Style

Culture class

-
0
Culture class

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Squeezed between cuts to California’s higher education system and the dizzying price of tuition, students can take heart — as well as some bittersweet heartbreak — with An Education. Comfort yourself with the fact that a dearth of classes will leave plentiful time to sample life lessons of an extracurricular, taboo-testing ilk.

The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan, justifiably earning praise for her plucky, pluckable vulnerability) is a good girl and ace student, raring for the wisdom she’s only beginning to grasp as she sings along with her Juliette Greco LPs.

It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The Twickenham home of Jenny’s parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Majorie (Cara Seymour), positively vibrates with their parental aspirations and a dank, tea-cozy-ed conservatism. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner.

Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society, whether he’s installing a black family in a neighborhood to spur a mini-white flight or making off with vulnerable villagers’ heirlooms alongside pal Danny (Dominic Cooper). The two, paired with Danny’s bubbly, bobble-headed girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike), are styled as the UK counterparts of Breathless-era Jean-Paul Belmondo and Purple Noon-esque Alain Delon, seductive and stylish scalawags in the know and on the make, taking advantage of the fluid moment.

The pair purveys a sophistication that sidesteps class — and signals a change that extends beyond the borders of Twickenham and London — as David successfully woos Jenny’s charm-deprived parents with white lies that grow increasingly daring and dire. But can you blame the gentle cad? A gamesman and connoisseur, David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles, even as Jenny’s teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) battles over her star pupil’s future with protofeminist fervor.

The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David’s gang of outsiders while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across a face reminiscent of those guileless ingénues who came of age in another age: Sandra Dee of Imitation of Life (1959) and Gidget-era Sally Field. This is just one lesson among many, in the life of a girl who pulls back from the precipice.

AN EDUCATION opens Fri/16 in San Francisco.

Brütal odyssey

-
0
Brütal odyssey

>>Read Ben Richardson’s full interview with Tim Schafer here

arts@sfbg.com

GAMER "The first time we pitched it, they wanted us to change the genre, to make it about country or hip-hop or something."

Game designer Tim Schafer is sitting in his SoMa office, in his favorite chair — appropriately, a rocking chair — and talking about his masterpiece. "They were saying, ‘Why don’t you open it to all music?’ We said, ‘Look — this is a game about epic battles, good vs. evil, Braveheart-type moments. And heavy metal is the musical genre that focuses heavily on folklore. It sings about medieval combat. It’s really the only genre that makes sense for it.’"

The game is Brütal Legend (Double Fine/EA), and in the end, Schafer got his way. Taking control of Eddie Riggs, a grizzled roadie voiced by Jack Black, the player journeys through a metal landscape inspired by the album covers the designer studied in his youth. Wielding a massive battle-ax and a magical guitar, Riggs encounters righteous friends and fiendish foes, including characters voiced by luminaries like Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford, and Lita Ford. The soundtrack is a carefully compiled list of headbang-inducing classics.

Schafer agrees that the game is his most personal creation to date. "All games are wish fulfillments. All games are about fantasy. This is a game where I’ve been able to make my own wish fulfillment. I would like to go back in time with a cool car and a battle-axe while listening to heavy metal."

THE TROOPER

Growing up in Sonoma, the designer escaped his suburban life by rocking out to Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. He would drive down to San Francisco for shows, catching sets at Mabuhay Gardens or the Stone. The music introduced him to a mythic world of horned hell-monsters, glistening chrome, and mortal combat, a world he never quite left behind.

He attended both UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, dividing his attention between computer programming and creative writing, two talents he would later fuse. At Berkeley, he took a class on folklore from Alan Dundes, a provocative professor whose belief in the power of folklore influenced Schafer’s work tremendously. In 1989, he got a job in San Rafael at Lucasfilm Games, now LucasArts. He was assigned to The Secret of Monkey Island, a comedic adventure game by designer Ron Gilbert. Monkey Island was the perfect vehicle for Schafer’s talents, taking full advantage of his boundless imagination, storytelling sense, and biting wit. It is best remembered for its "insult sword fighting" section, in which dueling buccaneers trade verbal jabs in lieu of physical ones.

Mitch Krpata, game critic for the Boston Phoenix and author of the blog Insult Swordfighting, identified the defining quality of Schafer’s LucasArts output via e-mail: "Character. There are a few archetypes that most games go to again and again: silent man of action, easygoing everyman, tormented soul out for revenge. Schafer’s protagonists aren’t like that. They’re individuals. They’re good guys, but they have flaws, and their flaws aren’t things like they just care too much, dammit."

BE QUICK OR BE DEAD

After finishing the biker-themed Full Throttle in 1995, Schafer hunted inspiration. It came to him as an unlikely combination of themes, both closely tied to his San Francisco home. Initially, he was devouring classic noir films at the Lark and Castro theatres. A trip to the Day of the Dead parade in the city’s Mission District delivered the epiphany. The higher-ups at LucasArts had been agitating for a game with 3-D graphics, a prospect he did not relish. "I really hated the look of 3-D art back then, because it looked like a nylon stretched over a cardboard box," he remembers.

Picking through a table of Day of the Dead ephemera, the idea came: "I saw those calavera statues. Instead of modeling all of the bones in papier-mâché, they’ll just make a tube and paint the bones on the outside. I was like, ‘This is just like bad 3-D art. This is great!’"

Additional fodder was provided by doctor visits to 450 Sutter — a building that combines Art Deco architecture with Mayan motifs — and Schafer began work on his most ambitious project to date. Drawing on his collegiate folklore training, he and his team wove together elements of Day of the Dead tradition, Aztec folk tales, and noir cinema to create 1998’s Grim Fandango (LucasArts), a sprawling epic of crime and love in which all the characters were stylized, calavera-style skeletons "living" in the Land of the Dead. Featuring a labyrinthine, affecting story, delectable hard-boiled dialogue, and stunning art direction, it is still ranked among the best games of all time.

RUNNING FREE

Schafer left LucasArts in 1999, concerned that the company would exercise its ownership of his beloved characters without his participation. He wanted to found his own studio in San Francisco. As he told me over the phone, "Working at a company where you can look out the window and see the city outside is just so inspiring. It’s not just about having great restaurants at lunch, though that’s part of it." Starting in his living room "in a bathrobe and flip-flops," the nascent Double Fine Productions — named after a "double fine zone" sign on the Golden Gate bridge — jumped from location to location, including an unheated warehouse with a rodent problem and a toilet that often unleashed an "ocean of human waste" into the office.

The first Double Fine game was 2005’s Psychonauts, an ambitious project about a summer camp for psychic kids that failed to reach the wide audience it deserved. Even in this rarefied setting, Schafer included bits of the city’s lore. A character named Boyd was based on a homeless man who hung out near the team’s offices, doing odd jobs and enlightening the Double Fine crew with his extensive conspiracy theories.

"Sometimes he would just be on a rant about [how] the government would be trying to read his mind using satellites, or using the broken glass in the streets to bend their optics around," Schafer recalls. "He just produced great quotes: ‘I don’t want to be liquid, I want to be a turtle with rockets strapped to my back!’" Deciding to include him in the game, the designer painstakingly created a flow-chart that would procedurally generate conspiracy theories for Boyd to spout onscreen. "He constructs it by coming up with a conspirator, what their plan is, what the victim of it is, and strings it all together with a bunch of coughing and stuff."

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

Brütal Legend, Double Fine’s latest game, was released Oct. 13, and gamers across the country will have the opportunity to play through the piece of San Francisco folklore most familiar to Schafer: the one based on himself. By making a game about a character transported from our familiar world into an ax-happy metal battleground, the designer has turned his story, the story of a misfit headbanger from a city steeped in metal history, into a new kind of 21st century myth.

Magnolia

-
0
Magnolia

paulr@sfbg.com

Imagine a casting call for a beer commercial — a beer, I should add, marketed toward cool young people and not geezers or swollen couch slugs — and you’ll have some idea of the scene at Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery on any given night. Loose halter tops, soccer butts, and headsful of tousled hair dot the Rathskeller-scape, while the human noise (let’s call it the roar of youth) is so loud and steady as to achieve a transcendence. The noise is beyond noise; it warps reality and becomes another dimension. As a confirmed hater of noise, I should have hated it passionately, but it’s hard to sustain that kind of energy when you are engulfed in a sea of jubilant 20-somethings. Like all human moods, exuberance is communicable, and you won’t see many long faces coming out of Magnolia. On the other hand, you might well see some people, probably older than 40, gingerly checking to make sure their ears are still attached to their skulls as they regain the (comparatively) tranquil street.

Magnolia has been a beacon-like presence at the corner of Haight and Masonic for 15 years. In part, and in true pub fashion, it’s a neighborhood joint, but from the beginning the microbrewed beers have provided a broader draw. Magnolia was among the first of the city’s modern brewpubs — places that brewed their own beer and matched good food to go with it. And while the kitchen has recently undergone a change of chef, with Ronnie New now in charge, the food retains its gastro-pubby, beer-friendly edge. There’s a daily pizza, a burger made with Prather Ranch beef, and (at lunch) a meatloaf sandwich. But New has Louisiana roots, and he’s infused Magnolia’s new menu with various Cajun and Creole touches.

You’ll find quite a few of these among the side dishes ($5), which include collard greens, dirty rice, cheese grits, and black-eyed peas simmered with ham hocks. I love black-eyed peas and consider them a real delicacy, and how could you go wrong simmering them with ham hocks? But something did go wrong — maybe a total dearth of salt — and the result was lifelessness. There was considerably more kick in the vinegary (though non-bayou) sauerkraut, but when we asked whether it was house-made, our server shook her head. (Service is surprisingly good, by the way, considering the intensity of the evening rush, but the service staff’s manner is Parisian in its emphasis on efficiency rather than fawning.)

Okra, a staple of bayou cooking, makes its presence felt in ways subtle and not. You can have it more or less straight up, as a buttermilk-battered and deep-fried appetizer, but it also appears in the succotash that accompanies a slab of pan-seared halibut ($19). The fish, topped by a beret of basil aioli, is nicely cooked, moist and flaky, but the plate is dominated by the colorful succotash, a gravelly mat of corn kernels, halved cherry tomatoes, and okra splinters.

Not all the food is Louisiana-inflected or even pubby. We were especially impressed by a watermelon salad ($7), which managed to give the late-summer bounty of California a sly Saharan aura. The cubes of melon were tossed with slices of peeled, seeded cucumber and chunks of goat cheese and then dressed with a saba vinaigrette and shreds of mint. Some sweetness, some tang; a bit of creaminess, a bit of crunch. (The watermelon, incidentally, is thought to be native to Egypt and was cultivated as a means of carrying water in the desert.)

And a summer tomato soup ($7) could have been on the menu at many a California-cuisine spot. The (hot) soup had a pleasant coarseness, but the real treat was the archipelago of croutons, coated with melted Gruyère, bobbing in the middle of the bowl.

In a surprising development, desserts are quite good — neither overwrought nor (as is so often the case at pub-style establishments) ordinary and perfunctory. A plum crisp ($7) was deftly enlivened by the addition of tomatoes; their texture was difficult to distinguish from that of the plums, but their earthy acidity helped damp the sweetness. I would have called this dish a crumble, since it was in effect a shallow dish of stewed fruit with the pastry bits scattered over the top like sprinkles on a doughnut. There was no proper crust.

A pair of tiny ice-cream sandwiches ($7), like sliders, reached the table in a supercooled condition, and we were told to let them stand for five minutes so they could relax. The crisp, alas, didn’t last that long, so when we turned to the sandwiches, they were still slightly gelid. But the flavor of the Bi-Rite roasted banana ice cream glowed through the cold, and the graham-cracker cookies were like un-lemony madeleines. (Perhaps to compensate for the lack of lemon, the inner faces of the cookies were smeared with white chocolate.) The bite- (or two-bite-) size of the sandwiches was also a bit of caloric discipline for those of us no longer in our 20s. A diamond might be forever, but not a soccer butt. *

MAGNOLIA GASTROPUB & BREWERY

Mon.–Thurs., noon–midnight; Fri., noon–1 a.m.;

Sat., 10–1 a.m.; Sun., 10 a.m.–midnight

1398 Haight, SF

(415) 864-7468

www.magnoliapub.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Deafening

Wheelchair accessible

Film listings

-
0
Film listings

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, Matt Sussman, and Laura Swanbeck. The film intern is Fernando F. Croce. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

SF DOCFEST

The eighth annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival runs Oct 16-29 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets ($11) are available by visiting www.sfindie.com. For commentary, see "Is the Truth Out There?" All times p.m.

FRI/16

The Entrepreneur 7. Shooting Robert King 7. Drums Inside Your Chest 9:15. Houston We Have a Problem 9:15.

SAT/17

Drums Inside Your Chest 2:30. Waiting for Hockney 2:30. Between the Folds 4:45. Finding Face 4:45. HomeGrown 7. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia 7. Dust and Illusions 9:15. The Earth Is Young 9:15.

SUN/18

"Bay Area Shorts" (shorts program) 2:30. We Said, No Crying 2:30. Another Planet 4:45. I Need That Record: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store 4:45. Cat Ladies 7. Off and Running 7. Vampiro 9:15. What’s the Matter with Kansas? 9:15.

MON/19

Between the Folds 7. We Said, No Crying 7. October Country 9:15. Waiting for Hockney 9:15.

TUES/20

The Earth Is Young 7. I Need That Record: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store 7. Another Planet 9:15. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia 9:15.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

The 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival runs through Sun/18 at the Century Cinema, 41 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera; CinéArts@Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; and Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael. Tickets (most shows $12.50) available by calling 1-877-874-MVFF or visiting www.mvff.org. All times p.m. unless otherwise noted.

WED/14

Rafael The Horse Boy 4:30. "5@5: America Is Not the World" (shorts program) 5. "Spotlight on Jason Reitman:" Up in the Air 6:30. White Wedding 7. Linoleum 7:15. Tapped 9. The Eclipse 9:15. Up in the Air 9:40.

Sequoia The Swimsuit Issue 4:15. "5@5: Oscillate Wildly" (shorts program) 5. Trimpin: The Sound of Invention 6:30. Surrogate 7. Elevator 8:45. Hellsinki 9.

Throck "Insight: The Cassel Touch" (interview and discussion) 8.

THURS/15

Rafael The Girl on the Train 4. Reach for Me 4:30. "5@5: The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get" (shorts program) 5. Icons Among Us: jazz in the present tense 6:30. Meredith Monk: Inner Voice 6:45. "Tribute to Woody Harrelson:" The Messenger 7. Hipsters 9. Barking Water 9:15.

Sequoia "5@5: Sister I’m a Poet" (shorts program) 5. Jim Thorpe: The World’s Greatest Athlete 5:15. Apron Strings 6:45. The Missing Person 7:30. This Is the Husband I Want! 9. Winnebago Man 9:30.

Throck Storm 7.

FRI/16

Rafael Sweet Rush 4. "5@5: The Edges Are No Longer Parallel" (shorts program) 5. Stalin Thought of You 6. "Tribute to Anna Karina:" Victoria 6:30. Zombie Girl: The Movie 7. Jermal 8:15. Trimpin: The Sound of Invention 9. Red Cliff 9:30.

Sequoia Shylock 4. Shameless 5. Tenderloin 6:45. A Thousand Suns and Mustang: Journey of Transformation 7. One Crazy Ride 8:45. Happy Tears 9:15.

Throck Troupers: 50 Years of the San Francisco Mime Troupe 7:30.

SAT/17

Rafael [Blank.] 11am. A Thousand Suns and Mustang: Journey of Transformation noon. Ricky Rapper 1. The Girl on the Train 1:45. Hellsinki 2. Oh My God 3. The Strength of Water 4:15. Awakening from Sorrow 4:45. The Missing Person 5:30. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg 6:45. The Swimsuit Issue 6:45. Surrogate 7:45. Tenderloin 9. Hipsters 9:15.

Sequoia The Letter for the King 10:30am. Eat the Sun noon. White Wedding 1:30. Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn 2:30. Dark and Stormy Night 3:45. Mine 5. A Year Ago in Winter 6:15. Reach for Me 7:15. "Hi De Ho Show" (shorts and music) 9:15. Winnebago Man 9:45.

Throck "New Movie Labs: Distribution of Specialty Film" (seminar) 12:30. Project Happiness 3. "5@5: The Edges Are No Longer Parallel" (shorts program) 5. "Cinemasports" (shorts program of films made in one day) 7:30.

SUN/18

Rafael Stella and the Star of the Orient noon. This Is the Husband I Want! noon. Mine 12:30. Apron Strings 2:30. Soundtrack for a Revolution 2:45. One Crazy Ride 3. Project Happiness 5. The Young Victoria 5:15. Race to Nowhere 5:45. Skin 7:30. Bomber 7:45.

