Rent

The test of the Tenderloin

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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16
The test of the Tenderloin

caitlin@sfbg.com

This is a story about love and money. Or a story about love, money, and location. — Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City (Verso 2000)

It’s a sunny day in the most maligned neighborhood in San Francisco. I’m walking down a busy sidewalk with an excited Randy Shaw, long-time housing advocate. He’s giving me a tour of his Tenderloin.

“There’s history everywhere you look here,” he notes as we rush about the dingy blocks of one of the city’s most densely populated, economically bereft communities. In a half-untucked navy button-down and square-frame glasses, Shaw reels off evidence of this legacy faster than I can write it down and still maintain our walking pace.

To our left, Hyde Street Studios, where the Grateful Dead recorded its 1970 album American Beauty. Across the street, a ramshackle building that once housed Guido Caccienti’s Black Hawk nightclub, where the sounds of jam-fests by the likes of Billie Holiday and John Coltrane would echo out onto the streets during its heyday in the 1950s. Throughout its history, the Tenderloin has been renowned for its nightlife: music, theater, sex work — and the social space that occurs between them.

Shaw came to the Tenderloin 30 years ago as a young law student and founded and built the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a nonprofit agency that is now one of the largest property owners in the neighborhood and employs more than 250 full-time workers. Shaw has spent the last few decades fighting to improve conditions in the single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, once notorious for malfunctioning heating systems and mail rooms that would dump the letters for their hundreds of low-income residents into a pile on the floor rather than fit them into personal lock boxes (which now line the walls of THC’s lobbies).

But that activism isn’t the reason for this tour. No, today Shaw is showing me why tourism can work in the Tenderloin. The heavy iron gate of an SRO is quickly buzzed open as the doorman recognizes him. Inside, working-class seniors mill about aided by walkers — this particular property is an old folks’ home — but over our heads, affixed to a majestically high ceiling, looms a triple-tiered glass and metal chandelier, evidence of the area’s architecturally important past.

“When I show people this,” Shaw smiles at my amazement at this bling in a nonprofit apartment building, “they’re amazed at the quality of the housing.” Further down the road, we peep in at a vividly Moorish geometric vaulted ceiling and a lobby that once housed a boxing gym where Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali liked to spar. Both are now home to the inner city’s poorest residents.

Of course, it’s not just tours that we’re talking when it comes to Shaw’s plans for the future. Shaw has acquired a 6,400-square-foot storefront in the Cadillac Hotel on the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth streets, where he plans to open the Uptown Tenderloin Museum in 2012. He says it will showcase the hood’s historical legacy as well as house a nighttime music venue in the basement. The increased foot traffic, he says, will do good things for public safety (a problem that has been identified as a high priority by the resident-run Tenderloin Neighborhood Association) and bring business to the neighborhood’s impressive collection of small ethnic restaurants.

An increased focus on the Tenderloin’s heritage and public image, Shaw says, will translate to more jobs and a better quality of life for the people who live here. “My goal is to have this be the first area in an American city where low income people have a high quality of life,” he says.

If Shaw is correct, it will indeed be a first. Many cities have attempted to transform low income areas with arts districts — and the end result has typically been the displacement of the poorer residents. Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach described the process: “Gentrification follows a very specific path. First come police sweeps, then the arts, then the displacement. That’s the path that we’re seeing. Hopefully we’ll be able to avoid the displacement part,” she says.

It’d be great if the Tenderloin took the road less traveled — but will it?

Shaw’s best-case scenario seems unlikely, according to Chester Hartman, a renowned urban planning scholar and author of the numerous studies of San Francisco history and the activist handbook Displacement: How to Fight It (National Housing Law Project 1982). Hartman doubts the Tenderloin will remain a housing option for the city’s poor, given its central location and market trends. “The question is, what proportion will move and what will stay?” he said in a phone interview.

Earlier this summer, the National Endowment of the Arts awarded the SF Arts Commission $250,000 toward an arts-based “revitalization of the mid-Market neighborhood.” The area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin, is considered by many to be the more outwardly visible face of the TL. In truth, the two neighborhoods share many of the same issues and public characteristics, including high density living and prominent issues with drugs.

Amy Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of neighborhood business development, said the Newsom administration is using the money “to implement arts programming that would have an immediate impact on the street. These activities would then build momentum for the longer-term projects.” At this point, plans for that “immediate impact” have started with the installation of lights on Market Street between Sixth and Eighth streets. Two other projects are also in effect: a city-sponsored weekly arts market on United Nations Plaza and an al fresco public concert series.

It’s hard to distinguish these moves from a general trend toward rebranding the image of the Tenderloin. These streets have already seen Newsom announce a historic preservation initiative that put $15,000 worth of commemorative plaques on buildings; it was also announced they would be added to the National Register of Historic Places, a move that allows property owners deep tax cuts for building renovations.

Cohen said her office has spent time trying to attract a supermarket (something the neighborhood, although flush with corner stores, currently lacks), but efforts seem to be faltering. “Grocery store operators and other retailers perceive that the area is unsafe and have expressed concerns about the safety of their employees and customers,” Cohen said. “The arts strategy makes sense because it builds on the assets that are there. Cultivating the performing and visual arts uses that are already succeeding will ultimately enhance the neighborhood’s ability to attract restaurants, retail, and needed services like grocery stores.”

These days, many of the small businesses in the area have window signs hyping “Uptown Tenderloin: Walk, Dine, Enjoy” over graphics of jazzy, people-free high-rises. Looking skyward, one observes the recent deployment of tidy street banners funded by the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District that pay homage to the number of untouched historic buildings in the neighborhood. The banners read “409 historic buildings in 33 blocks. Yeah, we’re proud.”

Figuring out who benefits from these new bells and whistles can seem baffling at times. Even the museum plan, which Shaw says will draw inspiration in part from New York’s Tenement Museum, has drawn criticism. A July San Francisco Magazine blog post was subtitled “An indecent proposal that puzzled even the San Francisco Visitors Bureau” and likened Shaw’s attempts to the “reality tourism movement” that takes travelers through gang zones in L.A. and poverty-stricken townships in South Africa.

This seems to be a misconstruction of what he’s attempting. “You know what no one ever calls out? The Mission mural tours, the Chinatown tours,” Shaw says.

And Shaw scoffs when I bring up that PR bane of the urban renewer: gentrification. He takes me through a brief rundown of the strict zoning laws in the Tenderloin, adding that many people don’t believe that poor people have the right to live in a high-quality neighborhood: “I haven’t been down here for 30 years to create a neighborhood no one wants to live in.”

Indeed, thanks to the efforts of Shaw and others, it would be hard for even the most determined developers to get rid of the SRO housing in the Tenderloin.

In the 1980s, community activists struggled to change the zoning designation of the neighborhood, which lacked even a name on many city maps. The area was zoned for high-rise buildings and was being encroached on by the more expensive building projects of tourist-filled Union Square, Civic Center, and the wealthier Nob Hill neighborhood. Their success came in the form of 1990s Residential Hotel Anti-Conversion Ordinance, which placed strict limits on landlords flipping their SROs into more expensive housing.

Hartman remains unconvinced of the efficacy of the protective measures activists have won in years past; indeed, even SRO rental prices have soared. According to the Central City SRO Collaborative, in the decade after the Anti-Conversion Ordinance, rental prices increased by 150 percent, not only pricing residents out of the Tenderloin but out of the city. “Where do they move?” Hartman asked. “It’s probably the last bastion of low-income housing in the city. That changes the class composition of the city.”

“The neighborhood has been changing slowly but steadily,” says District Six Sup. Chris Daly when reached by e-mail for comment on the Tenderloin’s future. He writes that rents in the neighborhood have been consistently rising and that several condo development proposals have crossed his desk. Daly has been involved in negotiating “community benefits” and quotas for low income housing in past mid-Market housing projects, but has been disappointed by subsequent affordable housing levels in projects like Trinity Plaza on the corner of Sixth and Market streets. In terms of the Tenderloin, he said, “it is untrue to say that the neighborhood is immune from gentrifying forces. It is shielded, but not immune.”

But some see the influx of art-based attention to the area as a possible boon to residents. Debra Walker, a San Franciscan artist who is running for the District 6 supervisor post, said she believes arts can be used “organically to resolve some of the chronic problems in the Tenderloin, street safety being the primary one in my mind.”

Though most of her fellow candidates expressed similar views when contacted for this story, western SoMa neighborhood activist Jim Meko said he thinks artists in the area are being used to line the pockets of the real estate industry. “The idea of creating an arts district is an amenity that the real estate dealers want to see because it makes the neighborhood less scary for their upper class audience” he says.

The area clearly has a rich legacy of nightlife, arts, and theater. The Warfield is here, as is American Conservatory Theater, the Orpheum, and the Golden Gate. So is the unofficial center of SF’s “off-off Broadway district,” which includes Cutting Ball Theater and Exit Theater. The Exit has been located in the TL since its first performance in 1983, held in the lobby of the Cadillac Hotel, and sponsors the neighborhood’s yearly Fringe Festival. There are art galleries and soup kitchens, youth and age, and more shouted greetings on the streets than you’ll hear anywhere else in the city.

No one is more aware of this diversity of character than Machiko Saito, program director of Roaddawgz, a TL creative drop-in center and resource referral service for homeless youth. I met Saito in the Roaddawgz studio, which occupies a basement below Hospitality House, a homeless community center that also houses a drop-in self-help center, an employment program, men’s shelter and art studio for adults in transition.

Despite its being empty in the morning before the open hours that bring waves of youth to its stacks of paints and silk-screens, Roaddawgz is in a glorious state of bohemian dishevelment that implies a well-loved space. It could be a messy group studio if not for the load-bearing post in the center of the room covered with flyers for homelessness resource centers and a “missing” poster signed “your Mom loves you.”

We talk about how important it is that the kids Saito works with have a place like this, a spot where they can create “when all you want to do is your art and if you can’t you’ll die.” A career artist herself, she cuts a dramatic figure in black, safety pins, and deep red lipstick painted into a striking cupid’s bow. Her long fingernails tap the cluttered desk in front of her as she tells me stories from the high-risk lives that Roaddawgz youth come to escape: eviction, cop harassment, theft, rape.

The conversation moves to some of the recent developments in the area. Saito and I recently attended an arts advisory meeting convened by the Tenderloin Economic Development Corporation’s executive director, Elvin Padilla, who has received praise from many of the TL types I spoke with regarding his efforts to connect different factions of the community. Attendees ranged from a polished representative from ACT, which is considering building another theater, for students, in a space on Market and Mason streets, to heralded neighborhood newbies Grey Area Foundation, to Saito and longtime community art hub Luggage Store’s cofounder Darryl Smith. Talk centered on sweeping projects that could develop a more cohesive “identity” for the neighborhood.

I ask Saito how it felt for her to be involved with a group whose vision of the neighborhood might be focused on slightly different happenings than what she lives through Roaddawgz. She says she’s been to gatherings in the past where negative things about the Tenderloin were highlighted. Of Padilla’s arts advisory meeting, she says, “I think that one of the reasons I wanted to go was that it’s important [for attendees] to remember that there’s a community out there. Things can get really complicated. It’s hard to come up with decisions that affect everyone positively. If we’re going to say, ‘The homeless are bad; the drug addicts are bad; the business owners that don’t beautify their storefronts…” She trails off for a moment. “I don’t want to lose the heart of the Tenderloin.”

In yet another Tenderloin basement — this one housing the North of Market-Tenderloin CBD, an organization that is known for its work employing ex-addicts and adults in transition — Rick Darnell has created the Tenderloin Art Lending Library. The library accepts donated works from painters and makes them available for use by Tenderloin residents, many of whom have recently moved into their SRO housing and are in need of a homey touch.

Darnell is rightfully ecstatic at the inclusive nature of his library, but has been hurt over its reception at an arts advisory meeting he attended to publicize its creation. “Someone whispered under their breath ‘I would never lend anything to anyone in the Tenderloin,’ ” he tells me. The exclusion that Saito and Darnell sometimes feel highlights the reality that the definition of the Tenderloin might well vary, even among those who are set on making it “a better place.” The arts community appears to suffer from fractures that appear along the lines of where people live, their organizational affiliation, their housing status, and how they think art should play a role in community building.

Sammy Soun is one Tenderloin resident who would welcome an increased focus on art in the Tenderloin. Soun was born in a Thailand refugee camp to Cambodian parents fleeing the civil wars in their country. He grew up in the Tenderloin, where his family lived packed into small studios and apartments.

But he was part of a community, with plenty of support, and lives in the neighborhood to this day, as do one of his four siblings and his daughter. Soun paints, does graffiti, draws — he’s considering transferring from City College to the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked at the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club for nine years, giving back to the kids he says “are the future. They’re going to be the ones that promote this place or keep it going — if they want to.” His sister, cousins, and uncles still live in the neighborhood. You might say he has a vested interest in the area’s future.

He finds the incoming resources for the Tenderloin arts scene to be a mixed bag. Soun has never been to the Luggage Store, although it’s one of the longtime community art hubs in the area. He can’t relate to the kinds of art done at the neighborhood’s recent digital arts center, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, though he says the space has contacted him and friends to visit. His disconnect from the arts scene implies that future arts projects need to work harder on their community outreach — or even better, planning — with artists who call the Tenderloin home.

But Soun loves the new Mona Caron mural the CBD sponsored on the corner of Jones Street and Golden Gate Avenue. Well-known for her panoramic bike path mural behind the Church Street Safeway, Caron painted “Windows into the Tenderloin” after dozens of interviews and tours of the neighborhood with community members. Its “before and after” panels are a dummies’ guide for anyone seeking input on ways to strengthen the Tenderloin community — though the “after” does show structural changes like roads converted into greenways and roof gardens sending tendrils down the sides of buildings, the focal point is the visibility of families. Where children were ushered through empty parking lots single-file in the “before” section, the second panel shows families strolling, children running, a space that belongs to them.

Our interview is probably the first time somebody has asked Soun where he thinks arts funding in the Tenderloin should go. “For projects by the kids in the community,” he said.

Truth be told, more art of any kind can only make the Tenderloin a better place — but if you’re trying to improve quality life, focus needs to be on plans that positively affect residents of all ages — art can be a vital part of that, but it should be one part of a plan that ensures rent control, safe conditions, and access to services. After all, if you’re going to rebrand the Tenderloin, you might want to look at the painting on the wall.

Dollars or sense?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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28
Dollars or sense?

rebeccab@sfbg.com

It’s no secret that San Francisco is a particularly costly place to live. It consistently ranks in the top 10 most expensive cities nationwide, and it isn’t uncommon to see people renting out their walk-in closets as makeshift bedrooms to make ends meet.

There’s ample evidence that the city’s market-rate housing is out of reach for many families, middle-class workers, and low-income populations, particularly during the recession. Yet the shortage of affordable housing is a problem that is going largely unaddressed at City Hall.

The city’s General Plan estimates that a full 61 percent of new housing would have to be affordable to satisfy the housing needs of city residents, but even the most demanding development standards fall far short, producing only about half that amount. And while most new affordable housing is built for low-income people, a sizable portion is intended for first-time homebuyers with salaries at the highest threshold of affordability. In recent years, about one-third of new “affordable housing” was built to sell to people with “moderate” incomes.

So as big plans are mapped out for new residential developments composed of mostly market-rate units, what’s the strategy for addressing the underlying affordability gap? And will it ever be enough to keep from further turning San Francisco into a city of rich people while its workers are forced to live elsewhere?

This map, which appears in San Francisco’s Five-Year Consolidated Plan, charts concentrations of low- and moderate-income households in the city using HUD 2000 income data. Under federal guidelines, people with low and moderate income could be eligible for affordable housing.

A San Francisco Unified School District proposal to create new housing for San Francisco teachers underscores just how mismatched housing prices are to income. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) estimates that San Francisco renters paying market rate in 2010 would have to earn $56,240 to afford rent a one-bedroom apartment, $70,400 for a two-bedroom unit, and $94,000 for a three-bedroom unit, assuming they spend no more than about one-third of their income on housing.

A starting teacher’s salary in San Francisco is $50,000, so early-career educators may feel the squeeze. A survey of teachers conducted for the proposal found that 81 percent of respondents were renters, most living with unrelated roommates. More than half had plans to relocate in five years to a city where they could afford to be homeowners.

Housing was a hot-button issue at the Sept. 16 Planning Commission hearing on the environmental impact review for a hospital and housing complex that California Pacific Medical Center wants to build near Van Ness Avenue.

“The CPMC EIR fails miserably to analyze the income of the CPMC work force, and where it’s supposed to be housed,” affordable housing advocate Calvin Welch told the Guardian. “It’s a profoundly important question. If they are [providing] jobs that produce incomes that are insufficient to pay for average market-rate housing in San Francisco, who’s responsibility is it going to be to build housing for that workforce?”

 

WHO CAN AFFORD IT?

San Francisco has a reputation as a diverse, politically engaged hub that supports emerging artists, independent thinkers, and advocates for youth, workers’ rights, healthy ecosystems, protections for the most vulnerable segments of society, and hundreds of other causes. Without economic diversity — which is only possible when housing is available to people with a range of incomes — it might be a different place.

NLIHC estimates that 65 percent of San Francisco households are renters, and a significant number are what the Mayor’s Office of Housing (MOH) calls “cost-burdened,” shelling out more than a third of their incomes on rent. To get by, tenants have been known to cram roommates in like sardines, or cling tenaciously to a rent-controlled unit.

In a thick report outlining affordable housing goals for 2010–14, MOH and two other city agencies clearly articulate the housing challenges facing low-income renters. For one thing, the report says rents are going up despite the economic recession and declining home prices. And most people’s salaries don’t stretch far enough to cover those high prices. Even though there are 16 billionaires and some fabulously wealthy CEOs residing in San Francisco, the majority of people work in more mundane occupations like waiting tables, retail, office work, nonprofit jobs, teaching, health care, or public service.

The MOH report notes that despite the city’s relatively high median income, there’s a widening gap between top earners and people on the lower end of the spectrum, so few households actually wind up in that middle zone. “In fact, over a quarter of San Francisco’s population earns under 50 percent of [area median income],” the report states. For individuals in 2010, this translates to one in four people earning $34,800 or less. Compounding that problem are recent unemployment figures indicating that nearly one in 10 is jobless.

About one half of San Francisco’s population is considered low- or moderate-income, the housing report notes, using the standards used to formulate affordable housing prices. MOH uses a tiered income matrix, calculated using federal guidelines, to determine who could qualify for housing below the market rate. If you make $20,900 or less, you’re counted as “extremely low income.” You’re “very low income” if you make between $21,000 and $34,800, “low income” if you earn between $35,496 and $55,700, and if you make between $56,376 and $83,500, you count as “moderate income.” Even these figures are skewed higher because they include data from wealthy Marin County. As a point of comparison, U.S. Census data estimates that the median income for American workers was $29,530 over the last several years.

Most of the new affordable housing constructed in San Francisco is aimed toward people in the lowest ranges, but in recent years one-third was built for those with moderate incomes, which could gentrify some parts of the city. “Supervisorial Districts 3, 6 and 10 had rates of more than 40 percent extremely low and low-income,” the MOH report notes. “These three districts make up the entire eastern part of the city.”

A Guardian analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational and wage estimates for 2009 suggests that about 71 percent of people who work in San Francisco (many commute from less expensive places) earned less than that highest “moderate” salary limit of $83,500. It suggests that the vast majority of the workforce could not afford market-rate housing unless they sought it in pairs or groups.

“A big issue is the inability of San Francisco’s employment market to produce jobs that pay people enough to afford housing,” Welch says. “There’s a mismatch between market-rate income and market-rate housing costs. We’re housing somebody else’s workforce.”

Another stab at assessing the affordable housing need gazes into the future. The Housing Element of the San Francisco General Plan includes an estimate for the city’s future housing needs for the better part of the decade. The city should build 31,200 new housing units to meet its need, the General Plan says, and “at least 39 percent of these new units must be affordable to very low and low-income households. Another 22 percent should be affordable to households with moderate incomes.”

What this adds up to is a full 61 percent of new residential development in San Francisco ought to be dedicated to some form of affordable housing. The calculation reveals a lot about the condition San Francisco is in, but it might as well be chalked up as a hollow academic exercise. Indeed, the report deems this goal “unrealistic.” The reality of the market and chronic government deficits ensures that there will not even be an attempt to meet it.

 

IF YOU BUILD IT

The trouble with affordable housing is that developers won’t build it unless there is a financial incentive. “The only way it works is not in the marketplace,” Welch said. “There’s no such thing as affordable land, affordable sheetrock, affordable architects, or affordable engineers. The profound condition … is that the market cannot produce affordable housing.” As long as developers can make higher profits building market-rate, they will.

That’s why government steps in to subsidize or mandate new affordable housing construction or preserve existing stock. Under the Inclusionary Housing Ordinance, if developers decide not to build the required 15 percent of affordable units, they must pay an in-lieu fee that gets funneled into an affordable housing fund.

In a good year, MOH Executive Director Douglas Shoemaker told the Guardian, the city receives $10 to $15 million from these fees, which is used in partnership with developers to build affordable projects. That system hasn’t worked so well lately. Last year funds for affordable housing were depleted instead of bolstered. Developers who paid their fees in anticipation of building new projects requested refunds after their projects were stalled, Shoemaker told the Guardian, so MOH gave back up to $12 million to developers instead of using that money to build new affordable housing.

This year, Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced what he called an “economic stimulus” program that allowed developers to defer payment of in-lieu fees. This guarantees that it will be a long, long time before new affordable housing can be built using those funds. So as it stands, the inclusionary housing law isn’t so effective at producing new affordable housing.

Projects done in conjunction with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, meanwhile, do include higher portions of affordable housing. With all of the planned Redevelopment projects combined — Treasure Island, the Hunter’s Point shipyard, and others — the city can expect to see perhaps 7,000 new affordable housing units in coming years, a portion of which will be condos meant for people in the “moderate” income range. It may well be better than other cities have offered, but it doesn’t begin to address the true need for more than 19,000 units outlined in the General Plan.

Shoemaker noted that San Francisco is a cut above the rest when it comes to affordable-housing requirements. “I just don’t think you could find a city that has more aggressive goals,” he said, noting that in major redevelopment areas, “We’re getting like 30 percent of homes to be affordable on some level.” Yet Shoemaker acknowledged, “the need is intense,” and “there’s more people we would like to serve.”

Olson Lee, deputy executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, also described San Francisco as taking a very aggressive stance on affordable housing. Redevelopment devotes 50 percent of its tax-increment financing to affordable housing, where the state requires just 20 percent, Lee said. And some Redevelopment project areas include twice as much affordable housing as is required by state law, he added. “The city has done a tremendous amount of affordable housing,” he said. However, “the fact of the matter is, there’s a greater demand for affordable housing than the number of units.”

From 2005 to 2009, there were 3,607 new affordable housing units constructed, mostly for people at the lowest end of the pay scale, MOH reports. But in that same time frame, 3,465 rental units were converted to condominiums. One could argue that the city essentially broke even with its affordable housing stock in a decade where housing prices almost doubled. As San Francisco housing prices skyrocketed, the city’s 170,000 rent-controlled units served as the saving grace for the majority who couldn’t afford market-rate, and condo conversions continue to threaten the erosion of that very significant housing stock.

Debra Walker, a candidate for District 6 and a tenant representative on the Building Inspection Commission, told the Guardian that she believes a new financing system is needed for affordable housing. “The argument for development is that we get affordable housing money out of it,” she said, but “the inclusionary doesn’t get us enough housing. We cannot include affordable in those high-rises, because they’re so expensive to build.”

She has talked up the idea of a real estate transfer tax that would create a dedicated fund that could then be used in partnerships with affordable-housing developers. Shoemaker, for his part, noted that having a dedicated revenue stream for affordable housing would be very helpful. A committee comprised of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, Welch, developer Oz Erickson, and Shoemaker was formed earlier this year and actually arrived at a deal, but Newsom ultimately rejected it. Other creative solutions, Walker says, might include reusing shuttered commercial properties or building cheaper by design using different building materials. “It’s about looking at what it is we need,” she said, “and realizing people are in a pinch.”

The greatest complicating factor of the current system, in which the city relies on market-rate development to get new affordable housing, is that even though there a some 40,000 new residential units in the pipeline, developers can’t secure financing to start building them. For now, in the down economy, they only exist on paper.

“They’ll never get built,” Welch predicts, and as long as Newsom continues to extend entitlements for those planned projects in hopes that the market will get a jump, “it’s freezing September 2008 conditions, evidently forever,” limiting opportunities to build something more reasonable.

“They’re zombies,” Welch added. “Who the fuck is going to pay $2 million for a new condo when they can buy a $4 million building for $1 million in foreclosure?” But if the need for affordable housing began to be addressed, he said, something might start to happen. “If you converted half the pipeline units to rental,” he theorized, “they might get built.”

Life and death in Sunnydale

Mary Magee
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7

Photographs by Sarah Phelan

On the first Friday afternoon in September, as most folks were trying to get an early start on their Labor Day weekend, C.L.A.E.R. director Sharen Hewitt and her advisory board member Carrie Manuel welcomed friends, family, neighbors—and a handful of D10 candidates—to a basketball hoop dedication ceremony outside C.L.A.E.R.’s office on Brookdale Ave at the heart of the  violence-racked Sunnydale housing project in Visitacion Valley.

By afternoon”s end, Hewitt had managed to get D 10 candidates Malia Cohen, Kristine Enea, Chris Jackson, Tony Kelly and Marlene Tran shooting hoops with a dozen African American youngsters who live in Sunnydale, the city’s largest public housing project, and talking about what they have learned about life and death in this deceptively pleasant-looking sun-and-fog bathed spot that overlooks the Bay, backs onto McLaren Park and the neighboring Gleneagles Golf course–little knowing that within two hours, yet another young black man would be fatally shot one block away from C.L.A.E.R.’s office.

Sunnydale’s appealing geographical location has made it the target of redevelopment plans that seek to rebuild 785 low income unit and add 925 market rate units into the mix—plans that have Hewitt concerned that Sunnydale’s current residents could end up being displaced through a combination of factors, including the San Francisco Housing Authority’s  announcement that many of these residents owe thousands in back rent, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s announcement that he is seeking a gang injunction against 41 alleged members of the Down Below Gangsters and the Towerside Gang, who have been engaged in a violent turf war in the Suinnydale for the past three years.

Many of these alleged gang members don’t actually live in Sunnydale, but their friends, families and their own children still do. Currently, seventy-five percent of lease holders in Sunnydale are single female heads of household. And while African Americansaccount for only six percent of San Francisco’s population citywide, black males represent 60 percent of the county jail’s population and feature in disproportionately high numbers in the city’s homicide statistics.

An unfortunate case in point occurred just hours after C.L.A.E.R.’s basketball hoop dedication, when 38 year old Asa Roberts was fatally shot on the first block of Brookdale Avenue, which is a stone’s throw from Hewitt’s office. Found after police responded to a report of gunshots at 8:20 p.m. at the Sunnydale projects, Roberts was pronounced dead at San Francisco General Hospital on what was his 38th birthday, making him the city’s 35th homicide this year.

And at the C.L.A.E.R. ceremony, held at 5:30 p.m. that day, the majority of kids in attendance raised their hands when asked if they knew someone who had been murdered—a shocking illustration of the traumatic stress that these children live with, even as they reside in one of the richest cities in the world

“This is more than just a basketball dedication ceremony and this is hardly just any basketball hoop, this hoop represents a small step toward safety and security for the residents of Sunnydale public housing,” Hewitt told the crowd, just hours before she would find herself rushing around the projects, trying to determine if families and kids in Sunnydale were safe, in the wake of Roberts’ shooting.

“In remembrance of Labor Day, one mother’s labor of love will unite a community under siege,” Hewitt said at C.L.A.E.R.’s 5:30 p.m. hoop dedication, recalling how she had seen Carrie Manuel’s four boys playing basketball against the wall of a public housing unit that was home to an old gas line with pipes that were in dire need of repair. Shocked, Hewitt called upon city partners and C.L.A.E.R. donors in an effort to get these boys a real hoop and thus minimize safety concerns.

