Video Archives — Page 72 of 118 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Overcoming a foreclosure, Cohen promises to be a “fierce advocate”

Mary Magee

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October 22, 2010

Overcoming a foreclosure, Cohen promises to be a “fierce advocate”

D10 candidate Malia Cohen deserves kudos for publicly confronting rumors that she was facing a foreclosure–and for vowing to be a strong advocate, in future.

“I first addressed the rumors publicly a month ago,” said Cohen, who returned to the topic of her foreclosure earlier this week at a San Francisco Housing Coalition candidate night.

You can watch the entire proceedings of the Housing Coalition’s candidate night by clicking on the video clip at the end of this post.

But what Cohen personally told me today not only typifies many of the foreclosure horror stories that have been making national headlines. It also illustrates the abysmal lack of local leadership on this issue–and that’s something that Cohen says she’ll change.

“During the apex of the economic boom, I was the recipient of a predatory loan,” Cohen explained. “I bought a house in the Bayview in 2006 and started the process to modify my home loan. It took one year to get the banks to answer my questions, my paperwork has been lost, and I have a housing counselor I’m working with.”

“Months ago, I got word that my foreclosure has been rescinded and the property is back in my name, so I look forward to being a housing advocate, if elected,” Cohen continued.”Because what the housing crisis has done locally has been to decimate and destabilize our local neighborhoods.”

She notes that 1400 homes have already been lost in the Bayview, and another 1200 are currently teetering on the edge, but so far efforts to reform foreclosure laws have failed in the California legislature.

“Senator Mark Leno proposed SB 1275, which laid out a homeowner’s Bill of Rights, but the bank lobby was too strong,” Cohen said.

‘It’s such a helpless feeling, it’s been a nightmare, “ Cohen continued. “And once again there was no leadership locally to protect our interests, which is another reason why Malia Cohen is in this race. I am going to work hard to advocate on behalf of the community. It’s a crime the amount of money that was transferred out of the Latino and African American community during this crisis. Someone needs to be held accountable.”

Creative forces unite against Prop. 23

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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October 22, 2010

7

Proposition 23, bankrolled by out-of-state oil interests, threatens to reverse California’s environmental progress by suspending its landmark climate change legislation, Assembly Bill 32. Titled the Global Warming Solutions Act, AB32 would place enforceable limits on major polluters and spur the creation of green businesses. But if voters approve Prop. 23, progress on transitioning to clean energy could be stalled for decades. The Guardian published in-depth coverage of Prop. 23 in the Oct. 13 issue.

A broad coalition of big green organizations, green-business associations, and others has formed to oppose Prop. 23 — but some of the most inspiring efforts have emerged from a coalition of environmental-justice advocates who are tapping their own creative genius to get the message out.

Hip hop artists Braelan B and Gammaray of the Los Angeles-based Beatrock Music label spearheaded the creation of a No on Prop 23 song, in collaboration with Otayo Dubb and T-Know (both of CounterParts with Braelan B and Gammaray), and artists Nomi of Power Struggle, Somos One of BRWN BFLO, and Damn Pete of Think Tank. Have a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCR4QF7w7Aw

Braelan B told the Guardian that the artists were inspired by the efforts of Communities United Against Prop 23 — a coalition of environmental-justice organizations that is highlighting the impact the ballot measure would have on communities of color — as well as a voter-mobilization effort called the Clean Energy Tour, and the California Students Sustainability Coalition (CSSC), which is seeking online pledges for “no” votes against Prop. 23. Also known as Braelan Murray, he also serves as communications director at the Greenlining Institute, which is part of Communities United.

“We’re trying to use music as a catalyst,” he explained. “The youth vote and the of-color vote are really the swing votes.” To launch the music project, he said, “I just sort of got on the phone and said, California’s under attack, and I really want to send a strong message.” The idea caught on, and the YouTube video featuring the song already has more than 1,000 hits.

Meanwhile, Green for All has released a YouTube video about Prop. 23 set to the tune of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” featuring some rather hilarious oily cowboys smoking cigars and clutching fistfuls of money. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCdTHrtU12Y

POTRERO HILL HISTORY NIGHT

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October 21, 2010

0

The 11th annual Potrero Hill History Night is this Saturday, October 23, at the International Studies Academy. There will be a barbeque with a jazz band from 5:30-6:30 PM and a free program from 7-9PM. As always, the focus will be on interviews with long-time Potrero Hill residents, this year 3 buddies who grew up in Hill public housing in the 50s & 60s. Over the next 12 years, Bridge Housing plans to rebuild Hill public housing and create an economically integrated community on the south slopes of Potrero Hill.
BAYCAT will premiere a video on public housing, and the woman who started the community garden in 1969 at 20th & San Bruno will be interviewed. Also, a special surprise performance.

Call (415) 863-0784 for more info.
Saturday, October 23rd at 5:30 PM @ International Studies Academy, 655 De Haro (at 18th St.), San Francisco

War — what is it good for? Video games!

Andrew Lam

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October 19, 2010

0

Medal Of Honor

Danger Close, Electronic Arts

(Xbox360, PS3, PC)

GAMER Though it arrives a few years behind its contemporaries in updating the mechanics of the original World War II series, Medal of Honor follows Call of Duty and Battlefield into the modern age of warfare. The most memorable aspect of this reboot’s PR muttering was that it was going to be authentic. Game developers working closely with members of the military is nothing new, but developer Danger Close wanted its take to be relevant to today’s war by setting the fight in Afghanistan and making the villains the Taliban. The game’s professed intent is to honor the soldiers who die every day in the conflict but, while the locations lend the game a sort of theoretical accuracy, Medal of Honor mostly just feels like War Games 101.

You won’t have any problems jumping into the action. From the first moments, Medal of Honor‘s game play, pacing, and button layout recall Modern Warfare‘s winning formula. The story is a tad more down to earth, but not without thrills and chills, and a good chunk of the game is devoted to sniper missions that do more than pay homage to the iconic Modern Warfare level “Ghillies in the Mist.” There are a few new twists (I will say, it’s been a while since a war game has made suppressive fire a mandatory game play element) but for the most part Medal of Honor emulates Modern Warfare‘s “shooting gallery” experience, which makes it fine, if not terribly inspired.

First-person shooters now ship with split personalities: single-player and multiplayer. The experiences are so divided (literally, with completely separate title screens) at this point that they might as well be two different games. Many developers have begun to send multiplayer development out-of-house, with the intention of focusing all their strength on the single-player experience. It’s probably a good idea — if one team is spread too thin, both experiences suffer.

Medal of Honor seems to have taken the stance “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” enlisting Battlefield developers DICE in creating its multiplayer experience. As such, Medal of Honor‘s multiplayer emulates the tight feel and style of Battlefield 2 fairly well, but lacks the balance of the different classes. Limiting the choice to assault, spec-ops, or sniper doesn’t encourage teamwork in the same way that including a medic or engineer does.

I suppose Danger Close deserves some kudos for even attempting to engage with a real, contemporary war, but it’s also the sort of thing that needs to be done right. If you’re going to talk the big talk, you better walk the long walk, and Medal of Honor doesn’t really offer much that you can’t find in either of its competitors’ more refined products. Nonetheless, it remains an engaging, well-made war game that delights adequately enough and could indicate a better game to come.

Empire strikes back

Andrew Lam

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October 19, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE Speaking to more immediate concerns, Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart turned England’s 17th-century battle royal between rising Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and imprisoned Catholic challenger Mary Queen of Scots into a fleet drama of intimate conflicts internal and external. In Shotgun Players’ current production, director-adapter Mark Jackson recasts Schiller’s 1800 play to his own purposes, slimming its five acts down to a fairly taut two and setting it in a vividly contemporary, American-looking world of power politics, religious fanaticism, and imperial hubris. Jackson’s Mary Stuart retains the emphasis on the personal drama, but it may hold less interest in the end than the political world containing it.

As the play opens, the Scottish queen (Stephanie Gularte) languishes in an English prison (a private castle, actually), her face projected onto three video screens above the stage, as her cousin on the throne, Elizabeth (Beth Wilmurt), weighs what to do with her. The execution order will come sooner or later, history tells us, but meanwhile we get a paralleling of two very different yet intimately linked personalities and the machinations they and others put into play around them, culminating in an unhistorical but highly dramatic meeting between the two women. In the end, both appear prisoners of the power structure that they battle each other, and those around them, to dominate.

As Elizabeth, Wilmurt is a nicely arranged set of contradictions. Projecting an array of subtle gestures and meaningful silences, her Elizabeth works to maintain a carapace of authority and willpower over a youthful and vulnerable heart. Wilmurt instinctively humanizes the character with delicate humor and a barely cloaked shyness. But her Elizabeth is also, and ultimately, a ruthlessly cunning power player. If there is a soul, Elizabeth loses hers long before she’s lost her ballyhooed virginity.

As Elizabeth’s cousin and nemesis, Gularte’s Mary is an overt storm of emotion and feminine potency. Jackson keeps her onstage for the entire play, in a section of Nina Ball’s excellent set that recedes at one point to disturbingly suggest a stark execution chamber, while also revealing a small patch of grass in a sunken prison yard, the site of Mary’s one brief visit with a regained sense of freedom. Gularte’s performance suffers from too self-conscious a take on her character’s understandable anguish, but she conveys some of the terrible contradictions that haunt a young woman facing imminent death.

Around the “female kings” swarm an assortment of men, some who still seem to be wrestling with the gender upset at the top of the power hierarchy. But the real divisions among them are over ideology, strategy, self-interest — and all hitch their concerns to one or the other of these two women. Mortimer (Ryan Tasker), for instance, is the cool-eyed fanatic, a secret convert to Catholicism who devotes himself to saving the imprisoned Mary at the cost of his own life. His counterpart is Burleigh (Peter Ruocco), equally committed and sure on behalf of the Protestant state, and determined to see Mary executed.

This is a time of deep civil strife, when “national security” seems paramount, as well as a convenient excuse for advancing momentary interests against the usual restraints of law and custom. At the same time, the actions of rulers are self-consciously squared against public appearances and the fickle, manipulated prejudices and opinions of Elizabeth’s subjects, the people at large.

It all should sound familiar. The present is present everywhere in this production. The sleek minimalist set shrewdly blends bland corporate meeting rooms with the two-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras of a modern, bureaucratic Panopticon. The contemporary costumes include de rigueur flag pins in the men’s lapels and the cast speaks unreservedly in American accents. Moreover, against the stark gravity of the scenic design and Schiller’s lively but heightened language, Jackson’s actors indulge in a fair amount of vernacular humor.

Still, there’s fidelity to the text and its dramatic core. Only once is there a very noticeable bit of updating — an irresistible one — when Burleigh responds to Mary’s accusation that the testimony gathered against her includes physically coerced slanders. “We do not torture,” corrects the spin-savvy Burleigh. “Nobody here was tortured.”

Elizabeth’s loyal minister Shrewsbury (a compellingly impassioned John Mercer) meanwhile argues restrain and the rule of law. “England is not the world,” he cautions his queen. But his eloquence falls on deaf ears. The tide of history moves inexorably in the other direction.

Other memorable performances here include the Scott Coopwood’s dexterous and patently charming take on the dashing but cowardly Leicester, who in getting up close and personal with each royal contender, plays a dangerous and amusingly macho game.

Jackson’s last effort with Shotgun Players, 2009’s Faust: Part 1, engaged another pillar of German Romanticism in a strikingly reimagined staging of Goethe’s masterwork. Both productions demonstrate a bold blending of voices and visions that, while sometimes discordant on the surface (and usually intentionally, productively so) are still in sync underneath. Jackson clearly shares Schiller’s enthusiasm for the opportunities afforded drama by history, an enthusiasm that forgoes strict fidelity to the factual record to offer deeper truths and more visceral connections.

But the political lesson, if there is one, is just this: rule is a matter of style. It’s always geared to the same ends. This is the import of the production’s own style, which at times feels like West Wing: The Obama Years. What we watch — on stage or in D.C. — is the revolving door of personalities bringing their own manner and virtues, such as they are, to the operation of the imperial machine. To offer the insight that the machine has each one of them in its grasp as much as anyone else obfuscates the point that it’s a machine designed to benefit a few at the expense of everyone and everything else making up life on the planet. That’s why it’s hard not to agree with the Sex Pistols when they doubt the very species similarity between the Queen and the rest of us. God save the Queen? “She ain’t no human being.”

MARY STUART

Through Nov. 6, $17–$30 (and pay-what-you-can performances)

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 841-6500

www.shotgunplayers.org

Epic Bush crawl, part one

Andrew Lam

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October 19, 2010

5

ruggy@yelp.com

SUPER EGO Marke B.’s off getting hitched to Hunky Beau, so we asked the raffishly cute Ruggy, senior community manager at Yelp.com, to fill in as nightlife correspondent. Part two comes out Nov. 3.

What does your average Friday night look like? Does it involve catching up with old college friends over a 2007 Chateau Montelena Bordeaux blend? Maybe you’d rather snuggle up next to your boo on an EQ3 chaise longue with the remote in one hand and a Shake Weight in the other.

If you’re anything like me and my ragtag group of degenerate colleagues, nothing quite spells F-U-N like a bar crawl spanning seven different locations in less than five hours, complete with gratuitous heavy petting, nacho cheese Doritos, and warm Miller High Life. Now, what if I told you there was an unheralded bar route in the city that’s chock-full of sticky floors, intoxicated curmudgeons, and more bottom shelf liquor than you can shake a Polaroid at?

