, which for many years has represented and encouraged ethnic news outlets.

Yet this isn’t exactly a new idea. SF Gate, the Chronicle’s Web site, has been running content from local blogs, including SF Streetsblog, for more than a year. But it doesn’t pay for that content and so far there have been few discernible benefits for either side of the equation.

“That’s been an experiment for us, but I’m not sure we see much of a return,” Streetsblog SF Editor Bryan Goebel told us. “The question is how you make these partnerships sustainable.”

That’s a question he’ll continue to explore with his newest partner, The Bay Citizen, which is promising to pay bloggers $25 for each post they run and to partner with them on larger projects. Although he’s still waiting to see a contract from Weber, Goebel said, “The model Bay Citizen is using could potentially work.”

Goebel needs something that will work. After 16 months in business, he said SF Streetsblog has 14,000 weekly readers and a loyal following among those interested in transportation and urbanism, but it’s funding (primarily from two rich individuals) has dried up to the point where he’s worried about the site’s future.

“I was hired to be the editor, but now the onus is on me to also keep it going,” Goebel said. “If the community likes this valuable resource … then the community needs to step up and support it.”

The Bay Citizen is also relying on that community-supported paradigm, using a four-part plan to pay the bills. At first The Bay Citizen will be heavily dependent on big donations. But Weber wants to see the operation transition to a more independent program that will rely on public broadcasting-style memberships (small donations), sponsorships (read: ad sales), and the sale of original content (syndication).

There’s already been some grumbling in the local blogosphere about Bay Citizen, from noting the outsized salary of the project’s president and CEO Lisa Frazier (a media consultant who led the search and then took the job at a reported $400,000 per year) to concerns about this big venture exploiting small local partners.

Frazier answered the salary question by noting that she has been working on the project for 14 months and emphasizing her business development experience. “This is a difficult problem we’re taking on and we need to put together a sustainable business model,” she told us. “It’s about results and our fundraising response has been fantastic.”

Another eyebrow-raiser is the background of The Bay Citizen’s Chief Technology Officer Brian Kelley, founder of the Web site ReputationDefender, which promises to remove negative items from the Internet searches of its paying clients — an antithetical mission for news organizations that expose the misdeeds of powerful figures.

Kelley downplayed his former company’s role in countering good journalism, telling us, “I do intend to take that knowledge here to promote our online content.”

Weber said the new venture won’t use its considerable initial resources to try to steal the show, and they’re bringing something truly valuable to the local media scene: a paid staff of journalists to counter the steep declines in local news-gathering.

“Listen,” Weber told us, “I was there for five years. I was running a little start-up with no resources. The last thing I want to do is hurt the smaller outfits. We think we can work together in ways that benefit everyone.”

SF Public Press has pursued a model like Bay Citizen’s for two years. But without millions of dollars in seed money, it’s still hobbling along as basically a volunteer newsroom despite getting around $35,000 from San Francisco Foundation, another Hellman-funded enterprise. “It’s an uncertain model. It’s a leap of faith for the writers to get involved with this,” said project manager Michael Stoll.

Yet Public Press is still moving forward with a newspaper (due out June 15) featuring content culled from a wide variety of local partners ranging from the Commonwealth Club and World Affairs Council to local public radio stations, local blogs, and The Bay Citizen. “We’re calling it both a pilot and a prototype,” Stoll said. “We want to get people’s reactions.”

Weber says he’s also eager to see how people react to The Bay Citizen when it launches May 26, because it will need to quickly establish itself. At the rate The Bay Citizen is spending, Hellman’s money won’t last more than a couple of years, and the financier told us he may be willing to put in a bit more, but he’s going to want to see a plan for financial stability that doesn’t involve him underwriting operations forever. It’s an experiment, but one most observers say is worth trying.

“We need to keep experimenting,” Goebel said, “because not every experiment is going to work.”

The politics of sit/lie

Zelda Bronstein
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91
The politics of sit/lie

It’s no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to put a sit/lie law on the ballot, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the supervisors are moving slowly on his proposal. It has nothing to do with any facts — the cops could enforce existing laws and address the problem.


No, this is all about politics. Newsom never wanted the supervisors to approve a sit.lie law; he and his operatives want to put it on the November ballot, so they can use it as a wedge issue to attack progressive candidates. They can also use it to raise money, which can be spread around through slate cards to support his supervisorial picks.


Remember, this is how Newsom got elected mayor: He picked a wedge issue (general assistance payments to homeless people), created a slogan (“care, not cash”), raised a ton of money, and made it his signature campaign strategy. It worked, so he’s trying again.


Before Arthur Evans leaps in and attacks me, let me say: I know there are people in the Haight who want this law. (There are also people in the Haight, including the venerable Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, who oppose it.) But I don’t think Newsom really cares about that; if he did, he’d work with the supervisors on a compromise or alternatives. Instead, he’s refusing to participate in the board’s debates.


This is all about November’s board elections. Sorry, Arthur, but your pet cause is now the mayor’s political tool.

East Oakland’s peaceful Youth Uprising

Andrew Lam
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4

Six months ago, Javae Reed could hardly have pictured himself as part of the solution to the problems that plague the East Oakland community where he grew up. Fresh off an incarceration in Reno (Reed had relocated temporarily to be with his mom) on charges of robbery, the 19 year old didn’t have a history of positive association with the system. But thanks to Youth Uprising, a youth advocacy non-profit — which celebrates its fifth anniversary with a gala fundraiser Tues/25 — Javae has landed a job, and got his driver’s license. Not to mention the fact that he’s performing policy work that will make a real difference for other young people like himself.

“I always had this potential in me,” Reed told me over the phone as he sat alongside YU director of strategy and investment director Maya Dillard-Smith. “I just needed that guidance to find it.” After hearing of  Youth Uprising through a friend upon his return to Oakland, Reed went to check out the program. The next day, he found himself heading out for a Youth Uprising LeaderShift retreat with 29 other young men, a trip which focuses on teaching individuals who are already leaders among their peers how to use their charisma and intelligence in a constructive direction.

Reed, a naturally outgoing guy, immediately found his niche. “By the second day, everybody was social, I got comfortable, the staff showed me support, we had fun. I became a part of the YU family,” he recalls. 

It’s indicative of the community-driven nature of YU that Reed was able to connect so readily. The organization celebrates a multi-pronged approach to youth empowerment, focusing both on physical (they operate the most used health clinic in Alameda County) and interior needs (a full purpose media lab gives participants a chance to use their voices artistically, and YU sponsors dance, theater and fine arts programs).

Reed was chosen to become a workshop facilitator, and the organization got to work helping him overcome the obstacles to employment for a young black man in Oakland. Through the Mayor’s Summer Jobs Program, they placed him as a janitor, enrolled him in a computing class to further develop his potential.