“Because the little things change a community, “ Hewitt said.

Hewitt recalled how Sup. Bevan Dufty put her in touch with the Department of Recreation and Parks and the San Francisco Parks Trust, when he heard about the basketball hoop situation, and that these departments helped heed her call to action.

Hewitt also tipped her hat to the five D 10 candidates who attended the hoop dedication: Kristine Enea for being the first to respond to this particular crisis, Malia Cohen for her ongoing support of CLAER’s Brookdale Center, Tony Kelly for his general support of the community, Chris Jackson for connecting Sunnydale residents, including four named in Herrera’s gang injunction, to the Gateway to College program, and Marlene Tran for her work on public safety.

After the dedication, Hewitt paired each D10 candidate with one of the bright-eyed small boys that were eagerly waiting to play ball, as Manuel looked on.

“She’s a woman under siege,” Hewitt said of Manuel, recalling how this woman and her kids witnessed a homicide outside their window, and how Manuel’s 16-year-old son was murdered before his child—her first grandson—was born. “This family has been besieged by no less than three murders, but they don’t even have space to run up and down,” Hewitt observed.

“Look at what we do with nothing,” Hewitt said, pointing to the basketball hoop outside C.L.A.E.R.’s office. “We are not a service provider in a box.”

“Look at this beautiful property,” Hewitt said, pointing to the Bay that sparkled in the distance below and the fingers of  fog that tumbled across the sun-baked hills behind Viz Valley. “But this has not been such a beautiful place. This has been a forgotten district, a forgotten neighborhood, but not in our name.”

“This mother,” Hewitt continued, pointing to Manuel, “must be embraced by all of you. And we must give these boys more options than a cage or a coffin.”

Hewitt was referring to the disproportionately high number of young black males that end up jailed or dead in San Francisco, with many of those arrests and fatalities occurring in and around Sunnydale. But while the City Attorney’s office has responded to this pattern of crime and violence by issuing gang injunctions, Hewitt believes this strategy is a waste of money and resources, given that local non-profits which seek to provide education and restorative justice, have just had their budgets decimated.

Last month, City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed an injunction naming 41 alleged members of the Down Below Gangsters and the Towerside Gang, claiming that the two groups were engaged in turf wars that had terrorized the residents of the Sunnydale housing projects for the last three years. And on Thursday, September 30, Herrera will go to court to try to get a judge to support his injunction request.

But Hewitt fears that Herrera’s injunction will further stress an already fragile community.

“Gang injunctions are plaguing this neighborhood and their families, but we don’t have gangs, we have families,” Hewitt said, as local residents Larry C. Jones of TURF and the Marsha Kyer Foundation, and Robert Cowan, watched the kids and candidates play ball.

After the basket ball game, Hewitt asked the five D10 candidates what they had learned from the C.L.A.E.R-sponsored event

“I’m struck by how strong the entrepreneurial spirit is,” Marlene Tran said, surveying a greeting card business that Sunnydale youth Tyree Vaughan started, under the auspices of C.L.A.E.R. “For 35 years, I was with kids every day,” Tran continued, referring to her career as a teacher. “And when I was 9 years old in Hong Kong, I helped my mother with work, and at 16, I had my own import/export business. So, we should recognize youth, all the positive things they do.”

 

Kristine Enea also praised the entrepreneurial spirit that was evident on the ground in Sunnydale.”Entrepreneurship is a powerful drug,” Enea observed. “Every child should know the joy of holding in your hands a product that started as an idea in your head,”

 

“This neighborhood is getting ready to be demolished,” Hewitt interjected. “What do we have to do with Project Hope?”

Tony Kelly admitted that he had never been to C.L.A.E.R.’s office before.
“But I’ve been involved with Hope SF on Potrero Hill,” Kelly said. “With Hope SF, there’s this weird thing of competition between public housing sites, this, ‘Oh, we can only get one project taken care of,’ and ‘Oh, we can’t get services’  attitude. But this is the largest public housing project in the city. We need complete neighborhoods where we live.”

Chris Jackson complimented C.L.A.E.R. on doing so much with so little.
“When I look at how many millions we spend on community services, but not something as simple as a basketball hoop, which gives a dozen black youth access to exercise, team work and figuring out how to work together, I see that you are doing with $300 what Goodwill and JHS failed to do with millions,” Jackson said.” You have brought the community together.”

Hewitt, who likes to call herself Mini Mouse and isn’t afraid to challenge her biggest supporters, responded by urging the candidates to get more hands on.

“The rhetoric doesn’t bode well for the community,” Hewitt said. “You can’t only come here every six months.”

Malia Cohen, who is on C.L.A.E.R.’s board, expressed her belief that the community needs to do more in terms of giving back.
“This is a partnership, I brought resources here, but people who live here ought to respect the resources, and say, this is our home and we are going to sweep up,” Cohen said, pointing to untended pathways and a couple of wilted potted plants that had died for lack of watering outside C.L.A.E.R.’s office.

“You did this because you are a board member,” Hewitt retorted, giving Cohen, who she supports politically, a predictably hard time.“But where are we collectively in terms of challenging ourselves to respond?”

 “I see great opportunities here, but because of budget cuts, you haven’t had resources,” Cohen continued. “The Department of Children, Youth and Families has been funneling funds to mega-organizations, and not the grassroots.”

“One opportunity is with City College,” Jackson, who counts Hewitt as a mentor, interjected. “And we can give deeper. I believe 20 percent of our participants are from Viz Valley, and we can do a better job of reaching out to the 41 young men listed on gang injunction. It’s something the City Attorney should have talked about before he put in for the gang injunction. A week later, he declares he’s running for mayor, while those of us on the ground are left to clean up.”

“785 units will come back as low-income and there is a zero vacancy rate here, so the one-to-one replacement of the units is not so much the issue as the replacement of the people,” Hewitt told me, as she locked up her office and the rest of the city prepared to enjoy a Labor Day weekend in a world that is not scarred by memories of fblack and brown brothers dying in a hail of bullets in the street.

And as I drove away, towards the bonfire of vanities that is downtown San Francisco, I couldn’t shake the twin images of those young black boys raising their hands when asked if they knew someone who has been murdered, and of Hewitt, fearlessly grilling the D10 candidates, even as she tries to hold together this fragile community of color on a prayer and an increasingly frayed shoelace budget.

Endorsement interviews: Chris Jackson

Mary Magee
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0
Endorsement interviews: Chris Jackson

In 2008, San Francisco voters elected Chris Jackson to the Community College Board, where he serves as Budget Chair. And from 2007 until spring 2010, Jackson worked as a policy analyst for the San Francisco Labor Council.
Those experiences helped convince Jackson, whose grandfather came from Mississippi to work at Hunters Point Shipyard, of the pressing need for the next D10 supervisor to promote progressive policies that help working class families remain in San Francisco.

“People in D. 10 aren’t asking for market rate housing, they are looking for job opportunities,” Jackson said, clarifying that he wants to see the creation of good-paying, entry-level jobs with health and retirement benefits and the shoring up of local hiring policies, so workers can support their families and stay in the local community.

Jackson plans to create a stable funding source for truly affordable housing. He wants to help Section 8 recipients to rent in San Francisco. He thinks the city needs a different vision of redevelopment—one in which the Redevelopment Commission is brought within the control of the Board. He thinks gang injunctions serve to accelerate gentrification in low-income communities of color. And he thinks the city needs to reduce the number of high-level management positions before it fires and rehires thousands of public health workers at lower wages.

“I believe that the role of the supervisor is to empower local residents and community groups to be voices for real transformative chang,” Jackson said.
You can listen to the full interview here:

 

Cjackson by endorsements2010

New website features worst landlords ever

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Tenants Together, a statewide nonprofit advocating for tenants’ rights, has launched a new website that allows tenants to nominate their landlords as the worst ever in California.

The Landlord Hall of Shame features a listing of landlords who’ve been suggested, officially nominated, or installed by vote into the Hall of Shame. The aim is to spotlight landlords who disrespect tenants’ rights, try to force tenants out for their own economic gain, or act in some other egregious way that makes life miserable for a renter. While none of them will be dubbed Hall of Shamers until December, a couple of official nominees already sound like tough contenders.

One of them is David Taran of Page Mill Properties, who has been embroiled in an ongoing battle with Tenants Together after imposing exorbitant rent hikes in an effort to force tenants out of a rent-controlled housing complex in East Palo Alto.

The purpose of the website is two-fold, according to Dean Preston, executive director of Tenants Together. It can be a deterrent to landlord misconduct, but it can also help the tenant advocacy group gather information about problem landlords.

“There are a lot of bad landlords out there that get away with doing the same thing over and over again,” Preston said, “Because no one knows that they did it before. A lot of landlords operate in multiple communities, so people in one city may not necessarily know what they’ve done in another city.”

Preston said that Tenants Together expects to nominate a couple landlords every month. Official nominees are those that the group has researched and found that “their conduct has risen to the level where we should call them out publicly,” he added.

On the list of suggested nominees is Laramar SF, a property management company that has taken over management in many San Francisco properties formerly controlled by Skyline Realty or CitiApartments. The Hall of Shame website is sure to note that if some one has been suggested as a nominee, it’s “not an indication that they have done anything wrong or are bad landlords.” But if tenants visiting the site wish to share comments about their experience with a nominated landlord or add a new one to the roster, they can simply fill out an online form.

“We think this really has the potential to make some landlords think twice about abusing their tenants,” Preston said. “It will make bad landlords realize that there is a spotlight on them.”

The real Steve Moss

Mary Magee
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83
The real Steve Moss

Some folks are so mad about D. 10 candidate Steve Moss that they have put together a website titled The Real Steve Moss that pulls together public records and poses a series of questions in an effort to make Moss provide concrete answers about his residency and his handling of tax-payer dollars before the November election rolls around.

“If Mr. Moss believes that he is such a great candidate, we suggest he answer critics instead of hiding out and just dodging the questions,” The Real Steve Moss website states. “Anyone who won’t answer direct questions while running, certainly won’t in office.”

The website challenges Moss to provide more details about his residency, including the exact date he moved back to D10, the identity and move-in date of the person(s) currently living in his Dolores Park home in D8, along with copies of his utility, internet, cable and telephone bills and records from his D8 Dolores Park home and the place he is currently renting in 18th Street to prove Moss’ residency claims.

“If your Dolores home wasn’t occupied till August 2010, did you maintain services such as Internet, cable and telephone, and if so why?” the website asks.

The Real Steve Moss also drills into questions about the $1.5 million that the Department of the Environment paid to Moss’ private company, M-Cubed.
Last week, the Department of Environment confirmed to the Guardian that a grant was awarded to M-Cubed sometime between 2000 and 2001. 
“The total amount of the agreement was $1.5 million and the purpose of the agreement was to set up an energy cooperative in Bayview Hunter’s Point,” the Department told us.

Yet, 990 forms filed by Moss’s SF Community Power Cooperative and his parallel SF Community Power non-profit in 2002 and 2003 do not reflect large infusions of tax payer dollars that the City reportedly paid to Moss’ private company M.Cubed to set up an energy cooperative.

As “The Real Steve Moss” notes, “information easily obtained from Mr.Moss’ for profit, non-profit, and campaign websites do not appear to match records obtained from the City, State or the IRS.”

And while the Guardian waits for the Department of the Environment to respond to our request for more information about this grant, The Real Steve Moss drills into other questions about Moss’ money flow.

“What exactly did you do with the $4m plus in mostly public and private funding that you stated was to create a newswire and help Bayview Hunters Point residents?” The Real Steve Moss  asks, presumably referring to, amongst other donations, a series of $50,000 grants that the Goldman Fund, where Moss’ wife works, paid to Moss’ SF Community Power.

“Exactly how many paid jobs did you create and for how long? Why is your non-profit paying such a lot of rent and for what? Why is your non-profit’s communications bills so high? How much money did you pay yourself from your non-profit and for profit companies funded in majority by taxpayer funds?”
Hopefully, Moss will respond to these and other questions posed at The Real Steve Moss with concrete evidence. And soon. So, stay tuned.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2010/09/21/plan-c-endorses-sweet-and-moss-d10

The District 8 dilemma

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The District 8 dilemma

tredmond@sfbg.com

Gabriel Haaland, a longtime queer labor activist, was talking to a friend from District 8 the other day, chatting about the race for a supervisor to fill the shoes of Harvey Milk, Harry Britt, Mark Leno, and Bevan Dufty. “She told me that she didn’t know who to vote for,” Haaland said, “because she didn’t know who the progressive was in the race.”

For supporters of Rafael Mandelman, that’s a serious challenge. “The polls are very consistent,” Haaland said. “Most of the voters in D-8 would prefer a progressive over a moderate, and when they know who the progressive is, they support that candidate.”

But oddly enough, although District 8 — the Castro, Noe Valley, and parts of the Mission — is one of the most politically active parts of the city, where voter turnout is consistently high, the supervisorial race is getting only limited media attention. The neighborhood and queer papers are doing a good job of covering the race, but for the rest of the media, it’s as if nothing’s happening. And that’s left voters confused about what ought to be a very clear choice.

The San Francisco Chronicle featured the District 6 race on the front page Sept. 19, with a long story about how demographic changes in the South of Market area would affect the successor to Sup. Chris Daly. District 10, with the mad political scrum of 22 candidates, no clear front runner and endorsements all over the map, has received considerable media attention.

Yet D–8 — which offers by far the most striking distinctions between candidates and the sharpest divisions over issues — has been flying under the radar.

Three major candidates are in the race, two gay men and a lesbian. All of them, for what it’s worth, are lawyers. Rafael Mandelman, who works for a firm that advises cities and counties, has the support of the vast majority of progressive leaders and organizations. Rebecca Prozan, a deputy district attorney, and Scott Wiener, a deputy city attorney, are very much on the moderate-centrist (some would say, by San Francisco standards, conservative) side of the political spectrum.

“As Barbara Boxer has said in her ads, the choice is clear,” Aaron Peskin, chair of the local Democratic Party and a Mandelman backer, told us. “Not to exaggerate, but this is like Boxer v. Carly Fiornia, and Rafael is our Boxer.”

Yet by almost all accounts, Wiener is ahead in the race.

 

ON THE ISSUES

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has been roughly divided in the past decade between the progressive camp and moderate camp. And while those labels are hard to define (the Chronicle won’t even use the term “progressive,” preferring “ultraliberal”), most observers have a basic grip on the differences.

The moderates, who tend to support Mayor Gavin Newsom, are social liberals but fiscal conservatives. They talk about the city surviving budget red ink without major tax increases. They talk about controlling government spending and increasing public safety. The progressives generally see local government as underfunded after four years of brutal cuts and support the idea of raising new revenue to fill the gap. They support tenants over landlords, seek stronger protections for affordable housing, support Sanctuary City, and oppose sit-lie.

Certainly with Wiener and Mandelman, it’s abundantly clear where the candidates fall. The two agree on some things (they both oppose Prop. B, the pension-reform measure that would reduce health care payments for the children of city employees) and they both support nightlife. But overall, they take very different political stands.

Wiener told us, for example, that the city’s structural budget problems won’t be solved without cuts. “We’re not going to able to tax our way out of this,” he said in an endorsement interview. “We have to lower our expectations for government.”

Other than Muni, public safety, and core public health services, cuts “will have to be across the board,” he said. “What are the things we really can’t do without?”

Wiener supports the sit-lie proposal, saying that he doesn’t think the local police have the tools they need to get poorly behaving people off the streets. He doesn’t support Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s measure mandating foot patrols because, he told us, he doesn’t think the supervisors should micromanage the Police Department.

Sup. Bevan Dufty, who currently holds the D–8 seat, has voted with the progressives occasionally — but almost never on tenant issues. And Wiener, who has the support of the rabidly anti-tenant Small Property Owners of San Francisco, is likely to follow that approach. Although he told us he supports rent control (which just about everyone in local politics agrees on at this point), he’s not a fan of additional protections against evictions and condo conversions. “I’m not prepared to go beyond what we have now” on eviction protections, he said. He supported Newsom’s plan to allow people to buy their way out of the waiting list and lottery for condo conversions.

And when it comes to public power, he’s to the right of the incumbent: Dufty has said repeatedly that he supports the city taking over Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s infrastructure and putting the city in control of a full-scale public power system. Wiener says he supports community choice aggregation (CCA), but not full-scale public power.

Mandelman is a big supporter of local government and says, without hesitation, that the city needs more revenue. “The public sector is dramatically underfunded,” he told us in a recent interview. “There’s great wealth in the city and it needs to be tapped to preserve public services.” Mandelman said he’s not “tax happy,” but told us that the structure of how the city raises revenue is a mess. He supports a top-to-bottom review of the city’s revenue base with the goal of making taxation more progressive — and bringing in enough money to fund crucial services.

Mandelman is a foe of sit-lie, which he sees as punitive and ineffective. He opposes gang injunctions and supports Sanctuary City. And he’s a strong advocate for tenants, supporting stronger eviction protections and limits on condo conversions that take away affordable rental stock.

“You have to look at the candidates and ask what their priorities are,” he said. “Are the displacement of long-time residents critically important or something that’s not on the top of the list? Do you believe we need to rebuild the safety net? Or is queer politics all about property values?”

Prozan told us that she’s the one who can “bring the two sides together” and said that, like Dufty, she is “right up the middle.” She supports the hotel tax and the vehicle license fee and opposes sit-lie, but also thinks gang injunctions are a useful tool for law enforcement. She doesn’t see any reason to split appointments between the mayor and the supervisors for the board that oversees Muni or the Redevelopment Agency. She doesn’t think the city can or should do anything more about the conversion of rental property to tenancies in common, but supports the idea of taking over foreclosed properties to create housing for teachers, cops, and firefighters. So it’s safe to say the Prozan would probably be similar to the incumbent — with the progressives on a few things, against them on others.

 

UNDER THE RADAR?

Wiener and Mandelman agree on two basic points: there are stark differences between the candidates — and the city’s major media outlets aren’t paying enough attention. That’s probably because the relatively tame politics doesn’t compare to the sort of wild excitement you see in Districts 6 and 10.

“There’s less chaos than some of the other districts,” Wiener said. “The three major candidates are all hard-working, respected people who have all lived in the district a while.”

He also agreed that he and Mandelman have “very different visions” for the district and the city, and that there are sharp contrasts and divisions between the two candidates.

Prozan also argued that the political differences on issues aren’t going to be the only — or even the deciding — factor for many voters. “I think they’re looking for who’s got the courage and independence to do what’s right,” she told us.

But Mandelman told us there’s a crucial story here that needs to be told: “It’s a definitional fight about what the queer community is about in 2010. As goes D–8, so goes San Francisco.”

Fresh “Horses”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Fresh “Horses”

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Some choreographers pack enough material into an hour of dance to leave you more satisfied than those who take twice as long and say less. Such was the case with “18 Virgo Horses” (Sept. 16-18), a double-bill by Dana Lawton and Jia Wu, who earn their rent money teaching at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. The old saying that inspiration wedded to craft makes for good art came to mind as I watched Lawton and Wu’s four pieces at CounterPULSE last week. The evening made me glad that the dance season has started again.

In her new solo Del Mar, Lawton opened the program with a tribute to 1950s-style Hollywood bathing beauties and cowboy singers. Toy horses encircled a round swimming pool in which Lawton, encased in a demure Esther Williams swim suit and aqua cap, paddled, floated, and dreamed as she listened and responded to lyrics about an old house and a boy and his horse. So simple, so evocative, so delicious.

Horsethief Lake is a state park in South Dakota. I am not sure if and how Lawton’s eponymous piece for a quartet (Michael Armstrong, Jerry Lin, Jill Randall, and Chantal Sampogna) related to that piece of geography. The work explored memory, less as never-never land than as something grounded in muscles, to be passed from one body to another. Over the course of its three sections, Horsethief ultimately lost some focus and began to needlessly meander. But it demonstrated how, in skilled hands, simple gestures — wafting arms, and grabbing at one’s chest — can undergo eloquent mutations. The piece also introduced Lin, who is potentially a spectacular dancer, if he doesn’t allow himself to descend into mannerism.

Continuity is not what choreographer Jia Wu seems after, at least not within anything resembling linear logic. Yet the five sections of Between You and Me II, a highly imagistic quintet (Jackie Angelo, Lin, Marissa Pfaff, Vera Schwegler, and Hailey Yaffee), rubbed against each other to arrive at a jumbled but real coherence. The piece’s attempts at absurdity, however, did not completely convince.

Going from Ukrainian folk music to Satie and Portuguese fado, Between started out looking like mourning ritual. The dancers were clad in black from head to toe, but as their outstretched arms and formal pacing disintegrated into spastic shakes and hops, tragedy was turned inside out. In other sections, the doll-like dancers wore tutus that were color-coordinated with balloons, while Lin streaked in as an impostor. They looked like cartoon figures. The audience loved the humor; I thought some it sophomoric.

The evening closed with Lawton’s other premiere, Inside. Though it took on one of dance’s oldest clichés — the travails of one-to-one relationships — her take on it was fresh and rich and rang true. It opened with Armstrong and Jennifer Smith in what might have been a wedding dance. As they performed in silence, their bodies seemed to melt into one. Then wave after wave of rejection and reconciliation enmeshed the couple in an ongoing turbulence. Anything — a touch, a glance, an imitative gesture — could provoke an explosion from one or the other, yet this stormy affair was also mitigated by moments of tenderness and calm. As Michelle Beauchesne on cello and Sean McCue on guitar provided sensitive musical commentary, the piece presented one surprise after another — you never knew who was going to do what to whom.

Lembi’s legacy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Lembi’s legacy

steve@sfb.com

Two of the most outrageous and intransigent political narratives in progressive San Francisco converge at the Hotel Frank near Union Square.

The first involves the relatively new namesake of a boutique hotel formerly known as the Maxwell Hotel San Francisco, Frank Lembi, the nonagenarian who was once one of the city’s largest and most notorious landlords, running CitiApartments, Skyline Realty, Lembi Group, and other related corporations with his recently deceased son, Walter, and others.

Since the Guardian first reported on allegations of illegal and unethical tactics intended to force protected renters from their homes in an award-winning three-part series (“The Scumlords,” March 2006), Lembi’s empire was sued by the City Attorney’s Office and its former tenants (“SF vs. Frank Lembi,” 10/6/09), followed by a financial crash that involved banks foreclosing on dozens of the group’s properties (“Triumph of tenacity,” 6/1/10).

That downfall has now dovetailed into a second prominent San Francisco story: the ongoing contractual impasse and labor unrest between the city’s corporate-owned hotels and workers represented by Unite-Here Local 2, whose list of boycotted local hotels grew to 10 with the addition of the Hotel Frank earlier this month.

After the Hotel Frank and Hotel Metropolis were foreclosed on by Wells Fargo Bank earlier this year, longtime union workers at the two hotels say their rights have been violated, their benefits slashed, and their workloads increased unilaterally by the bank’s management company, Provenance Hotels, whose representatives refused to comment for this story.

“These are troubling signs of the kind of relations they want to have with Local 2,” Anand Singh, a lead organizer with the union, told the Guardian.

Together, the stories that converge at the Hotel Frank are about the plight of renters and workers in San Francisco, and whether they can maintain their economic standing against attacks from powerful corporate interests.

Corporations run by members of the Lembi family once controlled more apartments in San Francisco than any other landlord, growing rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s using highly leveraged real estate purchases and renting units under CitiApartments and other names.

Tenants in rent-controlled apartments are protected under various San Francisco laws, but as the Guardian has reported and the city’s ongoing lawsuit against the Lembi empire alleges, the group’s business model was based on trying to force, intimidate, and cajole tenants into vacating those units in order to increase rents. Those complaints were also the subject of well-attended City Hall hearings in 2006 and a campaign called CitiStop organized by the San Francisco Tenants Union.

A separate class action lawsuit by former Lembi tenants brought by the San Francisco law firm Seegar Salvas LLP in 2009 alleges that the Lembi corporations also routinely refused to return the security deposits of former tenants. Both lawsuits are ongoing, with plaintiffs’ attorneys noting that the courts have fined the Lembi corporations for not cooperating with the discovery process.

Yet while the name Frank Lembi had been tarnished in progressive political circles, it was until only recently celebrated in the business press and by downtown organizations such as the San Francisco Apartment Association, which lauded Lembi as a tough-minded visionary. And it was a name that Frank Lembi’s daughter sought to memorialize in 2007 when the company she ran, Personality Hotels, added the York and Maxwell hotels to its string of four boutique hotels near Union Square.

Yvonne Lembi-Detert changed the name of the Maxwell to the Frank Hotel and rechristened the York as Hotel Vertigo after the Alfred Hitchcock movie set in San Francisco. Those familiar with the deal say she paid top dollar for the hotels — $35 million for the Maxwell, which had sold a few years earlier for $18 million. She then borrowed another $10 million to renovate the hotel she had renamed for her father, putting up the Hotel Metropolis in the Tenderloin as collateral.

“This was a vanity project, nothing more and nothing less, Yvonne’s legacy to father Frank,” one worker at the hotels told the Guardian.

Officials at Personality said Lembi-Detert was on vacation and unavailable for comment, but Director of Operations David Chin told us, “The purchase price was what the market bore at the time” and that the renovations were prudent. “The factor that drove the hotel to foreclosure was really the economy.”

Although the loans for the hotels came from a Japanese-based corporation called Nomura, they were packaged along with other troubled loans into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) — those toxic financial instruments that played such a key role in the crash of the banking system in 2008 — eventually coming to be controlled by Well Fargo.

As the Hotel Frank was put through extensive and expensive renovations that were never completed, the economy turned sour and the Lembis fell far behind in their loan payments. Wells Fargo finally took ownership of both the Frank and the Metropolis in May, contracting the management out to Provenance, which moved quickly to try to turn the financially troubled hotels around.

Workers at the two hotels, most of whom had been there for decades, say the new management team took an aggressive posture from day one, announcing increased workloads, longer work days, suspended vacation pay, and new medical plans with steeply higher costs to workers.

But they arrived in a town with a hotel union energized by clashes with management at hotels all over the city, so the workers at the hotels resisted the changes and their Local 2 colleagues have rallied to their defense. When thousands of workers and their progressive supporters marched through the streets of San Francisco to the Grand Hyatt in July, they stopped at the Hotel Frank along the way and unfurled a banner that read “Frank and Metropolis Hotel Workers United to Fight Provenance and Wells Fargo.” And on Sept. 8, both hotels were added to Local 2’s boycott list.

Singh said Provenance is unfairly trying to hold workers at the hotel responsible for the bad financial decisions that the Lembis made, and he called on Wells Fargo to absorb those financial losses without having its agents attack the union.

“It was not based on anything the workers have done,” Singh said of the financial situation at the hotels. “This huge bank is asking the workers to bear the brunt of this financial strategy even after being bailed out by taxpayers.”

The news that didn’t make the news in SF

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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0

Every year, the Guardian features the Top 10 Project Censored stories presented by the Sonoma State University project that spends all year analyzing which stories the mainstream media missed. But which stories did not find their way into the mainstream press here in the San Francisco Bay Area?

News outlets other than the Guardian typically ignore Project Censored (unless you count SF Weekly’s snark), so you might say that even Censored tends to be censored. Other than that, we note that issues not hand-delivered via press release or PR campaign might receive less attention than those obvious stories. Using a rather unscientific process of surfing alternative news sites online to find out which stories didn’t get a lot of play in the mainstream, we’ve come up with an assortment of Local Censored stories – though this is by no means a comprehensive list. What other news didn’t make the news?

Local Censored stories:

* What we didn’t hear about when PG&E was pushing Prop 16

Speaking at an informational hearing in Sacramento in February 2010 about Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s ballot initiative, Proposition 16, former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman noted that the state’s most powerful utility company was using customer money to finance a bid to change the state constitution for its own purposes. Prop 16, which earned a thumbs-down from voters in the June election, would have created a two-thirds majority vote requirement before municipalities could set up electricity services separate from PG&E. While there was no shortage of reporting about the astounding sums of cash that PG&E sank into Prop. 16, hardly anyone aside from Geesman picked up on the more salient point of what PG&E was not spending its money on.