The stretch of self-reproach I reference is Bush Street between Stockton and Taylor. But beware — this challenge isn’t for the faint of heart. Being the altruist I am, I decided to document this fantastic, drunken journey on your behalf, to ensure you avoid a colossal case of bottle flu the following morning. You can thank me later.

Tunnel Top (601 Bush): From Union Square, take the stairs north at the entrance to the Stockton Tunnel (after a salacious afternoon romp at the Green Door if you want to up the ante), turn about face, and gallop roughly 10 paces west. Perfect for guest registration on a Bush Street crawl, since the T-Top offers a nifty happy hour with $3 drafts and $2.75 bottled beers as well as a slew of aging hipsters and law school dropouts (a.k.a. real estate brokers) enjoying glasses of Chimay and a hip playlist. Plenty of complicated haircuts at 6:30 p.m., but not a single raccoon tail in sight.

Chelsea Place (641 Bush): If you’re expecting skyline views of Manhattan and metrosexuals out the wazoo, you most certainly have the wrong Chelsea in mind. This is a cozy nook for true alcoholics, where one drink is too many, and 1,000 is never enough. A tiny push through the saloon-style wooden doors grants you access to the Emerald City of unglamorous horizons. One of the few bars in San Francisco that will still let you smoke inside (but the first of many we encountered this Friday night), the immediate rush of second-hand smoke is enough to give you flashbacks to the first time you choked on a Marlboro Red in your junior high bathroom stall. If you’re sensitive to environmental tobacco, you’ll just have to suck it up and enjoy those delightful, toxic fumes.

As is usually the case with these sorts of establishments, the bar was packed with nothing but men over 50 (plus us) cooing over the female Asian staff, who all looked like they were auditioning for a Britney Spears music video. Laissez-faire seems to be in full effect: cigars, graffiti, dice games, whiskey shots out of plastic bottles that just say “whiskey” on the label, cheap beer, snuff pipes, and free bags of Orville Redenbacher. ‘Nuff said.

RJ’s Sports Bar (701 Geary): Korean women behind the bar (it seems to be Bush corridor de rigueur) who speak excellent Spanish and have incredible dance moves (don’t ask me how I know, but this was the biggest surprise of all). Another bar that allows indoor smoking, despite a sticker, in plain sight, that contradicts such actions. A man came in and requested that the bartender fill up his empty Gatorade bottle with Anchor Steam for $5, and without a second thought, that call was answered.

High Tide Lounge (600 Geary): Free food ranging from kimchi, chicken wings, and sushi rolls to stuffed peppers, pad Thai, chow mein, and something that resembled an egg roll but looked more like a snuffed out cigar. I didn’t ask questions. In the midst of our revels, we happened upon a petite woman taking a little catnap in the corner of the bar. Despite sleeping on a cold linoleum floor, she looked quite peaceful. Definitely not dead, though … we checked her pulse.

Rep clock

David Talbot

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October 19, 2010

0

Schedules are for Wed/20–Tues/26 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-10. “Fifth ATA Film and Video Festival: Human Nature,” Thurs, 8; “Lo-Fi Future,” Fri, 8. “PXL This 19,” toy camera film festival, Sat, 8:30. For related events visit www.laughtears.com/PXL-THIS-19.html. “ATA and Alternative Tentactles Present:” •The Widower (1999) and Terminal City Richochet (1990), DVD and CD release double feature, Sun, 7.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. I Am Love (Guadagnino, 2009), Wed, 2, 4:30, 7, 9:20. The Kids Are All Right (Cholodenko, 2010), Thurs, 2:30, 4:45, 7, 9:10. “15th Berlin and Beyond Film Festival,” Oct 22-28. Visit www.berlinbeyond.com for complete schedule and tickets ($10-11.50).

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. 36 (Marchal, 2005), Wed-Thurs, 6:30, 9. Inside Job (Ferguson, 2010), Oct 22-28, call for times. My Dog Tulip (Fierlinger and Fierlinger, 2009), Oct 22-28, call for times.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. The Whale Warrior: Pirate for the Sea (Colby, 2009), Wed, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. “CinemaLit: Apocalypse Noir:” Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Crichton, Dearden, and Hamer, 1945), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:” “1969-79,” Wed, 7:30. “Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro:” Come and Go (2003), Thurs, 7; The Hips of J.W. (1997), Sun, 7. “Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism:” The Bicycle Thief (De Sica, 1948), Fri, 7 and Sat, 6:30; Bitter Rice (De Santis, 1949), Fri, 9. “Shakespeare on Screen:” King Lear (Kozintsev, 1970), Sat, 8:30; Antony and Cleopatra (Heston, 1972), Sun, 4.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Stingray Sam (McAbee, 2009), Wed, 2, 7:15, 9:15. Winter’s Bone (Granik, 2010), Thurs-Sat, 7:15, 9:25 (also Sat, 2). The Girl Who Played With Fire (Alfredson, 2010), Sun, 2, 5, 8 and Mon-Tues, 7:30.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “SF DocFest,” through Oct 28. Program information at www.sfindie.com.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. $5. “San Francisco Cinematheque Presents:” “Private Lives: Beth Custer Ensemble and the Films of Alexander Hammid,” Thurs, 7; My Grandmother (Mikaberidze, 1929), with the Beth Custer Ensemble, Thurs, 9.

VICTORIA THEATER 2961 16th St, SF; www.peacheschrist.com. $20. “The Peaches Christ Experience in 4D:” All About Evil (Grannell, 2010), Thurs-Sun, 8. With the Midnight Mass Players.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10. “Ozu and His Muse: Setsuko Hara,” Late Spring (1949), Wed, 4:30; Early Summer (1954), Wed, 7:15 and Thurs, 4:30; Tokyo Twilight (1947), Thurs, 7:15. “Taiwan Film Days:” Monga (Doze, 2010), Fri, 6:15 and 9:40; Let’s Fall In Love (Wu, 2009), Sat, 1:30 and Sun, 4:10; Seven Days in Heaven (Liu and Wang, 2009), Sat, 4 and Sun, 9:10; Hear Me (Cheng, 2009), Sat, 6:40; Tears (Chen, 2009), Sat, 9:30 ansd Sun, 6:40; No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (Dai, 2009), Sun, 2.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Sing! The Music of Sesame Street,” Thurs, 7:30; Sun, 2. “San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Presents: Tough Guys: Images of Jewish Gangsters in Film:” Straight is the Way (Sloane, 1934), Sun, 2.

Film listings

David Talbot

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October 19, 2010

0

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

SF DOCFEST

The Ninth San Francisco Documentary Film Festival runs through Oct. 28 at the Roxie, 3117 16th, SF. For tickets ($11) and complete schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

Conviction A cross between 2001’s Legally Blonde and 1999’s The Hurricane, Conviction tells the real-life story of Betty Anne Waters, a high school dropout who spent 20 years trying to overturn her brother’s life sentence for murder. As this is clearly a film designated for Oscar season, Hilary Swank plays Betty, delivering another performance that is easy to appreciate, yet hard to enjoy. To her heavy gravity, Sam Rockwell brings a little levity as her brother Kenneth, once again playing a guy you can’t help but like, even if there’s no reason. If Conviction does anything perfectly, it’s casting, almost to a comedic degree, particularly with Clea DuVall and a scenery-devouring Juliette Lewis as Kenneth’s trashy exes. Otherwise, the story fails to convey an appropriate sense of struggle and time, as two decades behind books and bars pass onscreen all too easily. (1:47) (Prendiville)

Douchebag Sam Nussbaum (Andrew Dickler) is an insufferable know-it-all, a clear loser with undeserving confidence and a hideous beard. He’s the sort of obnoxious prat whose appeal can only be explained by his fiancée saying, "he just made me laugh." That he would even have a fiancée as cute and caring as Steph (Marguerite Moreau) requires major suspension of disbelief. If you can go along with that, then accepting the plot of two estranged brothers going on a road trip should be easy. Ben York Jones plays Tom, the quiet younger brother whose patchy facial hair has not yet reached terrifying proportions; he’s been wronged, and whether he can forgive Sam (if an apology ever comes, that is) is the issue that’s bubbling just beneath the surface. Visually flat with an occasionally bouncy soundtrack, Douchebag features meandering, somewhat amusing conversations; it’s best viewed as an illustration of how not to treat people. (1:16) Lumiere. (Prendiville)

Hereafter Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort starts out with an unusually flashy (for him) but effective setpiece: Parisian TV journalist Marie (Cécile De France) is at the end of a beach resort vacation with producer/lover Didier (Thierry Neuvic) when a tsunami hits, turning the market street on which she’s shopping into a rapids of rushing water and crushing debris. Meanwhile, two inseparable young London twins (Frankie and George McLaren), already coping with social service workers who want to take them from their junkie mother (Lyndsey Marshal), get duly separated in a less anticipated, cruel-hand-of-fate manner. And in San Francisco, loner George (Matt Damon) struggles to forget his "curse" — since a childhood near-death incident he’s been able to communicate with the dead — while an insensitive brother (Jay Mohr) insists this "gift" is a surefire moneymaker. What our main protagonists have in common is an unwanted ability, or desperate need, to glimpse the "hereafter." It takes a very long time for Peter Morgan’s script to orchestrate their inevitable, accidental (or is it…??) paths-crossing. You might conjecture that at age 80, Eastwood felt ready to deal with the subject of mortality in a gentler, more mystical fashion than before. Perhaps Morgan wanted a break from his excellent usual docudrama terrain (2009’s The Damned United, 2008’s Frost/Nixon, 2006’s The Queen) by doing something purely, even fancifully fictive. But nothing in the film’s execution (after that startling beginning) indicates the very literal-minded Eastwood feels comfortable with or even interested in this story’s supernatural gist — was he mostly attracted by the opportunity to shoot in three swell cities? While just possibly the screenplay might have worked in other hands (Peter Weir? Werner Herzog?), here it marches listlessly toward increasing implausibility and boredom. The performers do what they can, although in the case of the child actors that’s very little indeed, while Bryce Dallas Howard overacts horribly in a support role. As composer,
Eastwood does what he does — which means blanketing this DOA dud, which so badly needs tension and atmosphere, in the kind of cocktail-lounge noodling best suited for waiting rooms and pre-operative sedation. (2:09) (Harvey)

Inside Job See "Wall Street Hold ‘Em." (2:00) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael.

Paranormal Activity 2 They’re baaaaack. (1:45) California.

ONGOING

Cairo Time (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

*Easy A Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked ’00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. The brainy grandchild of 1930s screwball comedies and the knowing offspring of more recent spoofs of the Clearasil years like Clueless (1995) — with blood ties to the on-point pop of pater familias John Hughes — Easy A doesn’t quite aspire to the grainy, your-so-called-reality of YouTube auteurs, à la The Virginity Hit, though Bert V. Royal’s script is just as steeped in the culture of viral gossip and TMZ-writ-small, as well as the high-low literary and cinematic referents, that ’80s babies-and-up were succored on. Welcome to the postmodern mixed-up world of the girl who gets straight As, a marked contrast to all the bromancin’ going down in other parts of the cineplex: Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is curious enough to venture fully down the rabbit hole of bad-girl schoolyard celebrity after fabricating a story about losing her virginity. Despite the swelling disapproval of Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her virginal Christian fundamentalist crew, Olive’s soon giving pity faux-fucks to all the misfits on campus in exchange for gift cards to big-box stores. Her hilariously staged tryst with classmate Brandon (Dan Byrd), who’s sick of getting beaten up every day because he’s gay, is up there with anything in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). And though Easy A often seems pitched more to adults, like Olive’s wise-cracking parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci), its entertainingly self-aware fiction is still likely to bridge generational divides as much as anything on Facebook. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Enter the Void Gaspar Noé wants to share. Yet after three features, it’s still unclear whether what he’s got on his mind is worth sharing, let alone anywhere near as urgent as his need to share it. Enter the Void, a "psychedelic melodrama," has polarized responses (hypnotized vs. narcotized) since it premiered in preliminary form at Cannes last year. This was Noé’s dream project all along, his big meditation on Life, Sex, and Death. Oscar (first-time actor Nathaniel Brown) is a young American living in Tokyo with kid sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), dealing (and doing) drugs while she dances at a strip club. Caught delivering goods to a friend (whose mother he’s sleeping with), Oscar is killed by cops. The film’s remaining two hours — set up by blunt nods to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which our hero was reading — follow Oscar’s spirit as it floats through past, present, and future, eventually "escaping the circle" of this life’s consciousness via reincarnation. Noé has fingered Kenneth Anger, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and classic 1947 noir Lady in the Lake‘s entirely subjective camera as influences. But you could label rave lighting and black-light posters as equally important. Enter the Void does tamp down the prior films’ racist and homophobic invective, which discomfited mostly because it felt like the filmmaker’s personal ranting. Still, as attempted transcendence of mortal coil, Void ultimately sits and spins on Noé’s terminal literal-mindedness, no matter how many Day-Glo CGI vapors emit from vaginas. (2:17) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Gerrymandering This film is about gerrymandering. Last time the subject came up, you felt sleepy. Filmmaker Jeff Reichert understands this disinterest; he opens the film with a driving beat and ends it with a distorted guitar version of "My Country ‘Tis of Thee," keeping everything moving. Structured around California’s 2008 Proposition 11 race, Gerrymandering quickly explicate the issue for anyone who was too busy watching Prop 8 and Obama. Talking heads appear from the whole spectrum, as the film contends that redrawing districts is an issue that mostly serves politicians and should be a democratic concern. But quirky historical tidbits are central and range from banal ("gerry" is pronounced "gary") to actually interesting (man elected by just a two-vote margin). This is an educational film, but one that knows the limits of the average attention span. At 77 minutes it succeeds where many civics teachers have failed. (1:17) Shattuck. (Prendiville)