Sequoia The Ten Lives of Titanic the Cat 12:30. Meredith Monk: Inner Voice 1. Oh My God 2:30. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg 3:15. Looking for Eric 5:15. The Strength of Water 5:45.

Throck "New Movies Lab: Active Cinema" 12:30. "A Sweeter Music: Live Concert with Sarah Cahill and John Sanborn" 3:30.

OPENING

Birdwatchers War-painted natives don bows and arrows and watch from the Amazon riverbank as a boat of tourists passes by. Away from white eyes, they slip back into their modern clothes and are paid by the tour guide for a job well done. Had it sustained the evocative wryness of its opening scene throughout its running time, Marco Bechi’s film would have been more than a frequently striking culture-clash tract. As it is, there’s much to admire in this Brazil-set account of a disbanded Guarani-Kaiowà tribe struggling to hang on to their expiring heritage, from its clear-eyed view of the lingering human toll of colonialism to its uncondescending portrait of indigenous mysticism. Unfortunately, Bechi’s penchant for underlined contrasts and clumsy staging often threaten to sabotage his evocative mix of ethnography, satire, and social critique. While far from being as complacent as the titular sightseers, in the end the film is similarly content to merely skim over an ongoing cultural genocide. (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Croce)

*An Education See "Culture Class." (1:35) Albany, Embarcadero.

The Horse Boy Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff are a Texas couple struggling to raise their five-year-old autistic son Rowan. When they discover that the boy’s tantrums are soothed by contact with horses, they set out on a journey to Mongolia, where horseback riding is the preferred mode of traveling across the steppe and sacred shamans hold the promise of healing. Michael Orion Scott’s documentary is many things — lecture on autism, home video collage, family therapy session, and exotic travelogue. Above all, unfortunately, it’s a star vehicle for Isaacson, whose affecting concern for his son is constantly eclipsed by his screen-hogging concern for his own paternal image (more than once he declares that he’s a better father thanks to Rowan’s condition). The contradiction brings to mind doomed activist Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man (2005), and indeed the film could have used some of Werner Herzog’s inquisitive touch, if only to question the artistic merits of showing your son going "poopie." Twice. (1:33) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Croce)

Law Abiding Citizen "Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) as re-imagined by the Saw franchise folks" apparently sounded like a sweet pitch to someone, because here we are, stuck with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler playing bloody and increasingly ludicrous cat-and-mouse games. Foxx stars as a slick Philadelphia prosecutor whose deal-cutting careerist ways go easy on the scummy criminals responsible for murdering the wife and daughter of a local inventor (Butler). Cut to a decade later, and the doleful widower has become a vengeful mastermind with a yen for Hannibal Lecter-like skills, gruesome contraptions, and lines like "Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten." Butler metes out punishment to his family’s killers as well as to the bureocratic minions who let them off the hook. But the talk of moral consequences is less a critique of a faulty judicial system than mere white noise, vainly used by director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer in hopes of classing up a grinding exploitation drama. (1:48) Presidio. (Croce)

*More Than a Game In the late 1990s, armed with a camera and a certain amount of tenacity, Kristopher Belman set out to capture the glory that was regularly manifesting itself on a certain Akron, Ohio basketball court. The main reason: a future superstar named LeBron James. But James’ remarkable teenage career (at least until the age of 18, when the St. Vincent-St. Mary High School grad became the number one NBA draft pick) wasn’t completely a solo act; his core group of friends, the team’s starting line-up, was so tight they were called "the Fab Five." Despite Belman’s determination to equally divide the spotlight, James was clearly a star then as he is now, slam-dunking on hapless opponents even as he grappled with his burgeoning celebrity status. I’ll never tire of the tale of how James raised eyebrows when he started driving a brand-new Hummer — only to quash whispers of misconduct when it was revealed that his mother, Gloria, was able to secure a loan for the gift based solely on the understanding (shared by all) that her son’s skills would make him a zillionaire before his next birthday. (1:45) (Eddy)

New York, I Love You A variety of filmmakers (including Fatih Akin, Shekhar Kapur, Mira Nair, and Brett Ratner) directed segments of this stateside answer to 2006’s Paris, je t’aime. (1:43) Bridge, Shattuck.

The Providence Effect Located in Chicago’s gang-infested West side, the illustrious Providence St. Mel School rises above its surroundings like a flower in a swamp. Or at least it does in Rollin Binzer’s documentary, where analysis of the institution’s great achievements at times edges into a virtual pamphlet for enrollment. Focusing mainly on affable school president Paul J. Adams III, a veteran of the civil rights movement whose "impossible dream" made Providence possible, the film chronicles the daily activities of teachers and students vying for success in the face of poverty and crime. Given the school’s notoriously unwholesome environment, it’s a bit disappointing that the film chooses to exclusively follow the trajectory of model pupils, trading grittier tales of struggle in favor of a smoother ride of feel-god buzzwords and uplifting anecdotes. The documentary isn’t free of scholarly platitudes straight out of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), but, in times when teachers get as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield, its celebration of the importance of education is valuable. (1:32) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Croce)

The Stepfather Dylan Walsh: as scary as Terry O’Quinn? Discuss. (1:41)

Where the Wild Things Are Spike Jonze directs a live-action version of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s tale. (1:48) Four Star, Grand Lake, Marina.

ONGOING

*Bright Star Is beauty truth; truth, beauty? John Keats, the poet famed for such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and Jane Campion, the filmmaker intent on encapsuutf8g the last romance of the archetypal Romantic, would have undoubtedly bonded over a love of sensual details — and the way a certain vellum-like light can transport its viewer into elevated reverie. In truth, Campion doesn’t quite achieve the level of Keats’ verse with this somber glimpse at the tubercular writer and his final love, neighbor Fanny Brawne. But she does bottle some of their pale beauty. Less-educated than the already respected young scribe, Brawne nonetheless may have been his equal in imagination as a seamstress, judging from the petal-bonneted, ruffled-collar ensembles Campion outfits her in. As portrayed by the soulful-eyed Abbie Cornish, the otherwise-enigmatic, plucky Brawne is the singularly bright blossom ready to be wrapped in a poet’s adoration, worthy of rhapsody by Ben Whishaw’s shaggily, shabbily puppy-dog Keats, who snatches the preternaturally serene focus of a fine mind cut short by illness, with the gravitational pull of a serious indie-rock hottie. The two are drawn to each other like the butterflies flittering in Brawne’s bedroom/farm, one of the most memorable scenes in the dark yet sweetly glimmering Bright Star. Bathing her scenes in lengthy silence, shot through with far-from-flowery dialogue, Campion is at odds with this love story, so unlike her joyful 1990 ode to author Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (Kerry Fox appears here, too, as Fanny’s mother): the filmmaker refuses to overplay it, sidestepping Austenian sprightliness. Instead she embraces the dark differences, the negative inevitability, of this death-steeped coupling, welcoming the odd glance at the era’s intellectual life, the interplay of light and shadow. (1:59) Empire, Piedmont, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) California, Empire, Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (1:21) Oaks, 1000 Van Ness.

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Albany, SF Center. (Swanbeck)

Couples Retreat You could call Couples Retreat a romantic comedy, but that would imply that it was romantic and funny instead of an insipid, overlong waste of time. This story of a group of married friends trying to bond with their spouses in an exotic island locale is a failure on every level. Romantic? The titular couples — four total — represent eight of the most obnoxious characters in recent memory. Sure, you’re rooting for them to work out their issues, but that’s only because awful people deserve one another. (And in a scene with an almost-shark attack, you’re rooting for the shark.) Funny? The jokes are, at best, juvenile (boners are silly!) and, at worse, offensive (sexism and homophobia once more reign supreme). There is an impressive array of talent here: Vince Vaugh, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Jean Reno, etc. Alas, there’s no excusing the script, which puts these otherwise solid actors into exceedingly unlikable roles. Even the gorgeous island scenery — Couples Retreat was filmed on location in Bora-Bora — can’t make up for this waterlogged mess. (1:47) Grand Lake, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*District 9 As allegories go, District 9 is not all that subtle. This is a sci-fi action flick that’s really all about racial intolerance — and to drive the point home, they went and set it in South Africa. Here’s the set-up: 20 years ago, an alien ship arrived and got stuck, hovering above the Earth. Faster than you can say "apartheid," the alien refugees were confined to a camp — the titular District 9 — where they have remained in slum-level conditions. As science fiction, it’s creative; as a metaphor, it’s effective. What’s most surprising about District 9 is the way everything comes together. This is a big, bloody summer blockbuster with feelings: for every viscera-filled splatter, there’s a moment of poignant social commentary, and nothing ever feels forced or overdone. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp has found the perfect balance and created a film that doesn’t have to compromise. District 9 is a profoundly distressing look at the human condition. It’s also one hell of a good time. (1:52) Four Star. (Peitzman)

Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat A third entry in the low-budget gay franchise that goes mano-a-mano for crassness with mainstream teen sex comedies, this latest ages past even collegiate youth. That’s doubtless due to the expired jeune-fille status of series fave Rebekah Kochan, whose character Tiffani is a bitchy, potty-mouthed, horndoggie drag queen improbably inhabiting the person of an actual heterosexual born-female. Who operates a nail shop in West Hollywood, yet. That she bears no resemblance to credible real-world womanhood doesn’t entirely erase the line-snapping panache of Kochan herself, a gifted comedienne. If only she had better material to work with. After a truly horrific opening reel — duly tasteless but so, so unfunny — director Glenn Gaylord (is that really his name?) and scenarist Phillip J. Bartell’s sequel mercifully goes from rancid to semisweet. There’s little surprise in the Tiffani-assisted pursuit of slightly nelly dreamboat Zack (Chris Salvatore) by pseudo-nerdy, equally bodyfat-deprived new kid in town Casey (Daniel Skelton). But there is a pretty amusing climax involving a three-way (theoretically four) recalling the original’s hilarious phone-sex-coaching highlight. (1:23) Roxie. (Harvey)

Fame Note to filmmakers: throwing a bunch of talented young people together does not a good film make. And that’s putting it mildly. Fame is an overstuffed mess, a waste of teenage performers, veteran actors, and, of course, the audience’s time. Conceptually, it’s sound: it makes sense to update the 1980 classic for a new, post-High School Musical generation. But High School Musical this ain’t. Say what you will about the Disney franchise — but those films have (at the very least) some semblance of cohesion and catchy tunes. Fame is music video erratic, with characters who pop up, do a little dance, then disappear for a while. The idea that we should remember them is absurd — that we should care about their plights even stranger. It doesn’t help that said plights are leftovers from every other teen song-and-dance movie ever: unsupportive parents, tough-love teachers, doomed romance. "Fame" may mean living forever, but I give this movie two weeks. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

(500) Days of Summer There’s a warning at the tender, bruised heart of (500) Days of Summer, kind of like an alarm on a clock-radio set to MOPEROCK-FM, going off somewhere in another room. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a student of architecture turned architect of sappy greeting card messages, opts to press snooze and remain in the dream world of "I’m the guy who can make this lovely girl believe in love." The agnostic in question is a luminous, whimsical creature named Summer (Zooey eschanel), who’s sharp enough to flirtatiously refer to Tom as "Young Werther" but soft enough to seem capable of reshaping into a true believer. Her semi-mysterious actions throughout (500) Days raise the following question, though: is a mutual affinity for Morrissey and Magritte sufficient predetermining evidence of what is and is not meant to be? Over the course of an impressionistic film that flips back and forth and back again through the title’s 500 days, mimicking the darting, perilous maneuvers of ungovernable memory, first-time feature director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber answer this and related questions in a circuitous fashion, while gently querying our tendency to edit and manufacture perceptions. (1:36) Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*In the Loop A typically fumbling remark by U.K. Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) ignites a media firestorm, since it seems to suggest war is imminent even though Brit and U.S. governments are downplaying the likelihood of the Iraq invasion they’re simultaneously preparing for. Suddenly cast as an important arbiter of global affairs — a role he’s perhaps less suited for than playing the Easter Bunny — Simon becomes one chess piece in a cutthroat game whose participants on both sides of the Atlantic include his own subordinates, the prime minister’s rageaholic communications chief, major Pentagon and State Department honchos, crazy constituents, and more. Writer-director Armando Iannucci’s frenetic comedy of behind-the-scenes backstabbing and its direct influence on the highest-level diplomatic and military policies is scabrously funny in the best tradition of English television, which is (naturally) just where its creators hail from. (1:49) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Inglourious Basterds With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be. The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Mélanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual; brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (2:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Informant! The best satire makes you uncomfortable, but nothing will make you squirm in your seat like a true story that feels like satire. Director Steven Soderbergh introduces the exploits of real-life agribusiness whistleblower Mark Whitacre with whimsical fonts and campy music — just enough to get the audience’s guard down. As the pitch-perfect Matt Damon — laden with 30 extra pounds and a fright-wig toupee — gee-whizzes his way through an increasingly complicated role, Soderbergh doles out subtle doses of torturous reality, peeling back the curtain to reveal a different, unexpected curtain behind it. Informant!’s tale of board-room malfeasance is filled with mis-directing cameos, jokes, and devices, and its ingenious, layered narrative will provoke both anti-capitalist outrage and a more chimerical feeling of satisfied frustration. Above all, it’s disquietingly great. (1:48) Empire, Four Star, Oaks, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Richardson)

The Invention of Lying Great concept. Great cast. All The Invention of Lying needed was a great script editor and it might have reached classic comedy territory. As it stands, it’s dragged down to mediocrity by a weak third act. This is the story of a world where no one can lie — and we’re not just talking about big lies either. The Invention of Lying presents a vision of no sarcasm, no white lies, no — gasp —creative fiction. All that changes when Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) realizes he can bend the truth. And because no one else can, everything Mark makes up becomes fact to the rubes around him. If you guessed that hilarity ensues, you’re right on the money! Watching Mark use his powers for evil (robbing the bank! seducing women!) makes for a very funny first hour. Then things take a turn for the heavy when Mark becomes a prophet by letting slip his vision of the afterlife. Faster than you can say "Jesus beard," he’s rocking a God complex and the audience is longing for the simpler laughs, like Jennifer Garner admitting to some pre-date masturbation. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Julie and Julia As Julie Powell, disillusioned secretary by day and culinary novice by night, Amy Adams stars as a woman who decides to cook and blog her way through 524 of Julia Child’s recipes in 365 days. Nora Ephron oscillates between Julie’s drab existence in modern-day New York and the exciting life of culinary icon and expatriate, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), in 1950s Paris. As Julia gains confidence in the kitchen by besting all the men at the Cordon Bleu, Julie follows suit, despite strains on both her marriage and job. While Streep’s Julia borders on caricature at first, her performance eventually becomes more nuanced as the character’s insecurities about cooking, infertility, and getting published slowly emerge. Although a feast for the eyes and a rare portrait of a female over 40, Ephron’s cinematic concoction leaves you longing for less Julie with her predictable empowerment storyline and more of Julia and Streep’s exuberance and infectious joie de vivre. (2:03) Oaks, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

*9 American animation rarely gets as dark and dystopian as the PG-13-rated 9, the first feature by Shane Acker, who dreamed up the original short. The end of the world has arrived, the cities are wastelands of rubble, and the machines — robots that once functioned as the War of the Worlds-like weapons of an evil dictator — have triumphed. Humans have been eradicated — or maybe not. Some other, more vulnerable, sock-puppet-like machines, concocted with a combination of alchemy and engineering, have been created to counter their scary toaster brethren, like 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), who stumbles off his worktable like a miniature Pinocchio, a so-called stitch-punk. He’s big-eyed, bumbling, and vulnerable in his soft knitted skin and deprived of his guiding Geppetto. But he quickly encounters 2 (Martin Landau), who helps him jump start his nerves and fine-tune his voice box before a nasty, spidery ‘bot snatches his new friend up, as well a mysterious object 9 found at his creator’s lab. Too much knowledge in this ugly new world is something to be feared, as he learns from the other surviving models. The crotchety would-be leader 1 (Christopher Plummer), the one-eyed timid 5 (John C. Reilly), and the brave 7 (Jennifer Connelly) have very mixed feelings about stirring up more trouble. Who can blame them? People — and machines and even little dolls with the spark of life in their innocent, round eyes — die. Still, 9 manages to sidestep easy consolation and simple answers — delivering the always instructive lesson that argument and dialogue is just as vital and human as blowing stuff up real good — while offering heroic, relatively complicated thrills. And yes, our heros do get to run for their little AI-enhanced lives from a massive fireball. (1:19) SF Center. (Chun)

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon. (Harvey)

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Piedmont. (Chun)