“California’s investor-owned utilities face a Himalayan task in modernizing our electricity system and building the infrastructure necessary to serve a growing economy,” Geesman wrote on his blog, titled PG&E Ballot Initiative Fact Sheet. “They ought to focus on that, rather than manipulating the electorate to kneecap their few competitors.” It is now abundantly clear that PG&E’s aging gas pipelines in San Bruno were badly in need of replacement – and the utility’s neglect opened the door the catastrophic explosion that occurred Sept. 9, resulting in tragic loss of life and destroying homes. “The current leadership at PG&E has lost its way. Nobody is minding the ship,” senator Mark Leno told the Guardian shortly after the blast. “Enough with the self-initiated, self-serving political campaigns. … How about focusing on the current mission — to provide gas and electricity safely, without death and destruction?”

PG&E Ballot Initiative Fact Sheet: http://pgandeballotinitiativefactsheet.blogspot.com/
Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-pelosi/deadly-priorities-why-did_b_713800.html

* What you might not have read about Johannes Mehserle’s murder trial
 
If you looked to Colorlines.com, Blockreportradio.com, the San Francisco Bay View, or Indybay.org for coverage of Johannes Meherle’s murder trial for the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant, then you got a different picture from the one offered by mainstream Bay Area news outlets. There may well be plenty of details about the trial that didn’t make the cut for mainstream news, but one particular point caught our eye as something that should’ve warranted more prominent coverage, or at very least sparked deeper questions from mainstream press. According to the witness testimony of Jackie Bryson, who was with Grant on the train platform the night of the shooting, Grant’s friends immediately urged BART police to call an ambulance after Grant had been shot, but police didn’t do it right away.

Here’s the report from Block Report Radio: “Jack Bryson said he yelled at Oscar after he was shot to stay awake and to the police to call the ambulance. The unidentified officer who was on Bryson declared, ‘We’ll call the ambulance when you shut the fuck up!’ Bryson went on to say that he was never searched on the Fruitvale platform or at the Lake Merritt BART police station, which seems ridiculous if you consider the earlier testimony of former BART police officers Dominici and Pirone, who were involved in the murder and who testified last week that they had felt threatened by Oscar Grant and his friends.” So, if it’s true that Grant’s friends were told to “shut the fuck up” when they were urging BART cops to call an ambulance, and that the supposedly threatening parties weren’t ever searched, why didn’t these points receive as much attention in the media as, say, the claim that years earlier, Grant may have resisted arrest? After witnessing the death of his friend, Bryson said in his testimony, he was detained for hours while wearing handcuffs pulled so tight that his wrists hurt, only to be told afterward that since he had not been read his Miranda rights, he was not under arrest. To be fair, the detail about calling the ambulance did make it into the Chronicle, near the bottom of a blog post, under the subhead, “Friend’s claim.”

Block Report Radio: http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/894-jack-bryson-hits-the-stand.html
Colorlines: http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/06/defense_opens_with_gripping_testimony.html

* Homelessness on the rise in San Francisco

The controversy surrounding Prop L, a proposed ordinance to ban sitting and lying down on the sidewalk, has been widely reported on — but there’s a more pressing issue related to homelessness that hasn’t gotten nearly as much ink. An article in New America Media, “Shelters predict homeless count to skyrocket,” highlighted a perceived surge in San Francisco’s homeless population, evidenced by overwhelmed service providers who can hardly keep up with demand. “We’re serving 200,000 more meals per year than two years ago, but we haven’t had the capacity to add staff,” the chief executive officer of the Glide Foundation noted in the article. The drop-in center, she added, no longer had enough seats to accommodate those in need. According to a fact sheet issued by the Coalition on Homelessness in July of 2009, 45 percent of respondents to a COH survey were experiencing homelessness for the first time. The overwhelming majority of respondents, 78 percent, became homeless while living in San Francisco.

New America Media: http://newamericamedia.org/2010/04/shelters-predict-homeless-count-to-skyrocket.php
Coalition on Homelessness: http://www.cohsf.org/en/

* The long wait for Section 8

It isn’t easy for a tenant with a Section 8 voucher to find housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. In San Francisco, there’s a barrier to getting the voucher in the first place, since the waitlist is currently closed. Those who have vouchers are often passed over by landlords, and the string of denials can drive people to unstable housing situations such as extended hotel stays. An article in POOR Magazine features the story of Linda William, a woman who left a San Francisco public housing project with a Section 8 voucher in hand only to embark on a wild goose chase, ultimately winding up in a low-end motel outside Vallejo. “Well whaddya know,” William told the POOR magazine reporter, “I found closed wait lists on almost all the low-income housing units in all of those places and all the rest of the landlords wouldn’t even return my calls when I told them I had section 8.” An article by Dean Preston of Tenants Together that appeared in BeyondChron, meanwhile, spotlights the issue of landlord discrimination against Section 8 tenants.  “In the Section 8 voucher program, participating tenants pay 30 percent of their rent and the Housing Authority pays the balance to the landlord,” Preston writes. “It takes years for eligible tenants to be able to participate in the program. Once tenants get off the wait list, the landlord must sign a payment contract with the housing authority in order to receive the portion of the rent paid by the government. By refusing to sign onto the program, some landlords seek to force rent controlled tenants into situations where they cannot pay their rent.”
POOR Magazine: http://www.poormagazine.org/node/3277
BeyondChron: http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8012

* San Francisco’s trashy secret

Despite being thought of as a beacon of sustainability, San Francisco’s not-so-green waste stream is something that didn’t make the front page of many papers – except, of course, this one. Sarah Phelan’s “Tale of Two Landfills,” a Guardian cover story this past June, examined San Francisco’s decidedly unenlightened policy of transporting waste far outside of the city despite a goal of reducing waste to zero in the next 10 years. Here’s an excerpt: “It’s a reminder of a fact most San Franciscans don’t think much about: The city exports mountains of garbage into somebody else’s backyard. While residents have gone a long way to reduce the waste stream as city officials pursue an ambitious strategy of zero waste by 2020, we’re still trucking 1,800 tons of garbage out of San Francisco every day. And now we’re preparing to triple the distance that trash travels. ‘The mayor of San Francisco is encouraging us to be a green city by growing veggies, raising wonderful urban gardens, composting green waste and food and restaurant scraps,’ Irene Creps, a San Franciscan who owns a ranch in Wheatland, told us. ‘So why is he trying to dump San Francisco’s trash in a beautiful rural area?’”

SFBG: http://www.sfbg.com/2010/06/15/tale-two-landfills

* The real unemployment rate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics makes a distinction between so-called “discouraged workers” who have stopped looking for jobs, and the jobless who are actively seeking employment, so the official unemployment rate (9.7 percent in San Francisco, according to the most recent data) may be much lower than the actual unemployment rate.

We haven’t seen any brilliant local reporting on this issue, but the problem is summed up nicely in this YouTube video produced by a personal finance software firm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA&feature=player_embedded

Five things you should know about Steve Moss

David Talbot
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Five things you should know about Steve Moss

Sarah@sfbg.com

In August 2010, Steve Moss, who is running for District 10 supervisor, took out an ad in the Potrero View, which he owns, titled “Five things you need to know about Steve Moss.”

The ad, paid for by Moss’ political campaign, stated that Moss “edits and publishes this very paper (but got its endorsement on his own merits).” A year earlier, when Moss filed for the D–10 race, he promised in the View that “the paper will not endorse any of the contenders.” Reached by phone, Moss said that part of the ad was intended as a joke.

The other four bullet points seemed to be factual statements about Moss’ accomplishments. But Moss’ misleading ad got the Guardian taking a closer look, and, along the way, we found a lot of other things you probably didn’t know about Moss.

As far as we know, none of these things are illegal, and Moss can certainly argue that none of them are wrong. But since this is a progressive district, we thought voters would want to know a little more before the November election.

1. He’s a carpetbagger

Moss portrays himself as a District 10 resident who spent the last decade raising his family on Potrero Hill. In fact, during 2008 and 2009, Moss wasn’t living on Potrero Hill at all. When he filed his intent to run in the D–10 race in 2009, he was living near Dolores Park in a four-floor, four-unit, $1.6 million apartment building he owns. And shortly before he filed his intent to seek office, Moss’ wife told friends that the family was only moving to District 10 so Moss could run for supervisor, and that if he lost, they would be moving back to the Dolores Park area.

In his declaration of intent to run, a legal document he signed under penalty of perjury Aug. 4, 2009, Moss listed his address as 2325 Third St. That address is where the View; Moss’ nonprofit San Francisco Community Power; and M.Cubed, Moss’ private consulting company, share space. It’s also where where the Moss campaign asked supporters to send checks. It’s not where Moss was living with his family.

Indeed, evidence that came to light in a lawsuit between Moss and his wife, Debbie Findling, and a couple who co-own the property where Moss used to reside on Kansas Street, indicate that he moved out of D-10 in November 2007 and was living at 296 Liberty Street, in District 8, until February 2010.

In a July 8, 2009 e-mail to friends, filed in court in this lawsuit, Moss’ wife noted: “Steven has decided to run for city supervisor in District 10!!! (Sophie Maxwell’s term ends in November 2010) so we’ll be moving back to the hill in early spring! If you hear of any lovely rentals let us know. Or — I know it’s a crazy idea — but if you’re interested in swapping houses with us for a year as an even trade, you can move into our place on Dolores Park! (We’re hedging our bets in case he doesn’t win, we’d be moving back to Dolores Park after the elections. If he does win, we’ll find a long-term place to live … ).”

Reached by phone, Moss told us that it was only his candidate intention statement — a form that allows a candidate to start to raise money — that he filed while living at Liberty Street in 2009, not his official declaration of candidacy form. The language on the two forms is slightly different; the intent form only asks for a “street address” while the actual declaration of candidacy asks for a “residence” address.

Moss said he filed his declaration of candidacy a few days before the deadline, this summer. That form requires candidates to have resided in the district for not less than 30 days immediately preceding the date they file.

Moss insisted that he currently lives in a rental house at 2145 18th Street. “I’m planning to win,” Moss told us. “And we’re very much enjoying the house on Potrero Hill and hoping to stay there.”

2. He managed to avoid the condo lottery.

Moss and his wife bought a two-unit house on Kansas Street in May 2000 for $648,000 and filed for a condo conversion permit in 2002. San Francisco only allows only 200 condo conversions a year. It’s tough to get a permit, it’s very lucrative if you do, and most applicants — including two-unit buildings with a single owner — have to enter a lottery. But thanks to a strange short-term loophole in the law, Moss managed to get away without doing that.

The application, which got tentative approval in March 2004, notes that Moss and his wife — single owners of a two-unit building — did not win the lottery or qualify for a bypass. Asked how he managed this, Moss pointed to a loophole in legislation that former Sup. Jake McGoldrick passed in 2001. “The McGoldrick clause allowed us to directly convert it,” Moss said.

McGoldrick’s law tightened the conversion rules, but allowed two-unit buildings that, like Moss’, had only one owner-occupant, to slip through. The odd thing is that Andrew Zacks, a lawyer who represents landlords, and the Small Property Owners of San Francisco sued to overturn the McGoldrick legislation (not because of the loophole but because of the new restrictions) and the Superior Court ruled in January 2003 that the law was “unconstitutional on its face” and ordered that the city “shall not enforce this ordinance.” That should have ended the loophole, too.

Records show that Moss’ condo application was signed Feb. 10, 2003 by Planning’s Larry Badiner and received tentative mapping approval March 2004.

Department of Public Works Surveyor Bruce Storrs told us he thinks Moss’ case fell through the cracks. “It doesn’t say it was a McTIC,” Storrs said, using the nickname for McGoldrick’s condo conversion loophole, as he reviewed Moss’ file. “But it’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

There’s no indication that Moss did anything wrong, but he sure got a sweet deal. Records show that after he got his conversion permit, he sold the upper unit of Kansas Street in 2007 for more than he paid for the entire building in 2000.

3. He has the support of some very anti-tenant folks.

Attorney Zacks, who specializes in evictions and TICs, gave Moss $500, and the candidate claimed it was because his wife knows Zacks from the playground of the school where their kids both go. Pressed, Moss confirmed that Zacks is his attorney in a court case against the co-owners of the Kansas Street property and in another action he filed against a tenant in his Liberty Steet building in May 2009.

Moss also has the support of the Small Property Owners group, which opposes almost all tenants rights and is among the most conservative, pro-property rights groups in the city. He told us he made a mistake in seeking that endorsement.

And on Aug. 24, conservative campaign finance consultant Jim Sutton, who typically represents big business interests, filed papers representing “The Alliance For Jobs And Sustainable Growth,” which is financing three independent expenditure committees, one supporting Moss; another supporting Scott Weiner in D-8; and the third supporting Theresa Sparks in D–6.

4. He’s involved in a nasty lawsuit with his former neighbor.

Records show that after Moss and Findling subdivided their property on Kansas Street, they sold the upper unit to Edward Penrose and Heather Gibbons in 2007 and moved near Dolores Park.

Court filings suggest the couples remained friendly until March 2010, when Moss and Findling tried to sell the Kansas Street lower unit for $600,000 and ran into problems.

After the deal fell through, Moss and Findling turned around and sued Penrose and Gibbons, claiming that their behavior “constitutes a nuisance.”

In their complaint, Moss and Findling claim they suffered emotional distress, loss of sale, and diminution of the value of their lower unit on Kansas Street “due to the need, going forward, to disclose to buyers that [Penrose and Gibbons] have a propensity to engage in malicious and antisocial behavior.”

On July 30, Gibbons and Penrose countersued. They claim that when they offered to purchase 673 Kansas Street, Moss and Findling never disclosed that there was a boundary line dispute or prior instances of flooding, drainage, and grading problems that had damaged an abutting property.

Now Penrose and Gibbons are asking the court to rescind the purchase agreement whereby they obtained ownership of their Kansas Street condo.

Findling and Moss responded Aug. 31, claiming that “cross-complainants have unclean hands in that, beginning in the spring of 2010, they undertook efforts to interfere with the sale of the lower unit 673 1/2 Kansas] by making unfounded noise complaints and did discourage the buyer from consummating the transaction.”

Asked about this messy legal dispute, Moss said, “We were unhappy with the outcome of a sale in escrow that they disturbed.”

5. His nonprofit pays a bunch of money to his private consulting firm.

In 2001, Moss and two partners founded a private consulting company called M.Cubed. A few months later, Moss and his partners also founded SF Community Power, a nonprofit that started using M.Cubed as a consultant. “M.Cubed was subsequently awarded a contract from SF Community Power. I’m paid directly from SF Community Power, and I’m paid a consulting fee at M.Cubed, depending how much I work,” Moss told us.

Records show that as SFCP’s director, Moss made $48,000 in 2009 and $50,000 in 2008. But more than $1 million has moved from Moss’ nonprofit into Moss’ private consulting firm since 2001.

Moss confirms that SF Power has received $350,000, some of it from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. through the California Public Utilities Commission in 2010; $440,000 in 2009; and $500,000 in 2008 — and that some of those dollars went to M.Cubed.

“I intervene in regulatory cases on behalf of SF Community Power,” Moss said, “And then, if you win a case, you get compensation after the case.”

The Potrero View shares office space with the nonprofit and the consulting firm. Last year, SFCP paid $22,000 in rent, and the View paid SFCP $5,000 toward that rent.

Alhough Moss’ campaign asked supporters to mail contributions to the office that all three of Moss’ business entities share, his campaign finance records show that as of June 30, he had paid no rent for campaign headquarters. “I haven’t had a campaign headquarters,” Moss said. “It’s pretty much been at my house.”

Film listings

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

OPENING

*The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector See “Agony Uncle.” (1:42) Roxie, Smith Rafael.

Bran Nue Dae An energetic screen translation of a 1990 Australian stage musical, Rachel Perkins’ film is tourist cliché spun into crowd-pleasing slop, like a Down Under Riverdance. Young Aboriginal Willie (Rockie McKenzie) escapes the “corrective” environ of a 1969 Perth Catholic boarding school and flees homeward, only to be pursued by mercilessly hammy Geoffrey Wright’s racist priest baddie. The crude humor, generic tunes, and hectically shot and dance-poor numbers have about as much to do with Aussie abo culture as The Lion King does with “Africa” — it’s prefab feel-good pap posing as multicultural representation. (1:28) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Change of Plans Emmanuelle Seigner stars in this ensemble comedy revolving around a dysfunctional Parisian dinner party. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki.

I’m Still Here Casey Affleck’s long-awaited Joaquin Phoenix documentary follows the maybe-crazy actor during his mountain man-bearded hip-hop phase. (1:48)

*Mademoiselle Chambon See “Mellow Noir.” (1:41)

Resident Evil: Afterlife Milla Jovovich picks up her guns again, this time to fight zombies in 3D. (1:30)

*White Wedding Every culture’s gotta have its own version of the wacky road-trip movie, in which a series of snafus (mechanical failure, miscommunication, booze, rednecks, farm animals, etc.) sidetrack hapless travelers en route to their (inevitably very important) destination. If the basic structure of Jann Turner’s White Wedding feels rather familiar, at least this South African import has its share of original charm. Groom-to-be Elvis (Kenneth Nkosi) misses a bus at the beginning of the film (we know he’s a nice guy, because he misses it helping a lost child), setting in motion a series of mostly comical disasters en route to his Johannesburg wedding. While his beloved, Ayanda (Zandile Msutwana), clashes with her mother over her choice of wedding (she wants a modern, sophisticated affair; mom wants a more traditional party) — and fends off the advances of a suave ex — Elvis and best friend Tumi (Rapulana Seiphemo, who co-wrote with Turner and Nkosi) attempt to cross miles of countryside despite fate throwing every kind of theoretical and metaphorical roadblock in their paths. One happy distraction is Rose (Jodie Whittaker), an English doctor grappling with travel woes of her own. There’s never any real doubt that Elvis and Ayanda will get hitched at film’s end, but White Wedding‘s journey, which is mostly featherlight despite some eye-opening insights into South Africa’s post-apartheid culture, is worth taking. (1:33) (Eddy)

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop Zhang Yimou remakes (kind of) the Coen Brothers’ 1984 Blood Simple. (1:35)

ONGOING

*The American George Clooney caught in a moodily paranoid, yet exquisitely photographed, ’70s-style suspense-arthouse death-trap? Belmondo and Beatty could empathize. Nonetheless, veteran rock photographer and Control (2007) director Anton Corbijn suffuses the chilly proceedings with a fresh, wintry beauty, the carefully balanced sense of highly charged tension and silky smoothness that a gunsmith would appreciate, and a resonance that feels personal. How else would an ex-rock shooter like Corbijn, who’s made iconic images of the Clash, U2, and others, connect with this tale of an assassin masquerading as a photographer, one who’s constantly glancing behind and around himself — justifiably wary of being caught in another killer’s sights — and seemingly just as wary of the director’s, and audience’s, gaze? A character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Camus novella or a Melville brooder, Jack/Edward, or more accurately “the American,” (Clooney) is in exile after a bad collision with a girlfriend and hitmen in Sweden and hiding out in a picturesque Italian village, conspicuously the more-cold-than-cool outsider and doing one immaculate job for a gorgeous mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten). Is he a good or bad guy? The local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who knows and sees all like a great eye in the sky, is trying to find out, as is the most beautiful prostitute in town (Violante Placido). The answers are nowhere near as clear or as plainly painted as a Sergio Leone Western, although Corbijn nods to the maestro when stone-cold killer Henry Fonda, then playing shockingly against type, appears on a cafe TV screen in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the director’s care and attention to beauty — as well as the lines carved in the face of Clooney’s lean, mean-looking American, a whore like any other — say more than words. (1:43) (Chun)

*Animal Kingdom More renowned for its gold rush history and Victorian terrace homes than its criminal communities, Melbourne, Australia gets put on the same gritty map as Martin Scorsese’s ’70s-era New York City and Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s Los Angeles with the advent of director-writer David Michôd’s masterful debut feature. The metropolis’ sun-blasted suburban homes, wood-paneled bedrooms, and bleached-bone streets acquire a chilling, slowly building power, as Michôd follows the life and death of the Cody clan through the eyes of its newest member, an unformed, ungainly teenager nicknamed J (James Frecheville). When J’s mother ODs, he’s tossed into the twisted arms of her family: the Kewpie doll-faced, too-close-for-comfort matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver), dead-eyed armed robber Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Pope’s best friend Baz (Joel Edgerton), volatile younger brother and dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), and baby bro Darren (Luke Ford). Learning to hide his responses to the escalating insanity surrounding the Codys’ war against the police — and the rest of the world — and finding respite with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), J becomes the focus of a cop (Guy Pearce) determined to take the Codys down — and discovers he’s going to have use all his cunning to survive in the jungle called home. Stunning performances abound — from Frecheville, who beautifully hides a growing awareness behind his character’s monolithic passivity, to the adorably scarifying Weaver — in this carefully, brilliantly detailed crime-family drama bound to land at the top of aficionados’ favored lineups, right alongside 1972’s The Godfather and 1986’s At Close Range and cult raves 1970’s Bloody Mama and 1974’s Big Bad Mama. (2:02) (Chun)

Avatar: Special Edition (2:51)

Cairo Time (1:29)

*Centurion Neil Marshall is the kind of filmmaker who inspires glee among horror and action junkies, but indifference among mainstream moviegoers. Centurion isn’t likely to change this. It’s the second century, and Romans are invading what’s now the Scottish Highlands, much to the displeasure of the Picts, the tribal people who’re already living there. Enter Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), a Roman soldier who becomes the de facto leader of an ever-shrinking group of men trapped behind enemy lines after their general (The Wire‘s Dominic West) is captured. Devotees of Marshall (2002’s Dog Soldiers, 2005’s The Descent, 2008’s Doomsday) will recognize certain elements: an ensemble cast, a military setting, the presence of a fierce female (Bond heroine Olga Kurylenko, who makes Pict warrior drag both spooky and sexy). Unlike his earlier films, though, there’s no supernatural twist; it’s just good old battlefield guts and gore. Sure, the romantic subplot feels a little forced, but this is genre filmmaking in its purest form, to be celebrated with gusto by those who appreciate grisly decapitations and the like. (Read my interview with Marshall at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.) (1:39) (Eddy)

The Concert (1:47)

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) (Chun)

Dinner for Schmucks When he attracts favorable notice and a possible promotion from his corporate boss, Tim (Paul Rudd) is invited to an annual affair in which executives compete to see who can dig up the freakiest loser dweeb for everyone to snicker at. He literally runs into the perfect candidate: Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making elaborate tableaux with stuffed dead nice in tiny human clothes. He’s also the sort of person who, in trying to be helpful, inevitably wreaks havoc on the unlucky person being helped. Which means the 24 hours or so before the “Biggest Idiot” contest provide plenty of time for well-intentioned Barry to nearly destroy Tim’s relationship with a girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), reunite him with Crazy Stalker Chick (Lucy Punch), and imperil his wooing of a multimillion-dollar account. Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series) has a full load of comedy talent on board here. So why are the results so tepid? This remake softens the bite of Francis Veber’s 1998 original French The Dinner Game by making Tim not a yuppie scumbag but a nice guy who just happens to have a jerk’s job (his company seizes ailing firms and liquidates them), and who doesn’t really want to expose hapless Barry to humiliation. But even with that satirical angle removed and a wider streak of sentimentality, it should cough up more laughs than it does. (1:50) (Harvey)

Dogtooth A man, his wife, and their three children live in a country house with a swimming pool and a huge yard enclosed by a high fence. So far, so good. But the kids, who don’t have names, appear to be in their 20s. They’ve never left the property, and they won’t, Dad (Christos Stergioglou) says, until they lose a “dogtooth,” at which time they’ll be mature enough to deal with the terrors of the outside world. In the meantime, they’re trapped in the only world they’ve ever known, carefully constructed by their domineering father. Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who picked up the Prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes for this slice of disturbing domesticity, offers little explanation for Dad’s motives, or why Mom (Michelle Valley) goes along with his plan. The only hint comes from one of few scenes set outside the family’s compound, in which Dad goes to check on the progress of the family’s soon-to-be new dog. “Dogs are like clay, and our job here is to mold them,” the trainer explains. “Every dog is waiting for us to show it how to behave.” Indeed. It’s pretty clear Dad — master of his own private North Korea — is aware of that concept. Though Dogtooth‘s main themes enfold cruelty and child abuse, it also deploys the kind of black humor and button-pushing that fans of shock-trader Harmony Korine would appreciate. There is casual violence, extreme animal cruelty, full-frontal nudity, several disturbing sex scenes, and maybe the most alarming dance routine ever captured on film. (1:36) (Eddy)

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and “the art of doing nothing.” India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) (Jason Shamai)

The Expendables Exactly what you’re expecting: a completely ludicrous explosion-o-thon about mercenaries hired by Bruce Willis to take down a South American general who’s actually a puppet for evil CIA agent-turned-coke kingpin Eric Roberts. Clearly, Sylvester Stallone (who directed, co-wrote, stars, and even coaxed a cameo out of Schwarzenegger) knows his audience, but The Expendables — bulging with a muscle-bound cast, including Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Jason Statham, and Steve Austin, plus Jet Li, who suffers many a short-guy joke — is content to simply tap every expected rung on the 80s-actioner homage ladder. There’s no self-awareness, no truly witty one-liners, no plot twists, and certainly no making a badass out of any female characters (really, couldn’t the South American general’s daughter have packed some heat, or kicked someone in the balls — anything besides simply heaving her cleavage around?) The only truly memorable thing here is the inclusion of Mickey Rourke as Stallone’s tattoo-artist pal; I would possibly wager that Rourke was allowed to write his own weepy monologue, delivered in a close-up so extreme it’s more mind-searing than any of the film’s many machine-gun brawls. (1:43) (Eddy)

The Extra Man The polar opposite of buddy cop action flicks and spoofs a la The Other Guys, with only a faint resemblance to the bromances of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, and so on, The Extra Man is a gently weird throwback to another era, much like its title character, Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline). Sweet, cross-dressing-curious teacher and would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano) is drifting though life passively when he stumbles on eccentric playwright Harrison’s room-for-let and his oddball realm of hangers-on. A blustery, prickly, proudly misogynistic collector of Christmas balls, given to spasms of improvisational dancing, Harrison relishes his role as an escort to aged socialites, crankily shucking and jiving to score invites to fancy dinner parties and vacation homes in Florida. When Ives isn’t courting environmental magazine editor Mary (Katie Holmes) or hiding from the fearsome-looking wooly recluse Gershon (John C. Reilly), the mentor-able young man turns out to be more adept at the role than Harrison ever imagined. And like fossilized grande dames in Chanel, literate audiences also might be charmed by director-writer Shari Springer Berman’s unassuming, crushed-out bon mot, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, to a few mannered, less-than-examined, happily twisted New York City subcultures. (1:45) (Chun)

Flipped I’m sure a “he said/she said” film exists that makes good on the premise, but Rob Reiner’s Flipped doesn’t quite cut it. Nestled safely in 1960s small-town America, the film is first narrated by Bryce, an eighth grader who’s spent the past four years rebuking the advances of Juli, the girl who lives across the street. Bryce is a pretty typical boy, bumbling and unsure of just what he wants, but soon the story “flips” and we see the same events narrated from Juli’s POV. Juli is drawn to Bryce’s “sparkling eyes,” yes, but with a poor family and an annoyingly sincere love for life, she has problems outside of lusting for Bryce. Based on a tween-hit novel by author Wendelin Van Draanen, the story’s familiarity perhaps stems from the source material — in my experience those sorts of novels rarely invite readers older than high school — and similarly in the case of Flipped, I think this might be something we should leave to the kids. (1:30) (Galvin)

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) (Galvin)