And then he was tapped to play a larger role. East Oakland is one of the 14 neighborhoods Building Health and Communities, California’s largest health care foundation, has chosen as a major aide recipient through 2020. Research was needed, however, to identify just how that money was to be allocated.

Who better than the area’s youth themselves to figure that out? Youth Uprising, the lead agency on the project, put Reed and a team of his peers in charge. They were tapped to draw up a survey for their neighborhood that touched on health and safety issues, then gathered responses, and presented their findings to BHC stakeholders (perhaps not surprisingly, national health care reform topped the list of concerns they uncovered). Their conclusions would drive $10 million in social investments.

It was an empowering experience. “You know these things are right, but you’ve never walked in my shoes,” Reed tells me. Although he’d never located himself in politics before, he can now say confidently “I speak for myself — and my generation.”

Reed’s lightening quick transition from disenfranchised youth to community leader is just the kind of change that Youth Uprising wants to keep on the country’s to-do list. “Some people believe the investment should be on the back end with incarceration,” says Dillard-Smith. “But we’re building up social enterprises.”

Which hasn’t been easy in an era of social service mass murder — but YU is pulling through. “We’ve got to have a diversified funding strategy, because the needs of this community are not going away when the funding does,” Dillard-Smith says.

YU’s developing ways to get businesses involved in a way that touches more than just the youth they served. They’ve teamed up with Silicon Valley corporations to keep their data entry programs from being outsourced overseas. “The young people we work with are incredibly computer literate, even when they can‘t read and write,” says Dillard-Smith. They’ve set up their own youth run Corners Café, which gives chosen program participants a chance to develop job skills in a real life environment, and is set to cater your next event.

With all this self made empowerment, it should be no surprise that YU was lauded by US attorney general Eric Holder as a “perfect example” of how change can happen in our beleaguered country. Check out their anniversary on Tues/25, featuring civil rights activist Lateefah Simon  — you’ll join the Uprising, too.

Youth Uprising 5th Anniversary Event
Tues/25 6:30-8:30 p.m., $50 donation
8711 MacArthur, Oakland
(510) 777-9099
www.youthuprising.org

Most Californians want legal weed

Sasha Cuttler
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1
Most Californians want legal weed

By Brady Welch

Puff, puff, pass on the good news. A new poll finds that a majority of California voters—51 percent—support the fall ballot measure to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana for even strictly recreational uses (40 percent opposed it). And support rises a point when respondents are asked about its various benefits.

According to the poll by Oakland-based firm EMC, 69 percent agree that the initiative “will raise needed tax revenue,” arguably its largest selling point. Supporting this notion of turning green into more green, the state’s tax regulator, the Board of Equalization, issued a study last summer noting that taxing pot could bring in an estimated $1.4 billion to state and local governments’ starved coffers.

“We only need fifty plus one,” Dale Sky Clare, Executive Chancellor of Oaksterdam University, told us referring to the percentage needed to pass the initiative. “We’re excited. Even with conservative questions, the poll numbers still show support.”

Six in 10 voters believe the initiative “will save the state money.” This is in line with the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s office estimation of “savings of several tens of millions of dollars annually… on the costs of incarcerating and supervising certain marijuana offenders,” according to a report on its website. Even a number of state law enforcement figures have come out in support of the initiative, including Oakland City Attorney John Russo.

“Folks are becoming frustrated with the politics of pure symbols,” Russo told us, referring to the failed War on Drugs. “Marijuana is widespread among otherwise law-abiding people, and it’s viewed by people morally as no different from alcohol. We should stop pretending.”

Other polls have been floating around recently, some slightly higher in one direction or the other, but overall, the numbers suggest the political winds are moving in the right direction. More than three in four voters (77 percent) have heard of the initiative, according to EMC, and awareness is particularly high among newer voters, young folks, and independents—exactly the kind of people who voted for change in 2008, and exactly the kind of voters that will move California, and the country, into a greener (in more ways than one) and brighter future.

I want to throw up

Zelda Bronstein
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18
I want to throw up

I’ve gotten a pretty strong stomach after 25 years of political reporting, but when I read stuff like this, I reall want to throw up. It’s not just pandering or corruption or sleaze — that shit’s common enough, and I can deal. It’s this utter, blatant, mind-boggling lack of reality that makes me start to lose my lunch.


(Pretty good lunch, too — I made myself a nice turkey sandwich with havarti cheese and mayo, on a crispy roll, bag o’ chips, bottle of sparkling Calistoga — hate to see it come back up again.)


But please, folks: Cannot anyone running for governor of California be remotely honest about the budget problem? These people are not fools; Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner have run businesses. Jerry Brown has been governor before, and has been a mayor. They know how budgets work. And they know this:


You cannot — cannot — solve a $19 billion budget deficit by reducing waste and fraud. Even Schwarzenegger admits that:


Shortly after taking office, Schwarzenegger also promised to find billions in fraud through a top-to-bottom review of state government. But after the 2006 review, Schwarzenegger admitted his advisers “did not find the kind of abuse that I thought there is.”


 There’s not $19 billion worth of bureaucratic waste, either. It’s just not there.


There are only two options to make this state fiscally sound again: Fundamentally restructure what the state of California does (that means, for example, eliminating most of the social safety net, giving up on public education and releasing about half the prison population), or raise taxes.


Only two options. Anyone with any sense knows that; as my friend and colleague Johnny Angel Wendell likes to say, it’s just simple math.


And yet nobody’s talking about it. Nobody’s even coming close. And the press isn’t pushing all that hard, either.


I was pleased to see that my old pal Jerry Brown saying that “those with the biggest belts” should tighten them. At least that has a tiny nod to the notion that some people are better off than others and the rich ought to pay more than the poor. But what the hell does it mean?


I called Jerry’s campaign office this afternoon and asked Sterling Clifford, his press person, to help me out a little. Is Brown saying that he thinks the wealthy should pay more taxes?


Actually, no: “I think he has been very clear that there will be no new taxes unless the people vote on them,” Clifford told me.


Okay, so does that mean he’s going to cut the budget of the biggest departments — say, the prison system? Well, no: “He intends to enter the budget negotiations with the Legislature with all options on the table.”


Shit. How about restoring the Vehicle License Fee to what it was before Schwarzenegger rolled it back? That a good Jerry Brown issue, environmentally sound. How about it? “I don’t know,” Clifford said. “I’ve never asked him about it.”


Well, you should, Sterling, and so should every reporter who sees him at every press event and every activist who sees him at every rally. And the same goes for Meg and Steve. These people are acting delusional — and we just have to call them on it.