*Still Walking Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 After Life stepped into a bureaucratic beyond. His 2001 Distance probed the aftermath of a religious cult’s mass suicide. Likewise loosely inspired by fact, Nobody Knows (2004) charted the survival of an abandoning mother’s practically feral children in a Tokyo apartment. 2006’s Hana was a splashy samurai story — albeit one atypically resistant to conventional action. Despite their shared character nuance, these prior features don’t quite prepare one for the very ordinary milieu and domestic dramatics of Still Walking. Kore-eda’s latest recalls no less than Ozu in its seemingly casual yet meticulous dissection of a broken family still awkwardly bound — if just for one last visit — by the onerous traditions and institution of "family" itself. There’s no conceptually hooky lure here. Yet Walking is arguably both Kore-eda’s finest hour so far, and as emotionally rich a movie experience as 2009 has yet afforded. One day every summer the entire Yokohama clan assembles to commemorate an eldest son’s accidental death 15 years earlier. This duty calls, even if art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) chafes at retired M.D. dad’s (Yoshio Harada) obvious disappointment over his career choice, at the insensitivity of his chatterbox mum (Kiri Kirin), and at being eternally compared to a retroactively sainted sibling. Not subject to such evaluative harshness, simply because she’s a girl, is many-foibled sole Yokohama daughter Chinami (Nobody Knows‘ oblivious, helium-voiced mum You). Small crises, subtle tensions, the routines of food preparation, and other minutae ghost-drive a narrative whose warm, familiar, pained, touching, and sometimes hilarious progress seldom leaves the small-town parental home interior — yet never feels claustrophobic in the least. (1:54) Roxie. (Harvey)

Surrogates In a world where cops don’t even leave the house to eat doughnuts, Bruce Willis plays a police detective wrestling with life’s big questions while wearing a very disconcerting blond wig. For example, does it count as living if you’re holed up in your room in the dark 24/7 wearing a VR helmet while a younger, svelter, pore-free, kind of creepy-looking version of yourself handles — with the help of a motherboard — the daily tasks of walking, talking, working, and playing? James Cromwell reprises his I, Robot (2004) I-may-have-created-a-monster role (in this case, a society in which human "operators" live vicariously through so-called surrogates from the safe, hygienic confines of their homes). Willis, with and sans wig, and with the help of his partner (Radha Mitchell), attempts to track down the unfriendly individual who’s running around town frying the circuits of surrogates and operators alike. (While he’s at it, perhaps he could also answer this question: how is it that all these people lying in the dark twitching their eyeballs haven’t turned into bed-sore-ridden piles of atrophied-muscle mush?) Director Jonathan Mostow (2003’s Terminator 3) takes viewers through the twists and turns at cynically high velocity, hoping we won’t notice the unsatisfying story line or when things stop making very much sense. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 Castro, Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

*We Live in Public Documentarian Ondi Timoner (2004’s DiG!) turns her camera on a longtime acquaintance, internet pioneer Josh Harris, as talented and maddening a subject as DiG! trainwreck Anton Newcombe. From the internet’s infancy, Harris exhibited a creative and forward-thinking outlook that seized upon the medium’s ability to allow people to interact virtually (via chat rooms) and also to broadcast themselves (via one of the internet’s first "television" stations). Though he had an off-putting personality — which sometimes manifested itself in his clown character, "Luvvy" (drawn from the TV-obsessed Harris’ love for Gilligan’s Island) — he racked up $80 million. Some of those new-media bucks went into his art project, "Quiet," an underground bunker stuffed full of eccentrics who allowed themselves to be filmed 24/7. Later, he and his girlfriend moved into a Big Brother-style apartment that was outfitted with dozens of cameras; unsurprisingly, the relationship crumbled under such constant surveillance. His path since then has been just as bizarre, though decidedly more low-tech (and far less well-funded). Though I’m not entirely sold on Timoner’s thesis that Harris’ experiments predicted the current social-networking obsession, her latest film is fascinating, and crafted with footage that only someone who was watching events unfurl first-hand could have captured. (1:30) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Wedding Song Continuing the examination of Muslim-Jewish tensions and female sexuality that she started in La Petit Jerusalem (2005), writer-director Karin Albou’s sophomore feature places the already volatile elements in the literally explosive terrain of World War II. Set in Tunis in 1942, it charts the relationship between Nour (Olympe Borval), a young Arab woman engaged to her handsome cousin, and Myriam (Lizzie Brocheré), the outspoken Jew she’s known since childhood. Bombs rain down from the sky and toxic Nazi propaganda fills the air, but to Albou the most trenchant conflict lies between the two heroines, who bond over their place in an oppressive society while secretly pining for each other’s lives and loves. Jettisoning much of the didacticism that weighted down her previous film, Albou surveys the mores, rituals, and connections informing the thorny politics of female identity with an assured eye worthy of veteran feminist filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta (1986’s Rosa Luxemburg). (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Croce)

Whip It What’s a girl to do? Stuck in small town hell, Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page), the gawky teen heroine of Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, faces a pressing dilemma — conform to the standards of stifling beauty pageantry to appease her mother or rebel and enter the rough-and tumble world of roller derby. Shockingly enough, Bliss chooses to escape to Austin and join the Hurl Scouts, a rowdy band of misfits led by the maternal Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig) and the accident-prone Smashley Simpson (Barrymore). Making a bid for grrrl empowerment, Bliss dawns a pair of skates, assumes the moniker Babe Ruthless, and is suddenly throwing her weight around not only in the rink, but also in school where she’s bullied. Painfully predictable, the action comes to a head when, lo and behold, the dates for the Bluebonnet Pageant and the roller derby championship coincide. At times funny and charming with understated performances by Page and Alia Shawcat as Bliss’ best friend, Whip It can’t overcome its paper-thin characters, plot contrivances, and requisite scenery chewing by Jimmy Fallon as a cheesy announcer and Juliette Lewis as a cutthroat competitor. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

*Zombieland First things first: it’s clever, but it ain’t no Shaun of the Dead (2004). That said, Zombieland is an outstanding zombie comedy, largely thanks to Woody Harrelson’s performance as Tallahassee, a tough guy whose passion for offing the undead is rivaled only by his raging Twinkie jones. Set in a world where zombies have already taken over (the beginning stages of the outbreak are glimpsed only in flashback), Zombieland presents the creatures as yet another annoyance for Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nearly finished morphing into Michael Cera), a onetime antisocial shut-in who has survived only by sticking to a strict set of rules (the "double tap," or always shooting each zombie twice, etc.) This odd couple meets a sister team (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who eventually lay off their grifting ways so that Columbus can have a love interest (in Stone) and Tallahassee, still smarting from losing a loved one to zombies, can soften up a scoch by schooling the erstwhile Little Miss Sunshine in target practice. Sure, it’s a little heavy on the nerd-boy voiceover, but Zombieland has just enough goofiness and gushing guts to counteract all them brrraiiinss. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

REP PICKS

*"Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure" See "Camera Lucida." Pacific Film Archive.

Psychic Dream Astrology

-
0
Psychic Dream Astrology

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Our potential sometimes lies in the place we visit the least within ourselves. Delve deep to find a different way than you would typically use to handle your situations. See if you can, in the wise words of Tim Gunn, "make it work" without losing your unique style and perspective. Push the boundaries of what defines you.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

The fattest egos are often found on the saddest sacks. So much hard-nosed behavior comes from people being too hard on their own damn selves — and you are no exception, Taurus. Don’t be a bully with yourself or the people around you just ’cause you don’t want to feel sad or vulnerable. Substitute aggression with assertion.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

"Process" is an overused word. This week stay focused on it, though, because if you jump too far ahead of yourself, you won’t know what to tweak. You are in a great spot to lay some long-lasting foundations, but not so much for skipping ahead to the next level without getting confused.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

As an emotional person, the key to maintaining inner balance is to not be so reactive. When you define your happiness through your job, relationships, or how many times your cat scratched the post, you are in a constant state of reacting emotionally, which doesn’t allow you to find your own footing. Individuate instead.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

You have some major decisions to make, buddy, but first you have to establish your criteria. I know, it sounds boring, and it is, but a Leo’s gotta do what a Leo’s gotta do. Get really clear about your goals so that your actions are in time with them. Otherwise it will be more of the same.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

You are not a victim. You are responsible for all you do, and for all of your reactions to the things you have no control over. It’s time to forgive recent mistakes and the failings of the trustworthy folks around you. The clearer your head is from ego distractions, the smarter you’ll be.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

It’s the last full week of your sign’s birthday, and you are in full effect. Find yourself something (or someone) to sink your lovely energy into. It is a great time to initiate a new activity or project, because what you begin now is likely to flower by the time we hit Sagittarius’ birthday. You are fully capable — just put yourself out there.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

There are so many people you need to please that it can be hella frustrating. Thing is, you are poised to gain a lot from others being happy with you. Stay in touch with how compromise serves you as much as it does everyone else so you can give with an open heart.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

There’s a fine line between manifesting crappy circumstances because you were so focused on them and being a realist who sees the rough stuff as it is. Err on the side of the eternal optimist right now. You stand to gain more by fearlessly hoping for the best and innovating as direct a route toward it as you can see. Lean on your pals for reality checks.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Don’t buy time when you can just press pause — it’s a useless expense. Your week is riddled with boundary problems, and barreling through it won’t help matters. Find creative ways to assert your needs and be humble enough to include others in your process — even before it’s iron clad.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

You’ve got the right stuff, but you’re using it all wrong. Your fears are putting your sense of timing on the fritz and it’s reinforcing your them. Cultivate a healthy sense of detachment from your concerns and transform your anxiety into excitement. An adventurous attitude will help you out and take you far this week.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Making change and improving things is awesome by all accounts, Pisces. But changing things for the sake of change — or before you are clear about what you really think — is a whole lot of action with very little point. Get emotionally grounded before you start shaking shit up. Don’t act out just because you’re fidgety, or you’ll give yourself something to get really restless about.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a psychic dreamer for 15 years. Check out her Web site at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com.

Gavin Newsom’s “reform” pitch

-
6

By Tim Redmond

Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn’t have enough money to do a major statewide TV buy, but he’s making his early pitch, and trying to define the race, with a new internet ad. Calitics points out that the ad

mentions not once, but twice, both the Constitutional Convention and eliminating the 2/3rds rule. Newsom is positioning himself as the candidate of not just “change” but of structural reform:

Of course, those of us who live in San Francisco know that Newsom has done nothing — nothing — in terms of real structural reform in the city, and has pused a Schwarzenegger-style no-new-taxes budget. He was at first very wary about Constitutional change, but now is embracing it, sensing, no doubt, that the mood of the public is so down on Sacramento and Sacto politiciians that the concept of fundamental change is attractive — even when peddled by someone who has no credentials as a “change” candidate.

But for Jerry Brown, this is serious stuff — the candidate who defines the race first is often in a much better position to make the case for his or her election. And Newsom is trying to define the race as insider-outsider, change v. politics as usual. Brown may have the poll numbers and the money, but if he sits around and lets Newsom define the race, he’s playing a dangerous game.

Blank walls beware: Estria’s Graffiti Battle Invitational brings the bombers

-
0

By Caitlin Donohue

estriaoldskool1009.jpg
Too legit: Street artist Estria (second from right) and the Together With Style crew in 1987

Where would we be without graffiti? The debate over vandalism and aesthetics rages ad infinitum in the larger world but let’s be real- street art has made urban living what it is today. No doubt, its creators should be celebrated- not harassed by law enforcement art critics. We’ve got a unique opportunity to do just that (celebrate, not harass) coming up with the Third Annual Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle, part of the “Life Is Living” park day of the Oakland literary celebration, Living Word Festival. The battle’s creator, Estria Miyashiro, is a cause for celebration in his own right. The former street bomber has been making walls beautiful in the Bay Area for decades, and now teaches graffiti and mural classes around the country… in addition to running his own silk screening operation in San Leandro. The man is busy. Luckily, we manage to snag him for a few questions on the upcoming Invitational, women in graf and walking that tricky line between staying real and getting paid.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: You started throwing pieces up in the 80s and created some epic works before being arrested in 1994 for vandalism. Did the arrest change your mindset on “illegal” pieces?
Estria: The arrest in ’92 didn’t change my mindset on graffiti, but it made me understand and appreciate other people’s views on it. Of course I miss the thrill of bombing, but I am grateful to not be spending my days in jail. Were I a bomber now, I would not hit private property or places of worship. At this point I am interested in the creation side of graffiti, rather than the destruction. Getting up is exciting and I still love seeing it. [But] my time for that has passed and now I have found other ways for me to contribute to graffiti culture.

SamauriGirl1009.jpg
“Samurai Girl” (2008) mural by Estria and Bounce, two time champion of Estria’s graffiti battles

SFBG: I’ve seen graffiti and other street art described in academic texts as a “reverse colonization”; the act by the underprivileged in our society of taking back the institutions that try to dominate them. Do you see any truth in that idea?
E: There is an aspect of graffiti that is reverse colonization. I look at it as the people’s media. The average person cannot afford a billboard or a commercial, but we can put words on walls. It is the first and last form of free speech. For me it is critical to paint the people and cultures I see in my communities, because I do not see them much on TV or in movies. I use my murals to culturally level the media playing field.

Writers Issue: Trip the Light Fantastic

-
0

By Arisa White

I’m the lady in the joint without a g-string and waxed chocha.
Winter dressed and the money in my pocket afforded me a Heineken.
I have no ones to offer to thighs that can headlock Washington.
Coins work best for parking meters and wishes.

When the next dancer arrives to stage, she brings a blanket.
The basket and wine are missing. She wipes the pole
with a moist napkin — the abracadabra is gone.
Gestures to the wall to press start, positions her gingham
so it doesn’t abandon her when she scripts her alphabet.

She takes an interest in me — this is not ego —
she sees the wardrobe of long sleeves and pants in how I stare.
Weeks ago, I saw her forefinger in some butch’s belt loop,
coupled like his and hers towels. Maybe she noticed me then.

She comes to my earring and requests, slap my ass.
Shakes it like wind went through her leaves.
My hands are on pause. She laughs
then brings her undulations to a man in woodsman flannel.

She returns her legs, fans the sweet of green
apples ripe in my nose. In doggy style, demonstrates.
Her spank is the utter of unbreakable dishware.
Again — thud. No shatter.

She encourages me, recognizes this is my first time on a two-wheeler.
I grab the Heineken to cool the singing in my palm.
I’m ordered to give it to her, and like the kid in band
who plays cymbals, counting to cue, I make her bottom ring like Saturn.
She wanes from stage with a fête of smiles in her strut.

Writers Issue: The men behind Peter

-
2

By Johnny Ray Huston

This week’s Writers Issue includes a page devoted to the visual side of books and magazines, with contributions by comic book artist Eric Haven and comedy routine and joke book specialists Kasper Hauser. You’ll notice some compelling ads on the page — after admiring them, contemplate the fact that they are from Peter, a local men’s magazine co-created by David Enos and Tag Savage with a little help from their friends. So, what exactly is Peter? I recently met Enos in the smoking section. When I asked him for some background, I got some priceless rugged poetry for my troubles. Man oh man. Ooh la la!

SFBG How did Peter come to be?
David Enos Well, last year Tag (Savage) found a copy of a ’60s-era tabloid for men, a poverty-row Esquire or Argosy, called Man. This was from the Magazine, a great used bookstore in the Tenderloin that also sells found photographs. The voice of Man was that of a tough guy who doesn’t mince words, like a Kirk Douglas, but who also has a thirst for some very questionable, morbid information. In the way that Kirk Douglas wouldn’t think it odd to go into a book shop and ask the girl behind the counter for a book on Roman entertainment practices; to him it’s just part of having a healthy curiosity and he should catch up on the details.
The cover was a grid of boxes, and each one was a tease for an article: “KKK On My Skin” was a headline I remember. We both independently made take-offs after reading it. It was hard to shake. Around the same time, we had been talking about recreating the covers of board games like Mastermind as a photography exercise. Peter was a result of mushing these projects together. Also borne of this was Scumbag, a crasser counterpart to Peter.

SFBG Who is the target or ideal Peter reader?
DE I was never sure who would end up seeing it. Peter is for the reader who enjoys the finer things in life. Scumbag is for a different audience, maybe in jail. I think it was more of a success. It gets right to the point.

SFBG Unlike with so many magazines, Peter‘s advertisements often have an appeal that matches the editorial content. What advertisers are drawn to you, what do you like about their style or their products, and what advertisers would you like to court in issues to come?
DE Peter is 80 percent ads.
I saw an ad in an issue of Popular Mechanics. They send you the black widow eggs and you build wooden homes for them. You receive blueprints of cubbies for them to get into and build webs.