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

Going the Distance If you live in San Francisco, don’t try to date someone in New York. It’s just not worth the hassle. But hey, maybe you’re as adorable as Drew Barrymore, and your boyfriend’s as charming as Justin Long — you can’t be expected to let a little geographical complication get in the way. That’s the driving force behind Going the Distance, a romcom that stars real-life couple Barrymore and Long as Erin and Garrett, two crazy kids trying to make it work cross-country. In many ways, the film is your standard boy-meets-girl story, but it’s cute enough that the predictability factor doesn’t really matter. The cast is universally strong, with bonus points to the standouts: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day as Garrett’s embarrassing roommate, and Christina Applegate as Erin’s germaphobe sister. The humor is surprisingly sharp — and raunchy, which earned Going the Distance an R-rating. I’m not going to say Long’s bare ass is worth the price of admission, but it’s certainly a selling point. (1:43) (Peitzman)

Highwater The latest from the first family of surf movies comes courtesy of Dana Brown (2003’s Step Into Liquid), son of Bruce (1964’s The Endless Summer) and father of Wes (an up-and-comer who co-edited Highwater). The film focuses on Oahu’s legendary North Shore — “the one path all surfers must take,” per Dana’s occasionally woo-woo narration — and the annual big-wave contests held there each year. Though the majority of screen time is (of course) taken up by sweeping, slo-mo shots of pros tangling with looming walls of water, Highwater reaches out to civilian audiences with sidebars on the North Shore’s eccentric local culture, the science behind the 10-mile beach’s massive waves, and profiles of the sport’s more colorful characters. Brown is also careful to highlight the growing amount of women in the sport, who surf the exact same breaks as the men but earn far less prize money for it. Diehards might notice events in the film feel a bit dated, and indeed, Highwater was shot in 2005. But since surfers operate under the assumption that “one wave can make a person’s career” (especially if it’s captured on film), there’s presumably no sell-by date violation here. (1:30) (Eddy)

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, “Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island.” In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) (Eddy)

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child In 1986, filmmaker Tamra Davis was six years away from her breakthrough (1992’s Guncrazy; she also made 1998’s Half Baked and 2002 Britney Spears misfire Crossroads, and is married to one of the Beastie Boys). But she was already friends with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, then at the height of his career. He died two years later of a heroin overdose, equally shaken by close friend Andy Warhol’s death and the pressures of his own skyrocketing fame. This tender doc weaves Davis’ 1986 interview with a low-key Basquiat (shot in a Beverly Hills hotel room) with recollections from his New York City circle (girlfriends, gallery owners, fellow artists, art critics). Though his art-world rise was breathtaking — he went from graffiti-scrawling kid to a hip painter whose works sold for hundreds of thousands (and now, multi-millions) — Davis’ doc suggests it was too much, too soon, creating distractions that first interfered with his creativity, then his well-being. Even if you don’t care for his art, Radiant Child is a compelling, insidery look at the dark side of celebrity. (1:34) (Eddy)

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

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father (“the sperm donor,” played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) (Peitzman)

The Last Exorcism Latest in a long line of Louisiana preachers, genial extrovert Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) isn’t even sure he believes in God anymore — but it’s the family business, and it’s a living. He definitely doesn’t believe in demonic possession, yet has presided over many an “exorcism” if only to fool the psychologically damaged into thinking they’re “cured” of delusional ails. But now he’s decided such hijinks might be more harmful than helpful. So to debunk the whole idea, he takes a documentary filmmaking crew on one last “soul-saving” trek, answering a desperate letter from a widowed farmer (Louis Herthum) whose 16-year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is believed possessed. Cotton deploys theatrical tricks to rig an alleged purging of Satan’s minion. And it works … but this wouldn’t be a horror movie if that rationalist triumph didn’t turn out to be a false finish, followed by all kinds of inexplicable WTF. German director Daniel Stamm’s first English-language feature (written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) is being positioned by Lionsgate as the next viral word-of-mouth horror sensation a la prior faux-docs The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). But the “reality” illusion is more transparent here. Despite some clever buildup tactics, okay twists, and a handful of scares, this ultimately disappoints — a preview audience’s catcalls at its underwhelming fadeout suggested there will be no Last Exorcism 2. (1:27) (Harvey)

Lebanon “Das Boot in a tank” has been the thumbnail summary of writer-director Samuel Maoz’s film in its festival travels to date, during which it’s picked up various prizes including a Venice Golden Lion. On the first day of Israel’s 1982 invasion (which Maoz fought in), an Israeli army tank with a crew of three fairly green 20-somethings — soon joined by a fourth with even less battle experience — crosses the border, enters a city already halfway reduced to rubble, and promptly gets its inhabitants in the worst possible fix, stranded without backup. Highly visceral and, needless to say, claustrophobic (there are almost no exterior shots), Lebanon may for some echo The Hurt Locker (2009) in its intense focus on physical peril. It also echoes that film’s lack of equally gripping character development. But taken on its own willfully narrow terms, this is a potent exercise in squirmy combat you-are-thereness. (1:33) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg Here’s your chance to get to know the late poet before he’s portrayed by non-doppelgänger James Franco in the upcoming Howl. Whereas Howl, title drawn from his most famous and controversial creation, focuses on Ginsberg’s 1957 obscenity trial, Jerry Aronson’s 1994 doc offers a more sweeping take on his life. Friends and relatives (in both new and archival interviews), home-movie footage and photographs, talk show excerpts (William F. Buckley: so not down with the counterculture), and the man himself (reading his work, powerfully) help piece together what was undeniably a passionate and remarkable existence. (1:22) Roxie. (Eddy)

Lottery Ticket (1:39)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line “You just fucked with the wrong Mexican.” Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) (Eddy)

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to “the nice parts.”) Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) (Harvey)

*Mesrine: Killer Instinct This first half of a two-part film about notorious French bank robber Jacques Mesrine examines the early life of its subject, before he was a flamboyant, headline-grabbing folk hero. The very first scene uses 70s-style split-screens to revel Mesrine’s violent 1979 death; writer-director Jean-François Richet (2005’s Assault on Precinct 13) then jumps back 15 or so years for a glimpse of our (anti-) hero’s soldiering days in Algeria. Before long, “Jacky” (an outstanding Vincent Cassel, in a César-winning performance) is back in Paris, horrifying his upper-class parents and young wife by choosing the underworld over conventional pencil-pushing. (A near-unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu appears as a mob boss.) Killer Instinct, which is adapted from Mesrine’s own prison-penned autobiography, suffers from some standard biopic problems — it tries to cram in too much, and feels mighty rushed at times. But there’s still plenty of bad, bad behavior to enjoy, including the film’s spectacular last act, a breakneck recreation of one of the daring prison escapes that helped make Mesrine a legend. Continuation Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, which beings where this film ends, is now playing. (1:53) (Eddy)

*Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 If you see writer-director Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct (review below), you’re pretty much obligated to see this sequel, especially since the earlier film beings with the main character’s death, then flashes back and never catches up to it. This installment was actually filmed first, allowing star Vincent Cassell to pack on nearly 50 pounds to play the oldier, portlier version of the legendary French bank robber. Mesrine’s prowess as an escape artist allows him to spend much of this film on the lam with partner François (Mathieu Amalric) and girlfriend Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier). Along the way, the headline-hungry crook declares himself a revolutionary, poses for Paris Match, kidnaps a billionaire, spends his ill-gotten money on diamonds and BMWs, tortures a journalist, and does as much as he can to further the Myth of Mesrine. The foreknowledge of Mesrine’s ultimate end lends a sense of ticking-clock doom; the first time we see it, in Killer Instinct, it’s from the point of view of Mesrine and Sylvia. Richet films the death scene here from the perspective of the police who tracked him, with increasing frustration, for years. Clever twists like this make it preferable to watch both films back-to-back, though Cassell’s commanding performance makes each a worthwhile stand-alone. (2:14) (Eddy)

Nanny McPhee Returns Emma Thompson is back as the titular Mary Poppins type who’s far from practically perfect, her extreme case of the uglies lessening whenever children in her charge learn a “lesson.” The family in need this time belongs to harried Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal, trying a little too hard like everyone here), who’s got way more than she can handle raising three unruly children and running an English farm while her husband’s away fighting World War II. Making matters worse is the arrival of a horribly bratty nephew and niece fleeing the London Blitz, not to mention the constant pestering of a brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) who wants the farm sold to cover his secret gambling debts. Enter guess who, restoring order and civility with the thump of her magic walking stick. The first Nanny McPhee (2005) movie, adapted from Christianna Brand’s children’s books by Thompson and directed by Kirk Jones, was an old-fashioned delight adults could thoroughly enjoy. This sequel, again written by Thomson though directed by Susanna White, is roughly what Babe: Pig in the City (1998) was to the original Babe (1995): something endearingly simple and charming turned shrill, overproduced, and charmless, with way too many CGI animals doing stupid things (like porcine synchronized swimming). It’s bad enough that Ralph Fiennes and Ewan McGregor — no doubt beguiled by the earlier film — chose to do thankless cameos in such dross. But it’s pretty unforgivable that Dame Maggie Smith should suffer a career nadir as a senile old dear who at one point happily plops down on a big pat of cow shit. (1:48) (Harvey)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) (Chun)

The People I’ve Slept With Legions of walk-ons lay claim to the title role in the latest from Quentin Lee (1997’s Shopping for Fangs). The People I’ve Slept With‘s heroine, late-twentysomething L.A. dweller Angela (Karin Anna Cheung), leads a life of qualm-free sexual rapaciousness. That is, until the day when she finds herself — whether owing to a drunken bout of bad judgment or a breakdown in latex technology — pregnant, perplexed in regard to the issue of paternity, and forced to consult the thick stack of homemade baseball-style trading cards with which she documents her sexploits, using descriptive monikers and salient stats. Is Daddy dildo-lovin’ Mr. Hottie from down the hall? The smarmy gent with whom she briefly exchanged intimacies in the bathroom of a bar, a.k.a. Five-Second-Guy? Or the most appealing and least absurd contender, a local politico dubbed Mystery Man? Nothing in Angela’s track record suggests that the answer should matter as much as the location of the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, but as in Knocked Up (2007), if it was less inexplicable, it would be a much shorter film. Instead, Angela, with the help of her snarky, romantically challenged gay BFF Gabriel (Wilson Cruz), sets off in pursuit of DNA samples from the likeliest candidates and, with slightly unhinged optimism, starts planning her nuptials. These events offer some very mild comedy and the occasional gross-out gag; the film’s maneuverings as Angela fumbles toward a position on motherhood, slutdom, and constructing the perfect life are sweet, earnest, and a little clumsy. (1:29) Viz Cinema. (Rapoport)

Piranha 3D (1:29)

Salt Angelina Jolie channels the existential crisis of Jason Bourne and the DIY spirit of MacGyver in a film positing that America’s most pressing concern is extant Russian cold warriors, who are plotting to reestablish their country’s pre-glasnost glory via nuclear holocaust and a Dark Angel–style army of spy kids. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt, a woman who can stymie the top-shelf surveillance system at work using her undergarments and fashion a shoulder-mounted rocket out of interrogation-room furniture and cleaning supplies. These talents surface after Salt is accused of being a Russian operative in league with the aforementioned disturbers of the new world order and takes flight, with her agency coworkers (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit. What ensues is a vicious and confounding assault on the highest levels of the U.S. government, most known rules of logic, and the viewer’s patience and powers of suspending disbelief. Salt’s off-the-ranch maneuverings are moderately engaging, particularly in the first leg of the chase, but clunky expository flashbacks, B-movie-grade dialogue, and an absurd plotline slow the momentum considerably. (1:31) (Rapoport)

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) (Sam Stander)

Soul Kitchen Director Fatih Akin (2004’s Head-On) offers a tribute to the German Heimat (“homeland”) film, as well as to his own hometown, Hamburg, with this gritty comedy set in a restaurant dubbed Soul Kitchen. Star Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script with Akin, really did own a similar greasy spoon, and his knowledge of what makes an eatery soar or fail is exaggerated here to humorous and occasionally surreal effect. Bousdoukos’ character, the scruffy Zinos, loves funk music; he’s also in an existential funk, having just seen his girlfriend move to Shanghai. What’s worse, he’s just injured his back, necessitating the hiring of snooty chef Shayn (Head-On‘s Birol Ünel); his ne’er-do-well brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) is freshly out of jail; and he owes big bucks to the local tax board. Also, an old childhood pal turned sleazy businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is circling his property with sharky hunger. Will everything that can possibly go wrong, go wrong, with a side of ketchup and mayonnaise? Of course it will. Stylish direction and a game cast, including winning newcomer Anna Bederke as Zinos’ shot-gulping waitress, make Soul Kitchen a fun if non-essential diversion. (1:33) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Step Up 3D The third installment of the Step Up enterprise graduates performing arts high school and moves to the sidewalks, rooftops, and warehouses of New York City, as well as the occasional venue — part underground club, part ad-plastered sports arena — where packs of street dancers battle and mop up the floor with their rivals, employing only the weaponry of a fierce routine. That, and the fast-forward button in the editing suite — beyond drop kicks and droplets of water coming out of the screen at your face, Step Up 3D unabashedly adopts the choreographed F/X of contemporary action films, manipulating footage to make the dancers look like nimble, ferocious, supernatural creatures with a youthful disdain for gravity and the space-time continuum. There is a plot of sorts, involving a crew called the Pirates; their fearless leader Luke (Rick Malambri); his mysterious lady friend Natalie (Sharni Vinson); an NYU freshman named Moose (Adam Sevani of 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets), who was, in Luke’s oft-repeated words, “born from a boombox” (or BFAB); and the warehouse wonderland where the Pirates live and train, amid a decor of tape-deck-womb walls and galleries of limited-edition sneakers. It’s best, though, not to follow along too closely on the rare occasions when director Jon Chu (Step Up 2) mistakenly lets more than four lines of earnest dialogue stack up without a dance-scene intervention. The near-continuous wave of choreographed outbursts is like eye candy injected with multiple shots of 5-Hour Energy drink, but those who flinch at the idea of Auto-Tuning dance performance may want to stay home and rent 2000’s Center Stage. (1:46) (Rapoport)

*The Switch Has any hard-working actor ever made as many mediocre, albeit vigorously marketed, movies as Jennifer Aniston? It seems like an age since her last good one, Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money (2006), though some might go as far back as 2002’s The Good Girl, her dramatic and cinematic breakthrough. Perhaps that dry spell seems extra long due to Aniston’s tabloid overexposure, or maybe it’s just the feeble conceits (a la 2009’s Love Happens) that Aniston allows herself to get roped into. In any case, armed with a sharp script based on a Jeffrey Eugenides short story and a less-than-perfect but comically well-equipped everyman foil in Jason Bateman, The Switch turns out to be a refreshing break from Aniston’s run of predictability: it’s actually good, girl (if a bit far-fetched that even a neurotic, successful financial whiz could be so emotionally constipated). Heeding her biological alarm clock over the objections of best friend Wally (Bateman), Kassie (Aniston) decides to get artificially inseminated by handsome, smart, and charming donor Roland (Patrick Wilson), but nothing goes according to plan when Wally gets wasted at her insemination party and — no use crying over spilled semen — woozily decides to substitute his own emissions for Roland’s. Funny, tender, heart-strings-tugging shenanigans ensue when Kassie returns to NYC after seven years with her adorable, neurotic mini-Wally Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). Bateman is as reliably excellent as ever. Blades of Glory (2007) directors Will Speak and Josh Gordon put care into the details — from the lighting, to the scene-swiping cameos by Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum, to the on-point yet relatively realistic dialogue, and it shows, making this, along with The Kids Are All Right, a, ahem, seminal year for donor-coms. (1:56) (Chun)

*Takers Likely the best movie to be advertised on billboards all over Oakland in a while, Takers is one of those likeable, smart, and faintly ludicrous genre flicks — a gangsta B with a hip-hop heart, centered on a cadre of high-style, Rat Pack-like bank robbers — that redeems its playas all around. It gives T.I., in both starring and executive producer roles and tellingly emerging from the clink in his first scene, a career beyond the rap game and the pen: he’s a snottily charmismatic Little Caesar here, a slight, serpentine mini-Snoop. It gives the formidable Idris Elba (The Wire) as the group’s leader something to wrap his sonorous Cockney around as he plays off crack ‘ho sister (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) as if they were English-accented castaways on island L.A. It gives Paul Walker, the second-banana princeling of the urban action flick, something to do: namely function as Elba’s lieutenant. And it gives the benighted Chris Brown, who gets his share of fast-stepping glory via a nice, meaty chase scene, a way to recast and strive toward redeeming himself on the silver screen — while giving the little-girls-who-love-bad-boys something to scream about. See, something for everyone (except maybe Zoe Saldana, who gets saddled with the arm candy role). (1:57) (Chun)

*The Tillman Story To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught. Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the “friendly fire” circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House. Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else. The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. (1:34) (Harvey)

Vampires Suck (1:40)

The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest The Everest documentary has, by now, become a genre unto itself. It’s got its own tropes (sweeping shots of the mountain’s face, somber voice-over philosophizing about the human struggle with nature) and its own canon (topped, perhaps, by the harrowing 1998 IMAX hit Everest). The latest entry into this field is National Geographic Entertainment’s The Wildest Dream, which chronicles early-20th century explorer George Mallory’s lifelong — and ultimately life-ending — quest to reach Everest’s summit, and modern mountaineer Conrad Anker’s attempt to recreate his predecessor’s final climb. Director Anthony Geffen unfolds his tale in standard adventure-doc fashion. We get a lot of scratchy footage from Mallory’s climbs, a few risibly awkward dramatic re-creations, and quite a lot of portentous voiceover work. These are worn techniques, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the story told any less compelling. Mallory himself emerges as a particularly fascinating figure — a talented and charming scholar, a devoted husband, and an irresponsible, borderline suicidal obsessive. It’s a shame that we’re only able to observe him at a century’s distance. (1:33) (Zach Ritter)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit. Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) (Eddy)

Film listings

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

OPENING

*The American George Clooney caught in a moodily paranoid, yet exquisitely photographed, ’70s-style suspense-arthouse death-trap? Belmondo and Beatty could empathize. Nonetheless, veteran rock photographer and Control (2007) director Anton Corbijn suffuses the chilly proceedings with a fresh, wintry beauty, the carefully balanced sense of highly charged tension and silky smoothness that a gunsmith would appreciate, and a resonance that feels personal. How else would an ex-rock shooter like Corbijn, who’s made iconic images of the Clash, U2, and others, connect with this tale of an assassin masquerading as a photographer, one who’s constantly glancing behind and around himself — justifiably wary of being caught in another killer’s sights — and seemingly just as wary of the director’s, and audience’s, gaze? A character who wouldn’t be out of place in a Camus novella or a Melville brooder, Jack/Edward, or more accurately "the American," (Clooney) is in exile after a bad collision with a girlfriend and hitmen in Sweden and hiding out in a picturesque Italian village, conspicuously the more-cold-than-cool outsider and doing one immaculate job for a gorgeous mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten). Is he a good or bad guy? The local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who knows and sees all like a great eye in the sky, is trying to find out, as is the most beautiful prostitute in town (Violante Placido). The answers are nowhere near as clear or as plainly painted as a Sergio Leone Western, although Corbijn nods to the maestro when stone-cold killer Henry Fonda, then playing shockingly against type, appears on a cafe TV screen in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the director’s care and attention to beauty — as well as the lines carved in the face of Clooney’s lean, mean-looking American, a whore like any other — say more than words. (1:43) Cerrito, Presidio. (Chun)

Dogtooth See "Father Knows Best." (1:36) Sundance Kabuki.

Going the Distance If you live in San Francisco, don’t try to date someone in New York. It’s just not worth the hassle. But hey, maybe you’re as adorable as Drew Barrymore, and your boyfriend’s as charming as Justin Long — you can’t be expected to let a little geographical complication get in the way. That’s the driving force behind Going the Distance, a romcom that stars real-life couple Barrymore and Long as Erin and Garrett, two crazy kids trying to make it work cross-country. In many ways, the film is your standard boy-meets-girl story, but it’s cute enough that the predictability factor doesn’t really matter. The cast is universally strong, with bonus points to the standouts: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day as Garrett’s embarrassing roommate, and Christina Applegate as Erin’s germaphobe sister. The humor is surprisingly sharp — and raunchy, which earned Going the Distance an R-rating. I’m not going to say Long’s bare ass is worth the price of admission, but it’s certainly a selling point. (1:43) California, Marina. (Peitzman)

Highwater The latest from the first family of surf movies comes courtesy of Dana Brown (2003’s Step Into Liquid), son of Bruce (1964’s The Endless Summer) and father of Wes (an up-and-comer who co-edited Highwater). The film focuses on Oahu’s legendary North Shore — "the one path all surfers must take," per Dana’s occasionally woo-woo narration — and the annual big-wave contests held there each year. Though the majority of screen time is (of course) taken up by sweeping, slo-mo shots of pros tangling with looming walls of water, Highwater reaches out to civilian audiences with sidebars on the North Shore’s eccentric local culture, the science behind the 10-mile beach’s massive waves, and profiles of the sport’s more colorful characters. Brown is also careful to highlight the growing amount of women in the sport, who surf the exact same breaks as the men but earn far less prize money for it. Diehards might notice events in the film feel a bit dated, and indeed, Highwater was shot in 2005. But since surfers operate under the assumption that "one wave can make a person’s career" (especially if it’s captured on film), there’s presumably no sell-by date violation here. (1:30) Metreon. (Eddy)

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child Director Tamra Davis, a personal friend of Basquiat’s, draws on her insider knowledge for this doc about the late artist. (1:34) Lumiere, Shattuck.

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg Here’s your chance to get to know the late poet before he’s portrayed by non-doppelgänger James Franco in the upcoming Howl. Whereas Howl, title drawn from his most famous and controversial creation, focuses on Ginsberg’s 1957 obscenity trial, Jerry Aronson’s 1994 doc offers a more sweeping take on his life. Friends and relatives (in both new and archival interviews), home-movie footage and photographs, talk show excerpts (William F. Buckley: so not down with the counterculture), and the man himself (reading his work, powerfully) help piece together what was undeniably a passionate and remarkable existence. (1:22) Roxie. (Eddy)

*Machete Probably the first movie that was initially conceived solely as a fake-movie trailer (as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse), Rodriguez’s Machete emerges in full-length form to take on everyone’s sky-high expectations. I mean, the trailer promised motorcycles soaring through flames, a gun-toting priest, and the line "You just fucked with the wrong Mexican." Fortunately, Machete the film does Machete the trailer proud; its deliberately silly revenge plot is both spot-on vintage homage and semi-serious commentary on America’s ongoing immigration debate. In addition, it features more severed limbs, gunshots to the head, irresponsible sex, and smirking Steven Seagal close-ups than any other movie in recent memory. Frequent Rodriguez supporting player Danny Trejo pretty much kills it as the title badass — but then, you already knew he would. (1:45) Presidio. (Eddy)

*Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 If you see writer-director Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct (review below), you’re pretty much obligated to see this sequel, especially since the earlier film beings with the main character’s death, then flashes back and never catches up to it. This installment was actually filmed first, allowing star Vincent Cassell to pack on nearly 50 pounds to play the oldier, portlier version of the legendary French bank robber. Mesrine’s prowess as an escape artist allows him to spend much of this film on the lam with partner François (Mathieu Amalric) and girlfriend Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier). Along the way, the headline-hungry crook declares himself a revolutionary, poses for Paris Match, kidnaps a billionaire, spends his ill-gotten money on diamonds and BMWs, tortures a journalist, and does as much as he can to further the Myth of Mesrine. The foreknowledge of Mesrine’s ultimate end lends a sense of ticking-clock doom; the first time we see it, in Killer Instinct, it’s from the point of view of Mesrine and Sylvia. Richet films the death scene here from the perspective of the police who tracked him, with increasing frustration, for years. Clever twists like this make it preferable to watch both films back-to-back, though Cassell’s commanding performance makes each a worthwhile stand-alone. (2:14) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The People I’ve Slept With Legions of walk-ons lay claim to the title role in the latest from Quentin Lee (1997’s Shopping for Fangs). The People I’ve Slept With‘s heroine, late-twentysomething L.A. dweller Angela (Karin Anna Cheung), leads a life of qualm-free sexual rapaciousness. That is, until the day when she finds herself — whether owing to a drunken bout of bad judgment or a breakdown in latex technology — pregnant, perplexed in regard to the issue of paternity, and forced to consult the thick stack of homemade baseball-style trading cards with which she documents her sexploits, using descriptive monikers and salient stats. Is Daddy dildo-lovin’ Mr. Hottie from down the hall? The smarmy gent with whom she briefly exchanged intimacies in the bathroom of a bar, a.k.a. Five-Second-Guy? Or the most appealing and least absurd contender, a local politico dubbed Mystery Man? Nothing in Angela’s track record suggests that the answer should matter as much as the location of the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, but as in Knocked Up (2007), if it was less inexplicable, it would be a much shorter film. Instead, Angela, with the help of her snarky, romantically challenged gay BFF Gabriel (Wilson Cruz), sets off in pursuit of DNA samples from the likeliest candidates and, with slightly unhinged optimism, starts planning her nuptials. These events offer some very mild comedy and the occasional gross-out gag; the film’s maneuverings as Angela fumbles toward a position on motherhood, slutdom, and constructing the perfect life are sweet, earnest, and a little clumsy. (1:29) Viz Cinema. (Rapoport)

Soul Kitchen Director Fatih Akin (2004’s Head-On) offers a tribute to the German Heimat ("homeland") film, as well as to his own hometown, Hamburg, with this gritty comedy set in a restaurant dubbed Soul Kitchen. Star Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script with Akin, really did own a similar greasy spoon, and his knowledge of what makes an eatery soar or fail is exaggerated here to humorous and occasionally surreal effect. Bousdoukos’ character, the scruffy Zinos, loves funk music; he’s also in an existential funk, having just seen his girlfriend move to Shanghai. What’s worse, he’s just injured his back, necessitating the hiring of snooty chef Shayn (Head-On‘s Birol Ünel); his ne’er-do-well brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) is freshly out of jail; and he owes big bucks to the local tax board. Also, an old childhood pal turned sleazy businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is circling his property with sharky hunger. Will everything that can possibly go wrong, go wrong, with a side of ketchup and mayonnaise? Of course it will. Stylish direction and a game cast, including winning newcomer Anna Bederke as Zinos’ shot-gulping waitress, make Soul Kitchen a fun if non-essential diversion. (1:33) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

*The Tillman Story "See Notes on a Scandal." (1:34) Shattuck.

ONGOING

*Animal Kingdom More renowned for its gold rush history and Victorian terrace homes than its criminal communities, Melbourne, Australia gets put on the same gritty map as Martin Scorsese’s ’70s-era New York City and Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s Los Angeles with the advent of director-writer David Michôd’s masterful debut feature. The metropolis’ sun-blasted suburban homes, wood-paneled bedrooms, and bleached-bone streets acquire a chilling, slowly building power, as Michôd follows the life and death of the Cody clan through the eyes of its newest member, an unformed, ungainly teenager nicknamed J (James Frecheville). When J’s mother ODs, he’s tossed into the twisted arms of her family: the Kewpie doll-faced, too-close-for-comfort matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver), dead-eyed armed robber Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Pope’s best friend Baz (Joel Edgerton), volatile younger brother and dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), and baby bro Darren (Luke Ford). Learning to hide his responses to the escalating insanity surrounding the Codys’ war against the police — and the rest of the world — and finding respite with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), J becomes the focus of a cop (Guy Pearce) determined to take the Codys down — and discovers he’s going to have use all his cunning to survive in the jungle called home. Stunning performances abound — from Frecheville, who beautifully hides a growing awareness behind his character’s monolithic passivity, to the adorably scarifying Weaver — in this carefully, brilliantly detailed crime-family drama bound to land at the top of aficionados’ favored lineups, right alongside 1972’s The Godfather and 1986’s At Close Range and cult raves 1970’s Bloody Mama and 1974’s Big Bad Mama. (2:02) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Avatar: Special Edition (2:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

Cairo Time (1:29) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

*Centurion Neil Marshall is the kind of filmmaker who inspires glee among horror and action junkies, but indifference among mainstream moviegoers. Centurion isn’t likely to change this. It’s the second century, and Romans are invading what’s now the Scottish Highlands, much to the displeasure of the Picts, the tribal people who’re already living there. Enter Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), a Roman soldier who becomes the de facto leader of an ever-shrinking group of men trapped behind enemy lines after their general (The Wire‘s Dominic West) is captured. Devotees of Marshall (2002’s Dog Soldiers, 2005’s The Descent, 2008’s Doomsday) will recognize certain elements: an ensemble cast, a military setting, the presence of a fierce female (Bond heroine Olga Kurylenko, who makes Pict warrior drag both spooky and sexy). Unlike his earlier films, though, there’s no supernatural twist; it’s just good old battlefield guts and gore. Sure, the romantic subplot feels a little forced, but this is genre filmmaking in its purest form, to be celebrated with gusto by those who appreciate grisly decapitations and the like. (Read my interview with Marshall at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.) (1:39) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Concert (1:47) Clay.