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

It’s Kind of a Funny Story Largely self-inflicted scholastic pressures having manifested themselves in an array of symptoms from "stress vomiting" to suicidal ideations, depressive Brooklyn teen Craig (Keir Gilchrist) rides his bicycle to a local hospital and announces he needs help. Expecting to be fussed over a bit and given some nice tranquilizing pill, he’s dismayed instead when the no-nonsense intake psychiatrist (Viola Davis) tells him it’s her obligation to commit him for a minimum five days’ observation. Worse, the facility’s youth psych ward is being renovated, so he’s tossed in with the crazy adults. Other residents are led by comely but self-cutting fellow teen Noelle (Emma Roberts) and mentoring yet self-sabotaging Bobby (Zach Galifianakis). Based on Ned Vizzini’s semi-autobiographical novel, Funny Story is well acted (even or especially by the atypically subdued Galifianakis), its mixed humor and poignancy nicely negotiated by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck in their third feature. But compared to the duo’s prior Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008), this seems conventional and a little soft — hewing dangerously close to that sentimentally twee notion (popularized in 1966’s King of Hearts, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al.) that we’re all "crazy" and lunatics are really the wisest fools of all. Heartwarming life lessons get learned, needless to say. The cuteness climaxes with an "Under Pressure" music video fantasy that belongs in an episode of Glee — not, perhaps, in a movie that begins with a 15-year-old seriously considering jumping from a bridge. (1:51) California, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Jackass 3D How to capture the magic of Jackass: The Movie (2002), after 2006’s Jackass Number Two‘s bitter yuks, desperate striving for kicks, and pained grimaces? So much of Jackass has to do with body abuse: it hybridizes skate vids’ physical derring-do, backyard wrestling’s amateur one-upmanship, and the absurd lengths machismo will take boys to. What to do when the body crumbles and the imagination flags? Jackass 3D finds the remedy in the faux-excitement of 3-D, while thankfully jettisoning much of the sour, been-there tone and desperate striving of Two. Bless Johnny Knoxville and company for lampooning the 3-D medium with all the nose-thumbing gusto they can muster: tossing bowlfuls of dildos at the camera, blowing crap up until the shards rain down like Avatar (2009) jungle spew, and shooting each other with fluorescent-bright paint balls in a rainbow-hued opening that recalls ’70s kindergarten-colored memories and the gay pride flag. The ass in Jackass is foregrounded, big-time, in 3D. The perpetual shit stream — including Steve O’s bungee bounce in an overflowing port-o-potty and the human volcano that spews diarrhea — as well as stunts like Lamborghini dental surgery and the quaffing of writer Preston Lacy’s sweat will drive folks who used to frequent the carnival freak show to the cineplex, not the micro-cameos by aiders and abettors like co-producer Spike Jonze (his 2009 Where the Wild Things Are doesn’t seem so far afield from this Dickhouse production), Corin Tucker spouse Lance Bangs (who vomits on his own camera), the Margera parentals, and Rip Taylor. The inclusion of Taylor, though, tells you exactly where the boys are coming from, laughing at their own OTT antics and scattering debris like confetti along the way. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

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

Last Train Home In disaster movies, there’s a familiar scene: panicked throngs press against barriers, crushing one another, pleading "I have to get through!" to impassive guards. Watching the documentary Last Train Home, you realize an over-dramatic Hollywood cliché is a depressing reality in other parts of the world, as workers in China annually endure massive crowds to get home for New Year’s. Filmmaker Lixin Fan focuses on one couple among the 130 million taking part in the world’s largest migration. Their sacrifice (being away from their children for work) is called into question when their daughter runs away to the city to sew jeans and party. By the producers of 2007’s equally cinematic Up the Yangtze, this doc unfolds like a scripted film, until the family’s conflict shatters the fourth wall, and you’re reminded that people actually have to endure intense hardships so that we can have cheap pants with 40-inch waists. (1:27) Shattuck. (Prendiville)

*Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole Owl fever is everywhere — from the megahit Webcam trained on Molly the Barn Owl in San Marcos to the omnipresent ’70s-flavored owl necklaces designed by Real Housewife kook Kelly Bensimon. Animated fantasy Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is yet another sign that the fascination hasn’t faded yet. Less sophisticated than Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and more straight-faced than this year’s Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, this animated talking-animal epic displays director Zach Snyder in family-friendly fantasy mode. While venturing out of the safety of their nest and attempting to test their wings, youthful barn owlet Soren (Jim Sturgess) and competitive brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) are captured by the hench-owls of Nyra (Helen Mirren) and Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton), two Aryan Nation-esque critters who style themselves as the Pure Ones. They’re bent on imposing a strict heirarchy on the owl kingdom, subjugating the "lesser" birds, and destroying a mythical crew of warrior owls called the Guardians. And thanks to Legend of the Guardians‘ cunning detail and solid 3-D effects, that world of good vs. evil takes on a breadth and depth that both children and adults can probably fly with. Though the owls’ eyes can seem a bit too cartoonishly, and wildly unrealistically, expressive, the director who made 300 (2006) and Watchman (2009) and creative team Animal Logic still can’t resist giving the kids a little gritty kick with bloodless yet visceral bird battle scenes, and those nuggets of mouse parts that the cute li’l owlets puke up. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Let Me In In 2008, chilly Swedish import Let the Right One In offered an alternative, and an antidote, to the first Twilight movie’s sparkly vampire fantasy. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own book for director Tomas Alfredson, and the tale — about a bullied, neglected 12-year-old boy who befriends the seemingly same-aged, mysterious new girl in his apartment complex, only to discover her monstrous secret — became a favorite among critics and genre fans unafraid of foreign flicks. Just two years later, writer-director Matt Reeves (whose Cloverfield was also a 2008 release) offers his own take on Lindqvist’s story, with Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year’s The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) taking the leads, and Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas, and current Mad Men scene-stealer Cara Buono playing the peripheral adults. Reeves’ version is just fine — he shifts the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains, and Americanizes the original’s 80s setting (Reagan clips, new wave radio hits) — but doesn’t bring enough new to the table to justify remaking what was already a pretty fantastic film. Still, horror fans who haven’t seen the original, or who can’t be bothered to read subtitles, will no doubt appreciate this atmospheric spin on the age-old shared belief that growing up really sucks. For my interview with Reeves, including his explanation of why he chose to do a remake of a film he greatly admired, check out www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Life as We Know It (1:52) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

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

My Dog Tulip "Unable to love each other," J.R. Ackerley observes at the beginning of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip, "the English turn naturally to dogs." So it would seem from this animated adaptation of the British literary figure’s 1956 memoir, an account of 16 years’ cohabitation with and devotion to an adopted German shepherd distinguished mainly, it seems, by various deficits of behavior and temperament. Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer) narrates from the vantage point of a lonely middle age in which he has largely set aside the "dream of finding the Ideal Friend" with whom to share his life (depicted here as a scribbled series of hypothetical male and female figures, though Ackerley was rather openly gay). He comes to find this wished-for helpmeet in an unruly canine who destroys the drapery, alarms acquaintances, terrifies passersby, and generally turns Ackerley’s social calendar into a grid of empty squares. No matter, though, as human connection is depicted here as something of a lost cause; instead Ackerley busies himself with projects like finding Tulip a suitable "husband" so that she might know the joys of sexual intimacy and motherhood. This and other household adventures are recounted in somewhat graphic detail, and depicted by the filmmakers in a playful mix of animation styles that cleverly distinguish between straightforward narrative, fantastical musings, and faded recollection. The latter tactics are visually captivating, though the patchy narrative leaves both man and dog feeling somewhat sketchy and unknowable. (1:22) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Rapoport)

My Soul to Take (1:46) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Never Let Me Go The time is not so long ago, and the atmosphere is of a rural England that resists change. So it takes a while for us to realize that this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed book (by fellow novelist Alex Garland) takes place in an alternative recent past in which society has indeed changed in ways that are few, yet enormous. Raised at what appears to be a familiar if slightly peculiar English boarding school, the students of Hailsham are given limited but highly specific education preparing them for an adulthood of service. A short adulthood, that is, for they are clones grown from "originals," considered not quite human, their purpose being eventual willing harvest for organs by a populace whom medical science breakthroughs can now allow extraordinarily long lifespans. Placidly preparing for that future sacrifice are best friends Ruth (Keira Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the latter such a born accommodator that she doesn’t utter a peep of protest when Ruth grabs Tommy as her boyfriend — destroying all Kathy’s hopes and probably dimming Tommy’s somewhat as well. Directed by Mark Romanek (2002’s One Hour Photo), Never Let Me Go spans a couple of decades, but its aura of mournful melancholy never wavers. The results are well cast, handsomely outfitted (Rachel Portman contributes a plaintive string score), tasteful, and just a little bit more monotonous and less touching than you might hope. Not particularly plot-driven, this is a good film that’s also another illustration (like such recent examples as 2009’s The Road and 2008’s Revolutionary Road) of how sometimes no amount of intelligent effort can make a movie achieve everything that some literature can. (1:43) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Nowhere Boy Music biopics are hit-or-miss — and generally speaking, they’re the latter. Nowhere Boy is one of those rare exceptions because it limits its scope to John Lennon’s formative years. The Beatles don’t need an origin story, and we don’t get one. Instead, the film offers a look at a lesser-known period in John’s life, specifically his fraught relationships with Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas), the aunt who raised him, and Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), the mother who left him behind. Fresh off his breakout role in Kick-Ass, Aaron Johnson delivers another strong performance, capturing Lennon’s ever-shifting moods and effortless charm. Nowhere Boy doesn’t neglect the elephant in the room: the Beatles, though never named, are a constant presence, with John meeting Paul and George in his quest to form a rock band. Knowing the success they will soon encounter adds another layer to the film, but it never detracts from its well-earned emotional resonance. Fair warning to Beatles fans: you’ll never listen to the song "Julia" the same way again. (1:37) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Red Boomers — and rapidly aging Gen-Xers — rejoice: you’re still a force to be reckoned with, even as the hairline recedes and the paunch descends. The sleeker Hollywood companion to Michael Caine’s recent turn as a killer pensioner "Dirty Harry" in 2009’s Harry Brown, Red (based on a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner) turns the world of black ops, convert assassinations, and the government-approved killers that make it all happen — and happen to survive long enough to retire into humdrum civilian life — into the stuff of action comedy. Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) isn’t quite ready to go quietly into the good night: he’s restless, bored, and lonely enough to strike up a telephone flirtation with Sarah, the woman charged with issuing his pension checks. Luckily she’s Mary-Louise Parker, applying the wide-eyed and game yet sarcastic and knowing qualities she brings to Weeds to the current "situation": an assassination plot against Frank via the archetypal "Company" man (Karl Urban). The thrown-together couple is swiftly tracked from city to city while Frank rounds up the old gang, namely the very charismatic and watchable Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. Half the fun here, evident in the TV teasers, is watching Mirren quickly switch from Martha Stewart-like flower arranging to the steely application of machine gun fire, in a full-tilt formalwear. Consider Red the action-dappled, lightly entertaining wish fulfillment of so many oldsters, who have found themselves still toiling for a paycheck at time when they hoped to retire, frustrated and feeling betrayed by the so-called system and wishing they could also take it out on the proper baddies with seriously effective firepower. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Secretariat In this biopic of one of the most-celebrated horses in U.S. history, Denver housewife and mother of four Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) returns to the Kentucky horse-breeding farm where she grew up, drawn to the project of reviving the ailing business. She pins her hopes on an unborn foal of questionable marketability, who she comes to believe is destined for greatness. Secretariat — or Big Red, as he’s known to his friends — is raised in the light of this belief by a small, reverent circle including his trainer (John Malkovich), his jockey (professional rider Otto Thorwarth), his groom (True Blood‘s Nelsan Ellis), and the farm’s longtime secretary (Margo Martindale), and he goes on to attain the status of a national folk hero. Director Randall Wallace has crafted an appropriately epic tale — and heavily salted the film with messages about unswerving faith and determination and hope and glory, mostly delivered in ringing, overwrought tones by Lane (which undercuts the pleasure of seeing her character quietly pursue a larger setting than the domestic scene she inhabits at Secretariat‘s outset). But somehow it’s harder to poke fun when the hero of the story is a horse, especially one of such majestic stature and jaw-dropping prowess. Each time Secretariat goes surging around the oval, in one of the film’s white-knuckle race sequences, the clichés fly and then fall away like dirt on the track. (1:56) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Social Network David Fincher’s The Social Network is a gripping and entertaining account of how Facebook came to take over the known social-networking universe. In this version of events — scripted by Aaron Sorkin and based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, in turn based substantially on interviews with FB cofounder Eduardo Saverin, with input from Mark Zuckerberg icily absent — a girlfriend’s dumping of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a crisp evening in 2003 is the impetus in his headlong quest for a "big idea." The film is structured around the conference-room depositions for two separate lawsuits, brought against Zuckerberg by Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and by fellow Harvard entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) for crimes involving intellectual property and vast scads of retributive money. Unless Zuckerberg decides to post it on Facebook (which he probably shouldn’t, given the nondisclosure vows that capped off the first round of lawsuits), we’ll never know what truly motivated him and how badly he screwed over his friends and fellow students. But Fincher and Sorkin have crafted a compelling, absorbing, and occasionally poignant tale of how it could have happened. (2:00) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Stone Stone is the worst kind of bad movie: trash that takes itself seriously. The film, in which Edward Norton adopts an absurd Detroit street kid accent, has no idea that it’s ridiculous. Which is a pity, because it almost has camp appeal. Norton plays a convict, the titular Stone, who has to convince parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) that he’s reformed. Meanwhile, Stone urges his kooky wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to seduce Jack in order to gain leverage. With the talent involved, you’d expect something a lot better than what Stone is — an excuse for Norton and De Niro to exchange vulgar, sexually-charged banter, and for Jovovich and De Niro to engage in awkwardly explicit love scenes. There’s probably a moral buried somewhere here, but Stone‘s aggressively earnest tone is more laughable than affecting. In the end, it’s just not a movie that makes you think so much as a, "What were they thinking?" experience. (1:45) Bridge. (Peitzman)