Writers Issue: Steve Rotman

-
2

By Johnny Ray Huston

The cover image of this week’s Writers Issue and some of the photos accompanying the writing itself come courtesy of Steve Rotman, whose dedication to photographing work by local painters is evident in his amazingly vast and comprehensive Flickr contributions under the name funkandjazz. It’s also on display in a pair of recent books, Bay Area Graffiti (Mark Batty, 208 pages, $29.95) and San Francisco Street Art (Prestel Publishing, 91 pages, $14.95). I recently threw some questions Rotman’s way, and his answers were characteristically generous. Read up, then scope out his work.

SFBG What got you started taking graffiti and street art pics?
Steve Rotman In early 2004, I was spending a lot of time roaming around the city with my camera. At some point, I got inspired to shoot photos of all the incredible murals spread around San Francisco just because I really liked the art. I also enjoyed the process of searching for the murals — it became a fun new way to explore the city. Eventually, I came across some stunning murals created by graffiti artists, and they blew me away. I got curious about graffiti and began to look for it more and more and I also started to research the subculture and its history. Pretty quickly I got hooked! I’ve been photographing graffiti and street art ever since. I totally dig the art and to me it’s especially compelling because of its outlaw nature.

SFBG How did the funkandjazz moniker come about?
SR Years before Flickr, I was active on another photo-sharing site and needed a moniker. I spur-of-the-moment picked funkandjazz just because at that time I was listening to a lot of classic funk music and I’ve always been heavily into jazz — I was a jazz dj for years. No deeper meaning to it than that. When I joined Flickr, I kept the name and for some reason — inertia I suppose — I’ve stuck with it.

SFBG How would you say SF street art varies from street art in other cities featured within the series?
SR I don’t notice huge differences. Graffiti and street art today are worldwide forms of expression and styles are less regional than they used to be. San Francisco attracts artists from all over the world, so there’s a lot of variety and experimentation here. That melting-pot quality keeps the scene fresh. There does seem to be a little more playfulness or weirdness here, and that’s especially reflected in the city’s rich tradition of character-based graffiti.

SFBG Within the graffiti documentation realm, who do you have a kinship with or admire?
SR There are so many fantastic graffiti photographers out there. I’m a huge fan of the groundbreaking work of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. Steve Grody does inspiring work covering the scene in Los Angeles. Jim and Karla Murray‘s documentation of New York and Miami is outstanding. And there are many others. Honestly, before I began to shoot graffiti, I was mainly into landscape photography, and I think my style and approach often reflects that, for better or worse. Many of my favorite photographers are landscape people. I tend to be influenced a lot by criticism and advice from friends and the other photographers I shoot with.

Half and half

-
0
Half and half

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS At a pretty good restaurant in a small town, other side of the mountains, we were greeted and seated by a small boy, age 9, 10, 11 tops. We looked at each other, looked at the kid, looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him to our table.

"Can I get you anything to drink?" he said.

We had just emerged from Death Valley, where the heat was intense and the scenery surreal, and milk was the last thing on our minds.

"Um, what kind of lemonades do you have?" I said, scanning the menu very quickly. It was an inside joke between me and me — one of my specialties.

Romeo ordered a beer. He lives in Germany, and his favorite brew is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Well, we were doing it. Setting up camp together, if not house. After a few days of cooking on fires, sleeping in tents, squatting in the bushes, and not washing at all, Romeo said he felt like he had got to meet Dan Leone. He said he liked him OK, but maybe we should get a motel room for one night.

I agreed. It was weird to be cut in half like that and, though I have never been one to run from weirdness, I do prefer speaking of myself in the first person. A bath seemed like a very good idea.

A bath, a pluck, a night of mattressousness, change of clothes in the morning, and I would be myself again. But first, while I was still Dan Leone, I had to order a buffalo burger with bacon, cheese, barbecue sauce, and chili on it, because … I mean, come on, were we or were we not a couple of smelly cowboygirls just in from a roundup?

Of course we were. The more interesting question is what was the fuck re: the fourth- or fifth-grade waitchild. Sixth-grade tops. Do we have child labor laws here? My German wanted to know. I think so, I thought, but maybe they don’t apply to family-run restaurants in tiny middle-of-nowhere towns. Clearly that was what this was, a family. There was a strong resemblance between the kid, a slightly older kid also waiting tables, a slightly-older-than-that kid, and the cat in charge, their father, who seemed too young to have three kids, including at least one teenager, so maybe he was the oldest brother, I don’t know.

Anyway, it was a school night.

And I still can’t decide if the whole thing was cute or creepy, so I’ll just tell you that the burger was great. Even though it may well be mean, unfair, and irresponsible of me to tell you so, according to a whole pile of e-style mail waiting for me upon my return to civilization.

Apparently a popular restaurant that I slagged a couple weeks ago is run by a positive force in the community, and so therefore I shouldn’t say anything bad about their carne asada. Which sucked. But most of the people who called for my resignation, apologies, do-overs, and so forth, admitted that they were vegetarians, and so presumably have never had the carne asada (which sucks) at their favorite restaurant.

Really, I doubt I’ll like the vegetarian food there either, because the rice and beans didn’t impress me and the salsa was even worse than the meat, but I am nothing if not a good sport. I will re-review the Sunrise, and I will order something vegetarian this time, provided one of the vegetarians calling for my head/job/apology agrees to a) pay for it, and b) sit across from me and eat carne asada.

You’ll get your do-over, and I’ll get to watch a vegetarian eat meat. Which is one of my favorite pastimes.

Just so you know though: I’ll say exactly what I think about anything I eat, I don’t care if Jesus Hisself runs the joint. I calls ’em like I tastes ’em, and if I don’t like His bread and wine, or carne asada …

Oh, but I did like that buffalo burger, very much. What a shame, that a child labor law scofflaw and/or mean dad can be a better cook than a sweetie-pie.

Cruel world!

MOUNT WHITNEY RESTAURANT

Daily: 6 a.m.–9 p.m.

227 S. Main, Lone Pine

(760) 876-5751

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Film listings

-
0
Film listings

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, Matt Sussman, and Laura Swanbeck. The film intern is Fernando F. Croce. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

The 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival runs October 8-18 at the Century Cinema, 41 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera; CinéArts@Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; and Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael. Tickets (most shows $12.50) available by calling 1-877-874-MVFF or visiting www.mvff.org. For commentary, see article at www.sfbg.com. All times p.m. unless otherwise noted.

THURS/8

Sequoia The Boys Are Back 7 and 7:15. The Road 9:40.

Smith Rafael Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire 7.

FRI/9

Sequoia An Education 6:30. Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie 6:45. The Bass Player: A Song for Dad 9. Ricky 9:15.

Smith Rafael Aching Hearts 6. Bomber 6:30. "Spotlight on Clive Owen: Croupier" 7. Eat the Sun 8:30. Original 8:45.

SAT/10

Sequoia Ricky Rapper 1:30. Breath Made Visible 2. Race to Nowhere 3:30. Awakening from Sorrow 4:30. Here and There 6. Soundtrack for a Revolution 7. Fish Tank 8:30. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench 9:30.

Smith Rafael The Ten Lives of Titanic the Cat 1. Stalin Thought of You 1:15. Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn 3. Four of a Kind 3:30. Aching Hearts 3:45. "Tribute to Uma Thurman: Motherhood" 6. Original 6:15. Passengers 6:30. Superstar 8:30. Imbued 9. Dark and Stormy Night 9:15.

Throck Zombie Girl: The Movie 1. Concert for a Revolution 9:30.

SUN/11

Sequoia Stella and the Star of the Orient 10:30am. Homegrown 1. Jim Thorpe, the World’s Greatest Athlete 1:15. Ricky 3:30. Icons Among Us: jazz in the present tense 4. Tapped 6. Motherhood 6:30. The Maid 8:15. Sorry, Thanks 9.

Smith Rafael The Letter for the King 12:30. Shylock 1:15. "New Movies Lab: Girl Geeks" 1. "Insight: Henry Selick and the Art of Coraline" 3:15. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench 3:30. The Red Machine 3:45. Elevator 5:30. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee 5:45. Room and a Half 6. The Bass Player: A Song for Dad 7:30. The Eclipse 8:15. Imbued 9.

Throck "Children’s FilmFest Party" 12:30. "Live Show: Jazz Icons Among Us" 8.

MON/12

Sequoia "5@5: America is Not the World" (shorts program) 5. Barking Water 6. Storm 6:45. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee 7. Four of a Kind 8. Sparrow 9:30.

Smith Rafael Room and a Half 4. The Red Machine 4:30. "5@5: Oscillate Wildly" (shorts program) 5. Breath Made Visible 6:45. Linoleum 7. Jermal 7:15. A Year Ago in Winter 9. Here and There 9:15. Sorry, Thanks 9:30.

TUES/13

Cinema Youth in Revolt 7.

Sequoia "5@5: The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get" (shorts program) 5. The Horse Boy 6:30. Skin 6:45. Fish Tank 9. Passengers 9:15.

Smith Rafael "5@5: Sister I’m a Poet" 5. Pierrot le fou 6. HomeGrown 6:45. Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie 7. Shameless 8:45. Superstar 9. The Maid 9:15.

OPENING

The Boys Are Back "Inspired by a true story," as its poster trumpets, The Boys Are Back is truly all about inspiration. It hopes to propel its parenting-age demographic to be their better selves, wooing them with elusive shots of adorable, floppy-haired youngsters whooping it up — or at least to make them feel good about their own attempts at child-rearing. Director Scott Hicks (1996’s Shine) positively luxuriates in Australia’s countryside — its rippling, golden waves of grass, dazzling vistas of ocean — in way that seems to simulate the honey-hued memories of an adult looking back fondly on his or her own childhood. But alas, despite some lyrical cinematography, The Boys Are Back doesn’t rise far beyond its heart-tugging TV movie material. Clive Owen is a sports writer who finds his life torn asunder when his wife dies of cancer: like a true sportsman, he’s game to the task of learning to care, solo, for the scrumptiously shaggy 7-year-old Arthur (Nicholas McAnulty) as best he can — all is permissible in his household except swearing and do whatever dad says. And when his guarded older son Harry (George MacKay) jets in from boarding school in England, it’s as if The Dangerous Book for Boys has come to cinematic fruition, with a few mildly tough lessons to boot. Owen does his best to transfigure that scary, albeit sexy, rage lurking behind blue eyes into the stuff of parental panic, but for half the audience at least, that can’t save this feel-gooder designed for women about a man among boys. The gender breakdown at my screening could be encapsulated by the woman quietly sobbing at the start and the man gently snoring through two-thirds. (1:45) California, Embarcadero. (Chun)

Chelsea on the Rocks Abel Ferrara’s first documentary should be a sure thing: a storied New York extremist contemplates the place where others before him went to push the edge in a kind of ritualized bohemia. The Chelsea Hotel is a long poem of death at an early age, with a registry that includes Dylan Thomas’s chasers, Harry Smith’s debts, Warhol’s superstars, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin in a room, and Sid and Nancy at the end. One doesn’t expect a straight-laced historical record from the prowling Ferrara; what disappoints about Chelsea on the Rocks isn’t the film’s loose, marinating narration, but rather Ferrara’s refusal to pursue any conversational threads past a convivial but stultifying, "No fucking way." One wants more of the longtime residents’ molasses-slow anecdotes and further investigation of their own private Xanadus. The film is a fount of New York conversation, but it’s also teeming with irritating "wish you were here" postcards from a bygone underground. The question isn’t one of self-regard — the Chelsea wouldn’t exist without it — so much as editing. Milos Foreman’s Cheshire grin is fun, but do we really need to watch him network with Julian Schnabel’s daughter? At the heart of Chelsea on the Rocks is a fairly conventional underdog story: longtime manager and patron Stanley Bard has been cut out by a new board looking to cash in on the Chelsea’s legend, leaving the "real" bohemians in the lurch. But then, pace Ethan Hawke, hasn’t this hipster haunted house been cannibalizing its own past all along? (1:28) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

Couples Retreat Vince Vaughn heads up an ensemble cast in this comedy about four couples who unwittingly vacation at a resort for couples who need relationship therapy. (1:47) Grand Lake, Marina.

Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat A third entry in the low-budget gay franchise that goes mano-a-mano for crassness with mainstream teen sex comedies, this latest ages past even collegiate youth. That’s doubtless due to the expired jeune-fille status of series fave Rebekah Kochan, whose character Tiffani is a bitchy, potty-mouthed, horndoggie drag queen improbably inhabiting the person of an actual heterosexual born-female. Who operates a nail shop in West Hollywood, yet. That she bears no resemblance to credible real-world womanhood doesn’t entirely erase the line-snapping panache of Kochan herself, a gifted comedienne. If only she had better material to work with. After a truly horrific opening reel — duly tasteless but so, so unfunny — director Glenn Gaylord (is that really his name?) and scenarist Phillip J. Bartell’s sequel mercifully goes from rancid to semisweet. There’s little surprise in the Tiffani-assisted pursuit of slightly nelly dreamboat Zack (Chris Salvatore) by pseudo-nerdy, equally bodyfat-deprived new kid in town Casey (Daniel Skelton). But there is a pretty amusing climax involving a three-way (theoretically four) recalling the original’s hilarious phone-sex-coaching highlight. (1:23) Roxie. (Harvey)

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon. (Harvey)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) Embarcadero. (Chun)

The Wedding Song Continuing the examination of Muslim-Jewish tensions and female sexuality that she started in La Petit Jerusalem (2005), writer-director Karin Albou’s sophomore feature places the already volatile elements in the literally explosive terrain of World War II. Set in Tunis in 1942, it charts the relationship between Nour (Olympe Borval), a young Arab woman engaged to her handsome cousin, and Myriam (Lizzie Brocheré), the outspoken Jew she’s known since childhood. Bombs rain down from the sky and toxic Nazi propaganda fills the air, but to Albou the most trenchant conflict lies between the two heroines, who bond over their place in an oppressive society while secretly pining for each other’s lives and loves. Jettisoning much of the didacticism that weighted down her previous film, Albou surveys the mores, rituals, and connections informing the thorny politics of female identity with an assured eye worthy of veteran feminist filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta (1986’s Rosa Luxemburg). (1:40) Smith Rafael. (Croce)

ONGOING

Amreeka Dreaming of freedom and white picket fences in the US, West Bank transplants Muna (Nisreen Faour) and son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) instead get racist slurs and White Castle. Despite being overqualified with previous experience as a banker, Muna must work at the restaurant chain to make ends meet while Fadi struggles with bigotry and culture shock in school. Set in the days following September 11, Amreeka (the Arabic word for "America") details the backlash against innocent, unsuspecting minorities who many labeled as terrorists. Cherien Dabis’ feature film debut is smart and enticing (a sign outside White Castle meant to spell "Support Our Troops" drops the "tr" to display a clever preternatural clairvoyance) and creates a lively debate on immigration and discrimination. Ending with a symbolic dance between two nationalities, Dabis recognizes that while people may be bombarded with empty promises of freedom and hope on the Internet, the real American Dream doesn’t exist online but, instead, in small pockets of the community where a Palestinian and a Polish Jew can dance side by side. (1:37) Opera Plaza. (Swanbeck)

*The Baader Meinhof Complex "The Baader Meinhof gang? Those spoiled, hipster terrorists?" That was the response of one knowledgeable pop watcher when I told her about The Baader Meinhof Complex, the new feature from Uli Edel (1989’s Last Exit to Brooklyn). The violence-prone West German anarchist group, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), still inspires both venomous spew and starry-eyed fascinatio; Edel’s sober, clear-eyed view of the youthful and sexy yet arrogant and murderous, gun-toting radicals at the center of Baader-Meinhof’s mythology — a complex construct, indeed — manages to do justice to the core of their sprawling chronology, while never overstating their narrative’s obvious post-9/11 relevance. The director’s far from sympathetic when it comes to these self-absorbed, smug rebels, yet he’s not immune to their cocky, idealistic charms. Cool-headed yet fully capable of thrilling to his subjects’ eye-popping audacity, the filmmaker does an admirable job of contextualizing the group within the global student and activist movements and bringing the viewer, authentically, to the still timely question: how does one best (i.e., morally) respond to terrorism? (2:24) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Bright Star Is beauty truth; truth, beauty? John Keats, the poet famed for such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and Jane Campion, the filmmaker intent on encapsuutf8g the last romance of the archetypal Romantic, would have undoubtedly bonded over a love of sensual details — and the way a certain vellum-like light can transport its viewer into elevated reverie. In truth, Campion doesn’t quite achieve the level of Keats’ verse with this somber glimpse at the tubercular writer and his final love, neighbor Fanny Brawne. But she does bottle some of their pale beauty. Less-educated than the already respected young scribe, Brawne nonetheless may have been his equal in imagination as a seamstress, judging from the petal-bonneted, ruffled-collar ensembles Campion outfits her in. As portrayed by the soulful-eyed Abbie Cornish, the otherwise-enigmatic, plucky Brawne is the singularly bright blossom ready to be wrapped in a poet’s adoration, worthy of rhapsody by Ben Whishaw’s shaggily, shabbily puppy-dog Keats, who snatches the preternaturally serene focus of a fine mind cut short by illness, with the gravitational pull of a serious indie-rock hottie. The two are drawn to each other like the butterflies flittering in Brawne’s bedroom/farm, one of the most memorable scenes in the dark yet sweetly glimmering Bright Star. Bathing her scenes in lengthy silence, shot through with far-from-flowery dialogue, Campion is at odds with this love story, so unlike her joyful 1990 ode to author Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (Kerry Fox appears here, too, as Fanny’s mother): the filmmaker refuses to overplay it, sidestepping Austenian sprightliness. Instead she embraces the dark differences, the negative inevitability, of this death-steeped coupling, welcoming the odd glance at the era’s intellectual life, the interplay of light and shadow. (1:59) Marina, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) California, Empire, Grand Lake, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (1:21) Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness.