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) SF Center. (Chun)

Dinner for Schmucks When he attracts favorable notice and a possible promotion from his corporate boss, Tim (Paul Rudd) is invited to an annual affair in which executives compete to see who can dig up the freakiest loser dweeb for everyone to snicker at. He literally runs into the perfect candidate: Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making elaborate tableaux with stuffed dead nice in tiny human clothes. He’s also the sort of person who, in trying to be helpful, inevitably wreaks havoc on the unlucky person being helped. Which means the 24 hours or so before the "Biggest Idiot" contest provide plenty of time for well-intentioned Barry to nearly destroy Tim’s relationship with a girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), reunite him with Crazy Stalker Chick (Lucy Punch), and imperil his wooing of a multimillion-dollar account. Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series) has a full load of comedy talent on board here. So why are the results so tepid? This remake softens the bite of Francis Veber’s 1998 original French The Dinner Game by making Tim not a yuppie scumbag but a nice guy who just happens to have a jerk’s job (his company seizes ailing firms and liquidates them), and who doesn’t really want to expose hapless Barry to humiliation. But even with that satirical angle removed and a wider streak of sentimentality, it should cough up more laughs than it does. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and "the art of doing nothing." India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) Cerrito, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Expendables Exactly what you’re expecting: a completely ludicrous explosion-o-thon about mercenaries hired by Bruce Willis to take down a South American general who’s actually a puppet for evil CIA agent-turned-coke kingpin Eric Roberts. Clearly, Sylvester Stallone (who directed, co-wrote, stars, and even coaxed a cameo out of Schwarzenegger) knows his audience, but The Expendables — bulging with a muscle-bound cast, including Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Jason Statham, and Steve Austin, plus Jet Li, who suffers many a short-guy joke — is content to simply tap every expected rung on the 80s-actioner homage ladder. There’s no self-awareness, no truly witty one-liners, no plot twists, and certainly no making a badass out of any female characters (really, couldn’t the South American general’s daughter have packed some heat, or kicked someone in the balls — anything besides simply heaving her cleavage around?) The only truly memorable thing here is the inclusion of Mickey Rourke as Stallone’s tattoo-artist pal; I would possibly wager that Rourke was allowed to write his own weepy monologue, delivered in a close-up so extreme it’s more mind-searing than any of the film’s many machine-gun brawls. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Extra Man The polar opposite of buddy cop action flicks and spoofs a la The Other Guys, with only a faint resemblance to the bromances of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, and so on, The Extra Man is a gently weird throwback to another era, much like its title character, Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline). Sweet, cross-dressing-curious teacher and would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano) is drifting though life passively when he stumbles on eccentric playwright Harrison’s room-for-let and his oddball realm of hangers-on. A blustery, prickly, proudly misogynistic collector of Christmas balls, given to spasms of improvisational dancing, Harrison relishes his role as an escort to aged socialites, crankily shucking and jiving to score invites to fancy dinner parties and vacation homes in Florida. When Ives isn’t courting environmental magazine editor Mary (Katie Holmes) or hiding from the fearsome-looking wooly recluse Gershon (John C. Reilly), the mentor-able young man turns out to be more adept at the role than Harrison ever imagined. And like fossilized grande dames in Chanel, literate audiences also might be charmed by director-writer Shari Springer Berman’s unassuming, crushed-out bon mot, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, to a few mannered, less-than-examined, happily twisted New York City subcultures. (1:45) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Flipped I’m sure a "he said/she said" film exists that makes good on the premise, but Rob Reiner’s Flipped doesn’t quite cut it. Nestled safely in 1960s small-town America, the film is first narrated by Bryce, an eighth grader who’s spent the past four years rebuking the advances of Juli, the girl who lives across the street. Bryce is a pretty typical boy, bumbling and unsure of just what he wants, but soon the story "flips" and we see the same events narrated from Juli’s POV. Juli is drawn to Bryce’s "sparkling eyes," yes, but with a poor family and an annoyingly sincere love for life, she has problems outside of lusting for Bryce. Based on a tween-hit novel by author Wendelin Van Draanen, the story’s familiarity perhaps stems from the source material — in my experience those sorts of novels rarely invite readers older than high school — and similarly in the case of Flipped, I think this might be something we should leave to the kids. (1:30) Opera Plaza. (Galvin)

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) Albany, Empire, Opera Plaza. (Galvin)

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

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, "Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island." In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Bridge, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

The Last Exorcism Latest in a long line of Louisiana preachers, genial extrovert Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) isn’t even sure he believes in God anymore — but it’s the family business, and it’s a living. He definitely doesn’t believe in demonic possession, yet has presided over many an "exorcism" if only to fool the psychologically damaged into thinking they’re "cured" of delusional ails. But now he’s decided such hijinks might be more harmful than helpful. So to debunk the whole idea, he takes a documentary filmmaking crew on one last "soul-saving" trek, answering a desperate letter from a widowed farmer (Louis Herthum) whose 16-year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is believed possessed. Cotton deploys theatrical tricks to rig an alleged purging of Satan’s minion. And it works … but this wouldn’t be a horror movie if that rationalist triumph didn’t turn out to be a false finish, followed by all kinds of inexplicable WTF. German director Daniel Stamm’s first English-language feature (written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) is being positioned by Lionsgate as the next viral word-of-mouth horror sensation a la prior faux-docs The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). But the "reality" illusion is more transparent here. Despite some clever buildup tactics, okay twists, and a handful of scares, this ultimately disappoints — a preview audience’s catcalls at its underwhelming fadeout suggested there will be no Last Exorcism 2. (1:27) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Lebanon "Das Boot in a tank" has been the thumbnail summary of writer-director Samuel Maoz’s film in its festival travels to date, during which it’s picked up various prizes including a Venice Golden Lion. On the first day of Israel’s 1982 invasion (which Maoz fought in), an Israeli army tank with a crew of three fairly green 20-somethings — soon joined by a fourth with even less battle experience — crosses the border, enters a city already halfway reduced to rubble, and promptly gets its inhabitants in the worst possible fix, stranded without backup. Highly visceral and, needless to say, claustrophobic (there are almost no exterior shots), Lebanon may for some echo The Hurt Locker (2009) in its intense focus on physical peril. It also echoes that film’s lack of equally gripping character development. But taken on its own willfully narrow terms, this is a potent exercise in squirmy combat you-are-thereness. (1:33) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Lottery Ticket (1:39) 1000 Van Ness.

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to "the nice parts.") Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life
isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Mesrine: Killer Instinct This first half of a two-part film about notorious French bank robber Jacques Mesrine examines the early life of its subject, before he was a flamboyant, headline-grabbing folk hero. The very first scene uses 70s-style split-screens to revel Mesrine’s violent 1979 death; writer-director Jean-François Richet (2005’s Assault on Precinct 13) then jumps back 15 or so years for a glimpse of our (anti-) hero’s soldiering days in Algeria. Before long, "Jacky" (an outstanding Vincent Cassel, in a César-winning performance) is back in Paris, horrifying his upper-class parents and young wife by choosing the underworld over conventional pencil-pushing. (A near-unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu appears as a mob boss.) Killer Instinct, which is adapted from Mesrine’s own prison-penned autobiography, suffers from some standard biopic problems — it tries to cram in too much, and feels mighty rushed at times. But there’s still plenty of bad, bad behavior to enjoy, including the film’s spectacular last act, a breakneck recreation of one of the daring prison escapes that helped make Mesrine a legend. Continuation Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, which beings where this film ends, comes out Fri/3. (1:53) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Nanny McPhee Returns Emma Thompson is back as the titular Mary Poppins type who’s far from practically perfect, her extreme case of the uglies lessening whenever children in her charge learn a "lesson." The family in need this time belongs to harried Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal, trying a little too hard like everyone here), who’s got way more than she can handle raising three unruly children and running an English farm while her husband’s away fighting World War II. Making matters worse is the arrival of a horribly bratty nephew and niece fleeing the London Blitz, not to mention the constant pestering of a brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) who wants the farm sold to cover his secret gambling debts. Enter guess who, restoring order and civility with the thump of her magic walking stick. The first Nanny McPhee (2005) movie, adapted from Christianna Brand’s children’s books by Thompson and directed by Kirk Jones, was an old-fashioned delight adults could thoroughly enjoy. This sequel, again written by Thomson though directed by Susanna White, is roughly what Babe: Pig in the City (1998) was to the original Babe (1995): something endearingly simple and charming turned shrill, overproduced, and charmless, with way too many CGI animals doing stupid things (like porcine synchronized swimming). It’s bad enough that Ralph Fiennes and Ewan McGregor — no doubt beguiled by the earlier film — chose to do thankless cameos in such dross. But it’s pretty unforgivable that Dame Maggie Smith should suffer a career nadir as a senile old dear who at one point happily plops down on a big pat of cow shit. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

Pirahna 3D (1:29) 1000 Van Ness.

Salt Angelina Jolie channels the existential crisis of Jason Bourne and the DIY spirit of MacGyver in a film positing that America’s most pressing concern is extant Russian cold warriors, who are plotting to reestablish their country’s pre-glasnost glory via nuclear holocaust and a Dark Angel–style army of spy kids. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt, a woman who can stymie the top-shelf surveillance system at work using her undergarments and fashion a shoulder-mounted rocket out of interrogation-room furniture and cleaning supplies. These talents surface after Salt is accused of being a Russian operative in league with the aforementioned disturbers of the new world order and takes flight, with her agency coworkers (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit. What ensues is a vicious and confounding assault on the highest levels of the U.S. government, most known rules of logic, and the viewer’s patience and powers of suspending disbelief. Salt’s off-the-ranch maneuverings are moderately engaging, particularly in the first leg of the chase, but clunky expository flashbacks, B-movie-grade dialogue, and an absurd plotline slow the momentum considerably. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) California, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness. (Sam Stander)

Step Up 3D The third installment of the Step Up enterprise graduates performing arts high school and moves to the sidewalks, rooftops, and warehouses of New York City, as well as the occasional venue — part underground club, part ad-plastered sports arena — where packs of street dancers battle and mop up the floor with their rivals, employing only the weaponry of a fierce routine. That, and the fast-forward button in the editing suite — beyond drop kicks and droplets of water coming out of the screen at your face, Step Up 3D unabashedly adopts the choreographed F/X of contemporary action films, manipulating footage to make the dancers look like nimble, ferocious, supernatural creatures with a youthful disdain for gravity and the space-time continuum. There is a plot of sorts, involving a crew called the Pirates; their fearless leader Luke (Rick Malambri); his mysterious lady friend Natalie (Sharni Vinson); an NYU freshman named Moose (Adam Sevani of 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets), who was, in Luke’s oft-repeated words, "born from a boombox" (or BFAB); and the warehouse wonderland where the Pirates live and train, amid a decor of tape-deck-womb walls and galleries of limited-edition sneakers. It’s best, though, not to follow along too closely on the rare occasions when director Jon Chu (Step Up 2) mistakenly lets more than four lines of earnest dialogue stack up without a dance-scene intervention. The near-continuous wave of choreographed outbursts is like eye candy injected with multiple shots of 5-Hour Energy drink, but those who flinch at the idea of Auto-Tuning dance performance may want to stay home and rent 2000’s Center Stage. (1:46) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*The Switch Has any hard-working actor ever made as many mediocre, albeit vigorously marketed, movies as Jennifer Aniston? It seems like an age since her last good one, Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money (2006), though some might go as far back as 2002’s The Good Girl, her dramatic and cinematic breakthrough. Perhaps that dry spell seems extra long due to Aniston’s tabloid overexposure, or maybe it’s just the feeble conceits (a la 2009’s Love Happens) that Aniston allows herself to get roped into. In any case, armed with a sharp script based on a Jeffrey Eugenides short story and a less-than-perfect but comically well-equipped everyman foil in Jason Bateman, The Switch turns out to be a refreshing break from Aniston’s run of predictability: it’s actually good, girl (if a bit far-fetched that even a neurotic, successful financial whiz could be so emotionally constipated). Heeding her biological alarm clock over the objections of best friend Wally (Bateman), Kassie (Aniston) decides to get artificially inseminated by handsome, smart, and charming donor Roland (Patrick Wilson), but nothing goes according to plan when Wally gets wasted at her insemination party and — no use crying over spilled semen — woozily decides to substitute his own emissions for Roland’s. Funny, tender, heart-strings-tugging shenanigans ensue when Kassie returns to NYC after seven years with her adorable, neurotic mini-Wally Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). Bateman is as reliably excellent as ever. Blades of Glory (2007) directors Will Speak and Josh Gordon put care into the details — from the lighting, to the scene-swiping cameos by Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum, to the on-point yet relatively realistic dialogue, and it shows, making this, along with The Kids Are All Right, a, ahem, seminal year for donor-coms. (1:56) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*Takers Likely the best movie to be advertised on billboards all over Oakland in a while, Takers is one of those likeable, smart, and faintly ludicrous genre flicks — a gangsta B with a hip-hop heart, centered on a cadre of high-style, Rat Pack-like bank robbers — that redeems its playas all around. It gives T.I., in both starring and executive producer roles and tellingly emerging from the clink in his first scene, a career beyond the rap game and the pen: he’s a snottily charmismatic Little Caesar here, a slight, serpentine mini-Snoop. It gives the formidable Idris Elba (The Wire) as the group’s leader something to wrap his sonorous Cockney around as he plays off crack ‘ho sister (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) as if they were English-accented castaways on island L.A. It gives Paul Walker, the second-banana princeling of the urban action flick, something to do: namely function as Elba’s lieutenant. And it gives the benighted Chris Brown, who gets his share of fast-stepping glory via a nice, meaty chase scene, a way to recast and strive toward redeeming himself on the silver screen — while giving the little-girls-who-love-bad-boys something to scream about. See, something for everyone (except maybe Zoe Saldana, who gets saddled with the arm candy role). (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

*The Two Escobars In America, the World Cup ends, and most sports fans turn their attentions elsewhere. In other countries, soccer is a year-round happening that inspires religious devotion. Putting this fact into perspectives both glorious and cruel is The Two Escobars, Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s involving new doc about the rise of "narco-soccer" in Colombia, circa the coke-crazed 1980s and early 90s. One Escobar, we’ve all heard of: Pablo, a noted drug kingpin who was also a hero to the slum-dwellers who benefited from his donations of housing and, perhaps more importantly, soccer fields. A rabid footy fan himself, Pablo invested in Colombian teams, an influx of cash that helped the national team become one of the strongest in the world. Escobar number two is Andrés, the affable, wholesome defender who served as team captain in the 1994 World Cup. The events that caused both Escobars to meet untimely and brutal deaths are detailed here, by people who knew them well, in a moving, well-edited film that’s as cautionary as it is celebratory. Highly recommended. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Vampires Suck (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest The Everest documentary has, by now, become a genre unto itself. It’s got its own tropes (sweeping shots of the mountain’s face, somber voice-over philosophizing about the human struggle with nature) and its own canon (topped, perhaps, by the harrowing 1998 IMAX hit Everest). The latest entry into this field is National Geographic Entertainment’s The Wildest Dream, which chronicles early-20th century explorer George Mallory’s lifelong — and ultimately life-ending — quest to reach Everest’s summit, and modern mountaineer Conrad Anker’s attempt to recreate his predecessor’s final climb. Director Anthony Geffen unfolds his tale in standard adventure-doc fashion. We get a lot of scratchy footage from Mallory’s climbs, a few risibly awkward dramatic re-creations, and quite a lot of portentous voiceover work. These are worn techniques, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the story told any less compelling. Mallory himself emerges as a particularly fascinating figure — a talented and charming scholar, a devoted husband, and an irresponsible, borderline suicidal obsessive. It’s a shame that we’re only able to observe him at a century’s distance. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Zach Ritter)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit. Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Empire, Four Star, Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Endorsement interviews: Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde

Zelda Bronstein
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Endorsement interviews: Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde

Editors note: The Guardian is interviewing candidates for the fall elections, and to give everyone the broadest possible understanding of the issues and our endorsement process, we’re posting the sound files of all the interviews on the politics blog. Our endorsements will be coming out Oct. 6th.

District 6 candidate Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde is full of intriguing ideas for how San Francisco can bring greater dignity into people’s lives.

These include a five-year moratorium on condominiums, the establishment of safe injection sites, building a grocery store in the Tenderloin, continuum housing for youth that age out of foster care, the charging of weight-based fees on vehicles that enter the city, and the creation of a theater and cultural district on the mid-Market Street corridor.

“We have been inspiring a whole lot of people that didn’t have a voice,” Hyde, who performs as the drag queen Anna Conda, told us in a conversation that touched on hot-button topics like decriminalizing homelessness, expanding rent control, creating safe and affordable housing, and providing better and basic services for folks in low-income areas,

“I was more into the idea of rent control but people are far more willing to talk about harm reduction and safe injection sites,” Hyde said of life on the campaign trail.

“San Francisco is a magical place that draws people to it, but it’s become the place that forces people out.”

Folks often talk about the divisive rise of NIMBYism in the South of Market, but Hyde thinks there is a way to create a more unified front in the district. “People don’t understand the ramifications of not taking care of the homelessness,” Hyde said. “Your tax is putting people in jail or on the streets, where it will cost twice as much. Three nights in jail equals the cost of an entire month of housing.”

To learn more about how Hyde intends to offer permanent solutions to these challengers, instead of simply sweeping folks from a doorstep to a jail cell, listen to the interview here:

 

glendon by janwend

Film listings

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

OPENING

Avatar: Special Edition Now with nine extra minutes? Wasn’t this movie long enough the first time? (2:51)

Cairo Time Patricia Clarkson plays a married magazine editor who unexpectedly falls in love while on vacation in Cairo. (1:29) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

*Centurion Neil Marshall is the kind of filmmaker who inspires glee among horror and action junkies, but indifference among mainstream moviegoers. Centurion isn’t likely to change this. It’s the second century, and Romans are invading what’s now the Scottish Highlands, much to the displeasure of the Picts, the tribal people who’re already living there. Enter Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), a Roman soldier who becomes the de facto leader of an ever-shrinking group of men trapped behind enemy lines after their general (The Wire‘s Dominic West) is captured. Devotees of Marshall (2002’s Dog Soldiers, 2005’s The Descent, 2008’s Doomsday) will recognize certain elements: an ensemble cast, a military setting, the presence of a fierce female (Bond heroine Olga Kurylenko, who makes Pict warrior drag both spooky and sexy). Unlike his earlier films, though, there’s no supernatural twist; it’s just good old battlefield guts and gore. Sure, the romantic subplot feels a little forced, but this is genre filmmaking in its purest form, to be celebrated with gusto by those who appreciate grisly decapitations and the like. (Read my interview with Marshall at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.) (1:39) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Flipped I’m sure a "he said/she said" film exists that makes good on the premise, but Rob Reiner’s Flipped doesn’t quite cut it. Nestled safely in 1960s small-town America, the film is first narrated by Bryce, an eighth grader who’s spent the past four years rebuking the advances of Juli, the girl who lives across the street. Bryce is a pretty typical boy, bumbling and unsure of just what he wants, but soon the story "flips" and we see the same events narrated from Juli’s POV. Juli is drawn to Bryce’s "sparkling eyes," yes, but with a poor family and an annoyingly sincere love for life, she has problems outside of lusting for Bryce. Based on a tween-hit novel by author Wendelin Van Draanen, the story’s familiarity perhaps stems from the source material — in my experience those sorts of novels rarely invite readers older than high school — and similarly in the case of Flipped, I think this might be something we should leave to the kids. (1:30) Embarcadero. (Galvin)

The Last Exorcism Latest in a long line of Louisiana preachers, genial extrovert Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) isn’t even sure he believes in God anymore — but it’s the family business, and it’s a living. He definitely doesn’t believe in demonic possession, yet has presided over many an "exorcism" if only to fool the psychologically damaged into thinking they’re "cured" of delusional ails. But now he’s decided such hijinks might be more harmful than helpful. So to debunk the whole idea, he takes a documentary filmmaking crew on one last "soul-saving" trek, answering a desperate letter from a widowed farmer (Louis Herthum) whose 16-year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is believed possessed. Cotton deploys theatrical tricks to rig an alleged purging of Satan’s minion. And it works … but this wouldn’t be a horror movie if that rationalist triumph didn’t turn out to be a false finish, followed by all kinds of inexplicable WTF. German director Daniel Stamm’s first English-language feature (written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) is being positioned by Lionsgate as the next viral word-of-mouth horror sensation a la prior faux-docs The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). But the "reality" illusion is more transparent here. Despite some clever buildup tactics, okay twists, and a handful of scares, this ultimately disappoints — a preview audience’s catcalls at its underwhelming fadeout suggested there will be no Last Exorcism 2. (1:27) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Mesrine: Killer Instinct This first half of a two-part film about notorious French bank robber Jacques Mesrine examines the early life of its subject, before he was a flamboyant, headline-grabbing folk hero. The very first scene uses 70s-style split-screens to revel Mesrine’s violent 1979 death; writer-director Jean-François Richet (2005’s Assault on Precinct 13) then jumps back 15 or so years for a glimpse of our (anti-) hero’s soldiering days in Algeria. Before long, "Jacky" (an outstanding Vincent Cassel, in a César-winning performance) is back in Paris, horrifying his upper-class parents and young wife by choosing the underworld over conventional pencil-pushing. (A near-unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu appears as a mob boss.) Killer Instinct, which is adapted from Mesrine’s own prison-penned autobiography, suffers from some standard biopic problems — it tries to cram in too much, and feels mighty rushed at times. But there’s still plenty of bad, bad behavior to enjoy, including the film’s spectacular last act, a breakneck recreation of one of the daring prison escapes that helped make Mesrine a legend. Continuation Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, which beings where this film ends, comes out Sept 3. (1:53) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Takers This just in: Hayden Christensen still getting work. (1:57) Shattuck.

*The Two Escobars In America, the World Cup ends, and most sports fans turn their attentions elsewhere. In other countries, soccer is a year-round happening that inspires religious devotion. Putting this fact into perspectives both glorious and cruel is The Two Escobars, Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s involving new doc about the rise of "narco-soccer" in Colombia, circa the coke-crazed 1980s and early 90s. One Escobar, we’ve all heard of: Pablo, a noted drug kingpin who was also a hero to the slum-dwellers who benefited from his donations of housing and, perhaps more importantly, soccer fields. A rabid footy fan himself, Pablo invested in Colombian teams, an influx of cash that helped the national team become one of the strongest in the world. Escobar number two is Andrés, the affable, wholesome defender who served as team captain in the 1994 World Cup. The events that caused both Escobars to meet untimely and brutal deaths are detailed here, by people who knew them well, in a moving, well-edited film that’s as cautionary as it is celebratory. Highly recommended. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

ONGOING

*Animal Kingdom More renowned for its gold rush history and Victorian terrace homes than its criminal communities, Melbourne, Australia gets put on the same gritty map as Martin Scorsese’s ’70s-era New York City and Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s Los Angeles with the advent of director-writer David Michôd’s masterful debut feature. The metropolis’ sun-blasted suburban homes, wood-paneled bedrooms, and bleached-bone streets acquire a chilling, slowly building power, as Michôd follows the life and death of the Cody clan through the eyes of its newest member, an unformed, ungainly teenager nicknamed J (James Frecheville). When J’s mother ODs, he’s tossed into the twisted arms of her family: the Kewpie doll-faced, too-close-for-comfort matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver), dead-eyed armed robber Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Pope’s best friend Baz (Joel Edgerton), volatile younger brother and dealer Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), and baby bro Darren (Luke Ford). Learning to hide his responses to the escalating insanity surrounding the Codys’ war against the police — and the rest of the world — and finding respite with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), J becomes the focus of a cop (Guy Pearce) determined to take the Codys down — and discovers he’s going to have use all his cunning to survive in the jungle called home. Stunning performances abound — from Frecheville, who beautifully hides a growing awareness behind his character’s monolithic passivity, to the adorably scarifying Weaver — in this carefully, brilliantly detailed crime-family drama bound to land at the top of aficionados’ favored lineups, right alongside 1972’s The Godfather and 1986’s At Close Range and cult raves 1970’s Bloody Mama and 1974’s Big Bad Mama. (2:02) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Army of Crime In 1941 Paris, a group of resistance fighters — mostly foreign-born, many Jewish — form an underground network to sabotage the ever-growing Nazi presence in France. Their schemes range from the clever (playing loud piano to disguise the sound of a printing press) to the violent (grenades tossed under buses). Tension builds as the film progresses, though we learn in the first three minutes which characters will have "Died for France" at the end. In addition to its important historical lesson (with a modern-day nod toward the shifting definition of what makes a terrorist), Army of Crime also boasts a strong, easy-on-the-eyes ensemble cast and a depiction of wartime Paris that favors glamorous nostalgia. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

The Concert (1:47) Clay.