*Tamara Drewe Applying the lightest hand where Thomas Hardy waxed heavily symbolic, Tamara Drewe finds director Stephen Frears in an airily bucolic, comedic mood, working with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel, which was, in turn, inspired by Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Here, country life clashes with city rascals in a hilariously on-point vaguely meta-ish satire that would likely offend ye olde moralizer Hardy. The titular heroine (Gemma Arterton) has returned to the village where she grew up — riper, more voluptuous, and, thanks to a nose job, a Bathsheba-style hottie — to deal with her late mother’s country manse. The old stomping grounds teem with amusing characters: neighboring mystery novelist-cum-lecher Nicholas (Roger Allam) and long-suffering spouse Beth (Tamsin Greig) run a writers retreat populated by creatively constipated scribblers; Tamara’s childhood love Andy (Luke Evans) is pulling himself up by his bootstraps after hard times; and two naughty, low-brow schoolgirls Casey (Charlotte Christie) and Jody (Jessica Barden) keep things interesting with romantic fantasies of their own. Frears has the most fun with his sharp lampoon of writerly pretensions — one wishes he continued to train his gaze on their huffy, stuffy, Chintz-ruffled follies, as the affairs ensue, a cheesy rock star rumbles through the hamlet, and both illumination and scandal comes to pass. (1:51) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom. (2:10) California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Undertow This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. (1:40) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Waiting for "Superman" As was the case with Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, his latest documentary has an active internet campaign: pledge to see Waiting for "Superman." The films seem like apples and oranges at first glance — Truth warned about the extinction of our species, the end of life as we know it, while "Superman" takes on the public education system. But the picture Guggenheim paints in the latter is a bleak one: our schools are failing America’s youth. In clear, relatable words, he reveals the causes of this national epidemic lack of funding, misguided unions, no accountability. Like Truth, "Superman" is a smart and inspiring call to arms. Guggenheim’s wisest choice was following a group of young schoolchildren who want nothing more than to get a good education. Their struggle provides a necessary contrast to the bureaucracy. In showing the problem’s human face, the film offers further proof — as if we needed more—that something must be done to fix a broken system. For supplemental interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:51) California, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps This seems just the moment for a sequel to Oliver Stone’s indictment-celebration of financial-sector yuppies: one again, all eyes are focused on Wall Street’s fluctuating fortunes and sleazy insider dealings. Oscar winner Michael Douglas reprises his role as the enjoyably sinister Gordon Gekko, but it’s kinda like watching Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter in anything post-Silence of the Lambs (1991), with a celebrated character floundering amid a script that doesn’t measure up to what came before. Gekko’s not even the main focus here, with Shia LaBeouf stepping up as Jake, a whiz kid who’s already made millions (unlike Charlie Sheen’s character in the first film, whose financial aspirations allowed him to be manipulated by the shellac-haired GG). See, Jake’s engaged to Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan, fretting elegantly); they’ve already got a sweet loft and enough dough to kick hundreds of thousands over to Jake’s real estate-agent mom (a superfluous Susan Sarandon). Anyway, the main conflict involves evil banker Josh Brolin taking down Jake’s firm and driving his boss to suicide; meanwhile, Jake is a pure-hearted idealist lured into wrongdoing only to save his pet cause, alternative energy. Yeah, really. Any time there’s a financial concept to be explained, Stone revs up animated graphs and numbers, vainly attempting to create thrills from the inherently boring. And in case you were wondering, the once and future Bud Fox does indeed make a cameo, his winking, leathery visage a sad reminder that he was once a promising film actor before choosing a path of serial marriage and sitcom megabucks. (2:13) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen’s latest, once again set in tony London, has all the moving parts for a satisfying farce of self-sabotage, but the writer-director never gets past touching up his character sketches — which are far from interesting in themselves. There is Helena (Gemma Jones), elderly and recently divorced; she wants something stronger than tea and a psychic to rescue her from reality. Her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) either wants a child or her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). She gets migraines and has an eye for art, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, hubby Roy (Josh Brolin) eyes the available young body across the way from his study (Freida Pinto) when he’s not grousing about his fledgling career as a novelist. Helena’s ex Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is off in his own corner of the movie, taking up with a dopey prostitute (Lucy Punch) who, unlike his wife, is not old. There are sparks of life when these fine actors are allowed to play off one another — Jones and Brolin, in particular, work up a nicely caustic repartee — but a chirpy narrator belies the wobbly narrative construct. And unlike 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, the ethnically marked objects of desire don’t get any good lines. Banderas as an art dealer is paint-by-numbers fantasy, while Pinto’s Dia is embarrassingly elaborated: always in red, a musicology PhD student who wants to be someone’s muse, she responds favorably to Roy’s slovenly flirtations, and, the kicker, has a father who translates Eastern European authors. Jones’ spiritualist is the only one who gets a Hollywood ending, and while I suppose that’s meant ironically, there’s plenty of soft-headedness to go around. (1:38) Albany, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness. (Goldberg)

Stage listings

David Talbot

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October 19, 2010

0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Dracula’s School for Vampires Young Performers Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg C, Third Floor, Room 300; 346-5550, www.ypt.org. $7-10. Opens Sat/23, 1pm. Runs Sat, 1 pm; Sun, 1 and 3:30pm. Through Nov 14. Young Performers Theatre presents a Dracula comedy by Dr. Leonard Wolf.

BAY AREA

Dracula Center REPertory Company, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerrep.org. $36-42. Previews Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm; Sun/24, 2:30pm. Opens Tues/26, 7:30 pm. Runs Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2:30pm (also Nov 20, 8pm). Through Nov 20. Eugene Brancoveanu stars as the Count in a production directed by Michael Butler.

The Great Game: Afghanistan Roda Theatre, 201 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $17-73. Call for times. Through Nov 7. Berkeley Rep presents the West Coast premiere of a three-part show about Afghanistan.

Winter’s Tale Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Opens Fri/22, 8pm. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Oct 31, Nov, 7, and Nov 14, 2pm; Nov 18, 8pm). Through Nov 20. Actor’s Ensemble of Berkeley presents the rarely-performed Shakespeare play.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Phoenix Theatre, Stage 2, 414 Mason; 433-1235, www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com. $20-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/23. A one-woman musical starring Karen Hirst, with book and music by Anne Doherty.

Anita Bryant Died For Your Sins New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sun/24. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a show by Brian Christopher Williams.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Fri/22. Actors Theatre presents Tennessee Williams’ sultry, sweltering tale of a Mississippi family, directed by Keith Phillips.

Christian Cagigal’s Obscura: A Magic Show EXIT Cafe, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 18. Magician Christian Cagigal presents a mix of magic, fairy tales, and dark fables.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm (also Sat/16, 1pm). Through Sat/ 24. Although a little slow and awkward at the start, not long into 42nd Street Moon’s staging of Stephen Sondheim classic and classical (being inspired by the farces of Plautus) musical comedy (with book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart) you feel it’s making up in enthusiasm and grit what it lacks in Broadway-sized budgets. It helps that artistic director Greg MacKellan has assembled an able cast, especially in the principal roles. It can’t be easy to follow in the cavorting footsteps of Zero Mostel and Nathan Lane, but Megan Cavanagh has absolutely no trouble wooing the audience in the central role of Pseudolus, the clever slave bargaining and scheming for his freedom. Strong performances come too from Michael Rhone as fellow slave Hysterium (a name that speaks for itself), Bob Greene as horny paterfamilias Senex, and Rob Hatzenbeller as the self-loving captain Miles Gloriosus. Nice costuming (by Louise Jarmilowicz), a hint of Roman architecture (courtesy of set designer Jon Wai-keung Lowe), generally spiffy choreography (by Tom Segal) and jaunty musical accompaniment from musical director Dave Dobrusky and horn player Nick Di Scala all add lift to a gradual charmer of a show. (Avila)

Futurestyle ’79 Off-Market Theater, Studio 250, 965 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Wed, 8pm. Through Oct 27. A fully improvised episodic comedy played against the backdrop of SF in 1979.

Habibi Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. $15-25. Thurs-Sun, 8pm. Through Nov 7. Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo present the world premiere of a play by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh.

*Hamlet Alcatraz Island; 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. By donation. Sat-Sun, times vary. Through Nov 21. Outside of an actual castle, it would hard to say what could serve as a more appropriate stand-in for Kronborg castle of Helsingør—also known as Elsinore—than the isolated fortress of Alcatraz Island, where WE Players are presenting Hamlet in all its tragic majesty. As audience members tramp along stony paths and through prison corridors from one scene to the next, the brooding tension the site alone creates is palpable, and the very walls impart a sense of character, as opposed to window-dressing. Deftly leaping around rubble and rock, a hardy troupe of thespians and musicians execute the three-hour production with neat precision, guiding the audience to parts of the island and prison edifice that aren’t usually part of the standard Alcatraz tour package. Incorporating movement, mime, live music, and carefully-engineered use of space, the Players turn Alcatraz into Denmark, as their physical bodies meld into Alcatraz. Casting actress Andrus Nichols as the discontent prince of Denmark is an incongruity that works, her passions’ sharp as her swordplay, the close-knit family unit of Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius are emphatically human (Benjamin Stowe, Misti Boettiger, Jack Halton), and Scott D. Phillips plays the appropriately militaristic and ego-driven Claudius with a cold steel edge. (Gluckstern)

Last Days of Judas Iscariot Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.CustomMade.org. $10-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 30. Custom Made Theatre Company presents the 2005 play by New York’s Stephen Adly Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the A Train), which places purgatorial Judas (Kristoffer Alberto Barrera) on trial to determine his deserved fate for dropping a dime on Jesus and all that jazz. Flamboyant, sycophantic and horny prosecutor El-Fayoumy (Ben Ortega) and defense attorney Loretta (Amelia Avila) call between them a series of brow-raising witnesses—including Mother Teresa (Brandy Leggett), Sigmund Freud (Catz Forsman), and Satan (Richard Wenzel)—as Judas (seated on the upper tier of Sarah Phykitt’s suitably imposing split-level set) stares stoically in relative silence or appears in a series of childhood flashbacks. Characteristically funny and streetwise, as well as versed in the Catholic rigmarole as filtered through a NYC-boroughs sensibility, Guirgis’s play is also unusually tedious in its jokey, poky unfolding since—offering not much more than a cipher in the largely mute Iscariot—the proceedings lack a strong sense of dramatic stakes. It feels more like a revue than a play, or like an unnecessarily long-winded excuse for the final, well-turned concluding monologue by a heretofore marginal character (a speech delivered with admirable understatement by director Brian Katz). (Avila)

Love Song Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Sat/23. An offbeat comedy by John Kolvenbach, directed by Loretta Janca.

Mary Stuart The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $15-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. (also Wed/20, Oct 27, Nov 3; 7pm). Through Nov 7. Shotgun Players presents Friedrich Schiller’s historical drama, directed by Mark Jackson.

Nina and the Monsters Shotwell Studios, 3252A 19th; 509-8656, 509-8656. $10-15. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/24, 2pm). Ninjaz of Drama with Footloose present a modern-day fairy tale.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (8008) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 19. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

Proof Exit Stage Left Theatre, 156 Eddy; www.belljartheatre.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 30. Bell Jar Theatre presents David Auburn’s award-winning play.

*The Real Americans The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 6. The fifth extension of Dan Hoyle’s acclaimed show, directed by Charlie Varon.