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Albany, Clay, SF Center. (Swanbeck)

*District 9 As allegories go, District 9 is not all that subtle. This is a sci-fi action flick that’s really all about racial intolerance — and to drive the point home, they went and set it in South Africa. Here’s the set-up: 20 years ago, an alien ship arrived and got stuck, hovering above the Earth. Faster than you can say "apartheid," the alien refugees were confined to a camp — the titular District 9 — where they have remained in slum-level conditions. As science fiction, it’s creative; as a metaphor, it’s effective. What’s most surprising about District 9 is the way everything comes together. This is a big, bloody summer blockbuster with feelings: for every viscera-filled splatter, there’s a moment of poignant social commentary, and nothing ever feels forced or overdone. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp has found the perfect balance and created a film that doesn’t have to compromise. District 9 is a profoundly distressing look at the human condition. It’s also one hell of a good time. (1:52) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Fame Note to filmmakers: throwing a bunch of talented young people together does not a good film make. And that’s putting it mildly. Fame is an overstuffed mess, a waste of teenage performers, veteran actors, and, of course, the audience’s time. Conceptually, it’s sound: it makes sense to update the 1980 classic for a new, post-High School Musical generation. But High School Musical this ain’t. Say what you will about the Disney franchise — but those films have (at the very least) some semblance of cohesion and catchy tunes. Fame is music video erratic, with characters who pop up, do a little dance, then disappear for a while. The idea that we should remember them is absurd — that we should care about their plights even stranger. It doesn’t help that said plights are leftovers from every other teen song-and-dance movie ever: unsupportive parents, tough-love teachers, doomed romance. "Fame" may mean living forever, but I give this movie two weeks. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

(500) Days of Summer There’s a warning at the tender, bruised heart of (500) Days of Summer, kind of like an alarm on a clock-radio set to MOPEROCK-FM, going off somewhere in another room. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a student of architecture turned architect of sappy greeting card messages, opts to press snooze and remain in the dream world of "I’m the guy who can make this lovely girl believe in love." The agnostic in question is a luminous, whimsical creature named Summer (Zooey eschanel), who’s sharp enough to flirtatiously refer to Tom as "Young Werther" but soft enough to seem capable of reshaping into a true believer. Her semi-mysterious actions throughout (500) Days raise the following question, though: is a mutual affinity for Morrissey and Magritte sufficient predetermining evidence of what is and is not meant to be? Over the course of an impressionistic film that flips back and forth and back again through the title’s 500 days, mimicking the darting, perilous maneuvers of ungovernable memory, first-time feature director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber answer this and related questions in a circuitous fashion, while gently querying our tendency to edit and manufacture perceptions. (1:36) Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Five Minutes of Heaven Most bad guys were good guys once — it’s a process, not a natal condition. It’s unpleasant but valuable work to imagine exactly how fanaticism can create a sense of righteousness in violence. Who really knows what we’re be capable of after a few weeks, months, years of deprivation or indoctrination? It took Patty Hearst just 71 days to become machine-gun-wielding Tania. Who can blame her if she chose a life of John Waters cameos and never discussed the matter afterward? Alistair, the character played by Liam Neeson in Five Minutes of Heaven, deals with his terroristic youth in precisely the opposite fashion — it’s become both penitentiary cause and ruination of his life. At age 17, he assassinated a young Catholic local to prove mettle within a midsize Irish city’s pro-England, Protestant guerrilla sect. He served 12 years for that crime. But in mind’s eye he keeps seeing his young self committing murder — as witnessed by the victim’s little brother, Joe. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, German director of 2004’s Downfall, Five Minutes of Heaven — the ecstatic timespan James Nesbitt’s flop-sweating adult Joe figures he’d experience upon killing Alistair — is divided into three acts. The first is a vivid, gritty flashback. The second finds our anxious protagonists preparing for a "reconciliation" TV show taping that doesn’t go as planned. Finally the two men face each other in an off-camera meeting that vents Joe’s pent-up lifetime of rage. Heaven has been labeled too theatrical, with its emphasis on two actors and a great deal of dialogue. But there’s nothing stagy in the skillful way both rivet attention. This very good movie asks a very human question: how do you live with yourself after experiencing the harm fanaticism can wreak, as perp or surviving victim? (1:30) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Food, Inc. Providing a broader survey of topics already covered in prior documentaries like 2004’s Super Size Me and 2007’s King Corn, Robert Kenner’s feature taps the expertise of authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), and others to explore how agribusiness’ trend toward "faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper" is bad news for your health, and that of the planet. Corporations have monopolized factory farming, slaughterhouses, and processing plants — and made themselves largely immune from regulatory agencies while creating more risks of food poisoning and diabetes through the use of food engineering, antibiotics, pesticides, and even ammonia. Lobbyists, in-pocket legislators (Clarence Thomas is just one of the many policy-setters still loyal to their behemoth ex-employer Monsanto), immigrant worker exploitation, grotesque livestock conditions, and much more figure among the appetite-suppressing news spread here. This informative, entertaining documentary with slick graphics ends on an upbeat note, stressing that your own consumer choices remain the most powerful tool for changing this juggernaut of bad culinary capitalism. (1:34) Roxie. (Harvey)

*In the Loop A typically fumbling remark by U.K. Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) ignites a media firestorm, since it seems to suggest war is imminent even though Brit and U.S. governments are downplaying the likelihood of the Iraq invasion they’re simultaneously preparing for. Suddenly cast as an important arbiter of global affairs — a role he’s perhaps less suited for than playing the Easter Bunny — Simon becomes one chess piece in a cutthroat game whose participants on both sides of the Atlantic include his own subordinates, the prime minister’s rageaholic communications chief, major Pentagon and State Department honchos, crazy constituents, and more. Writer-director Armando Iannucci’s frenetic comedy of behind-the-scenes backstabbing and its direct influence on the highest-level diplomatic and military policies is scabrously funny in the best tradition of English television, which is (naturally) just where its creators hail from. (1:49) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Inglourious Basterds With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be. The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Mélanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual; brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (2:30) Lumiere, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Informant! The best satire makes you uncomfortable, but nothing will make you squirm in your seat like a true story that feels like satire. Director Steven Soderbergh introduces the exploits of real-life agribusiness whistleblower Mark Whitacre with whimsical fonts and campy music — just enough to get the audience’s guard down. As the pitch-perfect Matt Damon — laden with 30 extra pounds and a fright-wig toupee — gee-whizzes his way through an increasingly complicated role, Soderbergh doles out subtle doses of torturous reality, peeling back the curtain to reveal a different, unexpected curtain behind it. Informant!’s tale of board-room malfeasance is filled with mis-directing cameos, jokes, and devices, and its ingenious, layered narrative will provoke both anti-capitalist outrage and a more chimerical feeling of satisfied frustration. Above all, it’s disquietingly great. (1:48) Bridge, Empire, Four Star, Marina, Oaks, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Richardson)

The Invention of Lying Great concept. Great cast. All The Invention of Lying needed was a great script editor and it might have reached classic comedy territory. As it stands, it’s dragged down to mediocrity by a weak third act. This is the story of a world where no one can lie — and we’re not just talking about big lies either. The Invention of Lying presents a vision of no sarcasm, no white lies, no — gasp —creative fiction. All that changes when Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) realizes he can bend the truth. And because no one else can, everything Mark makes up becomes fact to the rubes around him. If you guessed that hilarity ensues, you’re right on the money! Watching Mark use his powers for evil (robbing the bank! seducing women!) makes for a very funny first hour. Then things take a turn for the heavy when Mark becomes a prophet by letting slip his vision of the afterlife. Faster than you can say "Jesus beard," he’s rocking a God complex and the audience is longing for the simpler laughs, like Jennifer Garner admitting to some pre-date masturbation. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Irene in Time With a scheduled limited release following Father’s Day, Irene in Time no doubt hoped to capitalize on its father/daughter sob stories of altruism and abandonment alike. Set in modern-day L.A., the film opens with Irene, a neurotic, self-absorbed singer, listening eagerly to recollections of her late father, a compulsive gambler and philanderer whom she nonetheless idealizes. Plagued by "daddy issues," Irene believes that her father’s inconsistent presence has left her unable to form a mature and lasting relationship. When not strung along by a procession of two-timing suitors, she is scaring them away with her manic bravado. Additionally, her fundamental need to recapture her father in the form of a lover (can you say "Electra complex"?) comes across as creepy and borderline incestuous. This self-indulgent endeavor of epic proportions finally descends into soap-opera kitsch when a family secret surfaces (explaining Irene’s pipes but not her grating personality) and sinks further still with a slow-mo musical montage using old footage of Irene and her father frolicking in the surf. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Swanbeck)

Julie and Julia As Julie Powell, disillusioned secretary by day and culinary novice by night, Amy Adams stars as a woman who decides to cook and blog her way through 524 of Julia Child’s recipes in 365 days. Nora Ephron oscillates between Julie’s drab existence in modern-day New York and the exciting life of culinary icon and expatriate, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), in 1950s Paris. As Julia gains confidence in the kitchen by besting all the men at the Cordon Bleu, Julie follows suit, despite strains on both her marriage and job. While Streep’s Julia borders on caricature at first, her performance eventually becomes more nuanced as the character’s insecurities about cooking, infertility, and getting published slowly emerge. Although a feast for the eyes and a rare portrait of a female over 40, Ephron’s cinematic concoction leaves you longing for less Julie with her predictable empowerment storyline and more of Julia and Streep’s exuberance and infectious joie de vivre. (2:03) Oaks, Piedmont. (Swanbeck)

My One and Only (1:48) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

*9 American animation rarely gets as dark and dystopian as the PG-13-rated 9, the first feature by Shane Acker, who dreamed up the original short. The end of the world has arrived, the cities are wastelands of rubble, and the machines — robots that once functioned as the War of the Worlds-like weapons of an evil dictator — have triumphed. Humans have been eradicated — or maybe not. Some other, more vulnerable, sock-puppet-like machines, concocted with a combination of alchemy and engineering, have been created to counter their scary toaster brethren, like 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), who stumbles off his worktable like a miniature Pinocchio, a so-called stitch-punk. He’s big-eyed, bumbling, and vulnerable in his soft knitted skin and deprived of his guiding Geppetto. But he quickly encounters 2 (Martin Landau), who helps him jump start his nerves and fine-tune his voice box before a nasty, spidery ‘bot snatches his new friend up, as well a mysterious object 9 found at his creator’s lab. Too much knowledge in this ugly new world is something to be feared, as he learns from the other surviving models. The crotchety would-be leader 1 (Christopher Plummer), the one-eyed timid 5 (John C. Reilly), and the brave 7 (Jennifer Connelly) have very mixed feelings about stirring up more trouble. Who can blame them? People — and machines and even little dolls with the spark of life in their innocent, round eyes — die. Still, 9 manages to sidestep easy consolation and simple answers — delivering the always instructive lesson that argument and dialogue is just as vital and human as blowing stuff up real good — while offering heroic, relatively complicated thrills. And yes, our heros do get to run for their little AI-enhanced lives from a massive fireball. (1:19) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Oblivion We go to documentaries to learn about the lives of others, but rarely are we put in touch with the patience, sensitivity, and grit required of listening. Heddy Honigmann’s films privilege the social aspect of these encounters and are the emotionally richer for it — I’d bet her hard-earned humanism would appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences if given the chance, but her documentaries remain woefully under-distributed. Oblivion is her first set in Lima since 1992’s Metal and Melancholy, still my favorite film of hers. Honigmann, who was born in Lima to Holocaust survivors but left the city to study and work in Europe, made that first film to clarify the everyday reality of Peru’s economic ruin. In Oblivion, Honigmann reverses angle, following children and adolescents as they flip cartwheels for stopped traffic, the crosswalk their stage. She also zeroes in on the more established service class, from a stunned shoeshine boy up to a dexterous master of the pisco sour. Slowly, we realize Honigmann’s interviews are an exercise in political geography: she talks to people in the near proximity of the presidential palace, the long shadow of Peru’s ignominious political history framing their discreet stories. Oblivion exhibits both class consciousness and formal virtuosity in its coterminous realizations of an Altman-numbered array of characters. As ever, Honigmann’s ability to transform the normally airless interview format into a cohesive band of intimate encounters is simply stunning. History consigned them to oblivion, but as Honigmann adroitly shows by periodic cut-aways to past presidential inaugurations, personal memory often outlasts the official record. (1:33) Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

Pandorum (1:48) 1000 Van Ness.

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Albany, Embarcadero. (Peitzman)

*Passing Strange: The Movie Spike Lee should do more concert films. His records of theatrical events like the all-star stand-up gathering in The Original Kings of Comedy (2000) or Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man show in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001) are not without the director’s trademark stylistic bombast, yet they show how, when serving the material, Lee’s overheated camera tricks become rollicking rather than overbearing. So it goes with this kinetic filmed performance of the Tony-winning Broadway rock musical, shot during its last two nights at New York’s Belasco Theater. Starting slow but building to a cheering frenzy, the show takes its timbre from the rich rumble of writer-composer-narrator Stew (nee Mark Stewart), who regales the audience with an autobiographical tale of restless youth (energetically embodied by Daniel Breaker), clinging motherhood (Eisa Davis), and burgeoning artistic identity. Performed and directed with celebratory vigor, this is Lee’s most purely enjoyable work in nearly a decade. (2:15) Shattuck. (Croce)

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Still Walking Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 After Life stepped into a bureaucratic beyond. His 2001 Distance probed the aftermath of a religious cult’s mass suicide. Likewise loosely inspired by fact, Nobody Knows (2004) charted the survival of an abandoning mother’s practically feral children in a Tokyo apartment. 2006’s Hana was a splashy samurai story — albeit one atypically resistant to conventional action. Despite their shared character nuance, these prior features don’t quite prepare one for the very ordinary milieu and domestic dramatics of Still Walking. Kore-eda’s latest recalls no less than Ozu in its seemingly casual yet meticulous dissection of a broken family still awkwardly bound — if just for one last visit — by the onerous traditions and institution of "family" itself. There’s no conceptually hooky lure here. Yet Walking is arguably both Kore-eda’s finest hour so far, and as emotionally rich a movie experience as 2009 has yet afforded. One day every summer the entire Yokohama clan assembles to commemorate an eldest son’s accidental death 15 years earlier. This duty calls, even if art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) chafes at retired M.D. dad’s (Yoshio Harada) obvious disappointment over his career choice, at the insensitivity of his chatterbox mum (Kiri Kirin), and at being eternally compared to a retroactively sainted sibling. Not subject to such evaluative harshness, simply because she’s a girl, is many-foibled sole Yokohama daughter Chinami (Nobody Knows‘ oblivious, helium-voiced mum You). Small crises, subtle tensions, the routines of food preparation, and other minutae ghost-drive a narrative whose warm, familiar, pained, touching, and sometimes hilarious progress seldom leaves the small-town parental home interior — yet never feels claustrophobic in the least. (1:54) Roxie. (Harvey)