The coffee shop-dollar store king of Divco

Andrew Lam
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1

One questions the need for another coffeehouse on Divisadero – seems like every time I turn around there’s another corner store churning out lattes and biscotti. But clearly I lack the vision of Haile Taddesse, owner of the 99¢ Divis Variety Discount at Divisadero and McAllister. “I am a coffee addicted person,” the Eritrean business owner tells me. “I grew up in a coffee country.” And no offense to the other establishments on his street, but he thought their coffee was mediocre. So, sick of trekking “ten blocks, or a mile even,” to find Philz or Blue Bottle, he decided to expand his business empire with a cafe next door to his dollar store.

Which makes for an interesting blend of customers. The DivCo (Division Corridor) neighborhood demographics are changing rapidly these days. Older restaurants and barbershops are ceding their storefronts to trendy new restaurants and coffee shops. Hell, some people (we won’t go into who those people are, we don’t particularly jibe with them) have even made up a name, NoPa, for the stretch, eschewing the working class implications of Western Addition.

So it’s nice to see a long time business owner successfully adapting to the winds of change. This morning when I visited, business was rolling at the five year old 99¢ Divis. A group of immigrant men chatted with Taddesse about politics (“I like Reagan and Clinton. Reagan was respected abroad. Americans, they don’t care about that.”). On the other side of the door that leads to Oasis Cafe, a cheerful barista made sandwiches and coffee for young people, and a few individuals working on their laptops.

And true to his word, Tadesse’s got some damn good coffee. Ten different kinds of beans sit behind the counter, and drinks are made on a cup by cup basis. “Most coffees around here are deceptive,” he told me. “You don’t see them make it. I am trying to make everything fresh for the neighborhood.” I tried the Divisadero blend, which I was told was the darkest of the blends that day. It gave me a rich jolt that I must admit is hard to come by at other spots down DivCo.

Seating is ample and comfortable; banquettes and deep, overstuffed leather armchairs. There’s a large mural of an oasis on the back wall, painted free of charge by a fellow cafe owner who just wanted to contribute something to Tadesse, who turns in 16 plus hours a day at his mini commercial empire. Already, an extensive menu of milkshakes, fresh juices, omelettes, and sandwiches are available — but the owner sees all this as merely the beginning for the cafe. He has plans for an Ethiopian food menu, soups, outside seating for his customers.

Business at the cafe, located on less frequented stretch of Divisadero blocks from both the Mt. Zion Hospital lunch crowds and the hot Lower Haight blocks, has already exceeded Tadesse’s expectations. Which flies in the face of the advice from the friends who wieghed in when he first concieved of Oasis.

“They said not to waste my money, that it was a bad location,” he tells me as another customer unloads an armful of cheap toiletries at the dollar store counter. “But it’s not up to the competition. It’s up to you, and your product. I said ‘don’t worry, I’ll show you.’ ”

 

99¢ Divis Variety Discount & Oasis Cafe All in One

901 Divisadero, SF

(415) 474-4900

Butoh, and beyond

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Butoh, and beyond

I was just in Baltimore for a conference on the New Drama movement in Russia — not so much a movement, as it turns out, as a new and diverse post-Soviet generation of theater artists carrying forward, reassessing and reinventing the form. The work on display over an eventful weekend was quite varied and, on the whole, an intriguing sampling of the restive theatrical activity being generated under the New Drama label. The take-home point: Russia is a hotbed of serious work to which attention should be paid.

The folks behind the San Francisco International Arts Festival don’t need to be told such things, much to the benefit of Bay Area audiences. They comb the globe for exciting developments in the arts and bring them to our doorstep each year. Indeed, when I last spoke to Andrew Wood, the festival’s executive director, he had just returned from Russia and Poland, where he was scoping out next year’s potentials among some of the most innovative theater-makers anywhere. But the beauty of SFIAF, whose seventh annual program opens May 19 and runs through the end of the month, is its commitment to bringing together local as well as international artists and companies under one broad, synergistic umbrella.

Among the tempting theatrical programs in 2010’s multidisciplinary lineup are two very different, envelope-pushing physical theater companies that nonetheless share a common Butoh influence: Russia’s Derevo and San Francisco’s inkBoat. Derevo’s artistic director Anton Adasinskiy predates the new generation of Russian theater makers I was learning about in Baltimore. He founded his company (whose Russian name means “tree”) in 1988, three years before the Soviet Union imploded. Now based in Dresden, Derevo enjoys a worldwide rep for innovative and devilishly clever work. Indeed, it’s been maybe the most buzzed-about theater ticket for weeks. The company’s 2009 piece, Harlekin, receives its U.S. premiere at SFIAF.

Pair this with local Butoh-fusion heroes inkBoat and that company’s SFIAF offering, the world premiere of The Crazy Cloud Collection — itself an international collaboration featuring choreography by Japanese Butoh master Ko Murobushi and inkBoat’s founder Shinichi Iova-Koga — which channels one of Zen Buddhism’s more eccentric figures, the 15th-century monk Ikkyu, also known as Crazy Cloud.

A rare glimpse of contemporary life and politics in the Middle East comes with the Syrian company Al Khareef Theatre Troupe, which makes its West Coast debut this year with The Solitary, a two-person play that posits the relationship between a political prisoner and the guard who represents his sole human contact.

And almost as rare: a new show from the Bay Area’s legendary Antenna Theater. The Sausalito experiential theater company (inventors back in the 1980s of Walkmanology, which adapted portable audioplayers to their all-encompassing sensory spectacles) rolls out its world premiere of The Magic Bus, a forward-moving look back at the Summer of Love and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters that (tooling around the city on a tricked-out bus) will be a real trip.

Also worth checking out: the circus-inspired French company A.K.Y.S. Project, making its U.S. debut with 100 Percent Croissance (100 Percent Growth), a highly physical meditation on contract workers in the high tech industry. SF’s own Keith Hennessey, of Circo Zero, presents one of his acclaimed (but rarely performed locally) all-improv concerts under the title Almost Nothing, Almost Everything. SF’s foolsFURY offers, as a work-in-progress, the American premiere of French playwright Fabrice Melquiot’s The Unheard of World. Local shadow theater masters ShadowLight unveil their latest, The Good-for-Nothing Lover: Concert Reading with Shadows. And last but not least, Australia’s Sunny Drake is here with the U.S. premiere of his other-wise, a solo multimedia performance piece as magic act about accepting yourself as different, distinct and not alone — a play that comes with a flat disclaimer: “You will only understand this show if you are human and born on Planet Earth.” You’ve been warned.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 19–31