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

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) SF Center. (Chun)

Dinner for Schmucks When he attracts favorable notice and a possible promotion from his corporate boss, Tim (Paul Rudd) is invited to an annual affair in which executives compete to see who can dig up the freakiest loser dweeb for everyone to snicker at. He literally runs into the perfect candidate: Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making elaborate tableaux with stuffed dead nice in tiny human clothes. He’s also the sort of person who, in trying to be helpful, inevitably wreaks havoc on the unlucky person being helped. Which means the 24 hours or so before the "Biggest Idiot" contest provide plenty of time for well-intentioned Barry to nearly destroy Tim’s relationship with a girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), reunite him with Crazy Stalker Chick (Lucy Punch), and imperil his wooing of a multimillion-dollar account. Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series) has a full load of comedy talent on board here. So why are the results so tepid? This remake softens the bite of Francis Veber’s 1998 original French The Dinner Game by making Tim not a yuppie scumbag but a nice guy who just happens to have a jerk’s job (his company seizes ailing firms and liquidates them), and who doesn’t really want to expose hapless Barry to humiliation. But even with that satirical angle removed and a wider streak of sentimentality, it should cough up more laughs than it does. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

*The Disappearance of Alice Creed The reliably alarming Eddie Marsen (concurrently Life During Wartime‘s pederast) plays bullying Vic, one-half of a criminal duo — with puppyish Danny (Martin Compston) his younger subordinate — who abduct grown child of wealth Alice (Gemma Arterton) for ransom in a carefully-thought-out kidnapping. This simple setup, for the most part very simply set in the two abandoned-apartment-complex rooms where Alice is held captive, allows talented British writer-director J. Blakeson to spring a number of escalating narrative surprises. The whole endeavor is almost too chamber-scaled to justify being seen on the big screen (let alone being shot in widescreen format). But it does have some mighty satisfying tricks up its sleeve. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Eat Pray Love The new film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s chart-busting memoir, Eat Pray Love, benefits greatly from the lead performance by Julia Roberts, an actor who can draw from her own reserves of pathos when a project has none of its own. The adaptation, about a whiny American author farting around the globe in search of what amounts to spiritual room service, is nothing without her. The journey begins with the Type-A, book contract-inspired premise that Gilbert will travel to three appointed countries over the course of a year in order that, having thrice denied herself absolutely nothing, she might come out the other end a better-balanced human being. The first stop is Italy, where her entire plan is to finally unbutton her jeans and indulge in a celebrated cuisine, as if her home base of Manhattan were a culinary backwater. But this film is all about tired equivalencies, so Italy equals food, and expressive hand gestures, and "the art of doing nothing." India, her next stop, equals enlightenment (her discovery that the guru she’s come to see is currently at an ashram in New York is an irony lost on the movie). And Bali, her final getaway, apparently equals contradictory but flattering aphorisms and thematically hypocritical romances. The sole appeal to a moviegoer here is aspirational. What’s so embarrassing about Eat Pray Love is its insistence that this appeal sprouts from the spiritual quest itself, and not just from the privilege that enables Gilbert to have such an extravagant quest in the first place. But then, self-awareness is supposed to be a obstacle to enlightenment. She’s got nothing to worry about there. (2:30) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Expendables Exactly what you’re expecting: a completely ludicrous explosion-o-thon about mercenaries hired by Bruce Willis to take down a South American general who’s actually a puppet for evil CIA agent-turned-coke kingpin Eric Roberts. Clearly, Sylvester Stallone (who directed, co-wrote, stars, and even coaxed a cameo out of Schwarzenegger) knows his audience, but The Expendables — bulging with a muscle-bound cast, including Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Jason Statham, and Steve Austin, plus Jet Li, who suffers many a short-guy joke — is content to simply tap every expected rung on the 80s-actioner homage ladder. There’s no self-awareness, no truly witty one-liners, no plot twists, and certainly no making a badass out of any female characters (really, couldn’t the South American general’s daughter have packed some heat, or kicked someone in the balls — anything besides simply heaving her cleavage around?) The only truly memorable thing here is the inclusion of Mickey Rourke as Stallone’s tattoo-artist pal; I would possibly wager that Rourke was allowed to write his own weepy monologue, delivered in a close-up so extreme it’s more mind-searing than any of the film’s many machine-gun brawls. (1:43) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Extra Man The polar opposite of buddy cop action flicks and spoofs a la The Other Guys, with only a faint resemblance to the bromances of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, and so on, The Extra Man is a gently weird throwback to another era, much like its title character, Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline). Sweet, cross-dressing-curious teacher and would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano) is drifting though life passively when he stumbles on eccentric playwright Harrison’s room-for-let and his oddball realm of hangers-on. A blustery, prickly, proudly misogynistic collector of Christmas balls, given to spasms of improvisational dancing, Harrison relishes his role as an escort to aged socialites, crankily shucking and jiving to score invites to fancy dinner parties and vacation homes in Florida. When Ives isn’t courting environmental magazine editor Mary (Katie Holmes) or hiding from the fearsome-looking wooly recluse Gershon (John C. Reilly), the mentor-able young man turns out to be more adept at the role than Harrison ever imagined. And like fossilized grande dames in Chanel, literate audiences also might be charmed by director-writer Shari Springer Berman’s unassuming, crushed-out bon mot, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, to a few mannered, less-than-examined, happily twisted New York City subcultures. (1:45) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Galvin)

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

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

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, "Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island." In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Bridge, California, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Lebanon "Das Boot in a tank" has been the thumbnail summary of writer-director Samuel Maoz’s film in its festival travels to date, during which it’s picked up various prizes including a Venice Golden Lion. On the first day of Israel’s 1982 invasion (which Maoz fought in), an Israeli army tank with a crew of three fairly green 20-somethings — soon joined by a fourth with even less battle experience — crosses the border, enters a city already halfway reduced to rubble, and promptly gets its inhabitants in the worst possible fix, stranded without backup. Highly visceral and, needless to say, claustrophobic (there are almost no exterior shots), Lebanon may for some echo The Hurt Locker (2009) in its intense focus on physical peril. It also echoes that film’s lack of equally gripping character development. But taken on its own willfully narrow terms, this is a potent exercise in squirmy combat you-are-thereness. (1:33) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Lottery Ticket (1:39) 1000 Van Ness.

*Mao’s Last Dancer Based on the subject’s autobiography of the same name, this Australian-produced drama chronicles the real-life saga of Li Cunxin (played as child, teen, and adult by Huang Wen Bin, Chengwu Guo, and Chi Cao), who was plucked from his rural childhood village in 1972 to study far from home at the Beijing Dance Academy. He attracted notice from Houston Ballet artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) during a cultural-exchange visit, and was allowed to go abroad for a Texas summer residency. At first the film looks headed toward well-handled but slightly pat inspirational territory pitting bad China against good America, as it cuts between Li’s grueling training by (mostly) humorless Party ideologues, and his astonishment at the prosperity and freedom in a country he’d been programmed to believe was a capitalist hellhole of injustice and deprivation. (Though as a Chinese diplomat cautions, not untruthfully, he’s only been exposed to "the nice parts.") Swayed by love and other factors, Li created an international incident — tensely staged here — when he chose to defect rather than return home. But Jan Sardi’s script and reliable Aussie veteran Bruce Beresford’s direction refuse to settle for easy sentiment, despite a corny situation or two. Our hero’s new life
isn’t all dream-come-true, nor is his past renounced without serious consequence (a poignant Joan Chen essays his peasant mother). The generous ballet excerpts (only slightly marred by occasional slow-mo gimmickry) offer reward enough, but the film’s greatest achievement is its honestly earning the right to jerk a few tears. (1:57) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Nanny McPhee Returns Emma Thompson is back as the titular Mary Poppins type who’s far from practically perfect, her extreme case of the uglies lessening whenever children in her charge learn a "lesson." The family in need this time belongs to harried Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal, trying a little too hard like everyone here), who’s got way more than she can handle raising three unruly children and running an English farm while her husband’s away fighting World War II. Making matters worse is the arrival of a horribly bratty nephew and niece fleeing the London Blitz, not to mention the constant pestering of a brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) who wants the farm sold to cover his secret gambling debts. Enter guess who, restoring order and civility with the thump of her magic walking stick. The first Nanny McPhee (2005) movie, adapted from Christianna Brand’s children’s books by Thompson and directed by Kirk Jones, was an old-fashioned delight adults could thoroughly enjoy. This sequel, again written by Thomson though directed by Susanna White, is roughly what Babe: Pig in the City (1998) was to the original Babe (1995): something endearingly simple and charming turned shrill, overproduced, and charmless, with way too many CGI animals doing stupid things (like porcine synchronized swimming). It’s bad enough that Ralph Fiennes and Ewan McGregor — no doubt beguiled by the earlier film — chose to do thankless cameos in such dross. But it’s pretty unforgivable that Dame Maggie Smith should suffer a career nadir as a senile old dear who at one point happily plops down on a big pat of cow shit. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

Pirahna 3D (1:29) 1000 Van Ness.

Salt Angelina Jolie channels the existential crisis of Jason Bourne and the DIY spirit of MacGyver in a film positing that America’s most pressing concern is extant Russian cold warriors, who are plotting to reestablish their country’s pre-glasnost glory via nuclear holocaust and a Dark Angel–style army of spy kids. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt, a woman who can stymie the top-shelf surveillance system at work using her undergarments and fashion a shoulder-mounted rocket out of interrogation-room furniture and cleaning supplies. These talents surface after Salt is accused of being a Russian operative in league with the aforementioned disturbers of the new world order and takes flight, with her agency coworkers (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit. What ensues is a vicious and confounding assault on the highest levels of the U.S. government, most known rules of logic, and the viewer’s patience and powers of suspending disbelief. Salt’s off-the-ranch maneuverings are moderately engaging, particularly in the first leg of the chase, but clunky expository flashbacks, B-movie-grade dialogue, and an absurd plotline slow the momentum considerably. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on. Cera plays a good feckless twerp; his performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. (1:52) California, Four Star, Presidio. (Sam Stander)

Step Up 3D The third installment of the Step Up enterprise graduates performing arts high school and moves to the sidewalks, rooftops, and warehouses of New York City, as well as the occasional venue — part underground club, part ad-plastered sports arena — where packs of street dancers battle and mop up the floor with their rivals, employing only the weaponry of a fierce routine. That, and the fast-forward button in the editing suite — beyond drop kicks and droplets of water coming out of the screen at your face, Step Up 3D unabashedly adopts the choreographed F/X of contemporary action films, manipulating footage to make the dancers look like nimble, ferocious, supernatural creatures with a youthful disdain for gravity and the space-time continuum. There is a plot of sorts, involving a crew called the Pirates; their fearless leader Luke (Rick Malambri); his mysterious lady friend Natalie (Sharni Vinson); an NYU freshman named Moose (Adam Sevani of 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets), who was, in Luke’s oft-repeated words, "born from a boombox" (or BFAB); and the warehouse wonderland where the Pirates live and train, amid a decor of tape-deck-womb walls and galleries of limited-edition sneakers. It’s best, though, not to follow along too closely on the rare occasions when director Jon Chu (Step Up 2) mistakenly lets more than four lines of earnest dialogue stack up without a dance-scene intervention. The near-continuous wave of choreographed outbursts is like eye candy injected with multiple shots of 5-Hour Energy drink, but those who flinch at the idea of Auto-Tuning dance performance may want to stay home and rent 2000’s Center Stage. (1:46) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*The Switch Has any hard-working actor ever made as many mediocre, albeit vigorously marketed, movies as Jennifer Aniston? It seems like an age since her last good one, Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money (2006), though some might go as far back as 2002’s The Good Girl, her dramatic and cinematic breakthrough. Perhaps that dry spell seems extra long due to Aniston’s tabloid overexposure, or maybe it’s just the feeble conceits (a la 2009’s Love Happens) that Aniston allows herself to get roped into. In any case, armed with a sharp script based on a Jeffrey Eugenides short story and a less-than-perfect but comically well-equipped everyman foil in Jason Bateman, The Switch turns out to be a refreshing break from Aniston’s run of predictability: it’s actually good, girl (if a bit far-fetched that even a neurotic, successful financial whiz could be so emotionally constipated). Heeding her biological alarm clock over the objections of best friend Wally (Bateman), Kassie (Aniston) decides to get artificially inseminated by handsome, smart, and charming donor Roland (Patrick Wilson), but nothing goes according to plan when Wally gets wasted at her insemination party and — no use crying over spilled semen — woozily decides to substitute his own emissions for Roland’s. Funny, tender, heart-strings-tugging shenanigans ensue when Kassie returns to NYC after seven years with her adorable, neurotic mini-Wally Sebastian (Thomas Robinson). Bateman is as reliably excellent as ever. Blades of Glory (2007) directors Will Speak and Josh Gordon put care into the details — from the lighting, to the scene-swiping cameos by Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum, to the on-point yet relatively realistic dialogue, and it shows, making this, along with The Kids Are All Right, a, ahem, seminal year for donor-coms. (1:56) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Tales from Earthsea Drawn from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series of fantasy novels, the feature debut of Goro Miyazaki, the legendary Hayao Miyazaki’s son, is the latest to come out of Japan’s Studio Ghibli. It tells the story of angsty patricidal prince-refugee Arren, who finds himself in the company of the wise Archmage Sparrowhawk and must help him and his friends defeat a Maleficent-esque evil sorcerer. But this film’s fantastical world tends too often toward the unengagingly mundane, with a cast of half-baked archetypes battling over overwrought metaphysical concepts. To boot, too many of the weird creatures and unreal elements seem reminiscent of the elder Miyazaki’s creations in films like Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001). Ghibli is famed for its relentlessly creative productions, but Earthsea misses the mark, even if it is entirely watchable. It’s worth noting that Le Guin herself has written a lengthy piece on the film’s many problems. (1:55) Sundance Kabuki. (Stander)

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

Vampires Suck (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest The Everest documentary has, by now, become a genre unto itself. It’s got its own tropes (sweeping shots of the mountain’s face, somber voice-over philosophizing about the human struggle with nature) and its own canon (topped, perhaps, by the harrowing 1998 IMAX hit Everest). The latest entry into this field is National Geographic Entertainment’s The Wildest Dream, which chronicles early-20th century explorer George Mallory’s lifelong — and ultimately life-ending — quest to reach Everest’s summit, and modern mountaineer Conrad Anker’s attempt to recreate his predecessor’s final climb. Director Anthony Geffen unfolds his tale in standard adventure-doc fashion. We get a lot of scratchy footage from Mallory’s climbs, a few risibly awkward dramatic re-creations, and quite a lot of portentous voiceover work. These are worn techniques, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the story told any less compelling. Mallory himself emerges as a particularly fascinating figure — a talented and charming scholar, a devoted husband, and an irresponsible, borderline suicidal obsessive. It’s a shame that we’re only able to observe him at a century’s distance. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Zach Ritter)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit. Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Empire, Four Star, Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Smoked dry

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Smoked dry

DRUGS Personally, I’ll smoke any dried-up old horseshit you hand me. I don’t care. Brown buds, flat buds, wet seedy buds, leaves, stems, branches, even stuff that’s already been smoked. You got it, let’s roll it.

But I’m also not stupid: pricey gorgeous buds are the best. The tight-purple supernugs have the best smell and the best taste; they are the ultimate gateway to the total marijuana experience. On the other hand, top-shelf Prada buds will fuck you up, financially and otherwise. A dab will definitely do you.

Except at my house. If there’s weed anywhere near me, I’ll smoke it right up. I don’t care how sacred the bud is, or even if I had to scalp a hippie just to pay for it. I am a high-energy, compulsive, scatterbrained cat-lady freak-out type who isn’t a major boozer, thank God. So I’m basically the perfect candidate for chain-spliffing. And I don’t have a problem with that, in case the church people were wondering. I need my weed and I need it to be abundant and cheap. That’s why being a legal stoner smoked me dry.

It took me about three months in the fully legit scene to finally realize that my zero cash flow was entirely the weed’s fault. Oh, of course, of course: weed doesn’t smoke people; people do. I know all that. But I’m telling you, sister––you need to get a load of this dispensary weed. It will blow your mind and bring you to your knees (and don’t bother getting up, honey, because you’ll have to blow a lot of stoners to make your rent at these rates). The buds at the pot clubs are so purple, so crystal-y and seductive that it’s not offensive in the least to admit they were asking for it — for me to smoke every last one of them, that is. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, I couldn’t help myself.

No, the pressure of constant availability was simply too much. I couldn’t deal with all that convenience. Three blocks away was just too close. Realistically, the pot club would need a moat filled with cannibals and a legion of snipers with perfect aim to keep a person like me away. And imagine — I am just one Roberta Seawhore among many. I was there every other day, talking weed sass with the staff, sampling this, sampling that, always walking out with at least two to three kinds of Cannabis Cup–level bud products and paraphernalia. Long gone were the silly days of yore when I’d have to go through lazy stoner drug mules, who would maybe show up six days later, if ever, with a few scraps of pot-related plant parts that crawled directly out of a witch’s humid crotch. Ga. How plebeian.

So who did I think I was with my fancy-ass buds, anyway — the pope? I’m the kind of broad who shops flip-flops on the Payless sale rack––and now I’m some ganja quality-control expert? Please. “But it’s medicine,” I reminded myself daily. “You legally need to smoke an enormous amount of papal-quality weed, Roberta. That’s why the nice pot-doctor lady prescribed you the EZ Vape2––because you are sick. You have insomnia, dude. Because of your very critical medical-marijuana-necessitating crazy-head condition, you not only deserve the city’s sweetest buds, you simply must have them, 24/7, even if it makes you homeless. Relax, marijuana is good for you.”

Here’s what I learned: Pot clubs are perfect for yuppies who posses a freakish sense of self-control. Everyone else is too low budge.

Which is exactly why, one foggy new-moon morning, I looked deep into my dark Persephone soul and mustered the courage to do the unthinkable: I set fire to my pot card. A few bittersweet tears of relief (mixed with intense pangs of regret and panic) elbowed their way out my left eye as I watched that pretty little pot card burn in the cat dish. Sigh. Heavy is my heart under the weight of the world. Then I rolled a fat one.

From that day forward, however, I resolved to only buy buds, or whatever you call those shriveled, turd-like things, from the renegade marijuana underground — from those brave women and men who boldly said “Never mind!” to the law and scammed PG&E for the noble purpose of getting us all hella stoned. In other words: “Hey, criminals — the bitch is back. Who do I have to blow for some free shake?”

But I’d be lying if I said the financial and self-control fallouts of having unlimited access to superbuds were the only reasons I destroyed my card: In all honesty, I was getting too fucked up, thanks to the edibles.

Indeed, one of the first things I noticed when I became legit is that smoking weed is so last year. Only losers and totally boring Deadheads still smoke it. Everybody else eats it, drinks it, or swallows it, which is where, if you are not careful, you may cross the line from harmless stoner dingbat to depressing drug addict nodding off. Just ask me.

At $15 bucks a pop, the Showstopper hash cookie had better be the shit. It turns out that it is, big time. Although nothing special to look at it, this buttery, chocolate-chip morsel is similar to a ‘ludey combination of MDMA, mushrooms, and weed — a pretty sublime experience for a pot cookie. At first, half a cookie did the trick. But soon I was eating a whole one and contemplating taking two in one afternoon.

Clearly, the point of edibles is to get you majorly fucked up, and I initially had no problem with that concept because, as you will remember, I am sick! But did I really need the $50 container of hash oil, too? You bet I did. As soon as the cute hipster stonerrista at the dispensary finished explaining the proper way to spread the dark, golden oil on my spliff papers, I was thinking, “Three blocks is too far away, man. I need to be lighting this shit up RIGHT NOW.”

I ate my $15 cookie on the way home, where I smeared the hash oil on a Zig Zag with a safety pin, sparked it up, and soon started nodding off on the couch. So early ’90s, right? And it was just noon on a Saturday, and all I had to do was laundry, which prompted me to wonder, “Why am I getting this high? What am I after here? Maybe I should just start using heroin or morphine. Or maybe heroin and morphine together. What the fuck is going on, Seawhore?”

Suddenly, those lightweight days of just huffing whatever crap landed my way seemed so sweet and innocent in contrast to my new life as a hardened doper. And didn’t I feel bad for abandoning my grower peeps? Yes, I did feel bad. And stupid, too. After all, Roberta Seawhore isn’t in this habitual pot-smoking biz to get completely out of her head. I like to think of marijuana as Roberta’s little helper––not as the k-hole heroin-bomb of the plant world.

Don’t get me wrong here, people. I am thankful the dispensaries exist, and the legalization of marijuana is a huge step forward for mankind. But if you are a Payless flip-flop shopper with no self-control like me, I suggest you think twice before getting legal. Can you handle the ease? Or are you better off chasing an unreliable drug mule throughout the Mish just to get an oregano fix? Only you know the answer to that. I wish you the best.

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

I suppose I should be thrilled that 40 of the richest people in the United States have agreed to give away half their money before they die. Actually, it kind of makes me sick.

The concept is called the Giving Pledge, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet started it. The two have been on the phones this summer, dialing up other really, really rich people and asking them to sign on. I’ve got nothing against Gates and Buffet (well, Gates has always been into world domination, so that’s a problem, but Buffet seems a decent sort for a billionaire). In fact, Buffet has promised to give away 99 percent of his $47 billion, which would leave him and his heirs with just a paltry $470 million.

Even that much money fits into New York Mayor (and billionaire) Michael Bloomberg’s entirely accurate statement: “The reality of great wealth is that you can’t spend it and you can’t take it with you.”

That’s the thing: You can’t spend that much money, and you can’t take it with you, and the United States used to be the kind of country that disdained inherited monarchy. Bloomberg says he wants his kids to have to work for a living, which is nice, although even after he gives away half his wealth, none of them are likely to miss any meals or have trouble paying the rent. His children, and their children, and their children, will all be able to afford to go to good schools and colleges, even if the public education system in America completely collapses for lack of adequate funding.

The irony is that, for the most part, these exceptionally rich people who feel so good about giving their money to charities of their choosing (which then honor them with awards and testimonials and dinners) oppose the notion of raising taxes on high incomes.

The problem with charity is that it won’t ever really reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. The only way you do that is with aggressive, effective government action: by taxing the great wealth when it comes in (as income) and when it goes out (as estates) — and then, through a democratic process involving elected representatives, deciding where the money should go.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is wonderful, I guess, but it won’t provide mental health care for homeless people in San Francisco. That’s a government job. It also won’t ensure that every kid in America gets quality preschool, good teachers, schools that aren’t falling apart, and access to a college education. That’s what we pay taxes for.

But wait a minute. There’s never enough money for these things, because we keep cutting taxes on the rich. Instead, these guys can give money to their own pet projects — and pay no taxes at all. It’s charity! It’s a tax write-off!

I wanna throw up.

What DCCC questionnaires reveal about Adachi reform, sit-lie and marijuana

Mary Magee
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What DCCC questionnaires reveal about Adachi reform, sit-lie and marijuana

The DCCC makes its endorsements for the November election on August 11. And in preparation for that crucial endorsement, candidates filled out questionnaires that are posted online, providing fodder for those interested in Jeff Adachi’s pension reform, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s sit-lie ordinance, and the legalization of marijuana, amongst other measures.

But before we get to those issues, I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see that D. 10 candidate Malia Cohen, who has already secured the endorsements of Sally Lieber, Fiona Ma and Aaron Peskin, says on her DCCC questionnaire that she supports the death penalty.

Now, to be fair, advocating for or against the death penalty isn’t the duty of the Board of Supervisors. And I haven’t yet caught up with Cohen yet to clarify why she holds this stance, (or whether it was one big typo, though I somehow doubt it). So, I’ll be sure to update this post, once I have a chance to talk to Cohen, who was busy at yet another candidate forum, when I was writing this entry. UPDATE: Cohen says she does not support the death penalty, and that she inadvertently misanswered the question. (Thanks for clearing up the mystery, Malia, and being gracious about it in the process.)

I should mention that Peskin also endorsed D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly.

And I should also note that while D. 10 candidate Lynette Sweet’s questionnaire says she supports Jeff Adachi’s pension and healthcare reform, Sweet’s campaign says that’s not the case, pointing to how Sweet said at the Potrero Hill Democratic Club’s August 2 D. 10 forum that what Adachi did wasn’t a bad thing, but the way he went about it was.

I quoted Sweet saying those very words in a previous post, and Sweet’s campaign manager Shane Mayer told me that he forwarded what I wrote about that meeting to the DCCC to clarify Sweet’s position. But Mayer got testy when I asked him about the rent, or rather the lack of rent, that Sweet, who Mayor Gavin Newsom has already endorsed, appears to be paying for her campaign headquarters at 25 Division Street (at Rhode Island).

As Beyond Chron tells it, the deal looks more than a bit fishy, and appears to be bankrolled by the Visovichs, a family with Republican leanings that supported Mayors Willie Brown and Newsom in past election campaigns.

 Mayer tried to dismiss the Beyond Chron article as a “hit piece”.

“The article focuses on only one candidate,” Mayer said. “We’re paying fair market rate, and using only a small portion of a warehouse. When we moved in, we didn’t have lights.”

But Sweet isn’t the only D. 10 candidate to come under Beyond Chron’s fire in recent days: fellow D. 10 candidate Steve Moss also took flak for receiving $500 from Andrew Zacks, the landlord attorney famous for doing Ellis Act evictions.

While on the phone with Moss recently, I asked what he thought about Newsom’s sit-lie ordinance, Moss said he hadn’t made up his mind yet.

And in his DCCC questionnaire, Moss also waxes ambiguous on sit-lie. “There’s clearly a lack of civility in certain areas of the city,” Moss wrote. “And in Bayview-Hunters Point, youth loitering can create conditions that create violence. However, it’s not clear to me that sit-lie is an appropriate response to this issue, and that it won’t result in unintended consequences. For example, sidewalks in Bayview-Hunters Point are also often used for peaceful gathering of neighbors, which is community-building and non-threatening.”

Makes me wonder what Moss and the rest of the candidates think about City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s recent gang injunction in Viz Valley…

UPDATE: I should add here that termed-out D.6 Sup. Chris Daly has just endorsed legislative aide and D.6 candidate James Keys, whose DCCC answers I’ve included in my round up of some of the candidate responses to this year’s DCCC questionnaire. UPDATE: And for all the Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde supporters, my humble apologies for omitting your candidate’s positions in my first post on this issue:

Chiu’s non-citizen voting in School Board elections
Supportive of non-citizen voting:  Adachi, Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and D. 2 challenger Janet Reilly, D. 6 candidates Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, James Keys, Jane Kim, Jim Meko, Debra Walker and Theresa Sparks. D. 8 candidates Rafael Mandelman, Rebecca Prozan and Scott Wiener. D. 10 candidates Isaac Bowers, Cohen, Chris Jackson, Tony Kelly, Dewitt Lacy and Eric Smith.
Opposed: D.2 candidates Farrell and Berwick, D. 4 incumbent Carmen Chu, and D. 10 candidates Kristine Enea and Lynette Sweet.

Newsom’s ban on dual office holding

Supportive: Berwick, Farrell, Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Meko, Enea.

“Yes. Better distribution of power,” Anna Conda said.

Opposed: Adachi, Alioto-Pier, Reilly, Keys, Kim, Walker, Sparks, Mandelman, Sweet, Lacy, Kelly, Cohen, Wiener, Jackson, Smith and Prozan.
“This measure is the result of petty politics between the mayor and the Board,” Prozan, who contributed S100 to Newsom’s Lt. Governor campaign, famously wrote on her DCCC questionnaire.

Newsom’s Sit-Lie Ordinance
Supportive: Farrell, Alioto-Pier, Reilly, Chu, Sparks, Wiener and Sweet.
Opposed: Adachi, Berwick, Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, and Walker. Mandelman and Prozan. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy and Smith.

Adachi’s Pension Reform
Supportive: Adachi, Berwick, Meko, and Sweet
Opposed: Chu, Farrell and Reilly. Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, Walker and Sparks. Mandelman, Prozan and Wiener. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy and Smith.
No position, yet: Alioto-Pier.

Legalization of pot (Prop. 19)
Supportive: Adachi, Berwick. Glen “Anna Conda” Hyde, Keys, Kim, Meko, Sparks, and Walker. Mandelman, Prozan and Wiener. Cohen, Jackson, Kelly, Lacy, Smith and Sweet.
Opposed: Chu and Farrell

No position, yet: Alioto-Pier, Janet Reilly.

Hard to tell: Moss.

“I philosophically support this measure but am concerned that its economic and social implications haven’t been carefully considered, nor its interaction with federal law,” Moss wrote on his DCCC questionnaire.

Sparks for her part just clarified that she mistakenly answered “No” on two DCCC questionnaire items: “Do you opposeprivatization of essential government services,” and “Will you oppose anti-worker initiatives that seek to undermine the ability of union leaders to carry out will of members and engage in political activities.”

“I meant to answer yes, as I explained at my DCCC interview,” Sparks said. “I was confused by the double negatives.”

While she was on the phone, Sparks also admitted that the pace on the campaign trail is getting intense with forums and meetings every night.

“David Campos, who has been a good friend since we were both on the Police Commission, recently told me, ‘win or lose, you need to schedule a few weeks off in November when the election is over,’” Sparks said.

Campos is right. To all the candidates on the campaign trial, here’s wishing you lots of energy and calm in the weeks to come. And see you at the DCCC forum.

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Triad quartet

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Triad quartet

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM In 2008, the Pacific Film Archive did a retrospective on prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To, highlighted by his two best films to date: 1999’s The Mission and its sorta-sequel, 2006’s Exiled. Both are about hired killers going about their business — a favored To plot that allows him to explore his fascination with male bonding, particularly amid crooks who fiercely adhere to the underworld’s sticky loyalty codes.

His latest stateside release is 2009’s Vengeance; I had to double-check to make sure this was a new movie, because how could To have not made one called Vengeance already? And a casual fan could be forgiven if he or she found this film familiar. The turf is classic To: hired killers, etc. The Mission and Exiled star Anthony Wong is, of course, the chief assassin; as always, he’s a cool, stone-faced cat of the sunglasses-at-night variety. Taking orders from Simon Yam (as always, buffoonish-homicidal), Wong and his men (fellow To faves Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) blow away disloyal minions. There are elegantly staged gun battles, a post-skirmish tending-our-wounds scene, a daring getaway via a series of fire escapes, and lots of slo-mo.