Surrogates In a world where cops don’t even leave the house to eat doughnuts, Bruce Willis plays a police detective wrestling with life’s big questions while wearing a very disconcerting blond wig. For example, does it count as living if you’re holed up in your room in the dark 24/7 wearing a VR helmet while a younger, svelter, pore-free, kind of creepy-looking version of yourself handles — with the help of a motherboard — the daily tasks of walking, talking, working, and playing? James Cromwell reprises his I, Robot (2004) I-may-have-created-a-monster role (in this case, a society in which human "operators" live vicariously through so-called surrogates from the safe, hygienic confines of their homes). Willis, with and sans wig, and with the help of his partner (Radha Mitchell), attempts to track down the unfriendly individual who’s running around town frying the circuits of surrogates and operators alike. (While he’s at it, perhaps he could also answer this question: how is it that all these people lying in the dark twitching their eyeballs haven’t turned into bed-sore-ridden piles of atrophied-muscle mush?) Director Jonathan Mostow (2003’s Terminator 3) takes viewers through the twists and turns at cynically high velocity, hoping we won’t notice the unsatisfying story line or when things stop making very much sense. (1:44) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 Castro, Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

*We Live in Public Documentarian Ondi Timoner (2004’s DiG!) turns her camera on a longtime acquaintance, internet pioneer Josh Harris, as talented and maddening a subject as DiG! trainwreck Anton Newcombe. From the internet’s infancy, Harris exhibited a creative and forward-thinking outlook that seized upon the medium’s ability to allow people to interact virtually (via chat rooms) and also to broadcast themselves (via one of the internet’s first "television" stations). Though he had an off-putting personality — which sometimes manifested itself in his clown character, "Luvvy" (drawn from the TV-obsessed Harris’ love for Gilligan’s Island) — he racked up $80 million. Some of those new-media bucks went into his art project, "Quiet," an underground bunker stuffed full of eccentrics who allowed themselves to be filmed 24/7. Later, he and his girlfriend moved into a Big Brother-style apartment that was outfitted with dozens of cameras; unsurprisingly, the relationship crumbled under such constant surveillance. His path since then has been just as bizarre, though decidedly more low-tech (and far less well-funded). Though I’m not entirely sold on Timoner’s thesis that Harris’ experiments predicted the current social-networking obsession, her latest film is fascinating, and crafted with footage that only someone who was watching events unfurl first-hand could have captured. (1:30) Roxie. (Eddy)

Whip It What’s a girl to do? Stuck in small town hell, Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page), the gawky teen heroine of Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, faces a pressing dilemma — conform to the standards of stifling beauty pageantry to appease her mother or rebel and enter the rough-and tumble world of roller derby. Shockingly enough, Bliss chooses to escape to Austin and join the Hurl Scouts, a rowdy band of misfits led by the maternal Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig) and the accident-prone Smashley Simpson (Barrymore). Making a bid for grrrl empowerment, Bliss dawns a pair of skates, assumes the moniker Babe Ruthless, and is suddenly throwing her weight around not only in the rink, but also in school where she’s bullied. Painfully predictable, the action comes to a head when, lo and behold, the dates for the Bluebonnet Pageant and the roller derby championship coincide. At times funny and charming with understated performances by Page and Alia Shawcat as Bliss’ best friend, Whip It can’t overcome its paper-thin characters, plot contrivances, and requisite scenery chewing by Jimmy Fallon as a cheesy announcer and Juliette Lewis as a cutthroat competitor. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

A Woman in Berlin As titles go, A Woman in Berlin is rather vague. A clearer option, to borrow from a popular children’s books series, would be A Series of Unfortunate Events. Based on a true story published anonymously by, well, a woman in Berlin, the film recounts the tribulations faced by German women at the end of World War II. As the Russian army occupies Berlin, these ladies must defend themselves against rape and domination while they await their husbands’ return. It’s a dark chapter in history—and a frequently forgotten one at that. But though A Woman in Berlin may be an important film, it’s not a good one. Without the cinematic flair required to handle a story of this magnitude, writer-director Max Färberböck turns the movie into something monotonous and draining. The characters are morally ambiguous but not interesting; the plot is depressing but tedious. I’m reminded of a quote from The History Boys (2006), another film that touches on (albeit briefly) the atrocities of the second world war: "How do I define history? It’s just one fuckin’ thing after another." (2:11) Four Star. (Peitzman)

*Zombieland First things first: it’s clever, but it ain’t no Shaun of the Dead (2004). That said, Zombieland is an outstanding zombie comedy, largely thanks to Woody Harrelson’s performance as Tallahassee, a tough guy whose passion for offing the undead is rivaled only by his raging Twinkie jones. Set in a world where zombies have already taken over (the beginning stages of the outbreak are glimpsed only in flashback), Zombieland presents the creatures as yet another annoyance for Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nearly finished morphing into Michael Cera), a onetime antisocial shut-in who has survived only by sticking to a strict set of rules (the "double tap," or always shooting each zombie twice, etc.) This odd couple meets a sister team (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who eventually lay off their grifting ways so that Columbus can have a love interest (in Stone) and Tallahassee, still smarting from losing a loved one to zombies, can soften up a scoch by schooling the erstwhile Little Miss Sunshine in target practice. Sure, it’s a little heavy on the nerd-boy voiceover, but Zombieland has just enough goofiness and gushing guts to counteract all them brrraiiinss. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

REP PICKS

*"Pink Cinema Revolution: The Radical Films of Koji Wakamatsu" See article at www.sfbg.com. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Sunflower

-
0
Sunflower

paulr@sfbg.com

An as-yet unnamed phenomenon involves the transformation of stylish or distinctive restaurant spaces into homier Asian spots. The most conspicuous example I can think of is the restaurant adjoining the Hotel Milano, at Fifth and Mission. At one point, about 15 years ago, it held a Michel Richard venture, Bistro M, and now it’s a Thai joint, with purple neon signage.

A more recent exhibit is the migration, or extension, of the Vietnamese restaurant Sunflower from its longtime haunt at Valencia and 16th streets to the old Baraka space on Potrero Hill. For years, Sunflower has been a perfectly decent, modestly priced, rather ordinary-looking restaurant in a stratified and hypercompetitive venue, while Baraka was a small jewel, slightly above the fray on its hillside perch. I would not have foreseen the melding of the two. But now, when you step into what was Baraka, you’ll smell lemongrass — and much as I liked Baraka in its several guises over the past six years, I like lemongrass as much. (Outside, incidentally, you’re likely to smell the garlic breath of Goat Hill Pizza across the street.)

The restaurant’s décor looks to have been (so far) little touched by the regime change and the new, golden name. The walls of the h-shaped dining room are still a throbbing red, and there is no host’s station, which means that a line of tables begins within a few feet of the front door. This is awkward for all parties concerned, and it would be worse if the staff was less attentive. But they are very attentive, and blockages are cleared quickly. Still, the tables just inside the door are not exactly choice, and if you can find your way to a table on either side of the dining room, or deeper in, you’ll probably be happier.

The menu reflects the degree to which Vietnamese cooking has come to be accepted as another variety of American comfort food. You can certainly get similar stuff for quite a bit less in the Tenderloin, where it is served in much more modest settings that remind us of how ragged things were for many Vietnamese immigrants a generation ago, at the close of the Vietnam War. And you can get far fancier — and pricier — food at the Slanted Door. Sunflower sits somewhere between these two poles; it is upscale, in a mild, neighborhood way, while remaining more or less traditional and comparatively inexpensive in its cooking.

You can get imperial rolls, you can get pho (although it’s not called that), you can get garlic noodles ($7.95), and they are excellent. You can also get spring rolls, either with shrimp or in vegetarian guise ($6.95 either way); we found the vegetarian version to be a little heavy on the tofu — big, spongy blocks of tastelessness right in the middle of things.

Better were the vegetarian pot stickers ($6.95), which had been steamed (instead of wok-seared in the Chinese style) and therefore lacked that nicely caramelized base. They were also damper overall than their Chinese counterparts, and contained tofu. But they also held a wealth of shredded cabbage and mushroom chunks and were served with a velvet-smooth peanut sauce that helped make up any flavor deficiency.

If you like imperial rolls but are hesitant about ordering deep-fried items outright, you can find them slipped into your vermicelli ($7.95), a big bowl of fine rice noodles overlaid with bean sprouts, mint, ground peanuts, nuoc nam (the ubiquitous, salty-sweet sauce), and some kind of flesh, or no flesh. The barbecued beef in a lemongrass marinade was ethereally tender and fragrant, while the imperial rolls were flawless: nicely crisped skins (with a bit of stubble) enclosing an earthy blend of minced pork and taro.

Grilled lemongrass chicken ($13.95) is generally a bulletproof favorite. Here the kitchen uses strips of boneless breast meat, and as any Thanksgiving cook knows, it’s the white breast meat that’s most in peril of drying out. Our strips were pretty dry and slightly tough, though chicken never gets really tough. Fortunately, lemongrass has powerful therapeutic, or at least distractive, effects, and nuoc nam (a saucer of which seems to be a perpetual presence on most of the tables) is a useful moisturizer.

A dish that helped put Slanted Door on the map, way back when, was shaken (or shaking) beef. Sunflower offers its own, quite worthy version, and if, at $11.95, it isn’t quite a steal, it’s pretty close. The meat (filet mignon or a similar cut, I would guess from the lean tenderness) is cubed, then wokked with garlic and chilies. It isn’t as aromatic as the lemongrass items (and can initially be overwhelmed by them if they’re served simultaneously), but once you start to taste the garlic and feel the chili heat, it becomes addictive.

And may I offer a brief huzzah in the matter of Sunflower’s rice continence: You’re asked if you want it at all, and if you do, the serving for one is about the size and shape of an inverted teacup. Brown rice ($1.75) has an appealing mottled inkiness and a nice toasty taste that reminded me, a little, of sunflower seeds.

SUNFLOWER

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5-9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

288 Connecticut, SF

(415) 861-2336

www.sunflowersf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Higher ground

-
0

arts@sfbg.com

LIT What Susan Sontag wrote about illness in 1978’s Illness as Metaphor and 1989’s AIDS and Its Metaphors holds for disaster as well: all too often, widespread devastation is made to serve moralistic meanings. Perhaps the primary virtue of Rebecca Solnit’s clear-headed new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 353 pages, $27.95), is that it does not simply swap one interpretation of disaster — as anticonsumerist reckoning, for instance — for another, such as Jerry Falwell-style damnation. Solnit is interested in how people act in the aftermath, for better and for worse.

By tallying stories from a century’s worth of disasters, Solnit mounts a passionate argument that altruism and solidarity are the norm, no matter what the media or authorities might report. Early in A Paradise Built in Hell, she reflects on the unexpected joy found in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989: "We don’t even have a language for this emotion in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological."

Solnit collects evidence of commonplace resilience from bottom-up accounts of earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City, the London Blitz, 9/11, Katrina, and the Halifax Explosion of 1917. She marshals these anecdotes against the Hobbesian view, often taken by those in power, that ordinary people will backslide into chaotic violence without strict social controls. A ruling class’s authority is disrupted in disaster, and this tends to put them in a preemptive, paranoid mood. The helpful term for this displacement is "elite panic." The predictability of warrantless crackdowns is depressing. In Solnit’s history, we see Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ("These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will") echoing the brutal edict issued by San Francisco’s mayor, Eugene Schmitz, in 1906 ("The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force, and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons engaged in looting"). People matter more than property, except when they don’t.

It’s to Solnit’s credit as a journalist that she departs from her script in New Orleans for a harrowing account (with an assist from former Guardian reporter A.C. Thompson) of the murder of several black men by heavily armed white vigilante groups. One wonders, however, if these ragtag brigades—which certainly cannot be called "elite" — aren’t filling a similar vacuum, in their way, as the informal groups that set to feeding the hungry. How does Solnit’s goodness match up with the mass-complicity required of genocide? It’s telling, after all, that Jan T. Gross’ 2001 book about a massacre of Jews in World War II was titled Neighbors.

A Paradise Built in Hell is a little didactic and a lot repetitious in the typical nonfiction style, and for someone obviously concerned with the impact of words, Solnit never really explains the Christian tuning of her title. But these are only chinks in the book’s broad spirit of inquiry. Solnit’s sources include Carnival, Russian anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, the reactionary politics of disaster movies like Dante’s Peak (1997), and William James, who was visiting Stanford during the ’06 quake. Her most intriguing proposition is that the civic temper — James’ phrase — loosed by disaster represents a kind of desire. We’re so used to thinking of desires, both as they’re expressed and repressed, as a private matter of sexuality and identity that it’s almost shocking to hear the word in this social context.

One can easily think of Solnit’s look at hope regained as a kind of parable of the Bush-Obama transition, but if A Paradise Built in Hell is a product of its time, it’s not because it channels our new president’s good tidings. Instead, Solnit’s work is best read as a sustained critique of the degraded view of ordinary citizens taken by the Bush administration: in its eyes we were craven, greedy, vindictive, and worse. Solnit says no, not when it counts. It takes real imagination to answer the intellectual crisis provoked by the reign of W with a study in altruism. What’s even more surprising, she succeeds.

Fitting in?

-
0

arts@sfbg.com

FASHION Earlier this month, the white tents of New York Fashion Week went up at Bryant Park, and the tranquil and unassuming grassy lawn behind the public library was suddenly besieged by celebrities, buyers, press, and a lucky few fans with golden tickets, hungrily packing themselves in to peep the 2010 spring lines — including a handful by Bay Area designers, rare birds in the big-fashion aviary.

Seven happily frantic design students from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University had their senior thesis projects paraded alongside the collections of established designers, like Marc Jacobs and Vera Wang. For anyone hoping to make a break in the fashion industry, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Backstage, the designers — nearly hidden behind models waiting with hair held by clips and tissue paper, stylists kneeling on the floor to adjust hems, and makeup artists with heavy tool belts of beauty products hovering to perform last-minute touchups — speedily talked about the six or seven garments on the rolling racks along the walls whose realization had consumed the last year of their lives.

Richelle Valenzula, a Filipino who has lived in the East Bay since early adolescence, passed a hand over the silver gauze dress hanging on the rack behind him, jittery as he explained the tedious process he went through to attach intricately fitted panels of silk organza to each design. His work was worth it: on the runway, the light layers moved with a cerebral flutter, like a breeze rifling through pages of a book.

Kara Sennett showed a retro-poppy, California-dreamin’ sportswear line inspired by David Hockney’s painting Beverly Hills Housewife. Because everything was moving so fast, however, she didn’t get to see her line coming down the catwalk. "I just caught a glimpse of the very last girl from the monitor," Sennett told me. "But I’ll sacrifice to make sure everything goes out perfect." She was sacrificing for bubble-gum pink 1950s-ish bathing costumes with ivory stripes and lime vinyl cropped jackets, which created a bold, flat, in-your-face feeling.

On the other side of the classic California coin, a prominent psychedelic aesthetic shone through in the freewheeling butterfly-shaped knit dresses that Bulgarian native Marina Nikolaeva Popska whipped up. The garments look like an acid trip, and listening to Popska explain the concept behind the clothes, certainly felt like one. "It’s about humanity and nature," she enthused, as the rings on every one of her fingers shaped the air, her sandy frizz of hair creeping nearer her nose with each nod. "I have this philosophy where the human and the tree become one creature, one person, and this helps to release the soul and create a sense of light."

The antitheses of Popska’s lovechild gowns were the boyish plaid button-downs and shorts created by Brittney Major. Her Southern accent bent the ends of her words as she talked about the culture shock she experienced when she moved to SF, although the city’s attitude has since grown on her. "I love how everyone is out there at face value," Major says. As a result of her newfound California confidence, Major took daring moves with a bright, Easter-cellophane color scheme and a cheeky mix of print sizes.

Although they displayed ample verve, the students’ garments didn’t reach the meticulous construction standards of the other shows in the Bryant Park circus. Many of them felt like interesting stops along the way to developing a broader vision, which is a good place for students to be. Yet I kept thinking they would have fit in more comfortably at one of the many off-park sites in the city where fresh designers premiered their spring lines in shows that were less harsh-glare and more San Francisco vibe-y, like the vintage-inspired line that walked to an indie cover band on a Chelsea rooftop, or the party-like presentations in empty Meatpacking District warehouses.

San Francisco is just a temporary home for most of these students, many of whom are eager to move London or New York to pursue their careers. This city has become a surefire training and testing ground for the fashion-minded, exposing them to new flavors and freeing combinations. But even though this was a huge moment in the spotlight for the Academy of Art and suffused with Californian ideals, was it really a showcase of San Francisco style? A major show at Bryant Park featuring bona fide Bay Area designers might be a fashion-world revelation.

Of course, it could be that our native fashion sense, in all its subversive wiliness, may just not take well to the big catwalk. Last season’s raved-about breakout NYC show was by born-and-bred Bay label Nice Collective, showing exquisitely tailored leather waistcoats over skintight britches and heavy denim draped down the sides of worn construction-worker boots, whose open tongues flapped at the front row. The sculptural backdrop was constructed from charred wood and featured a 19th-century carriage. Nice Collective was supposed to show again this season, but — in true San Francisco fashion — the duo decided instead to focus their energies on a forthcoming "sustainable community project" here at home.