Various venues, most shows $25

1-800-838-3006

www.sfiaf.org

Film listings

David Talbot
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0

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

OPENING

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

*Dirty Hands The 1990s-ish iconoclastic, workaholic breed of Asian hipster is obsessively worked by David Choe in Dirty Hands. Exhaustively documenting the Los Angeles-born artist for eight years as he matures before our eyes, director Harry Kim charts the growth spurts: from mischievous tot to shoplifter and graf artist to porn illustrator to street-art superstar to spiritual penitent after a stint in a Tokyo jail. The filmmaker doesn’t seem to know quite when to stop, but then neither does his subject: an obviously intelligent, playful talent who specializes in compulsively analyzing himself and pushing himself to the limits of the law, his work, and his own (r)evolution as a human being. So driven in his pursuit of edge-skating experiences that he comes off as less hipster than haunted, Choe and his Bukowskian tendencies, Vice aesthetics, and "deep" thoughts rivet long after the bodily fluids and sensory overload murals congeal. (1:33) Roxie. (Chun)

Kites This Bollywood action-romance is "presented by" Brett Ratner (apparently, he helped re-edit this English version). (1:30)

MacGruber Will Forte’s bemulleted, MacGyver-biting Saturday Night Live character gets his own movie. (1:39)

Paper Man Though certainly offbeat enough to fall into the quirky indie category, Paper Man reminds us that weird is not always good. There’s very little original about the main conceit: plagued by writer’s block, Richard Dunn (Jeff Daniels) rents a house in Montauk where he befriends outcast Abby (Emma Stone), a teenage girl with a tragic past. The film’s unique addition is Richard’s imaginary friend Captain Excellent, played by Ryan Reynolds in full-on superhero attire. But Captain Excellent is so absurdly campy that he’s almost too much to take — which wouldn’t be such a problem if Paper Man weren’t asking us to take it seriously. The wacky superhero scenes are mostly out-of-place, and all the heavy drama moments fall flat. But even without the muddled tone, Paper Man is riddled with clichés. We’ve seen enough of the zany manchild learning valuable life lessons, and the troubled teen forming an unlikely bond. At this point, there’s nothing super about it. (1:50) Lumiere. (Peitzman)

Shrek Forever After 3D Mike Myers has sure gotten a lot of longevity out of his Scottish accent. (1:33) Four Star, Presidio.

ONGOING

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

*Babies Thomas Balmes’ camera records the first year in the lives of four infants in vastly different circumstances. They’re respectively born to hip young couple in Tokyo’s high-tech clutter; familiar moderately alterna-types (the father is director Frazer Bradshaw of last year’s excellent indie drama Everything Strange and New) in S.F.’s Mission District; a yurt-dwelling family isolated in the vast Mongolian tundra; and a Namibian village so maternally focused that adult menfolk seem to have been banished. Yes, on one level this is the cutest li’l documentary you ever saw. But if you were planning to avoid thinking that is all (or most) of what Babies would be like, you will miss out bigtime. Void of explanatory titles, voice-over narration, or subtitle translations, this is a purely observatory piece that reveals just how fascinating the business of being a baby is. There’s very little predictable pooping, wailing, or coddling. Instead, Balmes’ wonderful eye captures absorbing moments of sussing things out, decision-making, and skill learning. While the First World tykes firstborns both — are hauled off to (way) pre-school classes, the much less day planned Third Worlders have more complex, unmediated dealings with community. Those range from fending off devilish older siblings to Mongol Bayarjargal’s startlingly casual consorting with large furry livestock. (Imagine the horror of parents you know were their baby found surrounded by massive cows — a situation that here causes no concern whatsoever for adults, children, or bovines.) So accustomed to the camera that it doesn’t influence their behavior, the subjects here are viewed with an intimacy that continually surprises. Babies is getting a wider-than-usual release for a documentary, one cannily timed to coincide with Mother’s Day. But don’t be fooled: this movie is actually very cool. (1:19) Albany, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Back-Up Plan (1:40) SF Center.

*Casino Jack and the United States of Money Casino Jack is big-budget documentary filmmaking, glossy and prone to expensive music cues, but I suppose you get a license to be flashy when you’ve proven to be as good at it as Alex Gibney. The director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and Academy Award winner Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Gibney sets his sights on Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff with an abundantly in-depth exploration of government greed and fraud. Investigating Abramoff’s indiscretions, from his introduction as chairman of the College Republicans, to his illegal selling of House votes for sweatshops in the Mariana Islands and over-billing of numerous Indian casinos, Gibney solidly serves Abramoff his just desserts. The director is equally interested in questioning the kind of government America has fostered that turns a blind eye to this sort of behavior. (2:02) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Galvin)

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

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

Date Night By today’s comedy standards, Date Night is positively old-fashioned: a case of mistaken identity causes a struggling married couple (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) to be tangled in a ransom plot for a stolen flash drive that belongs to a local mob boss. Unfussy plots are par for the course for films belonging to the all-but-lost "madcap all-nighter" genre, and in this case the simplicity of the set-up becomes Date Night‘s greatest asset, allowing Carell and Fey free reign to joke and ad lib lines. Like it or loathe it, the pair’s trademark senses of humor are the movie, and they arrange some pretty gleefully entertaining bits on the fly. Toss in a bunch of cameos from the likes of Ray Liotta and Mark Wahlberg and you’ve got yourself a bona fide movie-film, but it’s difficult not to see what Date Night might have been with just a smidge more effort. (1:27) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Galvin)

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

Furry Vengeance (1:32) SF Center.

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

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

The Greatest Lofty title aside, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about The Greatest. In many ways, it’s your standard grief porn, in that it focuses on a group of characters mourning a dead teenager for an hour and a half. On the other hand, the cast is tremendous — Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan are solid as the parents of the broken Brewer family, but the young actors give the most memorable performances. Fresh off her Oscar nomination for An Education (2009), Carey Mulligan continues to mingle precociousness and naiveté. The Greatest also showcases the very talented Johnny Simmons, whose past films — Hotel for Dogs (2009) and Jennifer’s Body (2009) — haven’t exactly earned him exposure. For its genre, then, The Greatest is actually quite good. It has plenty of charm mixed with moments of genuine emotion, often marked by much welcome restraint. But even with a slight twist on the convention (Mulligan’s Rose is pregnant with the dead kid’s baby), it’s still just a well-made tearjerker. (1:36) Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

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

How to Train Your Dragon (1:38) 1000 Van Ness.

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

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

Just Wright (1:51) 1000 Van Ness.