So why not just stay home and rent Exiled instead? Well, there’s one new element here: 60-something Johnny Hallyday, dubbed “the French Elvis” in the 1960s. His Costello is a killer-turned-chef seeking revenge for the death of his Macau-based daughter’s family. He hasn’t been in the game for decades, so he hires Wong and company to help him annihilate the bad guys. Hallyday has a certain glamorous presence, but at times it feels like he’s been grafted onto Vengeance just so it won’t feel like To is repeating himself (again). Costello is losing his memory at a rapid rate, so much time is spent waiting for him to shuffle through his Memento-style sheaf of Polaroids, struggling to recall who he’s with, why he’s there, and finally, “What is revenge?”

Indeed, as another character points out, “What does revenge mean when you can’t remember anything?” Wong’s gunslingers may have just met Costello, but he’s paid for their loyalty — and earned their respect. Plus, his Paris restaurant is called “Frères,” so of course his newfound “brothers” will finish the job. Forgetfulness (for Costello) and déjà vu (for everyone else) aside, when the focus onscreen turns to servin’ up some payback, To fans will be in bullet-ballet heaven.

VENGEANCE opens Fri/13 at the Sundance Kabuki.

 

Film listings

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

OPENING

Eat Pray Love Julia Roberts has a midlife crisis. (2:30) Cerrito, Elmwood, Marina.

The Expendables Sylvester Stallone directs and stars (along with just about every other action hero, ever) in this mercenaries-in-the-jungle-with-big-guns adventure. (1:43)

The Extra Man The polar opposite of buddy cop action flicks and spoofs a la The Other Guys, with only a faint resemblance to the bromances of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, and so on, The Extra Man is a gently weird throwback to another era, much like its title character, Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline). Sweet, cross-dressing-curious teacher and would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano) is drifting though life passively when he stumbles on eccentric playwright Harrison’s room-for-let and his oddball realm of hangers-on. A blustery, prickly, proudly misogynistic collector of Christmas balls, given to spasms of improvisational dancing, Harrison relishes his role as an escort to aged socialites, crankily shucking and jiving to score invites to fancy dinner parties and vacation homes in Florida. When Ives isn’t courting environmental magazine editor Mary (Katie Holmes) or hiding from the fearsome-looking wooly recluse Gershon (John C. Reilly), the mentor-able young man turns out to be more adept at the role than Harrison ever imagined. And like fossilized grande dames in Chanel, literate audiences also might be charmed by director-writer Shari Springer Berman’s unassuming, crushed-out bon mot, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, to a few mannered, less-than-examined, happily twisted New York City subcultures. (1:45) Elmwood, Embarcadero. (Chun)

Harimaya Bridge The Harimaya Bridge might be the first film I’ve seen that portrays the American-Japanese culture clash so beloved by stateside filmmakers (see: 2003’s Lost in Translation) from the viewpoint of an African American man in Japan. The debut feature for short-film director Aaron Woolfolk, Bridge follows a retired man who travels to Japan after the death of his estranged son, with intentions to retrieve his son’s paintings for an art show. Likely based on Woolfolk’s personal experiences living in Japan, The Harimaya Bridge has both the look and feel of a short, an attribute that makes the otherwise agreeable film seem much too long and drawn-out. Or maybe, all along Woolfolk intended to replicate the dour melodrama and often glacial pacing of popular Japanese film. Meta-filmmaking? (2:00) Presidio. (Peter Galvin)

Lourdes Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes is a film about the people who things happen to rather than the things that happen to people. This is one of its merits yet also its greatest handicap because, really, not much does happen. Wheelchair-bound Christine (Sylvie Testud) makes the pilgrimage to the titular site of Catholic healing in the Pyrenees. When a miracle occurs and Christine walks, the other, less-enlightened denizens of Lourdes lampoon her, and God, for her inexplicable recovery. Hausner limns every scene with exaggerated blues, reds, and whites while relying on long takes and a certain clinical distance from the characters. The film’s atmosphere recalls Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) but since Christine, unlike Jean-Dominique in that film, can speak and move, she doesn’t need to rely on her imagination to make sense of the world, and that would’ve been nice. Testud is subtle and sweet, but personality falls short here. Maybe it went out with her character’s legs. (1:39) Roxie. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Patrik Age 1.5 Freshly settled in suburbia, gay couple Goran (Gustaf Skarsgard) and Sven (Torkel Petersson) are eager to adopt a child — or at least Goran is, with Sven reluctantly caving in. But when against the odds they’re informed a native-born boy is available, a misplaced bit of bureaucratic punctuation means they get not the 18-month-old toddler expected but 15-year-old Patrik (Tom Ljungman). He’s a foul-tempered foster home veteran who makes it clear he’s no happier cohabiting with two “homos” than they are with him. Nevertheless, they’re stuck with each other at least through the weekend, allowing a predictable mutual warming trend to course through Ella Lemhagen’s agreeable seriocomedy. While formulaic in concept, the film’s low-key charm and conviction earn emotions that might easily have felt sitcomishly pre-programmed. (1:38) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Peepli Live Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan uses his powers for good in producing Peepli Live, Anusha Rizvi’s occasionally funny but also sobering satire. Poor and possibly a bit simple-minded, farmer Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) declares he’ll commit suicide after learning his family will receive enough benefits to save their land if he offs himself. He’s encouraged by his unmarried brother, received with skepticism by his exasperated wife, and harangued (as he clearly has been his entire life) by his sharp-tongued, bedridden mother. Once the media gets wind of Natha’s decision, he becomes a cause célèbre; ambitious reporters descend on Peepli, his tiny village, hoping to launch or further their careers with exclusive scoops (including one camera crew who proudly shares an exclusive close-up of Natha’s bowel movements). The bewildered man also becomes a political pawn among government muckety-mucks, who eagerly use him as leverage in a fast-approaching election. Though obviously an exaggeration, Peepli Live is grounded by the fact that India has had a real-life epidemic of farmer suicides. Stirring original music (though the film is not a musical) and an unpretentious filming style help Peelpli Live convey pressing themes of class and economics without slipping into preachiness. (1:46) Balboa. (Eddy)

The Oxford Murders One doesn’t need the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes to see that things don’t quite add up in The Oxford Murders, cult Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s surprisingly stuffy adaptation of Guillermo Martinez’s 2003 murder mystery of the same name. Martin (Elijah Wood), an American graduate student, arrives at Oxford with the hopes of studying with the famous and prickly Wittgenstein scholar Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). After Seldom drubs Martin in a post-lecture Q&A, both men simultaneously come upon the corpse of Martin’s elderly landlady, a discovery appended by a cryptic note that reads, “the first of the series.” What follows is both a philosophical and criminal investigation as professor and student seek to prevent the next murders by determining whether the killer is a master domino layer or just a bookish nut-job. Iglesia has built his following on flash, and aside from one impressive tracking shot cribbed from 1958’s Touch of Evil and a few grisly air kisses to 1995’s Se7en, he yields far too much screen time to Seldom and Martin’s tendentious Philosophy 101 sparring matches. Although certainly more clever than your average Dan Brown whodunit, The Oxford Murders is no less ludicrous (or entertaining for that matter) for kitting out the bones of a CSI episode in the upper-crust finery of a university don. (1:50) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

*Scott Pilgrim vs. The World See “Geek Love.” (1:52) California, Four Star, Presidio.

Tales from Earthsea Goro Miyazaki (son of Hayao) directs this animated, environmentally-themed fantasy. (1:55)

Vengeance See “Triad Quartet.” (1:48) Sundance Kabuki.

ONGOING

Agora There’s a good movie somewhere in Agora, but finding it would require severe editing. It’s not that the film is too long, though it does drag in stretches. The problem is that there are too many stories being told: Hypatia of Alexandria, the central figure, only emerges as the focus well into the film. Meanwhile, there’s Davus (Max Minghella), the slave boy in love with her; Orestes (Oscar Isaac), the student who tries to win her affection; Synesius (Rupert Evans), the devout Christian. We jump from character to character and plot to plot — the conflict between the pagans and the Christians, the conflict between the Christians and the Jews, and Hypatia’s studies in astronomy. Agora is so scattered that by the time it reaches its tragic conclusion — only a spoiler if you haven’t already Googled Hypatia — there’s little room to breathe, let alone grieve. While Hypatia herself is a fascinating subject, Agora is weighed down by all the stories it’s intent on cramming in. (2:06) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*Alamar Pedro González-Rubio’s gorgeous Alamar (“to the sea”) is set between landscapes (land and sea) and ways of telling (fiction and documentary). The bare frame of a plot places a young boy with his father and grandfather, Mayan fishermen working the Mexican Caribbean. The sweetness of this idyll is tempered by its provisional bounds: the boy will return to his mother in Rome at the end of his compressed experience of a father’s love. Every shot is earned: there are several in which the camera bucks with the boat, physically linked to the actors’ experience. The child is at an age of discovery, and González-Rubio channels this openness by fixing on the details of the fisher’s elegant way of life and the environmental contingencies of their home at sea. (1:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

*Anton Chekhov’s The Duel Conformity vs. freedom, small-town whispers vs. the heavy hand of the law — Georgian director Dover Kosashvili successfully teases out some of the tensions in the Anton Chekhov novella, encapsulating the provincial pressures brought to bear on deviants and nonconformists during a steamy summer in a seaside resort town in the Caucasus. Dissolute civil servant and would-be intellectual Laevsky (Andrew Scott) is in the bind, as he gripes to the town doctor Samoylenko (Niall Buggy). Laevsky has everything he wants: he’s coaxed the creamy, married Nadya (Fiona Glascott) into living with him openly, yet now that her husband has died, he desires nothing more than to be free of her. In the meantime upstanding zoologist Von Koren (Tobias Menzies) simmers in the background, gaging Laevsky’s social mores and practically oozing contempt. Matters come to a head as Laevsky begs a loan from Samoylenko to escape his ripening paramour, who is also beginning to feel the gracious perimeters of the town closing in around her. From the buttons-and-bows millinery details to the oppressive dark wood furnishings, Kosashvili even-handedly builds a compelling Victorian-era mise en scene that seems to perfectly evoke the Chekhov’s milieu — it’s only when the title entanglement comes to pass that we finally see which side he’s on. (1:35) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Charlie St. Cloud The best thing one can say about Charlie St. Cloud is that it isn’t quite as terrible as the trailers would have you believe. Yes, the story is Nicholas Sparks-level silly: the eponymous Charlie (Zac Efron) loses his brother Sam (Charlie Tahan) in a tragic drunk driving accident, then spends the rest of the film playing baseball with his ghost. Add to that a romantic subplot involving fellow sailor Tess (Amanda Crew). There’s nothing you don’t already know about Charlie St. Cloud: each scene is laid out far in advance. So while the film itself is reasonably competent, it never surprises or unnerves an audience well-versed in its tropes. Efron, star of Disney’s delightful High School Musical series, is predictably charming, but even a few wet t-shirt scenes — yes, really — don’t distract from the story. Not to mention the fact that Tahan’s Sam is seriously grating. You’re dead, it sucks: no need to whine about it. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

The Concert (1:47) Embarcadero.

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

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

Dinner for Schmucks When he attracts favorable notice and a possible promotion from his corporate boss, Tim (Paul Rudd) is invited to an annual affair in which executives compete to see who can dig up the freakiest loser dweeb for everyone to snicker at. He literally runs into the perfect candidate: Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making elaborate tableaux with stuffed dead nice in tiny human clothes. He’s also the sort of person who, in trying to be helpful, inevitably wreaks havoc on the unlucky person being helped. Which means the 24 hours or so before the “Biggest Idiot” contest provide plenty of time for well-intentioned Barry to nearly destroy Tim’s relationship with a girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), reunite him with Crazy Stalker Chick (Lucy Punch), and imperil his wooing of a multimillion-dollar account. Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series) has a full load of comedy talent on board here. So why are the results so tepid? This remake softens the bite of Francis Veber’s 1998 original French The Dinner Game by making Tim not a yuppie scumbag but a nice guy who just happens to have a jerk’s job (his company seizes ailing firms and liquidates them), and who doesn’t really want to expose hapless Barry to humiliation. But even with that satirical angle removed and a wider streak of sentimentality, it should cough up more laughs than it does. (1:50) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Harvey)

*The Disappearance of Alice Creed The reliably alarming Eddie Marsen (concurrently Life During Wartime‘s pederast) plays bullying Vic, one-half of a criminal duo — with puppyish Danny (Martin Compston) his younger subordinate — who abduct grown child of wealth Alice (Gemma Arterton) for ransom in a carefully-thought-out kidnapping. This simple setup, for the most part very simply set in the two abandoned-apartment-complex rooms where Alice is held captive, allows talented British writer-director J. Blakeson to spring a number of escalating narrative surprises. The whole endeavor is almost too chamber-scaled to justify being seen on the big screen (let alone being shot in widescreen format). But it does have some mighty satisfying tricks up its sleeve. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Farewell (1:53) Lumiere, Shattuck.

Get Low Born from the true story of Felix Bush, an eccentric Tennessee hermit who invited the world to celebrate his funeral in advance of his own death, Get Low is a loose take on what might inspire a man to do a thing like that. It’s a small story, and unlikely to attract the attention of popcorn-addled viewers in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, but Get Low has a whopper of a character in Felix Bush. Robert Duvall becomes Bush, constructing a quiet man who sees it all and speaks only when he has something to say, and supporting roles from Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray are expectedly solid, but the real surprise is what a strong eye director Aaron Schnieder has. In allowing scenes to unfold on their own terms and in their own time, Schneider gives a real humanity to what could have been a Hallmark movie. (1:42) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Galvin)

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

*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) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

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

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, “Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island.” In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father (“the sperm donor,” played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Bridge, California, Cerrito, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center. (Peitzman)

*Let It Rain Well-known feminist author Agathe Villanova (writer-director Agnès Jaoui) is taking a rare break from her busy Paris life, visiting her hometown to see family, vacation with boyfriend Antoine (Frédéric Pierrot), and do a little stumping for her nascent political career. But despite the ever-picturesque French countryside as background, all is not harmonious. Antoine complains Agathe’s workaholism (among other things) is killing their relationship, particularly once she agrees to be time-consumingly interviewed for film about “successful women” by shambling documentarian Michel (coscenarist Jean-Pierre Bacri) and local Karim (Jamel Debbouze). Her married-with-children sister Florence (Pascale Arbillot) is having a secret affair with Michel, but seems more focused on old resentments springing from Agathe being their late mother’s favorite. Karim — son of the family’s longtime housekeeper (Mimouna Hadji) — bears his own grudge against the clan and brusque, officious Agathe in particular. Being happily wed, he’s further bothered at his hotel day job by his attraction to co-worker Aurélie (Florence Loiret-Caille). These various conflicts simmer, then boil over as the documentary shooting goes from bumbling to disastrous. In 2004, Jaoui delivered a pretty near perfect Gallic ensemble seriocomedy in Look at Me. This isn’t quite that good. Still, her seemingly effortless skill at managing complex character dynamics, eliciting expert performances (including her own), and weaving it all together with insouciant panache makes this a real pleasure. The problem with Agnès Jaoui: she’s so good it chafes that (acting-only gigs aside) she’s made just three films in ten years. Pick it up, girl! (1:39) Elmwood, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Life During Wartime The Kids Are Alright isn’t the only film this summer that subtly skewers the suburban upper-middle class by following a seemingly well-adjusted family as they’re thrown into crisis when a shadowy father figure attempts to enter their orbit. Only in the case of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, instead of a sperm donor, Dad is a convicted child molester. A quasi-sequel to 1998’s Happiness, Life picks up 10 years later to survey the still-damaged Jordan sisters. After discovering that her husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is still making sexually harassing phone calls, mousy Joy (squeaky-voiced British actress Shirley Henderson) flees to Florida, where her older sister Trish (Allison Janney) has attempted to start a new life for herself and her children. Oldest Billy (Chris Marquette) is now a bitter college student, and youngest son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) still doesn’t know the horrible truth about his father Bill (Ciarán Hinds), who has just been released from prison. Third sister Helen (Ally Sheedy), has had success in Hollywood, but still feels victimized by her family. Despite the entirely new cast, happiness remains just as elusive as before. Pleasure, when it can be found, is fleeting. Characters’ awkward conversations with each other inevitably sputter and stall, and even the best intentions are no measure against disaster. Solondz may be a scathing observer, but he is not above being sympathetic when its called for. Neither does he gloss over the serious questions — what are the limits of forgiveness? When is forgetting necessary? (1:37) Clay, Shattuck. (Sussman)

Making Plans for Lena Christophe Honoré’s latest presents an ensemble of difficult characters related to or entangled with a recently divorced mother of two. The titular Lena (Chiara Mastroianni) feels somewhat like a Noah Baumbach protagonist, a failing human being who is nonetheless pitiable and even relatable. At the core of this tense family drama are Lena’s relationships with her young son Anton (Donatien Suner), who is in many ways more mature than she is, and with her ex-husband Nigel (Jean-Marc Barr), whose name inspired the pun of the title, which refers to the XTC track “Making Plans for Nigel.” In the film’s most intriguing sequence, bookworm Anton reads his mother a story, which is in turn reproduced onscreen, of a woman who kills many suitors by dancing them to death. Besides that fantastical interlude, which hardly lightens the movie’s fundamental sadness, the film’s naturalistic depiction of family life rings true if also worryingly dissonant. (1:47) Sundance Kabuki. (Sam Stander)

Middle Men George Gallo’s Middle Men, though far beyond the salvage of so-bad-it’s-good, makes for the ultimate airplane movie (re: mind-numbing). Nothing audible is ever interesting, there are visual gimmicks galore, and you can more or less doze off and avoid missing much. Purportedly the events that unfold, from the 80s onward, are based on actual ones — but that’s like the Coen Brothers claiming Fargo (1996) was a true story. Pish posh. Jack (Luke Wilson) is a Texan who cleans up people’s messes. He gets entangled with the biggest idiots of all time, played by Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht, and soon they launch what will become the bastion of Americana: Internet porn. Everything is tits-and-giggles until the Russian mob wants a cut. It’s downright apoplexing how shallow, flashy, and lazy this movie is. If you must go, bring a friend and play I Spy A Desperate Has-Been (James Caan, Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Pollak). And Luke Wilson, formerly known as Fire of My Loins? Definitely not cute anymore. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Lattanzio)

The Other Guys Will Ferrell and Adam McKay can do no wrong in some bro-medy aficionados’ eyes, but The Other Guys is no Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) or Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). The other two Ferrell-McKay team-ups made short work of men’s jobs, in addition to genre filmmaking tropes, with crisper, cut-to-the-gag punchiness. And despite its laugh-out-loud first quarter — and some surprising TLC references by Michael Keaton, of all people, The Other Guys is about half a genuinely hilarious film that pokes fun at masculinity, as well as, interestingly, whiteness and beyond-the-pale, big-bucks white-collar crime. This lampoon of action buddy-cop flicks is dealt a semi-fatal blow when excess-loving, damage-dealing supercops Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson exit, manically chewing scenery as they go. Two forgotten desktop jocks, forensic accounting investigator-with-a-past Allen (Ferrell) and ragaholic screwup Terry (Mark Wahlberg), must step it up when the dynamic duo dissipates, and go after crooked financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan). The second half of The Other Guys could have used some of the dramatic tension budding between buddy team Jackson-Johnson and reluctant cohorts Ferrell-Wahlberg, especially when Wahlberg begins to get bogged down in single-gear disbelief. But perhaps we should just be grateful for what few yuks we can glean from the atrocities of Great Recession-era robber barons. (1:47) California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Chun)

Salt Angelina Jolie channels the existential crisis of Jason Bourne and the DIY spirit of MacGyver in a film positing that America’s most pressing concern is extant Russian cold warriors, who are plotting to reestablish their country’s pre-glasnost glory via nuclear holocaust and a Dark Angel–style army of spy kids. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt, a woman who can stymie the top-shelf surveillance system at work using her undergarments and fashion a shoulder-mounted rocket out of interrogation-room furniture and cleaning supplies. These talents surface after Salt is accused of being a Russian operative in league with the aforementioned disturbers of the new world order and takes flight, with her agency coworkers (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit. What ensues is a vicious and confounding assault on the highest levels of the U.S. government, most known rules of logic, and the viewer’s patience and powers of suspending disbelief. Salt’s off-the-ranch maneuverings are moderately engaging, particularly in the first leg of the chase, but clunky expository flashbacks, B-movie-grade dialogue, and an absurd plotline slow the momentum considerably. (1:31) Empire, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Socially awkward science nerd Dave (Jay Baruchel) toils away on his suspiciously elaborate NYU physics project, unaware that he’s about to have a Harry Potter-style moment of awakening. Enter Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old, steampunky sorcerer who believes Dave to be “the Prime Merlinian” — i.e., the greatest conjurer since Merlin himself. (Literally) rising from ashes to provide conflict are fellow sorcerers Horvath (Alfred Molina) and Morgana (Alice Krige); signing on for romantic-interest purposes are Monica Bellucci and newcomer Teresa Palmer. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice spins off Disney classic Fantasia (1940) in only the loosest sense, though there is a scene of dancing brooms. The bland Baruchel’s rise to fame continues to mystify, but at least Cage and Molina seem to be having a blast exchanging insults and zapping each other around. (1:43) SF Center. (Eddy)

Step Up 3D The third installment of the Step Up enterprise graduates performing arts high school and moves to the sidewalks, rooftops, and warehouses of New York City, as well as the occasional venue — part underground club, part ad-plastered sports arena — where packs of street dancers battle and mop up the floor with their rivals, employing only the weaponry of a fierce routine. That, and the fast-forward button in the editing suite — beyond drop kicks and droplets of water coming out of the screen at your face, Step Up 3D unabashedly adopts the choreographed F/X of contemporary action films, manipulating footage to make the dancers look like nimble, ferocious, supernatural creatures with a youthful disdain for gravity and the space-time continuum. There is a plot of sorts, involving a crew called the Pirates; their fearless leader Luke (Rick Malambri); his mysterious lady friend Natalie (Sharni Vinson); an NYU freshman named Moose (Adam Sevani of 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets), who was, in Luke’s oft-repeated words, “born from a boombox” (or BFAB); and the warehouse wonderland where the Pirates live and train, amid a decor of tape-deck-womb walls and galleries of limited-edition sneakers. It’s best, though, not to follow along too closely on the rare occasions when director Jon Chu (Step Up 2) mistakenly lets more than four lines of earnest dialogue stack up without a dance-scene intervention. The near-continuous wave of choreographed outbursts is like eye candy injected with multiple shots of 5-Hour Energy drink, but those who flinch at the idea of Auto-Tuning dance performance may want to stay home and rent 2000’s Center Stage. (1:46) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

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

The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest The Everest documentary has, by now, become a genre unto itself. It’s got its own tropes (sweeping shots of the mountain’s face, somber voice-over philosophizing about the human struggle with nature) and its own canon (topped, perhaps, by the harrowing 1998 IMAX hit Everest). The latest entry into this field is National Geographic Entertainment’s The Wildest Dream, which chronicles early-20th century explorer George Mallory’s lifelong — and ultimately life-ending — quest to reach Everest’s summit, and modern mountaineer Conrad Anker’s attempt to recreate his predecessor’s final climb. Director Anthony Geffen unfolds his tale in standard adventure-doc fashion. We get a lot of scratchy footage from Mallory’s climbs, a few risibly awkward dramatic re-creations, and quite a lot of portentous voiceover work. These are worn techniques, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the story told any less compelling. Mallory himself emerges as a particularly fascinating figure — a talented and charming scholar, a devoted husband, and an irresponsible, borderline suicidal obsessive. It’s a shame that we’re only able to observe him at a century’s distance. (1:33) Embarcadero. (Zach Ritter)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit. Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Empire, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Ideas that work: a plan for a new San Francisco

David Talbot
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Ideas that work: a plan for a new San Francisco

OPINION San Francisco is a city of tremendous riches and problems — a locus of wealth, inequality, innovation, creativity, and sometimes stifling resistance by political and economic power brokers. It’s time to break through. We have the ability, and opportunity, to create a whole new set of economic, social, and political relationships between people and government. On everything from municipal banking, to Muni reform, to public-controlled sustainable energy production and community-driven budgeting, we have a flood of ideas from thinkers and activists across the city.

The Aug. 14-15 Community Congress at the University of San Francisco will focus on turning those ideas into a political platform the city can implement. Last week, we described the vision; this week, we offer some proposals that will be discussed at the event; following the event, others will be posted at sfbg.com.

The event runs Aug. 14 from 9 a.m.–5 p.m. and Aug. 15 from 9 a.m.–1 p.m. at USF’s McLaren Conference Center. For information, go to www.sfsummitcongress.wordpress.com. (Karl Beitel and Christopher Cook)

1. A MUNICIPAL BANK


San Francisco is rich — it has $16.1 billion in assets, with a net worth of $6.5 billion, according to the city treasurer. With a little maneuvering and political will, roughly a half-billion of that money could be devoted to creating a municipal bank: a fiscally solvent, federally insured economic engine that would invest in community development projects serving underfunded activities and endeavors, providing significant economic and social benefits to the residents of San Francisco.

With its own public bank, San Francisco could begin to fund and promote more community-centered forms of economic development. Worker co-ops, for instance, could get loans for projects that are socially beneficial and economically viable. The bank could also help generate new homegrown industries that produce both revenue and social value to the city. This would help democratize the city economy, giving financial muscle to community-based projects and neighborhood-serving businesses.

Over a period of three to five years, a modest portion of the city’s liquid investments can be transferred to create to the new bank. The bank could use this pool of capital to extend low-interest, long-term loans for projects located in San Francisco. The bank would offer a full spectrum of retail banking services, such as money market accounts, to attract additional deposits to supplement funds from the city.

A municipal bank has potential to grow into a major economic force in the city for financing community-centered development. With the right up-front commitment from the city, the total asset portfolio of loans and other investments would grow far beyond this initial public investment — representing a significant infusion of loan capital into currently underserved segments of the credit market in San Francisco.

The municipal bank would be a member-owned, federally chartered, and federally insured credit union. It would engage in rigorous vetting of loan applicants. But because the bank would not run as a profit-maximizing enterprise, loan officers would explicitly consider projects in light of their economic viability and potential contribution to the economic, social, and cultural well being of San Francisco.

Priority could, for instance, be given to loans for affordable housing development and community economic development. In particular, the bank could prioritize businesses and enterprises that represent alternative models of ownership such as worker co-ops and worker collectives, and smaller, community-serving, locally-based, social enterprise-type businesses.

To ensure that the bank’s lending activities reflect the need for more democratic modes of credit and finance, governance and oversight could include representation from social groups and constituents normally excluded from corporate governance. The bank’s member-owners would elect the board of directors.

Municipal bank funds would be completely separate from the city’s general fund, with strict firewalls imposed to assure that lending activities do not become intermingled in any way with the annual appropriations process.

By creating its own bank, San Francisco would be a national model for community-based development and economic democracy. It would be a national first, and has the potential to transform how cities think about local economic development. (Beitel)

2. HOUSING SAN FRANCISCO


Since the beginning of the dot-com boom, San Francisco has seen displacement of low-income families from rent-controlled housing in alarming numbers. Much of this displacement has been happening through conversion of small residential apartment buildings (between four and 12 units) into tenancy in common units. Small-site displacement tends to target seniors, disabled people, and working class families — and many of the units that were converted were, under rent control, de facto affordable housing.

In addition, over the past 15 years the city has lost 4,370 units due to Ellis Act evictions. At the same time, the city’s housing production model favors larger projects because of the economies of scale possible for new construction of big projects, with 70 or more units. While these projects are important in adding to the city’s affordable housing stock, sites to accommodate giant developments are in short supply.

So how do we address San Francisco’s chronic affordable housing crisis. First, stabilize low-income communities and preserve diverse neighborhoods by encouraging the city to invest in developing a small sites acquisition and rehabilitation program that could help nonprofits take over and operate affordable rental housing for low-income tenants. That property could also be converted to limited equity housing cooperatives and community land trust properties.

Next, the city should ban all TICs from becoming condos. The city can give landlords and speculators a choice: If you want your property to be eligible for condo conversion, with all the economic benefits that come with that designation, then you need to follow the process and abide by tenant protections in the condo law. If you want to ignore the condo law, then you’re stuck with a TIC.