Balompie Cafe

-
0

paulr@sfbg.com

Balompié Café looks like many another modest restaurants in the Mission, but it does make a convincing claim to uniqueness, in three parts. The first is the striking name — basically “ball foot” in Spanish. Football by any other name — including “balompié” and “fútbol” — is still … soccer. Somehow soccer’s claim to being the true football is more convincing than our own. In American football, the combination of ball and foot is seldom a presence or factor.

The second part of our triad is Balompié’s identity as a soccer bar. The walls of the otherwise unassuming space are festooned with soccer-club banners from around the world, and flat-panel televisions mounted high on the walls show plenty of action. Some of the patrons scattered around the dining room and at the bar are likely to be watching rapt, while others will be dividing their attention between the screens and the plates of Salvadorean food in front of them — the place’s Salvadoreanness being its third distinguishing characteristic. Salvadorean cuisine resembles its Mexican cousin in broad outline, with corn and beans at the foundation, as they have been for centuries in Mesoamerica. But Salvadorean cuisine has its specialties and special delights.

Torn though some of the other patrons might be between the food and the televised proceedings, there was no contest for us. Soccer is a little too free-form a game to translate comfortably to television; the main impression made on the remote spectator pertains to the green vastness of the playing field. It’s like looking at an image from Google Earth, with tiny figures frantically running around. The food, on the other hand, richly rewards the attention you pay to it. It is as flavorful as any food you’ll find in this city and is also monumentally inexpensive. Balompié has been at its central Mission location since 1987, and in recent years has opened up at a few other spots (one in SoMa, the other in the outer Mission), but it still gives big bang for the buck, and that’s probably never been more valuable than it is now, in this depression-by-any-other-name.

The best-known Salvadorean dish in this country is the pupusa — and I probably should say “pupusas,” since, as with Lay’s potato chips, the singular reference is absurd. (Balompié’s menu codifies this preference for the plural by requiring that you order a minimum of two pupusas; the regular ones are $2.50 each, the fancier sorts $3.50.) Pupusas are basically stuffed flatbreads (made here either from masa or rice flour) that look a lot like small pita breads, and they can be filled with a variety of delectables.

Spinach and cheese reminded me of the Greek pastry pie spanikopita, while chorizo and cheese had the air of a Mexican-style breakfast. In the case of the blander pupusas — the cheese-and-beans combo springs to mind — enhancement is available in the form of an impressively spicy cabbage slaw, a dish of pickled vegetables (including carrot coins, cauliflower florets, and rounds of jalapeño pepper), and a richly tomatoey, though mild-mannered, salsa.

The pupusas are griddled. The corn pies called pasteles ($5.75 for three), on the other hand, are deep-fried and resemble an improbable cross between corn dogs, falafel balls, and Easter eggs. They’re crunchy on the outside and are filled with well-seasoned minced pork. (Chicken and shrimp versions are also available.)

The bigger plates tend to include large swaths of beans and rice — a worthy combination that can assume the proportions of a small landslide. (You can get the beans and rice as discrete entities, with salad, or mixed together and fried as casamiento.) The wonderful garlic chicken ($9.95), for instance, would have been fine on its own. The meat had been sliced into boneless flaps, then cooked — I would guess on the griddle — until the edges were lightly crisped and caramelized. The finishing touch was a fabulously creamy garlic sauce with a hint of lemon ladled over the top.

A chile relleno ($10.75) turned out to be less routine than it sounded. The pepper, a poblano, was familiar enough; the filling, of chopped, spiced beef, was less so. But the real puzzle was a band of mysterious white threads with the texture of pickled radish and a bitter-fruity flavor. That bite took some getting used to but was, in the end, a real enhancement. We quizzed our server, and she brought forth a jar labelled “pacaya,” or date palm — actually a date-palm blossom, pickled in brine. The date palm is a native of Mesopotamia and is one of the world’s most venerable food sources.

This is the sort of interesting food factoid that can get overlooked when Mexico scores on Costa Rica and the tiny figures run around on the surface of their flat green planet while, at Balompié, murmurs of exultation or disappointment ripple through the crowd and more beer is ordered, perhaps a bottle of Regia from El Salvador, a gorgeously smooth golden lager in a vessel like a quart of motor oil. Sort of the beer equivalent of the foot-long hotdog.

BALOMPIÉ CAFÉ

Daily, 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

3349 18th St. (also at 525 Seventh St. and 3801 Mission), SF

(415) 648-9199 (558-9668, 647-4000)

Beer and wine

DS/MC/V

Loud but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

 

Appetite: Pheasant eggs, shrimp and grits, Soul Food benefit, and more

-
0

Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

CaneRosso0909a.jpg

10/11 Soul Food Farm Fundraiser from Il Cane Rosso & Coi
Our Nor Cal food and farm community was saddened to hear about 30 burned acres and 1000 baby chicks lost in a recent devastating fire at Soul Food Farm in Vacaville. Daniel Patterson and his dynamic duo of restaurants, Il Cane Rosso and Coi, sponsor a fundraising dinner next week where all proceeds go to Soul Food Farm and you’re treated to a three course, family-style meal at Il Cane Rosso. Two seatings (between 5:30-6 pm, or 7:30-8 pm), offer a communal, heartwarming meal prepared with generously donated ingredients from Prather Ranch, Mariquita Farm and Full Belly. It feels good to help… and eat well at the same time.
$50 (including wine, not including tax & gratuity)
10/11, Sunday, 5:30-6pm or 7:30-8pm seatings
Il Cane Rosso, Ferry Building
415-391-7599
www.canerossosf.com
http://soulfoodfarm.com/blog/2009/09/cane-russo

———–

Magnolia0909.jpg

Magnolia’s new Southern-inspired brunch
Magnolia Gastropub is one of our best local breweries and a darn good restaurant to boot. With my great love for New Orleans comes excitement at Chef Ronnie New’s Southern-inspired brunch menu (he is from New Orleans, after all). Saturdays and Sundays there’s dishes Shrimp & Grits (made from the best, naturally: Anson Mills Grits), Crab Cake Benedict, even Pheasant Eggs & Toast. Magnolia’s best is still on offer, including their house-made sausages), excellent Chicken & Waffles, French Toast, and so on. So whether you prefer your brunch with Blue Bottle Coffee or Magnolia’s renowned suds (the sampler lets you try six), you know the morning after can be nearly as fun as the night before.
Saturdays and Sunday, 10am-2:30pm
1398 Haight Street
415-864-7468
www.magnoliapub.com

Appetite: Pheasant eggs, shrimp and grits, Soul Food benefit, and more

-
0

Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

CaneRosso0909a.jpg

10/11 Soul Food Farm Fundraiser from Il Cane Rosso & Coi
Our Nor Cal food and farm community was saddened to hear about 30 burned acres and 1000 baby chicks lost in a recent devastating fire at Soul Food Farm in Vacaville. Daniel Patterson and his dynamic duo of restaurants, Il Cane Rosso and Coi, sponsor a fundraising dinner next week where all proceeds go to Soul Food Farm and you’re treated to a three course, family-style meal at Il Cane Rosso. Two seatings (between 5:30-6 pm, or 7:30-8 pm), offer a communal, heartwarming meal prepared with generously donated ingredients from Prather Ranch, Mariquita Farm and Full Belly. It feels good to help… and eat well at the same time.
$50 (including wine, not including tax & gratuity)
10/11, Sunday, 5:30-6pm or 7:30-8pm seatings
Il Cane Rosso, Ferry Building
415-391-7599
www.canerossosf.com
http://soulfoodfarm.com/blog/2009/09/cane-russo

———–

Magnolia0909.jpg

Magnolia’s new Southern-inspired brunch
Magnolia Gastropub is one of our best local breweries and a darn good restaurant to boot. With my great love for New Orleans comes excitement at Chef Ronnie New’s Southern-inspired brunch menu (he is from New Orleans, after all). Saturdays and Sundays there’s dishes Shrimp & Grits (made from the best, naturally: Anson Mills Grits), Crab Cake Benedict, even Pheasant Eggs & Toast. Magnolia’s best is still on offer, including their house-made sausages), excellent Chicken & Waffles, French Toast, and so on. So whether you prefer your brunch with Blue Bottle Coffee or Magnolia’s renowned suds (the sampler lets you try six), you know the morning after can be nearly as fun as the night before.
Saturdays and Sunday, 10am-2:30pm
1398 Haight Street
415-864-7468
www.magnoliapub.com

William Safire — an appreciation (of sorts)

-
1

By Tim Redmond

William Safire was wrong about Vietnam. He was wrong about Watergate. He was right about poor Bert Lance, but wrong about Jimmy Carter. He was very, very wrong about Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and the Iraq War. He was, as the Telegraph of London says, “tall, dishevelled, slouching and dour.”

But Lord, what a good writer.

His conservative columns sparkled with style and wit — and often, with intelligence (that factor so utterly missing from the right wing of American politics today). I read him regularly, not just his language columns (which got more dreary as he aged), but his political commentary, which was sharp up until the day he retired from the New York Times op-ed page.

And while he was often horrendously wrong and politically awful, he was pretty consistent. After complaining repeatedly about the climate of secrecy in the Bush Sr. administration, he made it very clear in 1992 that a president who refused to accept sunshine in the White House was unacceptable and that “this lifelong Republican” was going to vote for Bill Clinton.

(He later chided Barbara Streisand for refusing to take his phone calls. “She told me if I voted for Bill Clinton, she’d [grant an interview.} I did; she didn’t.”) And, of course, he famously turned on the Clintons, referring to Hillary as a “congenital liar.”

And unlike a lot of conservatives of his era, he was willing to change with the times. By the late 1990s, he had become pro-choice on abortion, and once commented on a rally to save Roe v. Wade: “Nothing warms the heart of an old conservative as much as seeing thousands of protestors stare decisively at the Supreme Court and demonstrate in support of the status quo.”

Back in 2003, he opened the door to conservatives accepting same-sex marriage (“I’m a ‘libcon.’ To that small slice of the political spectrum called libertarian conservative, personal freedom is central,” and if he were still writing today, I’m pretty sure he’d be out front on that issue (and on allowing gays in the military).

So I’ll miss the crusty old right-winger. He did a lot of damage, and when he first started writing his column in 1973, as a former Nixon speechwriter, he was an apologist for an administration that was pretty much indefensible. But he was thoughtful and somewhat open-minded and sharp and funny and creative. There are no conservative writers who come even close today.

Erotic comics extra: Harry and Dickless Tom

-
0

By Justin Hall. Check out his awesome guide to erotic comics in this week’s Sex Issue here. Below is another extra special one-hander.

HARRY AND DICKLESS TOM
Brad Rader
(self-published)
www.flamingartist.com

hdt10909.jpg

This erotic graphic novel is both brilliant and completely unique. I certainly don’t know of any other gay porn comic that features such huge, well-drawn, splash pages of vaginas.

hdt30909.jpg

Two homophobic truckers are crossing the country screwing fags in truck stops and then beating them up, when the Goddess decides to teach them a lesson. Tom wakes up one morning with his dick replaced by a vagina, and his relationship with his buddy Harry, himself, his family, and the rest of the world is changed instantly. His new pussy humanizes him and when he finally gets his dick back, he finally knows how to really use it.

hdt20909.jpg

Harry and Dickless Tom is a very personal book by an extremely talented cartoonist. “My sole erotic release [when I was young],” writes Rader, “was my jerk-off sketchbooks. I would draw in them for hours, making love to the pages with pen and ink, pouring my angst, lust and longing into images I hoped and feared the world would someday see, and that I might somehow realize.” Rader has worked on everything from Batman to King of the Hill, and he puts his considerable illustration abilities to use with this book, drawing each section of it in the style of a different famous cartoonist. It starts off with an homage to Herge’s Tin Tin and winds up imitating Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. In every style, though, Rader makes sure that his odd cast of characters stay sexy, especially Tom, the balding, bespectacled, daddy muscle bear with a pussy. Check it out at Raders’ site www.flamingartist.com.

Godsend

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER God Is Good, the name of Om’s new long-player on Drag City, may run the risk of landing the heavy, heavy drone dealers in the gospel section of your clueless big-box retailer, but founder-bassist Al Cisneros couldn’t help the tug of title: "To me, at this point, in the journey of my life, that’s really all I can say."

The soft-spoken, spectacled musician, all in black with his instrument tucked beside him, laughs a little — and who can blame him? The longtime Bay Area fixture has been tackling some major changes in the past year. I almost don’t recognize him, now shorn of his long, black tresses, amid the bustling throng and espresso-machine groan of Muddy Waters at 16th and Valencia streets. He waves goodbye to his wife, whom he followed last year to San Luis Obispo, close to where she’s attending graduate school. In ’08 he also said farewell to the drummer he’s played with since high school, Chris Haikus, who quit in the middle of the last Om tour and retired from music. And after our chat, Cisneros will drive up to Portland, Ore., a commute he now makes regularly in order to practice with Om’s new drummer Emil Amos. Cisneros, who, with Hakius, once made up two-thirds of the legendary doom/stoner metal trio Sleep, is fully awake and in motion — and everything appears to be falling effortlessly into place.

"I have to keep playing," he explains. "I have music all the time, and it has to come out." To that end, Amos, who’s also in Grails, slipped into the drummer’s seat perfectly. "His playing style spoke my language directly when I first saw him playing drums," Cisneros murmurs. "The specific lyricism that he puts into his drumming, aside from the flow itself — which is beautiful. It was absolutely what I’d hear inside in many riffs and many parts I have, the complement of what I hear. There are certain fills, the way he’ll sit in a beat, the way he’ll be with a beat — it felt so familiar."

So he called up Amos on the chance that he would be able to work on a scheduled Sub Pop single. The two had already bonded during late-night rock-philosophy jam sessions while Om and the Grails were on tour a few years ago. After each show, Cisneros, Amos, and Hakius would hang out and analyze everything from dub to Billy Cobham — "the extremely nerdy academic aspects of the records we grew up with," the amicable Amos recalls by phone, taking a break from his day job at a Portland homeless shelter. "We’d get into philosophical debates, almost Platonic dissections of, when a verse ends and you go into chorus, what do you do on drums in this specific situation, in 1971? It was just this weird way of talking about music as a metaphor for spiritual education. We’re obsessed to that level. I think Al’s brain just thought, who can I trust?"

Remarkably, Cisneros — a man who has a Sanskrit passage from the Bhagavad-Gita tattooed on the left hand he uses for fingering — was right on, and though the two had never played together, a three-day rehearsal in Amos’ basement yielded the 7-inch. The Steve Albini-recorded God bears out the partnership, picking up the tempo, folding in tamboura and flute, and coming close to realizing the sounds in Cisneros’ head — the only other instance, he says, occurred with Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993), and "in the best way, we didn’t know what we were doing. It happened to us." Still, he offers, chuckling, "I don’t want to be in Sleep for the rest of my life."

For metal monks, as well as spiritual disciples of any order, the key is to focus on the practice — not fixate on whether or not Amos has a beard, a discussion the drummer says he’s found on some online forums. "I’ve never seen another band that gets so much attention about changing one bass guitar pedal or overdubbing one extra tambourine," Amos observes. "Nobody would say anything if Men at Work switched out a bass, but in this band, there’s the sense of trust between an artist and audience. It’s a delicate thing."

And it sounds like Cisneros has found an understanding new foil in his ever-evolving dialogue. "It’s a joy to work with Emil," he says softly. "The interplay between the instruments — the very premise of having a duo is to have a conversation between the instruments, and it literally happens nonstop when we play."

OM

With Lichens

Thurs/24, 8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Come of age

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

FILM A bittersweet tone in movies is an easy thing to flub. The most common culprits are asinine sentimentalism and mock-solemnity, neither of which figures into the graceful cinema of Ermanno Olmi. His early films, Il Posto (1961) and I Fidanzati (1963), still exhibit an impossibly light touch, with a warm humanist core of glances, material texture, and yearning wrapped in a dispassionate view of industrialized alienation.

In Il Posto, a boy’s coming-of-age is rendered a split decision: his entrance into the Milanese workplace is a gloomy premonition of adulthood, but there’s a taste of love for succor. Olmi’s breakthrough would have seemed small even if it hadn’t come on the heels of L’Avventura (1960) and La Dolce Vita (1960). It’s easy to imagine that Il Posto‘s quotidian pleasures might have seemed retrogressive in this context—but with contests for neorealism’s soul laid to rest, it’s easy to appreciate Olmi’s remarkable skill directing amateur actors, his elegant sequencing, and his aching cinematography, as ravishingly revealing as Robert Frank’s contemporaneous photographs. Insofar as the world-weariness of The Exiles (1961) and Killer of Sheep (1977) relate to the Italian style, they travel the Olmi path.