*Kick-Ass Based on a comic book series by Mark Millar, whose work was also the model for 2008’s Wanted, Kick Ass is a similarly over-the-top action flick that plays up its absurdity to even greater comedic effect. High school nerd Dave (Aaron Johnson) decides to become the world’s first real superhero. Donning a green wetsuit he bought on the internet and mustering some unlikely courage, he takes to the streets to avenge wrongdoing. Unsurprisingly, Dave is immediately beaten almost to death because he’s just a kid who has no idea what he’s doing, but Kick-Ass‘ greatest achievement is knowing exactly how to subvert audience expectations. Scenes that marry the film’s innocent story with enormously exaggerated violence enhance the otherwise Superbad-lite high-school comedy unfolding around them, and a parallel plot-line involving Nicolas Cage instructing his 12-year-old daughter to commit grievous murders will probably end up being the most gratifying aspect of the film. Though too much set-up and spinning gears mars the middle act, it’s hard to fault the film for competently setting up one of the most crowd-pleasing endings in recent memory. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Galvin)

Letters to Juliet If you can stomach the inevitable Barbara Cartland/Harlequin-romance-style clichés — and believe that Amanda Seyfried as a New Yorker fact-checker — then Letters to Juliet might be the ideal Tuscan-sunlit valentine for you. Seyfried’s Sophie is on a pre-honeymoon trip to Verona with her preoccupied chef-restaurateur intended, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s more interested in sampling cheese and purchasing vino than taking in the romantic attractions of Verona with his fiancée. Luckily she finds the perfect diversion for a wannabe scribe: a small clutch of diehard romantics enlisted by the city of Verona to answer the letters to Juliet posted by lovelorn ladies. They’re Juliet’s secretaries — never mind that Juliet never managed to maintain a successful or long-term relationship herself. When Sophie finds a lost, unanswered letter from the ’50s, she sets off sequence of unlikely events, as the letter’s English writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), returns to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), in search of her missed-connection, Lorenzo. Alas, Lorenzo’s long gone, and the fact-checker decides to help the warm-hearted, hopeful Claire find her lost lover. Unfortunately Sophie’s chemistry with both her matches isn’t as powerful as Redgrave’s with real-life husband Franco Nero — after all he was Lancelot to her Guenevere in 1967’s Camelot and the father of her son. Still, Redgrave’s power as an actress — and her relationship with Nero — adds a resonance that takes this otherwise by-the-numbers romance to another level. (1:46) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Little Traitor Lynn Roth’s film is set in 1947 Palestine, shortly before Israel became a state. Young Proffi Liebowitz (Ido Port) wasn’t yet born when his parents fled the Holocaust in Poland, but he’s politically tuned-in enough to form a mini-resistance group with his neighborhood pals, who plot against the occupying British forces (sample act of rebellion: "British Go Home" graffiti). Caught one night scampering home after the citywide curfew, Proffi meets Sergeant Dunlop (Alfred Molina), whose kindness makes the boy realize his black-and-white view of the enemy might have some room for color after all. Of course, Proffi’s friendship with the Brit, who teaches him to play snooker and pronounce complicated English words like "flatulence," is not received well by his community (see: film’s title). Despite its political undertones, this is a pretty standard coming-of-age tale (including the de rigueur "peeping on the sexy neighbor" subplot). Too bad the director decided to film so much of it in English — kid actor Port is far less cloying when he’s speaking his native Hebrew. (1:29) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

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

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

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

A Nightmare on Elm Street I’ll say this about the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street: it could have been worse. Yes, it’s pointless and unimaginative and producer Michael Bay should still be ashamed, but I didn’t hate every minute of it. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is not good. It’s not terrible, if only because it has a few decent scares — all of which are, of course, shamelessly lifted from the original. Mostly, however, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a waste of time, updating Freddy Krueger with an icky twist (which I won’t spoil here) and culling together more jump scares than should ever be shoved into one film. The cast is passable, with relative newbie Rooney Mara taking on Nancy — she’s fine but forgettable. Jackie Earle Haley does a solid job with Freddy, but he was doomed from the start, just by virtue of not being Robert Englund. This Freddy is more brutal, to be sure, but he’s also far less fun. One pun in the entire movie? He might as well be Jason Voorhees. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

*October Country In taking on the subject of family in the documentary October Country, co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher face some imposing specters, and I’m not just talking about the varied stories of the Mosher family. If there’s any micro-genre within documentary that has become embattled over the past decade, it’s the family portrait, thanks to controversial or contentious works such as Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (both from 2003), son-of-Grey Gardens freakouts which incited claims of exploitation and sensationalism on their paths to a larger public profile. Palmieri’s and Mosher’s movie is a quieter work, yet it isn’t folksy in a complacent Sundance manner, either. The list of the maladies plaguing the Mosher clan — physical abuse, drug abuse, war trauma, custody battles, and abortion, to name a handful — would provoke an ambulance-chasing impulse in some filmmakers, blood ties be damned. But Palmieri (who edited and did cinematography) and Mosher (a former San Francisco resident whose photo essays on his family were shown at Artists’ Television Access) realize these are common American problems, and their treatment of them is at once deeper and more ephemeral. They use the passage of a year from one Halloween to the next to reveal the changes wrought — or evident — on a person’s face, and when they can, a person’s life. (1:20) Roxie. (Huston)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincere Given the talent involved, Vincere should be a better film that it is. Director Marco Bellocchio has a lengthy track record of successes, and star Giovanna Mezzogiorno is one of the biggest names in contemporary Italian cinema. The based-on-a-true-story plot is certainly worthy of being filmed: Mezzogiorno plays Ida Dalser, secret wife of Mussolini and mother of the dictator’s first-born son. When Ida begins to make trouble for Il Duce by publicly proclaiming their marriage, she is locked away in a mental hospital. But while Vincere‘s subject is compelling, the film as a whole falls flat. Moments of greatness are few and far between, and the rest of the movie gets by on mediocrity. It’s likely the fault lies with the script, which is too scattered and unfocused to maintain an audience’s focus. Why after almost two hours of watching Ida’s struggle are we suddenly left with her son’s descent into madness? How depressing that a film about a woman forgotten by history is, itself, mostly forgettable. (2:02) Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

OMFG, Meg Whitman’s a smut dealer!

Zelda Bronstein
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1
OMFG, Meg Whitman’s a smut dealer!

Or so Steve Poizner says, in a battle of the airwaves that’s getting completely insane.


In a new ad, Poiz charges that Whitman, as CEO of EBay, allowed (oh no!) dirty movies to be sold on EBay. You can buy other dirty things there, too, like a Voodoo Hot Sex Life Improvement Love Spell (bidding starts at $9.99). And it’s all Meg’s fault!




The problem with this approach is that I suspect a lot of Republicans may also shop on EBay, and some of them may want their own copy of the official Naughty and Bawdy Songs of England CD — or maybe something even a little naughtier. And they may not be that upset that ol’ Meg allowed them an easy and discreet way to buy the things that the GOP kinks in the closet wouldn’t want to be seen picking up at the mall. (That kind of thing gets around.)