*Scapin American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary; 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-90. Tues-Sun, times vary. Through Sat/23. Bill Irwin, the innovative former Pickle Family clown and neo-vaudevillian turned Broadway star, makes a San Francisco return at the helm—and in the title role—of American Conservatory Theater’s production of Moliere’s classic farce. It’s an excuse for some arch meta-theatrical high jinx as well as expert clowning, a love fest really, with many fine moments amid a general font of fun whose heady purity seems like it should fall under some FDA regulation or other—clearly, somebody has paid someone to look the other way, and for once the corruption is unreservedly welcome. Joining the fun is Irwin’s old comrade-in-arms and, here, sacks, Geoff Hoyle, as miserly and dyspeptic daddy Geronte. Other ACT regulars and veterans flesh out a winning cast, among them the ever versatile and inimitable Gregory Wallace as Octave, a flouncing Steven Anthony Jones as put-out patriarch Argante, René Augesen as boisterously unlikely “virgin” Zerbinette, and a wonderfully adept and scene-stealing Judd Williford in the role of Scapin sidekick Sylvestre. As for Irwin, his comedic sensibility shows itself scrupulously apt and timeless at once, and his sure, lithesome performance intoxicating and age-defying. As a director, moreover, he gives as generously to each of his fellow performers as he does to his adoring, lovingly tousled audience. (Avila)

The Shining: Live The Dark Room, 2263 Mission; 401-7891, www.darkroomsf.com. $7-10. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/23. The Dark Room becomes the Overlook Hotel in this stage production of the horror classic.

*SHIToberfest Off-Market Theaters, 965 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 30. This special October run of PianoFight’s bowel-loosening comedy series, the S.H.I.T. Show (for acronym fans, that’s the Stop Hating Imagination Time Show), revolves dizzyingly around the subject of beer, Germans and, perhaps less explicably, flatulent dolphins, among much else in the wide open seas of poor taste. Is it hilarious? It is. And you don’t even need to smuggle in a forty to make it so, though it certainly doesn’t hurt. Fine comic acting throughout a charismatic cast (including writer-director-producers Alex Boyd, Zach Cahn, Jed Goldstein, Ray Hobbs, Devin McNulty, Evan Winchester and Duncan Wold, with help from Nicole Hammersla, Gabrielle Patacsil, Rob Ready, Derricka Smith, Andy Strong, Jacque Vavroch and Dan Williams) combines here with generally solid to exceptional sketch work, video and song. Add in a permeating spirit of revelry, debauchery and irreverence and the evening becomes a diversion of the first order, culminating in an utterly sacrilicious sketch about a bunch of toasted beer-brewing monks treated to a papal visit—one of the best venial sins for your buck. When it comes to Octoberfesting this year, “Bavaria” is just S.H.I.T.–faced for Bay Area. (Avila)

Shocktoberfest!! 2010: Kiss of Blood Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm (Thurs/21, Fri/22, Oct 28, Oct 29, Oct 30, and Oct 31 include performances of The Forsaken Laboratory by the Brazilian Grand Guignol group Vigor Mortis). Through Nov 19. Thrillpeddlers’ seasonal slice of eyeball is comprised of three playlets variously splattered with platelets, all directed by Russell Blackwood and bridged by a rousing burst of bawdy song from the full cast. Rob Keefe’s Lips of the Damned (after La Veuve by Eugene Heros and Leon Abric) takes place in a rat-infested museum of atrocities just before the fumigating starts, as an adulterous couple—comprised of a kinky married lady (a vivacious Kara Emry) and a naïve hunk from the loading dock (Daniel Bakken)—get their kicks around the guillotine display, and their comeuppance from the jilted proprietor (Flynn DeMarco). Keefe’s delightfully off-the-wall if also somewhat off-kilter Empress of Colma posits three druggy queens in grandma’s basement, where they practice and primp for their chance at drag greatness, and where newly crowned Crystal (a gloriously beaming Blackwood) lords it over resentful and suspicious first-runner-up Patty Himst (Eric Tyson Wertz) and obliviously cheerful, non-sequiturial Sunny (Birdie-Bob Watt). When fag hag Marcie (Emry) arrives with a little sodium pentothal snatched from dental school, the truth will out every tiny closeted secret, and at least one big hairy one. Kiss of Blood, the 1929 Grand Guignol classic, wraps things up with botched brain surgery and a nicely mysterious tale of a haunted and agonized man (Wertz) desperate to have Paris’s preeminent surgeon (DeMarco) cut off the seemingly normal finger driving him into paroxysms of pain and panic. Well-acted in the preposterously melodramatic style of the gory genre, the play (among one or two other things) comes off in a most satisfying fashion. (Avila)

Sunset Limited SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $40-50. Tues-Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Nov 6. This 2006 play by Cormac McCarthy exhibits some of the best and worst of the celebrated author, but significantly more of the latter. It sets an aging white academic and failed suicide (Charles Dean) in a room with his rescuer and would-be savior, a poor black social worker (Carl Lumbly), who has just snatched him from a railway platform ahead of a tête-à-tête with a train called the Sunset Limited. Both characters remain nameless, emphasizing the abstract pseudo-Socratic dimensions attendant on the dialogue-driven realism here (staged with a knowing wink in director Bill English’s scenic design, a partially walled wood-framed shack with see-through slits between the thin horizontal planking). The black man is a born-again Christian and ex-con convinced Jesus has just given him a major assignment. His dogmatic certainty is matched by the white man’s nihilism and despair. “I believe in the primacy of the intellect,” the miserable prof tells his host, who’s locked the door on his self-destructive guest in an effort to buy time to change his mind. Leaving aside the historically clichéd, problematic and baggage-heavy dynamic of a poor black American devoted to the welfare of a rich white one, neither man moves from his respective position one inch (at least until perhaps and partially at the very end), which constrains the dramatic development. Moreover, both sides argue feebly, mainly by gainsaying whatever it is the other one says, making this not a great intellectual debate either. SF Playhouse’s production sets two fine actors at this heavy-handed twofer, but little can be done to redeem so static and arid an exercise. (Avila)

Susie Butler Sings the Sarah Vaughan Songbook Exit Theater Cafe, 156 Eddy; (510) 860-0997, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Sat, 8:30pm. Through Nov 20. Local actress and singer Susie Butler takes on the Sassy songbook.

Zombie Town Stage Werx Theatre, 533 Sutter; www.stagewerx.org. (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $24. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Oct 31, 5pm). Through Oct 31. Catharsis Theatre Collective presents a documentary play about zombie attacks in Texas.

BAY AREA

*Compulsion Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-85. Dates and times vary. Through Oct 31. Director Oscar Eustis of New York’s Public Theater marks a Bay Area return with an imaginatively layered staging of Rinne Groff’s stimulating new play. Compulsion locates the momentous yet dauntingly complex cultural-political outcomes of the Holocaust in the career of a provocative Jewish American character, Sid Silver, driven by real horror, sometimes-specious paranoia, and unbounded ego in his battle for control over the staging of Anne Frank’s Diary. A commandingly intense and fascinatingly nuanced Mandy Patinkin plays the brash, litigious Silver, based on real-life writer Meyer Levin, a best-selling author who obsessively pursued rights to stage his own version of Anne Frank’s story. The forces competing for ownership of, and identification with, Anne Frank and her hugely influential diary extend far beyond her father Otto, Silver, or the diary’s publishers at Doubleday (represented here by a smooth Matte Osian in a variety of parts; and a vital Hannah Cabell, who doubles as Silver’s increasingly alarmed and alienated French wife). But the power of Groff’s play lies in grounding the deeply convoluted and compromised history of that text and, by extension, the memory and meanings of the Holocaust itself, in a small set of forceful characters—augmented by astute use of marionettes (designed by Matt Acheson) and the words of Anne Frank herself (partially projected in Jeff Sugg’s impressive video design). The productive dramatic tension doesn’t let up, even after the seeming grace of the last-line, which relieves Silver of worldly burdens but leaves us brooding on their shifting meanings and ends. (Avila)

*East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Dates and times vary. Through Nov 21. Don Reed’s solo play, making its Oakland debut after an acclaimed New York run, is truly a welcome homecoming twice over. (Avila)

*Loveland The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-50. Fri, 7pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 13. Ann Randolph’s acclaimed one-woman comic show about grief returns for its sixth sold-out extension.

Superior Donuts TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-67. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Oct 31. This latest from Tracy Letts (August: Osage County, Killer Joe) starts out as a delicious treat but a hollowness in the center of it all leaves one less than fully satisfied. Director Leslie Martinson’s cast shines, however, as the action unfolds in crisp, engaging scenes set in the titular run-down donut shop in Chicago’s slowly gentrifying Uptown neighborhood. Owner-operator Arthur Przybyszewski (Howard Swain) is an aging baby boomer and second-generation Polish immigrant who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft and returned years later to take over his parents shop, alienated and hesitant, though well liked by his regulars. At least most: As the play opens his shop has been vandalized. Two beat cops are on the scene, James (Michael J. Asberry) and Randy (Julia Brothers), the latter eventually displaying a visible crush on an oblivious, then discombobulated Arthur. When an impressive young African American man named Franco (Lance Gardner) comes in and charms his way into a job, Arthur gradually finds himself drawn out of his shell and faced with the challenge of valuing another human being more than his own hide—a challenge underscored by Arthur’s several monologues, in which his personal history comes to the fore. The play feels pat and a little lazy-sentimental in the end, but there’s no denying the entertainment afforded here, especially by the magnetic pairing of leads Swain and Gardner. (Avila)

Music listings

David Talbot

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October 19, 2010

0

Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Aerosols, Montra, Skystone Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Pryor Baird and the Deacons Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Blood and Sunshine, Callow, Shauna Regan Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $6.

Deer Tick, J. Roddy Walston and the Business Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $17.

Ennen Enne, Winebirds, Zoo Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Four Year Strong, Wonder Years, American Fangs Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Hedley, Gold Motel, Chairman Wow Café Du Nord. 8pm, $12.

Hesta Prynn, Kenan Bell, 40Love Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Scout Niblett, Esben and the Witch, Excuses for Skipping Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Suicidal Tendences, (hed)p.e. Fillmore. 8pm, $26.50.

UK Subs, Total Chaos, Sore Thumbs, Final Summation Thee Parkside. 8pm, $10-12.

Vaselines, Dum Dum Girls Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $23.

Hawksley Workman, Joe Firstman, Aimee Francis, Trey Lockerbie Hotel Utah. 7:30pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Breezin Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Amy A and Brynnie Mac spinning yacht rock od smooth 70s.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Ancestors, Pins of Light, Fucking Wrath Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Atreyu, Bless the Fall, Chiodos, Architects, Endless Hallway Regency Ballroom. 6:30pm, $23.

Bell X1 Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $18.

Company Car, Pebble Theory, Farewell Typewriter El Rio. 9pm, $6.

Stan Erhart with Garth Webber Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Harry and the Hitmen, Hypnotist Collectors, Jugtown Pirates Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Dave Mason Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $36.

Joey McIntyre, Emanuel Kiriakou Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $34.

Mischka, White Buffalo, Chris Velan Independent. 8pm, $15.

Old Man Markley, Whisky Richards, West Nile Ramblers Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Recoil: A Strange Hour, Alan Wilder and Paul Kendall, Architect, Conjure One Mezzanine. 8pm, $25.

*Saviours, Kowloon Walled City Thee Parkside. 9pm, free.

Scrams, Airfix Kits, Dirty Cupcakes, Bad Backs Knockout. 9:30pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz and guest Choco Mann spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

John Digweed Ruby Skye. 9pm, $30.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $2. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Nightvision Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; (415) 777-1077. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Danny Daze, Franky Boissy, and more spinning house, electro, hip hop, funk, and more.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

FRIDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Born Ruffians, Meligrove Band Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Fleeting Trance, Wish Inflicted, Jeremy Serwer Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Jon B. Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $25.

Lyrics Born, Chali 2na, Rakaa Independent. 9pm, $25.

Never Shout Never, Maine, I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business, Carter Hulsey Warfield. 6:30pm, $20.

Jack O and the Tearjerkers, Roy Loney, East Bay Grease, Wrong Words, Scrams Thee Parkside. 8:30pm, $10. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Mississippi Man, Silent Comedy, Michael Beach Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Pierced Arrows, Bare Wires, Burnt Ones Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $12.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Starfucker, Octopus Project, Strength Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $14.

Stone Foxes, Soft White Sixties, Real Nasty Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

*Yusef Lateef Grace Cathedral, 1100 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-50.

Gretchen Parlato Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $30.

Marlena Teich Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Boca do Rio Coda. 10pm, $10.

Marina Lavalle Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 8pm, $22.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrobeat Lab Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Featuring a live performance by ALBINO! with DJs Señor Oz and guests.

Alcoholocaust Presents Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free. DJ What’s His Fuck spins old-school punk rock and other gems.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Duniya Dancehall Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; (415) 920-0577. 10pm, $10. With live performances by Duniya Drum and Dance Co. and DJs dub Snakr and Juan Data spinning bhangra, bollywood, dancehall, African, and more.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

House of Voodoo Medici Lounge, 299 9th St., SF; (415) 501-9162. 9pm, $5. With DJ Purgatory and Stiletto spinning goth, industrial, deathrock, glam, darkwave, and eighties.

Psychedelic Radio Club Six. 9pm, $7. With DJs Kial, Tom No Thing, Megalodon, and Zapruderpedro spinning dubstep, reggae, and electro.

Queens are Wild Mezzanine. 8pm, $25-$500. A benefit casino night costume party with host Juanita More and DJs Gemini Disco.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa "Samoa Boy" spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Scientist with Roots Radics Rock-it Room. 9pm, $17.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Soul in the Machine DNA Lounge. 8pm, $20. Techno and industrial with Dyloot, Taj, and more.

$3 Dance Party Knockout. 10pm, $3. Eclectic tunes with DJs Paul Paul, dX the Funky Gran Paw, and Deadbeat.

SATURDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Laurie Anderson Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $55.

Bilal Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 2pm, free. 2pm, free.

Chuck Alvarez Band Biscuits and Blues. 8:30pm, $15.

Crosstops, Sassy Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Electric Six, Constellations, Ghost Robot Independent. 9pm, $16.

Frail, Savage Resurrection El Rio. 9pm, donations to Rocket Dog Rescue accepted.

Giovenco Project Coda. 10pm, $10.

JP, Chrissie and the Fairground Boys, Amy Correia Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $33.

Oblivians, Icky Boyfriends, Wounded Lion, Wild Thing Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $20.

Rubinoos Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $18. Part of Budget Rock 9.

*Skipper, Shannon and the Clams, C’Mon Everybody, Tropical Sleep, Larry and the Angriest Generation, Midnite Snaxx Thee Parkside. 2pm, $7. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Trashcan Sinatras Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $20.

Triptykon, 1349, Yakuza Slim’s. 9pm, $23.

Women, French Miami, Manchild Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bill Frisell and the 858 Quartet Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 7:30 and 9:30pm, $25.

JFJO, Con Brio, Evarusnik Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Will Sellenraad Coda. 7pm, $7.

Suzanna Smith Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Ashwin Batish and friends of Sitar Power Red Poppy Art House. 7pm, $25. With dance artist Rasa Vitalia.

Greensky Bluegrass Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $15.

Ten Sorrowful Songs and a Crane San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF; (415) 647-6015. 8pm, free.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Barracuda 111 Minna. 9pm, $10. Eclectic 80s music with DJs Damon and Phillie Ocean plus 80s cult video projections, a laser light show, prom balloons, and 80s inspired fashion.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with guest VJ Faroff and more.

Derrick Carter Ruby Skye. 9pm, $15.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm. Queer dance party with DJ Nuxx and friends.

David J. Cat Club. 9:30pm, $10-12. Music from the dark side.

Debaser Knockout. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop hits of the 90s with DJs Jamie Jams, EmDee, and Stab Master Arson.

4OneFunktion Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-10.

Go Bang! Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346 – 2025. 9pm, $5. Recreating the diversity and freedom of the 70’s/ 80’s disco nightlife with DJs Steve Fabus, Tres Lingerie, Sergio, and more.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Icee Hot 222 Hyde, SF; www.iceehotmartyn.eventbrite.com. 10pm. With Dutch drum and bass veteran and producer Martyn.

Reggae Gold Club Six. 9pm, $15. With DJs Daddy Rolo, Polo Mo’qz, Tesfa, Serg, and Fuze spinning dancehall and reggae.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Laurie Anderson Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $55.

Azure Ray, Whispertown, Tim Fite Independent. 8pm, $15.

"Battle of the Bands" DNA Lounge. 5:30pm, $12. With House of Clouds, Twisted Blues, and more.

Happy Body Slow Brain, Please Do Not Fight, Bird by Bird, Girlfriend Season Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, $10.

Making Dinner Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

Muskrats, Tee’n’Dee Explosion, Outdoorsmen, Spencey Dude and the Doodles, Angora Debs, Skkkumby Thee Parkside. 1pm, $7. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Lucky Peterson Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Reigning Sound, Flakes, Ty Segall, Touch-Me-Nots Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Safes, Cellar Doors, Dead Westerns Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Anthony Brown and friends Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.theintersection.org. 2pm, free.

Bill Frisell Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 2pm, free.

Bill Frisell and the 858 Quartet Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 7:30pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Kenny Barron Trio with David Sanchez Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

Big Tings Gravity, 3251 Scott, SF; (415) 776-1928. 5pm, free.

Jon Jang SF Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 3pm, $30-50.

Barrington Levy Slim’s. 9pm, $30.

Orquesta America El Rio. 4pm, $8.

Josh Workman, Bryan Bowman, Ravi Abcarian Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St, SF; (415) 826-6200. 4:30pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Ludachris, and DJ Tomas.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. "Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers." Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Lowbrow Sunday Delirium. 1pm, free. DJ Roost Uno and guests spinning club hip hop, indie, and top 40s.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred, DJ Antonio, and Montuno Swing.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Lights, Jeremy Fisher Slim’s. 8pm, $15.

Lucky Peterson Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Russian Circles, Keelhaul, Call Me Lightning Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $13.

Seabear, Grandchildren Independent. 8pm, $15.

Amanda Shires, Jesse Brewster, Heather Combs Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Best Coast, Sonny and the Sunsets Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $15.

Billy Nayer Show, Lee Vilensky Trio Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.

Breathe Owl Breathe, Little Wings, Kacey Johansing Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Ego Likeness, Chant, Slave Unit Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

Mariah Larkin El Rio. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. "Stump the Wizard" with DJs What’s His Fuck and DJ Wizard.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

Alerts

David Talbot

-

October 19, 2010

0

news@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 20

Oakland candidates forum

The Alameda County Democratic Lawyers Club hosts at forum featuring the candidates for Oakland mayor and Alameda County Superior Court judge. With the Oakland mayor’s race between well-funded favorite Don Perata and progressive challengers Rebecca Kaplan and Jean Quan heating up as it comes into the home stretch, this could be a fun one.

5–7 p.m., $25 for members, $30 for nonmembers

Everett & Jones BBQ Restaurant

126 Broadway, Oakl.

510-836-7563

demlawyers.org/events

THURSDAY, OCT. 21

Save the Dolphins

Earth Island Institute presents “From Flipper to The Cove to Blood Dolphin$: A Conversation with Ric O’Barry,” a plea to save dolphins for being slaughtered in Taiji, Japan. O’Barry, star of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove and the Animal Planet TV miniseries Blood Dolphin$, will update his campaign with information and video footage from his recent trip to Japan.

7 p.m., $5–$20 sliding scale

The David Brower Center

2150 Allston Way, Berk.

510-859-9100

www.eii.org/events/dolphin

FRIDAY, OCT. 23

Ports blocked for Oscar Grant

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 has called for a shutdown of Bay Area ports to call for justice in the case of Oscar Grant, who was fatally shot by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on an Oakland train platform on New Year’s Day 2009. “Bay Area ports will shut down that day to stand with the black community and others against the scourge of police brutality,” said Jack Heyman, an executive board member for the union. Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July and is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 5.

All day, free

Ports through the Bay Area

www.ilwu10.org

jackheyman@comcast.net

SUNDAY, OCT. 24

Sunday Streets

The final Sunday Streets car-free event of the season will for the first time travel through the streets of the Tenderloin and Civic Center area. Bicyclists, pedestrians, and skaters travel a route that passes City Hall, Boedekker Park, Tenderloin Recreation Center, and the Tenderloin National Forest in Cohen Alley, off Ellis near Leavenworth, featuring live performances, the Funkytown Roller Disco, and free bike rental and repair stations. This event also coincides with the second annual Tricycle Music Festival, with live music from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the steps of the Main Library.

10 a.m.–3 p.m., free

Civic Center/Tenderloin

sundaystreets@gmail.com

415-344-0489. ext. 2

www.sundaystreetssf.com

MONDAY, OCT. 25

Earth-a-llujah Revival

Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping Choir returns to San Francisco as part of their Earth-a-llujah, Earth-a-llujah Revival Tour, bringing the environmentalist and anti-consumerist gospel to the Mission District. Fresh off of a run for the mayor of New York City and successful campaign to get Chase Manhattan Bank to disinvest in mountaintop removal coal mining, Rev. Billy (a.k.a. performance artist Billy Talen, who got his start here in SF) and his flock will fill you with the Holy Spirit and exorcise you of your credit cards. Hallelujah!

7 p.m., $12

Victoria Theater

2961 16th St., SF

(415) 863-7576

www.revbilly.com/events/cali-tour

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/133698

From here, cinema

Andrew Lam

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October 14, 2010

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I saw my first movie when I was four or five: it was a revival of 101 Dalmations (1961), and I liked it enough to ask my mother if we could sit through it a second time (we did). I saw my second first movie when I was 19: it was a nine-minute short by Bruce Baillie titled Valentin de las Sierras (1967), and after seeing it I knew film history must be full of secrets. It was only after moving to Berkeley a few years later that I began to contextualize Baillie’s tactile daydream of a Mexican village — a singular vision, to be sure, but one emblematic of a regional avant-garde as difficult to survey as San Francisco itself.

Here’s to trying: “Radical Light”‘s ambitious ecology of alternative film and video in the Bay Area encompasses an invaluable anthology of firsthand accounts, secondhand appreciations, and historical overviews; a film series with many artists-in-attendance and restored prints (through the winter at the Pacific Film Archive and various SF Cinematheque affiliates); and a gallery show of ephemera at the Berkeley Art Museum.

To first address the question underlying the whole series: why here? Some of the book’s contributors offer fanciful conjectures: it must be the ghost of Muybridge, an island ecology, a city that won’t hold a straight line, the quality of light, or, more realistically, the influence of the Beats’ vow of poverty. While I’m attracted to environmental speculations like these, it seems important not to let them overshadow the essential evidence of hard work without promise of financial compensation or art world status. This is clearest in the Bay Area’s rich tradition of artist-run, self-reliant screenings: museum takeovers, backyard hoedowns, and basement salons.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Frank Stauffacher’s post-World War II “Art in Cinema” series at the San Francisco Museum of Art (before it became “modern”) in establishing this climate of creative investment. Handsome as hell and himself a fine filmmaker, Stauffacher audaciously placed cinema in an art context, colliding European avant-gardes, Hollywood outliers, and homegrown talent in a museum setting a few decades ahead of schedule. In essence, he prepared the audience for what became known as independent filmmaking (before that term was commoditized). Which is more remarkable: that Stauffacher showed Christopher Maclaine’s still incendiary The End (1953), precipitating a chair-clearing uproar, or that he fronted Maclaine (a bagpipe-playing speed freak known as North Beach’s Antonin Artaud when there was plenty of competition) the funds to make this unsellable thing? Most of “Art in Cinema”‘s audience wasn’t ready for The End, but one young spectator found it a revelation: his name was Stan Brakhage.

Less than 10 years later, after Stauffacher’s tragic death in 1955, Baillie and his Canyon Cinema collaborators (notably, Chick Strand and Ernest Callenbach) came down from the hills over Oakland and expanded their bohemian screenings to include public production equipment, a journal, and the distribution co-op that is today run by filmmaker Dominic Angerame. The early Canyon group’s ambitions were local, but nonetheless represented an alternative cinema practice as profoundly liberating as that of their Nouvelle Vague contemporaries — one taken up by the dozen or so major series (e.g. No Nothing Cinema, Total Mobile Home, Other Cinema) and college film departments (especially San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University) detailed in “Radical Light.”

Though wildly eclectic in form and content, the “Radical Light” films cohere around a widespread distrust of moral authority, whether political or aesthetic, as well as an abiding interest in the bending truths of portraiture, documentary, ethnography, and found footage. The anarchic and mystical are preferred modes, though not mutually exclusive ones. There is a long tradition of collaboration between filmmakers and, perhaps more strikingly, with poets, painters, and musicians. To cite but a few examples: Larry Jordan’s Visions of a City (1979, begun 1957) is drawn from material shot to accompany readings by Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia; Bruce Conner did lightshows at the old Avalon Ballroom before making music videos for Devo and documenting the Mabuhay Gardens punk scene; and Brakhage made In Between (1955) while living with Robert Duncan and Jess (and set the film to a John Cage composition). Early “Art in Cinema” habitués like Jordan Belson, Harry Smith, and James Broughton all approached film from different mediums, and later artists like Nathaniel Dorsky, Warren Sonbert, and Konrad Steiner explored the poetic or musical resonances of moving images. It runs the other way too — unsurprisingly, it takes someone like poet Bill Berkson to get Dorsky’s films in a (parenthetical) nutshell: “(Without being stupid about it, Dorsky really seems to put every conscious instant up against the growth chart of Eternity.)”

Indeed, all these films burn brightly as you watch. Witness all the different ways in which the makers seek to alter the cinematic experience, turning it into a Zen monastery (Dorsky), paranoid classroom (Craig Baldwin), troubled innerspace (Gunvor Nelson), innocent grindhouse (George and Mike Kuchar), confessional (Lynn Hershman Leeson), firing squad (Maclaine), astral plain (Belson), cross-examination (Trinh T. Minh-ha), beat street (Dion Vigne), all-night roadhouse (Conner), “unguided playground” (how Ernie Gehr described the images in his 1991 film, Side/Walk/Shuttle, two weeks ago), and on and on. If “Radical Light”‘s chronologically-based film programs serve an informative purpose similar to the well-labeled sectioning of a botanical garden, the thematic programs come off more as a noisy farmers market where the full variety of produce jams a narrow aisle. As always, the fruit tastes best when you know where it came from.

RADICAL LIGHT: ALTERNATIVE FILM AND VIDEO IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

Through April 30, 2011, $5.50–$10

(Book launch Fri/15, 7:30 p.m.)

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu/visit

Smoker’s delight

Andrew Lam

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October 12, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The first thing Wiz Khalifa wants to say is that he loves to smoke marijuana. “Usually I just wake up and get high to start my day,” he says. Comparing his love of green to Bob Marley’s, he adds, “For some people, weed is just made for them. I’m one of those people.”