To further protect renters, prior to sale of a renter-occupied unit, the city could require the owner to offer tenants the right to buy the unit, at a price based on the last best offer from a bona fide purchaser.

The Rent Board also needs reform. The panel, which oversees rent increases, consists of five members: two landlords, two tenants, and one homeowner. All are appointed by the mayor. We suggest three tenants, two landlords, and two homeowners — with the appointments split between the mayor and the supervisors.

There also must be a permanent, local source of funding for affordable housing development. A progressive increase in the real estate transfer tax could generate $45 million annually.

We further support Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s proposed legislation that would protect resident’s rights during relocation and ensure their right to return to buildings that have been redeveloped. (Amy Beinart and the Council of Community Housing Organizations)

3. THE CRISIS IN CARE


More than any other American city, San Francisco relies on a network of faith- and community-based nonprofits to deliver critical health and human services to its poorest and sickest residents. More than 15,000 people are employed in this sector, which had a total budget of almost $800 million in 2000.

Health and human service nonprofits play a significant role in providing a substantial portion of the city’s services for seniors, people with AIDS, the homeless, children and youth, people with special physical and mental needs, and those who suffer from substance abuse.

Yet this critical sector finds itself bearing the brunt of cuts and reduction in services caused by the fiscal crisis facing San Francisco.

So what can we do? Here are seven suggestions.

• First, conduct a coordinated citywide health and human services needs assessment driven by neighborhoods and communities.

• Second, working with service users, service providers, and city employees, create a 10-year plan for health and human services that can guide yearly budget considerations.

• Third, as the city implements the 2009 ballot measure that calls for a two-year budget cycle informed by five-year financial plans, require department heads and commissions to include the perspective of professional service providers and service users, including a standards analysis plan and a narrative about the impact on services.

• Fourth, open a dialogue with the foundation community on addressing the changing needs of the nonprofit human services community, including community needs, accountability, and funding cycles.

• Fifth, depoliticize the request-for-proposals (RFP) process by moving it out of city departments and into the Controller’s Office.

• Sixth, require city departments that contract with nonprofit health and human service providers to complete their implementation of the recommendations to streamline the city’s contracting and monitoring processes approved by the 2003 City Nonprofit Contracting Task Force, and ensure that current procedures and processes are consistent with those recommendations.

• And seventh, preserve services for the most vulnerable San Franciscans by focusing on revenue solutions to the city’s ongoing structural budget deficit, including November 2010 campaigns to increase the hotel tax and the real property transfer tax. (Debbi Lerman, Human Services Network)

4. BUILDING WORKER COOPERATIVES


Although these are hard times, there’s an opportunity for San Francisco to realize a new model of economic sustainability — by supporting worker cooperatives.

The worker cooperative model is a business form well-suited to the diverse needs of urban areas and is already viable in a broad variety of sectors including manufacturing, service, and retail. A key aspect of worker cooperative development is that its goal is not just the creation of jobs; it’s also about making business ownership accessible.

An inspiring new model of economic development is currently taking place with the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. In an ambitious effort, anchor institutions such as the local universities, hospitals, and the City of Cleveland have established procurement agreements with developing worker cooperatives rooted in the struggling urban communities of Cleveland (where unemployment rates are as high as 25 percent). The goal is to redirect the estimated $3 billion that these anchor institutions spend on goods and services toward worker cooperatives in the communities where these institutions are located. The first two business models underway are a commercial laundry service and a solar installation company.

There’s also a lot of inspiring work already being done by the worker cooperative community in the Bay Area. The Arizmendi Association continues to develop new worker-owned bakeries despite the economic recession. This fall, Arizmendi will launch its second SF location in the Mission District, creating new jobs and opportunities for local residents to have ownership over their work. Rainbow Grocery and Other Avenues are two extremely successful, long-lasting worker-owned grocery stores in San Francisco.

The city ought to officially recognize the worker cooperative model as both viable and preferable, and include it in the city’s various efforts of economic development. And city officials should take a leadership role in reimagining what a vibrant economy could look like and begin to promote worker cooperatives as central to that vision. (Poonam Whabi, Rick Simon, Steve Rice, Inno Nagara, and Nadia Khastagir)

Gods of Distortion: The Interviews (Part Two)

Sue Vaughan
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Gods of Distortion: The Interviews (Part Two)

Check out Ben Richardson’s story on the Southern Lord Mini-Tour in this week’s Guardian. Here, he talks with Mike Dean, bassist and singer of Corrosion of Conformity.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: You guys are practicing in North Carolina now, in preparation for the tour?

Mike Dean: That’s right, yeah. It might be useful.

SFBG: How long has it been since you’ve played all these Animosity songs?

MD: Quite a while. Easily 23, 24 years, something like that. 23 years!

SFBG: How does that feel? Is it like putting on an old garment?

MD: Either I remember the stuff precisely, and it is like putting on an old garment – it feels just like yesterday, and I can play it – or there are parts of songs that I have no recollection of. It’s either completely natural or kind of strange.

SFBG: Can you point to any particular parts that seem unfamiliar?

MD: There’s a bridge-like part in the middle of the song “Holier,” that I completely forgot about!

SFBG: This must be due in part to the fact that your technique has changed a lot over the years. At this point you’re a veteran, a very well-schooled musician – not to say that you weren’t good to begin with…

MD: It’s funny that you should mention that. It’s an astute observation, because sometime around the time we did [1987’s] Technocracy, I started to play with my fingers more and more, and sort of leave the picking thing behind. Basically, it was like starting all over again, to some extent. Now, I can do all the things on Animosity and Technocracy with my fingers, as opposed to a pick, which I would just be dropping anyway.

SFBG: So you recorded Animosity playing with a pick, but now you can play all those parts with your fingers.

MD: Yeah, I guess I’m losing points for authenticity that way.

SFBG: Well, I’m a fan of the pick-less bass playing, in general, so I gotta support that approach.

MD: I am too, but I try to have a real open mind about it now. You’ll see videos, certain songs in which John Entwistle [of the Who] or John Paul Jones [of Led Zeppelin] use a pick to mix it up.

SFBG: Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with this Southern Lord Mini-Tour. How did it all come together?

MD: That’s an interesting story. I’ve done a little recording for a band that was on Southern Lord called Earthride. Maybe about five years ago. I kinda knew Greg [Anderson, owner of Southern Lord Records] from that business. Greg was kind of a hardcore fan when he was really young. I believe that Corrosion of Conformity stayed at his house in Seattle back in the day. I have a foggy recollection of that happening. It took me a while to sort of put that person together with the guy in SunnO)))) and Goatsnake, but eventually I made that connection. Dealing with him is pretty cool, and there are a lot of artists on his label that I admire, like Wino and Goatsnake, whom I thought were really good the first time I heard them – it’s hard to go wrong with basically the rhythm section from the California version of The Obsessed and the singer for Scream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk3rlgFrL3w&feature=related

SFBG: Did he reach out to you, or you to him?

MD: He reached out to us. He was looking to re-issue some old stuff, and that still hasn’t happened too much. We mentioned that we were gonna record a new release, and that may happen. So we just started talking to him about doing that, and he said “hey you wanna play some shows out here?” and we were like “oh yeah!” It kinda lit a fire under our ass to get some new songs down and go out and play ’em.

SFBG: This is the new release as a trio that I’m hearing rumors about, with the Animosity line-up?

MD: Yeah. The only tangible thing that’s done is a seven-inch vinyl, two versions of one song called “Your Tomorrow.” That should be available by the time we’re out playing on the West Coast. It was kind of a hurry-up production, though it sounds really good, and looks really good too.

SFBG: Are there any plans to do any new C.O.C. material with [singer-guitarist] Pepper [Keenan]?

MD: There are plans to do that. We have a multi-pronged general plan, to perhaps take this and do a full-length three-piece release, and get out there and play it some. That’ll be quite a story – it’s been a long time, and I think we have some new material that we’re excited about. I think at the point after we’ve done that, it’ll be a story to get the Deliverance line-up together. Before we got the three-piece together, we were supposed to go to Europe and play some festivals, we had some offers, but Pepper’s busy with his other group, Down, so his schedule’s a little jacked up. So almost as a joke, I said, “Well we should do a three-piece tour!” Everybody stopped and went “Uhhhh….maybe we should!”

SFBG: What had you been up to since C.O.C. went on hiatus, in 2006? You mentioned recording Earthride…

MD: Well, C.O.C. had been going without [drummer] Reed [Mullin], and in some point around 2004, we decided to make a record with Stanton Moore, from Galactic – In the Arms of God. That’s something I’m pretty proud of, something we did ourselves in Galactic’s now-demolished rehearsal space, which was flooded out of the warehouse district of New Orleans. We had a nice little tour with Clutch, in the UK. At that point, [C.O.C. guitarist] Woody [Weatherman] and I started a band that we tentatively called Righteous Fool, and he moved up to the mountains, to basically go into agriculture and have a kid — that kind of put a damper on our plans. Then I started getting in contact with Reed for the first time in quite a few years, and we started jamming together, and that became Righteous Fool, and through that combination of circumstances we have Righteous Fool opening up for the three-piece-C.O.C gigs we have lined up in a couple weeks. It’s a slightly greasier kind of feel.

SFBG: I was gonna ask, since there’s only one song up on the Righteous Fool MySpace, and it seems more in the uptempo vein, like the older C.O.C. stuff: what are your plans for the Righteous Fool sound? What side of your musical personality do you get to express in that project?

MD: Well…it’s kind of in its infancy. We’re a couple years into it, and some good songs have emerged, but it’s difficult to call where that’s gonna go. We have a pretty solid musical presence in the form of Jason Browning. I don’t really know what to say about that. There’re a lot of directions we could go. I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis on vocal harmonies, things like that. We have a couple fun things we do, with a Fleetwood Mac song, and a Skip James song.

SFBG: Well I think people are curious to see what’s going to happen with that, and excited to see the band live. You’ll be playing two sets in a pretty short duration on this tour. What do you think the audience reaction is going to be, going from a super-slow, enveloping Goatsnake set right into this pissed-off hardcore Animosity stuff.

MD: It’ll be interesting to see. There are a lot of people who perform that kind of music [doom metal, a la Goatsnake] at some point in their life, in their younger life, in their previous life, who might have been into the hardcore kind of thing, so there’s a lot of overlap there, in terms of the cast of characters who perform that kinda stuff well. At the time – it’s kind of humorous to think, now – some of the parts on Animosity that were slower, briefly dirge-like, somewhat Black Sabbath inspired – that was considered slow, and within a certain kind of close-minded scene, was actually controversial. It was a controversy that you would play a few measures of something slow or heavy rock-inspired.

I think we were credited with being on the forefront of that, but in a way, we were just imitating Black Flag, but taking our Black Sabbath influence a little more literally, and indulging some more regressive influences. We did something original with borrowed ideas. There are people that would say we were involved in the beginnings of that type of thing, y’know. I don’t think that would be too pompous to say. [Laughs] If it is, I just said it, so…

SFBG: You mentioned having respect for Wino earlier. Being in Saint Vitus in that SST scene, he encountered people who would really be pissed off that he would play slow, super-Sabbathy songs.

MD: That was a pretty crazy thing. I’d already been initiated to the music of the Obsessed by that time, and picked up an appreciation for it. And so to see that dude in Saint Vitus not playing a guitar! It was just absurd, but it kind of wound him up, and made him a more intense vocalist. He’s been playing some shows with Saint Vitus recently, and I’ve heard that that’s still the case. I haven’t witnessed any Saint Vitus in quite a few years.

SFBG: You should take the opportunity, if it arises. I’ve seen two shows in this resurrected Saint Vitus era and…

MD: There’s no Armando on drums…they have some other dude on drums…

SFBG: Yeah, they have a different drummer, but Wino and Dave [Chandler, guitarist] are still really potent.

MD: So Saint Vitus comes to Raleigh, NC in like 1986, and Wino stays at my house (it’s a house a lot of people live at) and here he is on this tour not playing guitar. He picks up an acoustic guitar and plays tunes in a couple funny different ways, and plays Robert Johnson songs verbatim, as they are on the one LP – Robert Johnson Complete Recordings – we were just like, “Oh, my God!”

SFBG: I’m curious as to how you got from playing hardcore with Sabbath interludes to playing that reinvented C.O.C. sound from the early nineties, which is much more directly Sabbath-influenced. But that transition corresponds with the time when you were out of the band…

MD: I think we were already looking in that direction. You go out there and you play hardcore music, and you’re on tour, and the quality of it – of some of the bands you see – isn’t that great, and you’re listening to music partially devoid of melody. You want to unwind, and listen to some older stuff, and you realize that the craftsmanship of the older stuff is a little more advanced, even though its time has come and gone. Whats the next logical thing if you’re listening to Sabbath, or the next logical regression, to try to take something new? Deep Purple! We were listening to a lot of that. It’s funny, because after I quit the band they ended up with a singer [Pepper Keenan] who’s obviously really Ian Gillian-inspired, and they hooked up with a producer who had really sound music theory ideas. That resulted in Blind.

I had kinda moved on. I met a nice girl and moved to San Francisco for half a year. I lived in Philadelphia and I was delivering things on my bike. I heard the Blind record, and I was like “Oh mah god, its really good!” That minute came and went, and around the end of 1993, they had a dispute coming up with new material, and they were looking for a bass player and a singer. They asked me, did I want to come and make a record, and I was like “Yeah, all right!”

SFBG: That’s been the thing doing research for this interview…I think the archetypal narrative for rock bands is that they have members in and out and it gets complicated, and there are a lot of hard feelings, whereas it seems like with C.O.C. there’ve been all these people in and out of the band, but it’s been very amicable. You left and came back; you’re playing in Righteous Fool with guys who had been in the band before…

MD: Well, you know, that’s not to say that there weren’t heated incidents involved in some of this revolving door activity. There might be some negativity that occasionally rears its head. But I think everybody tries to be an adult, and a compassionate person. I think Kyuss would be the band that had that more amicable situation. Drummers in and out, a couple bass players…

SFBG: I thought some guys from that band don’t even speak anymore…

MD: Well now, yeah, you’re right. The funny thing is that they were all supposed to be on Roadburn in Holland like the same day. Nick Oliveri playing his acoustic stuff. Mr. Garcia doing some Kyuss stuff…

SFBG: It seems like a lot of these differences are being put aside in the interest of these tours that are resurrecting bands – bands that have been broken up for awhile and are coming back to tour.

MD: There’s a big rash of that right now, and it’s one of things that actually kinda gives me pause about doing this, to some extent. The only thing I can do to allay my feelings of not wanting to be part of that is to attempt to offer something new. At this point, we have four or five new songs that we can perform. We’re doing this as part of readying ourselves to do something new. And I know people are excited about the old stuff, and its fun to play, fun to reinterpret, and we enjoy it, but it’s also about having something new. Because there are a lot of 40-, 45-year-old people who were in some moderately famous musical endeavor when they were 20, and they’re all coming out of the woodwork. There’s just a new market for it.

SFBG: Is it possible for you to expand on the drawbacks of these nostalgia tours? Not asking you to slag anyone off, obviously. Are there things that you could point to that give you the bad vibe with that trend?

MD: No, not really. I’m not going to point to anyone who’s substandard or insincere. At some point it just becomes a little redundant. I’m kind of an unlikely subject [for a retro-focused tour] because I’ve never been real big on the nostalgia factor. But here we are.

SFBG: It just seems like if it’s overdone, it can take away the spotlight from some of the cool new bands. But it cuts both ways, right, because if you have these nostalgia tours, you can have new bands as openers, and take advantage of the known quantity, the big name. If there’s a similarity in the music, then the fans of Saint Vitus, say, get exposed to up-and-coming bands in the same genre that the older cats who listen to Saint Vitus might not have heard of.

MD: Well Saint Vitus this doesn’t really even apply to…

SFBG: Well, yeah. You’re right…

MD: …regular time, the laws of time, don’t really apply to them. They started off working this old crazy freedom-rock ethos anyway. They started off being out of style, and they’re a special case.

SFBG: A bad example for me to cite. In general, do you think it’s a good time in musical history to be a metal band?

MD: It might be! One of these trips has a corporate sponsorship, so apparently someone believes that this can help with product placement and identity. That’s…pretty crazy.

SFBG: Do you follow any newer, up-and-coming music? I’ve been impressed in recent years by the resurgence of a lot of North Carolina-based bands that have been making names for themselves…

MD: You know, the funny thing is, Between the Buried and Me…we had no earthly idea that they were from Raleigh, North Carolina. I was just like “that band with the really badass drummer, and sort of exaggerated dynamics – they’re from Raleigh?! Really?!” I’m not actively following stuff like that, but I’ve heard of them, and I’ve heard them.

SFBG: How about Valient Thorr?

MD: Valient Thorr I’ve actually seen, and the funny thing is I do a lot of…I work a lot of events, I do rigging, and I used to do straight-up stagehand stuff, so I’ve moved Valient Thorr’s gear, at the Warped Tour. They were like, “No, no, you can’t move our gear, you’re Mike Dean!” And I was like, “Dude, the rent is due, every month, I will move it.” I like them, I like their crazy anti-war video from several years ago, with Mr. Brian Walsby. Have you seen that? Being on the Volcom label, no one ever sees their shit.

SFBG: It seems to me like Southern metal has experienced a crazy boom in the last five, 10 years or so. All these bands out of Georgia – Baroness, Mastodon, Kylesa, Black Tusk. You’re sort of in a unique position to speak to how well Southern rock can combine with heavy music.

MD: A lot of the bands that you just mentioned there are good, non-stereotypical versions of what you would call “Southern metal.” There are other acts that kind of exploit that in an uninteresting way. There’s a lot interesting musicianship in that stuff, which is pretty cool. I’m not a big flag-waver, but all those bands are pretty good. It’s kind of astounding how popular and successful Mastodon are.

SFBG: It’s crazy. I’ve seen them go from the club shows to the college amphitheaters. It’s crazy to see the change in the kind of people who you see at the show.

MD: I’ve never been to a Mastodon show. I’ve may have seen them open for somebody a long time ago, but I’ve never been to one of these big shows. I’d be curious to see.

SFBG: They’re total pros in one sense – the performance is really top notch. But the guitarist, Brent, is kind of a wild man, and I think they’re almost better when he’s three sheets to the wind, because it ups the intensity. If he’s getting angrier and angrier as the show goes on, his solos get more expressive…

MD: A whole album based on Moby Dick.

SFBG: Can’t argue with that, right?

MD: Those kids’ English teachers gotta be proud!

SFBG: One of the things I was struck by, listening to Animosity to prepare for this interview, was the strident political nature of a lot of the lyrics. Even though we live in very politically contentious times, there really hasn’t been the kind of musical reaction that existed under Reagan, when people were using music as a channel for their dissent. Do you have any insight, having written a seminal political hardcore album, about why that isn’t going on today?

MD: That’s an interesting observation. I don’t really know the answer to that. I don’t think there’s as much consensus, because of the disparate nature of media now, or the wider number of outlets. At that time, we had cable TV in its infancy, we had print media, we had three networks – I think that people would be more tuned in to the same media outlets at that point, and they would either accept it or reject it. I think there was more potential for mass consensus even in terms of dissent. Now it’s just so diffuse; people just look at things that reinforce their worldview. A lot of those worldviews don’t have anything to do with reacting to political situations, or reacting to wars that are going on. Also, I think expressing oneself through music didn’t result in any massive type of change. I don’t think its really an effective means of effecting any kind of change. It’s just blowing of steam…

SFBG: Well, Bono cured hunger in Africa. So, there’s that.

MD: I crewed for U2 on their 360 show as a local, working the spotlight, and the guy on the spotlight above me pissed himself in the spot chair – I got to watch the piss drip down.

SFBG: He couldn’t leave?

MD: Yeah, he couldn’t leave. I watched him drink some coffee beforehand, and I was wondering…

SFBG: You said it was the spotlight above you? That sounds like a bad situation…

MD: Fortunately, they were offset.

SFBG: Did you see a trickle of urine going by, a couple feet from you?

MD: I did. Yeah, I did.

SFBG: That’s brutal.

MD: They landed the truss, and the guy just left – he resigned on the spot.

THE SOUTHERN LORD WEST COAST MINI TOUR

Corrosion of Conformity, Goatsnake, Black Breath, Eagle Twin, Righteous Fool

Tue/10, 7 p.m., $25

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

www.dnalounge.com

A new community congress

David Talbot
-
0
A new community congress

EDITORIAL The first time a group of activists from across San Francisco met in a Community Congress, it was 1975 and the city was in trouble. Runaway downtown development was creating massive displacement and threatening the quality of life. Rents were rising and tenants were facing eviction. An energy crisis had left residents and businesses with soaring power bills. The manifesto of the Congress laid out the problem:

"Every poor and working class community in San Francisco has learned the hard way that its interests are at the bottom of the list as far as City Hall is concerned. At the top of the list are the banks, real estate interests, and large corporations, who view San Francisco not as a place for people to live and work and raise families, but as a corporate headquarters city and playground for corporate executives. By using their vast financial resources, they have been able to persuade local government officials that office buildings, hotels, and luxury apartments are more important than blue-collar industry, low-cost housing and decent public services and facilities."

The Community Congress hammered out a platform — a 40-page document that pretty much defined what progressive San Francisco believed in and wanted for the city. It included district elections of supervisors, rent control, public power, a requirement that developers build affordable housing, and a sunshine ordinance — in fact, much of what the left has accomplished in this town in the past 35 years was first outlined in that document.

Beyond the details, what the platform said was profound: it suggested that the people of San Francisco could reimagine their city, that local government could become a force for social and economic change on the local level, even when politics in Washington and Sacramento were lagging behind. It called for a new relationship between San Franciscans and their city government and looked not just at what was wrong, but what was possible.

That’s something that too often gets lost in political debate today. With urban finances in total collapse, the progressives are on defense much of the time, trying to save the basic safety net and preserve essential programs and services. It seems as if there’s little opportunity to talk about a comprehensive alternative vision for San Francisco.

But bad times are great times to try new ideas — and when the second Community Congress convenes Aug. 14 and 15 at the University of San Francisco, that’s exactly what they’ll be trying to do. It’s not going to be easy — the left in San Francisco has always been fractious, and there’s no consensus on a lot of central issues. But if the Community Congress attracts a broad enough constituency and develops a coherent platform that can guide future political organizing efforts, it will have made a huge contribution to the city.

The event also offers the potential for the creation of a permanent progressive organization that can serve as a forum for discussion, debate, and action on a wide range of issues. That’s something the San Francisco left has never had. Sup. Chris Daly tried to create that sort of organization but it never really worked out. The city’s full of activist groups — the Tenants Union, the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, the Sierra Club, and many others — that work on important issues and generally agree on things, but there’s no umbrella group that can knit all those causes together. It may be an impossible dream, but it’s worth discussing.

The organizers of the Community Congress discuss some of their agenda in the accompanying piece on this page. It should be based on a vision of what a city like San Francisco can be. Think about it:

This can be a city where economic development is about encouraging small businesses and start-ups, where public money goes to finance neighborhood enterprises instead of subsidizing massive projects.

This can be a city where planning is driven by what the people who live here want for their community, not by what big developers can make a profit doing.

This can be a city where housing is a right, not a privilege, where new residential construction is designed to be affordable for the people who work here.

This can be a city where renewable energy powers nearly all the needs of residents and businesses and where the public controls the electricity grid.

This can be a city where the wealthy pay the same level of taxes that rich people paid in this country before the Reagan era, where the individuals and corporations that have gotten filthy rich off Republican tax cuts give back a little bit to a city that is proud of its liberal Democratic values.

This can be a city where it’s safe to walk and bike on the streets and where clean, reliable buses and trains have priority over cars.

This can be a city where all kids get a good education in public schools.

Despite all the economic woes, this is one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in the history of human civilization. There are no economic or physical or scientific or structural constraints to reimagining the city. The only obstacles are political.

In the next two years, control of City Hall will change dramatically. Five seats on the Board of Supervisors are up in November, and the mayor’s office is open the year after that. The progressives have made great progress in the past few years — but downtown is gearing up to try to reverse those advances. The community congress needs to address not just the battle ahead, but describe the outcome and explain why San Francisco’s future is worth fighting for.

A new community congress

David Talbot
-
2

Bad times are great times to try new ideas – the second Community Congress convenes Aug. 14 and 15 at the University of San Francisco

EDITORIAL The first time a group of activists from across San Francisco met in a Community Congress, it was 1975 and the city was in trouble. Runaway downtown development was creating massive displacement and threatening the quality of life. Rents were rising and tenants were facing eviction. An energy crisis had left residents and businesses with soaring power bills. The manifesto of the Congress laid out the problem:

“Every poor and working class community in San Francisco has learned the hard way that its interests are at the bottom of the list as far as City Hall is concerned. At the top of the list are the banks, real estate interests, and large corporations, who view San Francisco not as a place for people to live and work and raise families, but as a corporate headquarters city and playground for corporate executives. By using their vast financial resources, they have been able to persuade local government officials that office buildings, hotels, and luxury apartments are more important than blue-collar industry, low-cost housing and decent public services and facilities.”

The Community Congress hammered out a platform — a 40-page document that pretty much defined what progressive San Francisco believed in and wanted for the city. It included district elections of supervisors, rent control, public power, a requirement that developers build affordable housing, and a sunshine ordinance — in fact, much of what the left has accomplished in this town in the past 35 years was first outlined in that document.

Beyond the details, what the platform said was profound: it suggested that the people of San Francisco could reimagine their city, that local government could become a force for social and economic change on the local level, even when politics in Washington and Sacramento were lagging behind. It called for a new relationship between San Franciscans and their city government and looked not just at what was wrong, but what was possible.

That’s something that too often gets lost in political debate today. With urban finances in total collapse, the progressives are on defense much of the time, trying to save the basic safety net and preserve essential programs and services. It seems as if there’s little opportunity to talk about a comprehensive alternative vision for San Francisco.

But bad times are great times to try new ideas — and when the second Community Congress convenes Aug. 14 and 15 at the University of San Francisco, that’s exactly what they’ll be trying to do. It’s not going to be easy — the left in San Francisco has always been fractious, and there’s no consensus on a lot of central issues. But if the Community Congress attracts a broad enough constituency and develops a coherent platform that can guide future political organizing efforts, it will have made a huge contribution to the city.

The event also offers the potential for the creation of a permanent progressive organization that can serve as a forum for discussion, debate, and action on a wide range of issues. That’s something the San Francisco left has never had. Sup. Chris Daly tried to create that sort of organization but it never really worked out. The city’s full of activist groups — the Tenants Union, the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, the Sierra Club, and many others — that work on important issues and generally agree on things, but there’s no umbrella group that can knit all those causes together. It may be an impossible dream, but it’s worth discussing.

The organizers of the Community Congress discuss some of their agenda in the accompanying piece on this page. It should be based on a vision of what a city like San Francisco can be. Think about it:

This can be a city where economic development is about encouraging small businesses and start-ups, where public money goes to finance neighborhood enterprises instead of subsidizing massive projects.

This can be a city where planning is driven by what the people who live here want for their community, not by what big developers can make a profit doing.

This can be a city where housing is a right, not a privilege, where new residential construction is designed to be affordable for the people who work here.

This can be a city where renewable energy powers nearly all the needs of residents and businesses and where the public controls the electricity grid.

This can be a city where the wealthy pay the same level of taxes that rich people paid in this country before the Reagan era, where the individuals and corporations that have gotten filthy rich off Republican tax cuts give back a little bit to a city that is proud of its liberal Democratic values.

This can be a city where it’s safe to walk and bike on the streets and where clean, reliable buses and trains have priority over cars.

This can be a city where all kids get a good education in public schools.

Despite all the economic woes, this is one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in the history of human civilization. There are no economic or physical or scientific or structural constraints to reimagining the city. The only obstacles are political.

In the next two years, control of City Hall will change dramatically. Five seats on the Board of Supervisors are up in November, and the mayor’s office is open the year after that. The progressives have made great progress in the past few years — but downtown is gearing up to try to reverse those advances. The community congress needs to address not just the battle ahead, but describe the outcome and explain why San Francisco’s future is worth fighting for.

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