Now Meg will have to respond with something even more harsh about Poizner. What fun.


 


 

An environmental and worker disaster

David Talbot
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0

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century


It‘s coming up on 10 o’clock in the evening aboard a massive oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon, 130 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s Tuesday, April 20. The rig sways gently in the calm waters. Then, suddenly . . . BOOM!

A huge explosion rocks the rig, releasing tons of oil that soon will spread over an area of at least 2,500 square miles. Of course it’s an environmental disaster, probably the worst oil spill ever. That’s what draws massive attention from the media. But what of the workers aboard the rig, who suffered terrible trauma, serious injury and death?

Too often, the mainstream corporate media all but ignore workers’ suffering in such disasters. They sometimes seem more concerned with the degradation of the environment than with the suffering of humans. They focus almost solely on the environmental damage, and its cost to those who employ the workers.

Too often, the workers are treated as mere numbers. Eleven dead, 17 injured, said the media accounts of the Deepwater Horizon explosion.  But just what does that mean? Precisely how were the workers made to suffer? Might they suffer in the future because of their injuries? What can and should be done to make future work safer for them and others? The mainstream media rarely ask such questions. Working people, be they on land or sea, are of secondary concern to them.

The explosion was horrendous. It turned the Deepwater Horizon’s deck into what one worker described as “like a war zone.” One of his co-workers told of seeing “guys burning” and “some guy missing limbs.” The scene was indeed what he recalled as “extremely gruesome.”

Flames from the burning oil shot into the sky, high as a multi-story building, as some of the 126 people on board leaped overboard to reach lifeboats waiting in the water 80 feet below. It took 45 minutes for Coast Guard rescue boats and helicopters to reach the rig, the heat of the oil flames so intense by then it melted paint off the rescue boats.

Some survivors were rescued by a supply ship operated by British Petroleum (BP), which had leased the Deepwater Horizon from the Transocean corporation. Seven BP executives who were on board were injured, but that didn’t move them to express any concern for the future safety of their employees.

Transocean, meanwhile, has tried to keep the workers from filing for legal judgments that would grant them compensation for any alleged negligence that caused the explosion and for any psychiatric problems and other injuries that stemmed from the blast.
The workers were rushed under employer escort to hospitals and a New Orleans hotel immediately after rescue and not allowed to contact their families or anyone else who might advise them on whether they should agree to initial forms that Transocean lawyers insisted they initial.

The form said in effect that the worker had been on the rig when it exploded, but had seen nothing or did see something and was or was not hurt.

In the meantime, the media continue to report in detail about the serious effects the explosion has had on the environment while all but ignoring its serious effects on the workers involved.

To concerned environmentalists, the accident is yet another strong argument against the folly of offshore oil drilling, But a more immediate concern should be the dangers faced by workers involved in the continued drilling. For if the drilling is not to be halted, there’s a great need for much greater safety procedures.

Accidents have taken the lives of nearly 70 oil rig workers over the past nine years, including the 11 who died in the Gulf of Mexico. Protect the environment, yes.
But first, protect human lives.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century.  Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Pelosi needs to support the Fair Elections Act

Zelda Bronstein
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8
Pelosi needs to support the Fair Elections Act

In the wake of the horrible Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, Rep. John Larson of Connecticut has introduced a bill that would reform substantially the way members of Congress are elected. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step. The Fair Elections Now Act, H.R. 1826, would create partial public funding for Congressional races, with a 4-1 match for contributions of $100 or less. The money would come from a small fee on goverment contractors.


There are now more than 130 co-sponsors in the House, and they’re pusing for a floor vote. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn’t decided whether to allow the bill to come to the floor.


The politics of that are crazy. If the Democrats want to keep control of the House, they need to have something to campaign on this fall. During the presidential campaign, the party promise reform — but so far, other than a mild health care bill, there’s no real reform on the table.


“If Democrats don’t have a real reform agenda that includes election reform — and that shows the party wants to change how business is done in Washington — we could be in big trouble in the fall,” Steve Hildebrand, a former Obama strategist who is helping the Fair Elections Now Act folks, told me.


So what’s up. Nancy?  Why not at least give the bill a chance.


 

Benefits: May 12-May 18

David Talbot
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0
Benefits: May 12-May 18

Ways to have fun while giving back this week

Wednesday, May 12

Eat Drink Change
Enjoy some of the best Peruvian food in the Bay Area while helping to raise money for Small Schools for Equity (SSE), an organizing project that implements innovative education reform policies and programs to help diverse urban youth achieve their full scholastic potential and develop socially just communities. The June Jordan School for Equity, the pilot school for this project, boasts a 75% college acceptance rate for it’s graduates, ninety-nine percent of which are minorities. So raise a glass of sangria for social justice and 25% of the proceeds will benefit SSE and the leaders of tomorrow.
5:30 p.m., free admission
Mochica
937 Harrison, SF
(415) 278-0480
Piqueos
830 Cortland, SF
(415) 282-8812
www.jjse.org
www.smallschoolsforequity.org

Thursday, May 13

The Arc of San Francisco
Celebrate disability, diversity, and pride at this LGBTQQ community fundraiser for the Arc of San Francisco, a non-profit that serves adults with developmental disabilities. Featuring circus performers, cocktails, a drag show, and a special guest San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty.
7 p.m., $100
Cirque de l’Arc
1500 Howard, SF
www.thearcsf.org/cirque

Bubbles and Bivalves
Learn more about native oysters while helping to support the Oysters on the Half Shell program and efforts to restore the critical underwater ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay. Featuring emcee Wendy Tokuda, CBS 5 news anchor, oysters, hors d’oeuvres, champagne, and libations from regional sustainable restaurants.
7 p.m., $50
The Aquarium of the Bay
Pier 39, SF
www.thewatershedproject.org

Rendezvous of Victory
Attend this benefit for the Middle East Children’s alliance featuring historian Norman Finkelstein, author of This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion, and a performance by Iraqi/UK hip hop artist Lowkey.
7:30 p.m., $15
Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School
1781 Rose, Berk.
(510) 548-0542
www.mecaforpeace.org

Friday, May 14

Inside/Out #20
Attend this issue release party and fundraiser for Hyphen, a volunteer-run non-profit magazine that focuses on the Asian American community, including cultural trends, art, and politics. Featuring DJs Franchise, Esquire, and Citizen Ten, a food cart appearance by Adobo Hobo, live art, and more.
9 p.m.; $10, $20 with subscription
Som. Bar
2925 16th St., SF
www.hyphenmagazine.com