The rapper from Pittsburgh is a veritable weed glutton. (In a recent viral video, he bragged that he “might spend up to $10,000 on weed.”) It brightens the title of his recent mixtape, Kush & Orange Juice. (When asked if he actually has “kush” and orange juice for breakfast, he answers “I don’t always wake up and drink orange juice, but I always wake up and smoke weed.”) Even the music, an aromatic blend of cool vibes assembled by a close-knit team called ID Labs Productions, is conducive to semiautobiographical musings about girls, street fashion, cars, money, and smoke. Wiz has decent rhyme skills and a flair for themes. But he excels at creating electric relaxation, a mood perfect for … well, you know.

“I listen to certain artists for certain things. I listen to Three 6 Mafia when I’m in a rowdy mood; I listen to Snoop Dogg or Devin the Dude when I want to smoke weed; and I listen to Biggie when I want to listen to some lyricism,” Wiz says.

“It’s a mind state,” he adds. “It’s a lifestyle.”

Wiz Khalifa’s “Waken Baken” tour, which lands Oct. 19 at the Fillmore, may be yet another marker in hip-hop lore — a period when the much-hyped, blog-groomed generation of MCs evolved from fresh-faced optimists unburdened by stupid intramural beefs and heinous recording contracts into nouveau riche hustlers buoyed by cultish mixtape fame and major label development deals. Wiz’s popularity is real, though — his superior 2009 album Deal or No Deal (Ihiphop Distribution) breached the top 25 of the R&B album charts, and Kush & Orange Juice was reportedly a top 10 Twitter hash topic when it hit the Internet last spring.

Thankfully, “Waken Baken” won’t only be a smoker’s delight. The undercard features Yelawolf, a young gunner from Alabama. Earlier this year, he issued Trunk Muzik, an assembly of down South evocations, or “country shit” (as Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. once put it). Trunk Muzik’s crown jewel is “Pop the Trunk,” where Yelawolf swerves in double-time rapping from an image of his father shooting a vagrant on his property to one of his homies capping a rival in a parking lot “with his biscuit.” Over producer Will Power’s ominous interplay of keyboards and bass, Yelawolf delivers the moral, “Think he’s playing? You better listen to what he’s saying, punk! Don’t make me pop the trunk on you!”

The remarkable thing about “Pop the Trunk” is that Yelawolf is able to lyrically distinguish himself as an impartial observer while still conjuring the trauma of a violent encounter. “This is the life I live,” he says. “If I was on some gangsta shit, I would be talking about gangsta shit. But I’m just not. And I don’t sell dope so I can’t talk about that. I can talk about doing dope, and my folks growing weed. I can talk about partying, fashion, and all that punk rock shit.”

Yelawolf’s “Pop the Trunk” is more pointed and focused than anything Wiz Khalifa has recorded. Concurrently, Wiz’s Deal or No Deal and, to a lesser extent, Kush & Orange Juice float effortlessly, while Yelawolf’s Trunk Muzik sounds workmanlike, a series of brilliant pieces speckled amid the chaff. (Yelawolf has assembled a retail version, Trunk Muzik 0-60, that combines seven of the mixtape’s best cuts with new tracks. It’s tentatively scheduled for a November release on Interscope.) The two rappers offer a nice study in perspectives.

Yelawolf, who is much better at explaining himself than the amiable yet ambient Wiz, says, “I’m really hardcore and have rock energy on stage. I don’t smoke weed, I drink beer. But I’m all about putting on a good show and having a good time. Wiz steps on stage chillin’, smoking weed and real mellow. It’s a yin and yang thing.”

One thing Wiz Khalifa and Yelawolf have in common, though: both have a lot of tattoos. *

WAKEN BAKEN TOUR: WIZ KHALIFA WITH SPECIAL GUEST YELAWOLF

Tues/19, 8 p.m.; $32.75

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

www.thefillmore.com

Rep clock

David Talbot

-

October 12, 2010

0

Schedules are for Wed/13–Tues/19 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-15. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Art Festival 2010,” live performance, video installations, and more, Thurs, 8. “Immigrant Film Festival,” Fri, 7 and Sat-Sun, 3. “Other Cinema:” Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm (Federici and Harrison, 2010), Sat, 8:30. “Next! And Attention Deficit Gift: A 99 Hooker Screening,” Sun, 8. “Electroacoustic audio-visual improvisations” with Bill Hsu, Gino Robair, and John Shiurba, Tues, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. Where the Boys Are (Levin, 1961), Wed, 2:30, 4:45, 7, 9:15. Connie Francis in person to introduce 7pm show. “14th Annual Arab Film Festival:” Masquerades (Salem, 2008), Thurs, 7:30. This event, $20; for more info, visit www.arabfilmfestival.org. “Midnites for Maniacs: Don’t Get Bit … By Big Mouths:” •Fright Night (Holland, 1985), Fri, 7:15; An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981), Fri, 9:30; and The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981), Fri, 11:45. “Connie Francis: The Legend Continues,” live concert with full orchestra, Sat, 8. Presented by the Rrazz Room; visit www.cityboxoffice.com for tickets ($49-99). “Montgomery Clift Double Feature:” •From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953), Sat, 2:30, 7, and Wild River (Kazan, 1960), Sat, 4:50, 9:15.

CERRITO 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito; www.rialtocinemas.com. $7. “Cerrito Classics:” Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), Thurs, 7:45.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. “Mill Valley Film Festival,” Wed-Sun. Program information at www.mvff.com. 36 (Marchal, 2005), Oct 18-21, 6:30, 9.

DELANCEY STREET SCREENING ROOM 600 Embarcadero, SF; www.modjeskawomantriumphantmovie.com. Free ($5-10 suggested donation). Modjeska: A Woman Triumphant (Myszynski), Sun, 3.

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE 1304 Lincoln, Alameda; www.forbiddenislandalameda.com. Free. “Forbidden Thrills: Half N’ Half Halloween Horrors:” •Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory (Heusch, 1961), and The Manster (Breakston and Crane, 1959), Mon, 7:30.

GRAND LAKE 3200 Grand, Oakl; (510) 452-3556. $10. Enemies of the People (Lemkin and Sambath, 2009), Wed, 4:30, 7:15, 9:30.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Sharkwater: The Truth Will Surface (Stewart, 2006), Wed, 7:30.

LUMIERE 1572 California, SF; www.landmarkafterdark.com. Free. “Monthly Anime:” “Sengoku Basara,” Thurs, 7.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. “CinemaLit: Apocalypse Noir:” Matinee (Dante, 1993), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:” “1961-71,” Wed, 7:30; “Stories Untold,” Sat, 6; “The Exotic Erotic,” Sat, 8:30; “Procession of the Image Processors,” Sun, 6:30. “Shakespeare on Screen:” Chimes at Midnight (Welles, 1966), Thurs, 7; Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996), Sun, 4. “Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism:” Bellissima (Visconti, 1953), Fri, 7; Miracle in Milan (De Sica, 1951), Fri, 9:10. “Home Movie Day:” “Film Check-In,” Sat, 11am; “Home Movie Day Screening,” Sat, 1. Metropolis (Lang, 1926), Tues, 7.

PIEDMONT 4186 Piedmont, Oakl; www.landmarktheatres.coom. $8. The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9:15 (also Wed, 2). Cropsey (Zeman and Brancaccio, 2009), Fri-Tues, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 4).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 9:15. Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods (Meaney, 2010), Wed, 9:30 and Thurs, 7. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (Scheinfeld, 2010), Wed, 7, call for times. “SF DocFest,” Oct 14-28. Program information at www.sfindie.com.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. $5. “Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane,” Thurs, 7.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. “Beyond Manny and Marcos: A Showcase of Far-Out Filipino American Films and Theater,” Sat, 3-5:30.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10. “Ozu and His Muse: Setsuko Hara,” Early Summer (1954), Fri, 4:30 and Sat, 3:15; Late Autumn (1960), Sat, 12:15, Sun, 6, and Mon, 4:30; Late Spring (1949), Sun, 12:15 and Tues, 715; Tokyo Twilight (1947), Sun, 2:30 and Mon, 7:15.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Jim Henson and Friends: Inside the Sesame Street Vault,” Thurs, 7:30 and Sat, 2. “San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Presents: Tough Guys: Images of Jewish Gangsters in Film:” Little Caesar (LeRoy, 1931), Sun, 2.

Film listings

David Talbot

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October 12, 2010

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

SF DOCFEST

The Ninth San Francisco Documentary Film Festival runs Oct 14-28 at the Roxie, 3117 16th, SF. For tickets ($11) visit www.sfindie.com. For coverage, see “To Tell the Truth.”

THURS/14

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone 7:15. Eat the Sun 9:30.

FRI/15

American: The Bill Hicks Story 7:15. The Spirit Molecule 7:15. Family Affair 9:30. Plug and Pray 9:30.

SAT/16

Miss Landmine 5. Creative Minds 5. Urgh! A Music War 7:15. My Kidnapper 7:15. “80s Singalong” 9:30. OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger’s Movie 9:30.

SUN/17

All Kinds of Love 5. Biker Fox 5. Coming Back for More 7:15. The Forgotten Man 7:15. Tightrope 9:30. May I Be Frank 9:30.

MON/18

Miss Landmine 7:15. Eat the Sun 7:15. Family Affair 9:30. Biker Fox 9:30.

TUES/19

American: The Bill Hicks Story 7:15. Creative Minds 7:15. The Tightrope 9:30. The Spirit Molecule 9:30.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

The 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival runs through Sun/17 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; Century Cinema, 41 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera; Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; and CinéArts@Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. For tickets (most shows $12.50), call 1-877-874-6833 and schedule visit www.mvff.com.

OPENING

*Cropsey See “To Tell the Truth.” (1:24) Red Vic.

Gerrymandering This film is about gerrymandering. Last time the subject came up, you felt sleepy. Filmmaker Jeff Reichert understands this disinterest; he opens the film with a driving beat and ends it with a distorted guitar version of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” keeping everything moving. Structured around California’s 2008 Proposition 11 race, Gerrymandering quickly explicate the issue for anyone who was too busy watching Prop 8 and Obama. Talking heads appear from the whole spectrum, as the film contends that redrawing districts is an issue that mostly serves politicians and should be a democratic concern. But quirky historical tidbits are central and range from banal (“gerry” is pronounced “gary”) to actually interesting (man elected by just a two-vote margin). This is an educational film, but one that knows the limits of the average attention span. At 77 minutes it succeeds where many civics teachers have failed. (1:17) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Prendiville)

Jackass 3D Johnny Knoxville and friends return with skeevy new tortures. (1:30) Presidio.

Masquerades In Mounir’s Algerian village, getting married is just about the biggest thing that can happen. Unfortunately for the lowly gardener with high aspirations, he’s already married, and in the eyes of the town, his gorgeous sister Rym’s narcolepsy makes her a pariah. Never mind she’s secretly in love with Mounir’s best friend, a nice, pathetic guy with dreams of opening a video rental shop; Mournir will get drunk and announce to everyone that she is engaged to a wealthy foreigner (Australian? Canadian? Eh, from one of those places.) If this sounds like the set-up of a screwball comedy, it is. And with a set-up like that you probably already know how it will end. But the execution is key, and as the lies and charades of Masquerades — the opening night film at the 14th annual Arab Film Festival — pile atop one another and become increasingly convoluted, the film manages to avoid melodrama, resolving with simple elegance. (1:30) Castro. (Prendiville)

My Dog Tulip “Unable to love each other,” J.R. Ackerley observes at the beginning of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip, “the English turn naturally to dogs.” So it would seem from this animated adaptation of the British literary figure’s 1956 memoir, an account of 16 years’ cohabitation with and devotion to an adopted German shepherd distinguished mainly, it seems, by various deficits of behavior and temperament. Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer) narrates from the vantage point of a lonely middle age in which he has largely set aside the “dream of finding the Ideal Friend” with whom to share his life (depicted here as a scribbled series of hypothetical male and female figures, though Ackerley was rather openly gay). He comes to find this wished-for helpmeet in an unruly canine who destroys the drapery, alarms acquaintances, terrifies passersby, and generally turns Ackerley’s social calendar into a grid of empty squares. No matter, though, as human connection is depicted here as something of a lost cause; instead Ackerley busies himself with projects like finding Tulip a suitable “husband” so that she might know the joys of sexual intimacy and motherhood. This and other household adventures are recounted in somewhat graphic detail, and depicted by the filmmakers in a playful mix of animation styles that cleverly distinguish between straightforward narrative, fantastical musings, and faded recollection. The latter tactics are visually captivating, though the patchy narrative leaves both man and dog feeling somewhat sketchy and unknowable. (1:22) Clay, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Nowhere Boy Music biopics are hit-or-miss — and generally speaking, they’re the latter. Nowhere Boy is one of those rare exceptions because it limits its scope to John Lennon’s formative years. The Beatles don’t need an origin story, and we don’t get one. Instead, the film offers a look at a lesser-known period in John’s life, specifically his fraught relationships with Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas), the aunt who raised him, and Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), the mother who left him behind. Fresh off his breakout role in Kick-Ass, Aaron Johnson delivers another strong performance, capturing Lennon’s ever-shifting moods and effortless charm. Nowhere Boy doesn’t neglect the elephant in the room: the Beatles, though never named, are a constant presence, with John meeting Paul and George in his quest to form a rock band. Knowing the success they will soon encounter adds another layer to the film, but it never detracts from its well-earned emotional resonance. Fair warning to Beatles fans: you’ll never listen to the song “Julia” the same way again. (1:37) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont. (Peitzman)