The director has been drawn to simple characters and stories throughout his career, but his own formal means can be surprisingly experimental. In the prolonged opening of I Fidanzati, for instance, Olmi fragments two estranged lovers’ circumnavigation of a dance, stitching together the story of a relationship with a series of elusive encounters plucked from time. The jag echoes Alain Resnais’ early films, but a bookending montage of the lovers reading each other’s letters uses the same technique against the modernist grain, for emotional warmth.

While Olmi’s more highly esteemed cousin in pictorial ennui, Michelangelo Antonioni, absconded with neorealism to the metaphysical realm, Olmi plunged back to earth. To wit: his new film, Terra Madre, is the official documentary of the 2006 Slow Food conference in Turin. A strange hybrid of educational film and poetic reverie, Terra Madre leaves polemics to the conference participants. Olmi’s presence is felt in the digressive close-ups of soil, plants, faces and hands. In a beguiling sequence midway through the film, his camera studies the ramshackle space left behind by a self-sufficient hermit. Does the director see himself in the story of this man who found the world in a small plot of life and tended his own garden for decades? Regardless, the "Life’s Work" retrospective at the PFA is an abundant harvest.

LIFE’S WORK: THE CINEMA OF ERMANNO OLMI

Sept. 25–Oct. 30, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Creamin’ for comics

-
0

culture@sfbg.com

Erotic comics are a special breed of porn. Unlike prose, they can show as well as describe. Unlike photos, they’re narrative. Unlike film, they have a limitless special effects budget. Comics are capable of everything from gritty, realistic detail to "yowza!" flights of fancy — perfect for the demands of erotica.

And yet good erotic comics seem in short supply. Despite a venerable history that stretches from the Tijuana Bibles of the 1920s to the wild antics of the underground comix movement in the ’60s and ’70s, porn comics have languished of late. Alternative and independent comics have been trending more toward asexuality. And gay male erotic cartoonists are only now struggling out of the shadow of Tom of Finland, whose comics of square-jawed, fascist-reminiscent leathermen and bikers have dominated gay erotic art in the same way that Tolkien’s imagination bound and gagged fantasy writers for generations.

Once you start digging, however, it’s remarkable the gems you can find. The fact that comics are so marginalized creates a kind of purity to the art form. Cartoonists aren’t motivated by fame and fortune, but rather by their passion for their stories and their art. The same is doubly true for erotic cartoonists, whose work is often an evolution of the naughty pictures they drew compulsively while growing up.

Here are a few of the most unusual, hot, and fun recent erotic comics collections to get your juices flowing.

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2009

Greta Christina, Editor

(Last Gasp)

www.lastgasp.com

A man stimulates the orifice of a bound mermaid with a twig, an infertile professor convinces a student to impregnate his wife, a dominatrix hires a gay masseur to fuck her boyfriend, a sadistic dom pisses all over her girlfriend, King Kong and Godzilla have hot sex in the ruins of Tokyo.

Best Erotic Comics, an annual collection of the best and brightest of kinky comics, is yet another reason to be proud of our sexy Bay Area, published as it is by legendary, local institution Last Gasp. Editor Greta Christina has assembled an impressive collection of literary smut comics that run the full gamut of sexual interests, from octopus sex to airplane sex. It’s especially refreshing to see straight porn side by side with gay and lesbian imagery — it allows the reader to understand sexuality as a spectrum of possibilities, and to see how hot the fantasies of others can be.

PRIDE

Gengoroh Tagame

(G-Project, 2007)

www.tagame.org

Odd as it may seem, the best bear comics porn in the world is coming out of Japan, a country with a noticeable lack of big, hairy men. Clearly the exotic has its erotic charms. Unlike yaoi — the popular manga genre in which female cartoonists create stories of gay male romance and sex for an audience of girls and women — bara is gay manga created by actual gay male creators and usually does not feature the yaoi breed of androgynous boys with big eyes and floppy hairdos, but rather burly, hypermasculine men.

No one is better at portraying these than Gengoroh Tagame, arguably the world’s greatest, living erotic cartoonist. His universe is populated with the hottest muscle bears outside of the Lone Star’s patio during Folsom Street Fair weekend, and they have a tendency to be tied up, humiliated, and fucked senseless. Pride is a recent trilogy of books from the master, detailing the gradual transformation of a cocky, hirsute hunk into an obedient slave by a buff, bearded professor. The books are full of all sorts of S-M shenanigans, with our hero being put through the paces, from extreme bondage and piercings to fistings and scat play. Tagame has yet to be translated into English, but he’s such an accomplished cartoonist that his work can still be thoroughly enjoyed.

SMALL FAVORS

Colleen Coover

(Eros Comix, 2002)

www.eroscomix.com

While lesbian imagery exists in various straight publications, there is an unfortunate dearth of true lesbian erotic comics. Colleen Coover’s Small Favors is a notable exception. Coover is an excellent cartoonist and clearly has a great time illustrating her two heroines, Annie and Nibbil, having wild, fun, and juicy sex.

Annie is accused of masturbating too much by her own conscience and is assigned a finger-tall guardian to stop her from getting jiggy with it too often. Fortunately, this tiny watcher winds up being a nympho herself, and jumps Annie at her first opportunity, leading to comics’ best introduction line ever: "Ummm … Hi, Annie! My name’s Nibbil! Gosh, I hope you don’t mind me fucking myself on your nipple!"

WANKY COMICS

BiL Sherman

(Self-published)

www.wankycomics.com

Occasionally you’ll stumble across some underground, barely-distributed mini-comic, put together by the creator with a photocopier and a stapler, that will take your breath away. BiL Sherman’s Wanky Comics is bizarrely brilliant, completely original, and about as underground as you can get.

While the subject matter of the stories in WC ranges wildly from horny unicorns and space-age sex clones to an inexplicably naked superhero and his quest for love, Sherman has a distinctive style that unifies the series. He draws like a thirteen-year-old with OCD and a hard-on, filling his pages with burly, hairy men. Each chest hair is lovingly and obsessively drawn, and the faces are rugged and expressive.

Sherman is unafraid to get both funny and surreal, a refreshing trait in porn comics. The "Mike Thorn and the Nine Satanic Statements," episode, for example, is a blow-by-blow illustration of a scene on a porn set, while the text underneath the images is taken directly from Anton Levey’s Satanic Bible, creating a strangely disconnected, campy, yet beautiful juxtaposition.

BIRDLAND

Gilbert Hernandez

(Eros Comix, 1992)

www.eroscomix.com

Hernandez is one of the creators, along with brothers Jaime and Mario, of Love and Rockets, arguably the single greatest American comic book. Rarely does such a world-class, literary cartoonist turn his talents to porn. Luckily, however, the highly prolific Hernandez created Birdland, a voyeuristic foray into the lives of strippers, bodybuilders, and horny aliens — and one of the classics of erotic comics.

Birdland introduces characters such as Fritz, the large-breasted, brainy psychiatrist with a lisp and a passion for guns, which Hernandez later incorporated into L&R. But while L&R certainly never shies away from sexual material, Birdland is unabashedly erotica, with copious cum shots filling the pages.

Though Hernandez identifies as straight, Birdland is in many ways pansexual erotica, with every type of coupling depicted. The final scene, in which the characters have a giant orgy in a spaceship, is one of the most oddly liberating and transcendent sex sequences ever conceived. After reading it, anything seems possible.

————-

A GUIDE TO PORN CARTOONISTS AT THIS YEAR’S FOLSOM STREET FAIR

The Folsom Street Fair on Sun/27 is all about community, and one of the ways it demonstrates this is by donating a block of booth space to queer erotic artists, many cartoonists. This year’s little section of the Fair, at 11th Street and Folsom, is very exciting. Here’s some highlights.

Chuck Connor and Sean Platter: the duo’s Demonic Sex series pulls no punches with its depictions of satanic transformations and sexual hells. www.triplesixcomics.com

Dave Davenport and Justin Hall: An accomplished tattoo artist, Davenport uses his illustration chops to create horny werewolves, skate punk ghosts, and other wholesome characters in Hard To Swallow, co-created with Justin Hall (that’s me!). www.hardtoswallowcomics.com

Steve MacIsaac: As the co-creator (along with Dale Lazarov) of Sticky, MacIsaac offers sex-positive stories instead of the rape fantasies that often dominate gay porn. www.stevemacisaac.com

Bradley Rader: Harry and Dickless Tom is the story of two homophobic truckers who screw and then beat up fags. It turns surreal when one wakes up with a vagina. www.flamingartist.com

Sean Z: Sean’s Myth is a superb fantasy comic with complex plots, gorgeous color work, and big-dicked vampires. www.sean-z.com

See www.folsomstreetfair.org/art for more kinky artists.

The revolution will not be regionalized

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s safe to say that Achim Bergmann of Trikont, Germany’s oldest independent record label, has an affinity for the underdog. From his favorite soccer team (Munich’s best-loved losers, the 1860 Löwen) to his favorite musicians, it is outsiders who attract Bergmann’s attentions, personal and professional, rather than the heroes of the mainstream. Of course, outsider music comes in many variations, and somehow Trikont manages to embrace them all. From Finnish Tango to American yodeling, German-language reggae to Turkish techno, British punk to Black Panther soul, the label’s eclectic catalog has been transcending language boundaries and international borders long before "world music" became a Billboard buzzword.

First founded in 1967 as a radical publishing arm of the SDS, Trikont started publishing books of political and philosophical ideology collected mainly from the so-called "third world" (Trikont, short for trikontinentale, is a colloquial expression for same), including the Bolivian diaries of Che Guevera, the incendiary Revolution in the Revolution by Régis Debray, and the ubiquitous Little Red Book or Quotations from Chairman Mao. In 1971, Trikont released its first record album — a compilation of neoprimitive folk and radical "self-made music" titled Wir Befreien Uns Selbst or We Free Ourselves, a phrase that could stand as the label’s unofficial motto even today.

"It was very simple, very rough, not polished at all," Bergmann tells me as we sit at a wobbly kitchen table in Trikont’s Munich-Obergiesing headquarters. His youthful exuberance belies his bushy, white Ernest Hemingway beard. When Wir Befreien Uns Selbst sold 20,000 copies, for Bergmann it sparked the realization that "music was the non-dogmatic part of left-radicalism, a way to connect with the working class." It also provided the radicals with music — beyond the endlessly circuutf8g MC5 and Rolling Stones albums — they could call their own. Trikont’s official motto, "our own voice," reflects this ideal to this day.

And what a range of voices call the label home. After splitting from the book publishing side of the business in 1980, Trikont’s focus shifted from being a mouthpiece for the radical German left to being a conduit for what Bergmann terms "popular music" from all over the world. Not popular in the MTV hit-parade sense, but popular as in sphere-of-influence: from the emblematic zydeco of the Louisiana Bayou to the dramatic excesses of Mexican bolero, the label excels at tapping into that particular cultural zeitgeist expressible only through music. It does so through exactingly executed compilations curated by DJs, music journalists, and fellow aficionados of the slightly askew. Their ranks include a veritable who’s who of luminaries from the European music scene — John Peel, Jon Savage, Jonathan Fischer, Thomas Meineke, Bernadette La Hengst — while from our side of the pond, Greil Marcus provided the liner notes for Christoph Wagner’s harrowing 2002 compilation Prayers from Hell: White Gospel and Sinner’s Blues

Like the best mixed tapes, Trikont’s compilations are elegantly cohesive while still retaining the essential element of surprise. My first Trikont album, 1997’s Dead and Gone #2: Songs of Death — which I scored from a department store bargain bin while living in Munich — is an unlikely amalgamation of Serbian requiems, chilling soul tracks, avant-garde moaning provided by Lydia Lunch, Lou Reed, Nico, and Diamanda Galás, a suicidal lament by Bushwick Bill and the Geto Boyz, and an astonishingly moving funeral hymn from South Africa. Not exactly the stock-in-trade set list of goth clubs and vampire movies, yet as suitable a soundtrack for reflection on mortality as any Rosetta Stone album could aspire to be.

A current favorite, last year’s Roll Your Moneymaker: Early Black Rock ‘n’ Roll 1948-1958, plumbs the earliest incarnations of rock music. It includes the first recording of the Preston Foster song "Got My Mojo Working" (sung by the enigmatic Ann Cole), two classic Ike Turner tracks, the powerhouse Etta James anthem "W-O-M-A-N," and the hilariously snarky "Pneumonia" by Joe Tex. Trikont’s acclaimed swamp music series — nine albums’ worth of forgotten zydeco and Cajun gems — evolved from a crash course in music appreciation. Bergmann reminisces: "We came to Floyd Soileau of Flat Town Music … and told him to go to the cellar where the music that he couldn’t sell anymore was stored … [afterward] we were sitting here for weeks, reading things, listening to big boxes of it without any knowledge [of the genre] and ended up with the first three compilations, which were an incredible success."

One of the most outré of Trikont’s compilations is also perhaps one of its most universal: the "La Paloma" series — an audacious collection of 141 versions of one song. Originally penned around 1863 by a Basque national called Sebastian Iraider, the stately habanera spread from continent to continent, insinuating itself into the collective musical consciousness. In Mexico, it’s a call to arms (or to amor). In Romania, it’s a funeral march. In Tanzania, it’s chanted at weddings. In Germany, it’s a seafarer’s anthem. In Hawaii, it’s plucked out on the slack key guitar first introduced to the island by Spanish-speaking vaqueros. In fact, series curator Kalle Laar estimates that "La Paloma" has been recorded well over 2,000 times, in every possible language and style.

Even though his label is open to experimentation and quirk, Bergmann admits that when the "La Paloma" project was first pitched by Laar — a prominent sound artist and "a collector of very strange music" — Trikont’s first reaction was unequivocal: "We said, hey, Kalle Laar, we are crazy, but not that crazy." But Laar persisted, bringing mixed tapes of the song, presenting the history of the tune, and expounding on its worldwide popularity. "It was very interesting to hear," Bergmann recalls. "It was the same song each time, but it wasn’t. You could listen to all these versions at one time and it wasn’t boring or repetitive."

In 1995, the first volume of La Paloma: One Song for All Worlds was released. With versions recorded by Amon Duul II, Hans Albers, Carla Bley, Jelly Roll Morton, and Szedo Miklos, it documents a full 100 years’ worth of "La Palomania," and has since led to the eventual release of five more volumes. In turn Laar’s project inspired Sigrid Faltin’s 2008 documentary La Paloma. Sehnsucht. Weltwide (a.k.a. La Paloma. Longing, Worldwide) which screened at San Francisco’s Berlin and Beyond festival last January.

In addition to genre-crossing compilations, Trikont’s lineup of German-language folk, jazz, and avant-garde pop musicians keeps the label connected to its original mission. Collectively, the label’s single-artist albums are as varied as its compilations: they include recordings by Bayrische Rastafarian Hans Söllner, Berlin-based jazzman Coco Schumann, and Bavaria’s contribution to the anarchist brass band genre, La Brass Banda.

Though Trikont’s desire to free music from the narrow confines of regionalism applies to its German-language artists, the label is best recognized for its compilations of obscure Americana. American music, Bergmann points out, has long been the preferred music of German youth in regions occupied by the U.S. Armed Forces. Alien yet electrifying, the music broadcast on the AFN (Armed Forces Network) during the occupation and through the 1960s inspired a whole generation of young Germans searching for individuality and self-determination. It did so with more success than German volksmusik. "In Germany, we had never really had a revolution, so we didn’t have the music for it," Bergmann muses. "It’s hard for an old leftist like me to say it, but it was the American soldiers who brought freedom. But in the cultural sense, it was true."

On its unexamined surface, Munich seems like an unlikely place for a revolutionary underground music scene. Unlike its edgier northern counterparts, the city has enviably low unemployment and a relatively stable middle-class. It manages — somewhat tenuously — to strike a balance between being the capital of traditionally conservative Bavaria and the southernmost stronghold of the left-leaning Social Democrats. But scrape beneath and you’ll find that the same stubborn spirit that compels Bavaria to retain its status as a "Freistaat" within the German Bundesrepublik, and which has also fueled a streak of hard-left radicalism since the 1960s. Observe Trikont: with limited resources and anticapital ideologies considered counterintuitive by the so-called big players in a slumping music industry, the label nonetheless has created a stable home and well-deserved audience for the previously unheard music from every continent and classification.

What, then, is the key to Trikont’s longevity? "We never really had an agenda," Bergmann reflects. "We just wanted to say, ‘We will tell you a story in music, so you can see how good and how strong music can be.’ People have got an innate sense for it. If they listen to good music, they want good music." No matter what your definition of good music is, chances are, Trikont has it.

www.trikont.com

1...899091...131Page 90 of 131

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org