Marin Services for Women Benefit Dinner
Attend this dinner themed “Celebrating Strong Women,” featuring Emmy Award winning actor Mariette Hartley, Jan Wahl, live music, a delicious meal, live and silent auctions, and more. Marin Services for Women is a non-profit that provides a full continuum of alcohol and drug treatment programs specifically designed for women, their children, and their families.
6:30 p.m., $150
Mill Valley Community Center
180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley
(415) 924-5995, ext. 128
www.marinservicesforwomen.org

Saturday, May 15

Beautiful Dreamers
Help keep art alive in Alameda at this benefit for Autobody Fine Art Inc., a non-profit that helps emerging and mid-career artists from the East Bay and surrounding areas, featuring a silent auction, a raffle of art related gifts, services, and local restaurants, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, and live music.
5 p.m., $15
Autobody Fine Art
1517 Park Street, Alameda
(510) 865-2608
www.autobodyfineart.com

Paul “The Lobster” Wells’ Birthday Bash
Enjoy readings, a silent auction, rare rock n’ roll memorabilia, and live entertainment with David Denny, Barry “the Fish” Melton, Joli Valenti, Mitchell Holman, Carlos Reyes, Mindy Canter, Thrasher, Jamie Clark and the Players, and more. Proceeds to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
8:30 p.m., $30-$50
Broadway Studios
435 Broadway, SF
(415) 291-0333‎

Petchitecture 15
Attend this auction of dog houses and cat condos, created by San Francisco architects and designers, to benefit Pets Are Wonderful Support (PAWS), a non-profit that helps people with illnesses keep their pets. Featuring food, drinks, pups, and live and silent auctions of unique pet habitats. Fully licensed and vaccinated pups on leash are welcome.
6:30 p.m., $150
Palace Hotel
2 New Montgomery, SF
www.pawssf.org

Sunday, May 16

Lagunitas Beer Circus
Attend this fundraiser for the Petaluma Music Festival featuring carnival games, aerialists, contortionists, sideshow freaks, great food, beer from ten local breweries, live music, and more.
1 p.m., $35
Lagunitas Brewery
Parking lot and beer sanctuary
1280 N. McDowell, Petaluma
(707) 769-4495

Monday, May 17

Spelling “Bee-In”
Attend this spelling bee to benefit Small Press Distribution (SPD), a non-profit distributor of small press books, featuring local literati attempting to show off their spelling acumen.
7:30 p.m., $75
Crown Point Gallery
20 Hawthorne, SF
www.spdbooks.org/bee

Chris Jackson leaps into the District 10 race

Mary Magee
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9
Chris Jackson leaps into the District 10 race

Community College Board Trustee Chris Jackson has thrown his hat into the District 10 Supervisor race. The move is guaranteed to upset the already crowded field of candidates in the district. District 10 lies in the city’s southeast sector and is home to San Francisco’s largest remaining African American community, and some of its most economically disadvanted communities and environmentally polluted lands.

Jackson was elected to the Community College Board in 2008, winning more than 8,000 votes in District 10, as part of that citywide election. And he has done a good job on the Board ever since.

The only African-American male currently holding elected  public office in San Francisco, Jackson works as a policy analyst for the San Francisco Labor Council. That position is sure to raise questions about Jackson’s ties to Lennar’s redevelopment proposal at Candlestick Point and the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The Labor Council entered a community benefits agreement with the developer shortly before the June 2008 election on Prop. G. and Labor Council representatives appear to be proponents of Lennar’s draft environmental impact report (DEIR). A final version of that report is expected to come before  the Board of Supervisors for approval in June.

But Jackson told us that he will fight to keep District 10 a middle-class district and not a neighborhood dominated by millionaire’s condos.

 

Alerts

David Talbot
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0

alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, MAY 12

Fix California’s budget


Ever wonder if you could do a better job balancing the California budget than the professionals? Now’s your chance to take part in a simulated Budget Challenge that mirrors the decisions the Legislature will make in the next few weeks, accounting for all revenue and expenditures, the governor’s cuts, and more. Share your responses with the Legislature.

6 p.m., free

Richmond City Hall

450 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond

(510) 286-1400

THURSDAY, MAY 13

Ride ’em, city slickers


Join thousands of SF commuters in cycling solidarity at this year’s Bike to Work Day. Slip into the commuter convoy, which provides cool company and the safety of riding in a group; stop by an energizer station, where you can fuel up with free coffee, snacks, and goodies; and use the complimentary downtown bike parking station located at Market and Battery streets.

All day, free

Everywhere SF

www.sfbike.org/btwd

FRIDAY, MAY 14

Berkeley Critical Mass


Live in the carfree world you dream of for an evening at this monthly critical mass ride promoting self-powered commuting and community. Fill the streets with human interaction and DIY transportation!

6 p.m., free

Meet at Berkeley BART Station

Center and Shattuck, Berk.

www.berkeleycriticalmass.org

SATURDAY, MAY 15

Mourning Mothers’ March


Help raise awareness for ongoing homicide violence in Oakland and the impact it has on victims, survivors of victims, and the community at large. Mourn the senseless loss of life and spread hope for the future at this march around Lake Merritt.

Noon, free

Meet at Lake Merritt bandstand

Grand and Bellevue, Oak.

(510) 581-0100

Peace Flag-raising Ceremony


Celebrate International Conscientious Objector’s Day at this raising of a second Peace flag with war resisters from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

11 a.m., free

Civic Center Park, flagpole

2180 Milvia, Berk.

www.couragetoresist.org

Stop the Tea Party


Attend "Tea Party: Corporate and Racist Politics in Disguise," a public forum on how to fight back against extremist Tea Party politics. The event features Marsha Feinland from the Peace and Freedom Party, Don Belcher from Single-Payer Now, and Mark Ostapiak from Socialist Action.

7 p.m., $3–$5 donation

Center for Political Education

522 Valencia, SF

(415) 401-7471

TUESDAY, MAY 18

"Oakland’s Health Disparities in Black and White"


According to a report produced by the Alameda County Public Health Department, "compared to a white child in the Oakland Hills, African American children born in West Oakland can expect to die almost 15 years earlier." Hear Dr. Muntu Davis, one of the authors of the report, and representatives from the African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) discuss how the African American community can control of health care as part of the solution to the current community health crisis in Oakland.

7 p.m., free

Humanist Hall

390 27th St., Oakl.

(510) 763-3342 2

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Sit-lie proponents criticize their allies

Sasha Cuttler
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37
Sit-lie proponents criticize their allies

It’s really amusing to read the recriminations and second-guessing from the most vociferous proponents of criminalizing sitting or lying on San Francisco sidewalks after yesterday’s Public Safety Committee hearing on the matter. And the funniest part is their failure to understand that this punitive, overreaching law just isn’t needed to deal with aspects of street life that scare them most, as the police reluctantly testified.

Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius and Haight Street resident Arthur Evans have been the two most vocal promoters of the sit-lie ordinance, and both sounded similar criticisms of the Police Department and the Mayor’s Office (as well as progressives, their usual target), Nevius in the paper and Evans on the Guardian’s Politics blog (last comment on this item). They call on the so-called “moderates” step up their games or be defeated.

But they miss the point, and falsely believe that “common sense” is on their side. Certainly police officers have the ability to deal with rowdy groups of vagrants who are blocking the sidewalks and intimidating people. They do it all the time, and simply walking a beat usually prevents such behavior. To argue that tough police officers are powerless to deal with thugs defies common sense. And Assistant Chief Kevin Cashman even testified that police don’t need an official citizen complaint to deal with people who are blocking the sidewalk, debunking a fallacy that is oft-cited by Evans and others.

But the efforts by Evans and the Chamber of Commerce to rebrand the sit-lie ordinance as the Civil Sidewalks Law – and to threaten to use it as a wedge issue on the November ballot – reveals their true intentions. The bottom line is they don’t like the more unruly aspects of urban life, and they believe that they can legislate “civility” and have the cops enforce it.

That’s a scary notion, and it’s part of larger campaign to, as Nevius writes, “demonstrate to the far-left supervisors that they were seriously out of step with the residents of the city.” Nevius, who is not a resident of this city, wants San Francisco to be a bit more like his hometown of Walnut Creek. But San Franciscans shouldn’t fall prey to their divisive fear-mongering, and supervisors like Sup. David Chiu – who has publicly toyed with the idea of compromising on sit-lie with some kind of restorative justice program – should heed the message of this hearing and resist creating an unnecessary new law that the community opposes.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen yesterday as the committee voted to continue the matter for two weeks. And you better believe that next time, the Evan-Nevius crowd will come back strong, with more fearful anecdotes than ever. But the opposition campaign to sit-lie has been strong, creative, and effective — the true voice of San Francisco — and it seems up to the fight.

Is it okay to be quietly gay?

Zelda Bronstein
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16
Is it okay to be quietly gay?

The White House barely had time to announce President Obama’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, before the spin controllers were scrambling to deal with rumors that — gasp! the horror! — she might be gay.

The Chron blamed “the lesbian rumor” on “conservatives.” The Washington Post (and the White House) blamed CBS for letting a right-wing blogger report as a fact that Kagan likes girls, leading to this great moment in American politics:

“An administration official, who asked not to be identified discussing personal matters, said Kagan is not a lesbian.”  

And of course, no Washington rumor should ever be believed until an official source who won’t be named officially denies it.

The real question here is: Who cares? It’s actually worth discussing.

Andrew Sullivan kind of mangles logic in a post called “So is she gay?” . He starts off saying “it should mean nothing either way,” but then argues that it does:

“To put it another way: Is Obama actually going to use a Supreme Court nominee to advance the cause of the closet (as well as kill any court imposition of marriage equality)? And can we have a clear, factual statement as to the truth? In a free society in the 21st Century, it is not illegitimate to ask. And it is cowardly not to tell.”

Harvey Milk, of course, always said that everyone should be out, and that the cause of queer rights depended on tearing open the closet door. But that was then, and this is now, and I wonder: Has the United States, and the queer community, reached a point where it’s okay for someone to say that his or her sexuality is none of anyone’s business?

Judge Vaughn Walker, who’s handling the Prop. 8 case, is gay — but has never made a big deal of it one way or the other. I guess he’s sorta in the closet, but not really — he just keeps his personal life to himself.

What if Kagan’s the same way? What if she’s got a lesbian partner but isn’t going to talk about it? What about if she’s straight and isn’t going to talk about it? How can the White House prove she’s not gay, anyway — is her confirmation hearing going to feature a ten-minute televised session of her making out with a man? (And how would we know she wasn’t just acting, anyway?

Obviously, if she is gay, and she came out, having a lesbian on the Supreme Court would be a huge deal to the queer community, a major breakthrough in one of the highest offices in the land. And you can certainly argue that she shouldn’t be hiding anything, that the whole denial and ducking is an admission that homosexuality is something to be hidden in the first place. And that’s really sad.

In a perfect world, none of this would matter at all, and she could freely talk about her sexuality without any impact on her political career. But in a perfect world, could she also just say: Ain’t none of your business?

And are we anywhere close to that today?

SFBG Radio: Johnny and Tim on immigration politics

Zelda Bronstein
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0
SFBG Radio: Johnny and Tim on immigration politics

Today, the always calm, moderate and soft-spoken Johnny Angel Wendell talks to Tim Redmond about how the insanity of immigration politics in Arizona is going to impact the races for governor and senate in California. You can listen after the jump.

sfbg radio 5/11/2010 by SFBG

Moyers: Plutocracy and democracy can’t co-exist

Sasha Cuttler
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0
Moyers: Plutocracy and democracy can’t co-exist

The great public-interest journalist Bill Moyers, 75, ended his long-running Journal program on Friday with a warning: Plutocracy and democracy don’t mix. And these days, it appears that the former has all but destroyed the latter, turning American democracy into a cruel and deceptive farce. The fact that many readers will need to scramble to their dictionaries or computers to look up “plutocracy” is a good sign of how unaware the average citizen is of what ails this country and keeps them down. So let me save y’all the trouble, it means rule by the rich, and it’s what we now have in this country.

I got a lot of criticism last week when I raised the issue of how Meg Whitman, Goldman Sachs, and the other scions of our plutocracy have fatally undermined our democratic values, which used to involve taxing the rich adequately enough to fund our infrastructure, alleviate poverty, and protect the planet. So rather than repeating that point, I thought I’d just let Moyers carry the argument, as he did so effectively on his final Journal broadcast, calling for a kind of public-interest journalism, biased in favor of the people and the planet, that I firmly believe in. He’ll be missed, and we would all be wise to heed his words and his warning.

Moyers said: 

You’ve no doubt figured out my bias by now. I’ve hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.

Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don’t try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don’t mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.

Plutocracy is not an American word but it’s become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly “bang the drum on plutonomy.”

And bang they did, with an “equity strategy” for their investors, entitled, “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer.” Here are some excerpts:

“Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper…[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years…”

“…the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US– the plutonomists in our parlance– have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US…[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”

“…[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.”

And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.

Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on their side? It hasn’t mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street’s bidding.

Don’t blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call “campaign contributions” and Tony Soprano would call “protection.”

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.

So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.

Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.

So along with Jim Hightower and Iowa’s concerned citizens, and many of you, I am biased: democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

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