Red Boomers — and rapidly aging Gen-Xers — rejoice: you’re still a force to be reckoned with, even as the hairline recedes and the paunch descends. The sleeker Hollywood companion to Michael Caine’s recent turn as a killer pensioner “Dirty Harry” in 2009’s Harry Brown, Red (based on a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner) turns the world of black ops, convert assassinations, and the government-approved killers that make it all happen — and happen to survive long enough to retire into humdrum civilian life — into the stuff of action comedy. Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) isn’t quite ready to go quietly into the good night: he’s restless, bored, and lonely enough to strike up a telephone flirtation with Sarah, the woman charged with issuing his pension checks. Luckily she’s Mary-Louise Parker, applying the wide-eyed and game yet sarcastic and knowing qualities she brings to Weeds to the current “situation”: an assassination plot against Frank via the archetypal “Company” man (Karl Urban). The thrown-together couple is swiftly tracked from city to city while Frank rounds up the old gang, namely the very charismatic and watchable Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. Half the fun here, evident in the TV teasers, is watching Mirren quickly switch from Martha Stewart-like flower arranging to the steely application of machine gun fire, in a full-tilt formalwear. Consider Red the action-dappled, lightly entertaining wish fulfillment of so many oldsters, who have found themselves still toiling for a paycheck at time when they hoped to retire, frustrated and feeling betrayed by the so-called system and wishing they could also take it out on the proper baddies with seriously effective firepower. (runtime not available) (Chun)

Stone Stone is the worst kind of bad movie: trash that takes itself seriously. The film, in which Edward Norton adopts an absurd Detroit street kid accent, has no idea that it’s ridiculous. Which is a pity, because it almost has camp appeal. Norton plays a convict, the titular Stone, who has to convince parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) that he’s reformed. Meanwhile, Stone urges his kooky wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to seduce Jack in order to gain leverage. With the talent involved, you’d expect something a lot better than what Stone is — an excuse for Norton and De Niro to exchange vulgar, sexually-charged banter, and for Jovovich and De Niro to engage in awkwardly explicit love scenes. There’s probably a moral buried somewhere here, but Stone‘s aggressively earnest tone is more laughable than affecting. In the end, it’s just not a movie that makes you think so much as a, “What were they thinking?” experience. (1:45) Bridge. (Peitzman)

*Tamara Drewe Applying the lightest hand where Thomas Hardy waxed heavily symbolic, Tamara Drewe finds director Stephen Frears in an airily bucolic, comedic mood, working with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel, which was, in turn, inspired by Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Here, country life clashes with city rascals in a hilariously on-point vaguely meta-ish satire that would likely offend ye olde moralizer Hardy. The titular heroine (Gemma Arterton) has returned to the village where she grew up — riper, more voluptuous, and, thanks to a nose job, a Bathsheba-style hottie — to deal with her late mother’s country manse. The old stomping grounds teem with amusing characters: neighboring mystery novelist-cum-lecher Nicholas (Roger Allam) and long-suffering spouse Beth (Tamsin Greig) run a writers retreat populated by creatively constipated scribblers; Tamara’s childhood love Andy (Luke Evans) is pulling himself up by his bootstraps after hard times; and two naughty, low-brow schoolgirls Casey (Charlotte Christie) and Jody (Jessica Barden) keep things interesting with romantic fantasies of their own. Frears has the most fun with his sharp lampoon of writerly pretensions — one wishes he continued to train his gaze on their huffy, stuffy, Chintz-ruffled follies, as the affairs ensue, a cheesy rock star rumbles through the hamlet, and both illumination and scandal comes to pass. (1:51) (Chun)

ONGOING

*Buried Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ first English-language feature has one of the most deeply unsettling openings in recent memory: a pitch-black screen gradually soundtracked by the waking, disorientation, and frantic scratching made by Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) as he realizes he’s been buried alive. A U.S. civilian contractor (the good, reconstructionist kind, not the gun-crazy, mercenary “security” type) in Iraq, he struggles to calm down as he uses a pocket lighter to view the coffin he’s trapped in. Finding a flashlight and cell phone, he soon receives a call from his kidnappers informing he has just 90 minutes of oxygen (and probably less time on the phone’s running-down battery) to raise a considerable ransom. Chris Sparling’s clever screenplay and Cortés’ surprisingly cinematic treatment (given the single location’s extreme claustrophobia) keep this potentially one-note real-world horror movie nail-bitingly tense throughout, while Reynolds runs a grueling emotive gamut with aplomb. (1:34) SF Center. (Harvey)

Cairo Time (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Case 39 (1:49) 1000 Van Ness.

*Easy A Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked ’00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. The brainy grandchild of 1930s screwball comedies and the knowing offspring of more recent spoofs of the Clearasil years like Clueless (1995) — with blood ties to the on-point pop of pater familias John Hughes — Easy A doesn’t quite aspire to the grainy, your-so-called-reality of YouTube auteurs, à la The Virginity Hit, though Bert V. Royal’s script is just as steeped in the culture of viral gossip and TMZ-writ-small, as well as the high-low literary and cinematic referents, that ’80s babies-and-up were succored on. Welcome to the postmodern mixed-up world of the girl who gets straight As, a marked contrast to all the bromancin’ going down in other parts of the cineplex: Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is curious enough to venture fully down the rabbit hole of bad-girl schoolyard celebrity after fabricating a story about losing her virginity. Despite the swelling disapproval of Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her virginal Christian fundamentalist crew, Olive’s soon giving pity faux-fucks to all the misfits on campus in exchange for gift cards to big-box stores. Her hilariously staged tryst with classmate Brandon (Dan Byrd), who’s sick of getting beaten up every day because he’s gay, is up there with anything in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). And though Easy A often seems pitched more to adults, like Olive’s wise-cracking parents (Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci), its entertainingly self-aware fiction is still likely to bridge generational divides as much as anything on Facebook. (1:30) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Enter the Void Gaspar Noé wants to share. Yet after three features, it’s still unclear whether what he’s got on his mind is worth sharing, let alone anywhere near as urgent as his need to share it. Enter the Void, a “psychedelic melodrama,” has polarized responses (hypnotized vs. narcotized) since it premiered in preliminary form at Cannes last year. This was Noé’s dream project all along, his big meditation on Life, Sex, and Death. Oscar (first-time actor Nathaniel Brown) is a young American living in Tokyo with kid sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), dealing (and doing) drugs while she dances at a strip club. Caught delivering goods to a friend (whose mother he’s sleeping with), Oscar is killed by cops. The film’s remaining two hours — set up by blunt nods to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which our hero was reading — follow Oscar’s spirit as it floats through past, present, and future, eventually “escaping the circle” of this life’s consciousness via reincarnation. Noé has fingered Kenneth Anger, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and classic 1947 noir Lady in the Lake‘s entirely subjective camera as influences. But you could label rave lighting and black-light posters as equally important. Enter the Void does tamp down the prior films’ racist and homophobic invective, which discomfited mostly because it felt like the filmmaker’s personal ranting. Still, as attempted transcendence of mortal coil, Void ultimately sits and spins on Noé’s terminal literal-mindedness, no matter how many Day-Glo CGI vapors emit from vaginas. (2:17) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*A Film Unfinished Documentaries that “tell” the Holocaust tend to employ archival footage generically as a kind of historical flavoring. It’s rare that we are asked to contemplate either the provenance of the images or the individual lives depicted. Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished simultaneously confronts both of these gaps with a taut historiography of several reels of Nazi propaganda footage. Even in the German film’s inchoate form, we easily apprehend the propagandistic moves to further manipulate an already constructed reality (the Warsaw Ghetto) for objective “proof” of the necessity of Hitler’s Final Solution. Yet here before us, flowing at the speed of life, are the faces and places that would be destroyed within months of the filming. Hersonski attempts to extricate the documentary value of this footage using frame-speed manipulations and edits that call attention to telling movements. She also films elderly survivors watching the footage alone in a darkened theater. In their capacity for recognition and incredulousness, they unravel the German point of view. By weaving these live responses with diary entries of those consigned to the ghetto along with the deposition of a German cameraman, Hersonski draws a fragmentary, highly specific account of the Holocaust’s crisis of representation. (1:29) Opera Plaza. (Goldberg)

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

*Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods The common stereotypes of a comic book writer’s life usually don’t include tales of swinging sex clubs, playing in rock bands, dressing in drag, and diving headfirst into the world of psychedelic drugs. Scottish-born artist Grant Morrison, on the other hand, has built a reputation for himself as a sort of comic world bad-boy, while putting his psychologically dark, surreal stamp on comics such as The Invisibles, Doom Patrol and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Talking with Gods is pretty traditional in its talking-head retelling of Morrison’s career, and at times goes a little overboard with peers and coworkers trying hard to sell his shaman-like persona. But comic fans will eat this stuff up, and newbies can get a sense of how far this medium has come from just being for the kids. (1:30) Roxie. (Landon Moblad)

*Howl Beatniks get the Mad Men treatment — with a cast that includes that AMC hit’s Jon Hamm, playing the lawyer who defended the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s quintessential rebel yell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against obscenity charges in San Francisco’s most celebrated trial of the 1950s. It’s fun to see that anally nostalgic aesthetic translated to ramshackle North Beach apartments and sophomoric, filthy-mouthed literary heroes. Not so much fun: the overly literal animation chosen by the directors (famed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). Yes, parts of “Howl,” the poem, are animated — unfortunately in a style that calls to mind bad 1980s French Canadian pseudo-spiritual arthouse schlock. Still, this brief slice of beats is juicy, confined to the trial and the tale of Ginsberg’s poetic and sexual awakening. James Franco is wonderful as the young, self-obsessed, epically needy yet still irresistible crank. It was the first time I found myself wishing to see more of Ginsberg naked. (1:30) Four Star. (Marke B.)

It’s Kind of a Funny Story Largely self-inflicted scholastic pressures having manifested themselves in an array of symptoms from “stress vomiting” to suicidal ideations, depressive Brooklyn teen Craig (Keir Gilchrist) rides his bicycle to a local hospital and announces he needs help. Expecting to be fussed over a bit and given some nice tranquilizing pill, he’s dismayed instead when the no-nonsense intake psychiatrist (Viola Davis) tells him it’s her obligation to commit him for a minimum five days’ observation. Worse, the facility’s youth psych ward is being renovated, so he’s tossed in with the crazy adults. Other residents are led by comely but self-cutting fellow teen Noelle (Emma Roberts) and mentoring yet self-sabotaging Bobby (Zach Galifianakis). Based on Ned Vizzini’s semi-autobiographical novel, Funny Story is well acted (even or especially by the atypically subdued Galifianakis), its mixed humor and poignancy nicely negotiated by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck in their third feature. But compared to the duo’s prior Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008), this seems conventional and a little soft — hewing dangerously close to that sentimentally twee notion (popularized in 1966’s King of Hearts, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al.) that we’re all “crazy” and lunatics are really the wisest fools of all. Heartwarming life lessons get learned, needless to say. The cuteness climaxes with an “Under Pressure” music video fantasy that belongs in an episode of Glee — not, perhaps, in a movie that begins with a 15-year-old seriously considering jumping from a bridge. (1:51) California, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

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

Last Train Home In disaster movies, there’s a familiar scene: panicked throngs press against barriers, crushing one another, pleading “I have to get through!” to impassive guards. Watching the documentary Last Train Home, you realize an over-dramatic Hollywood cliché is a depressing reality in other parts of the world, as workers in China annually endure massive crowds to get home for New Year’s. Filmmaker Lixin Fan focuses on one couple among the 130 million taking part in the world’s largest migration. Their sacrifice (being away from their children for work) is called into question when their daughter runs away to the city to sew jeans and party. By the producers of 2007’s equally cinematic Up the Yangtze, this doc unfolds like a scripted film, until the family’s conflict shatters the fourth wall, and you’re reminded that people actually have to endure intense hardships so that we can have cheap pants with 40-inch waists. (1:27) Four Star, Shattuck. (Prendiville)

*Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole Owl fever is everywhere — from the megahit Webcam trained on Molly the Barn Owl in San Marcos to the omnipresent ’70s-flavored owl necklaces designed by Real Housewife kook Kelly Bensimon. Animated fantasy Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is yet another sign that the fascination hasn’t faded yet. Less sophisticated than Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and more straight-faced than this year’s Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, this animated talking-animal epic displays director Zach Snyder in family-friendly fantasy mode. While venturing out of the safety of their nest and attempting to test their wings, youthful barn owlet Soren (Jim Sturgess) and competitive brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) are captured by the hench-owls of Nyra (Helen Mirren) and Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton), two Aryan Nation-esque critters who style themselves as the Pure Ones. They’re bent on imposing a strict heirarchy on the owl kingdom, subjugating the “lesser” birds, and destroying a mythical crew of warrior owls called the Guardians. And thanks to Legend of the Guardians‘ cunning detail and solid 3-D effects, that world of good vs. evil takes on a breadth and depth that both children and adults can probably fly with. Though the owls’ eyes can seem a bit too cartoonishly, and wildly unrealistically, expressive, the director who made 300 (2006) and Watchman (2009) and creative team Animal Logic still can’t resist giving the kids a little gritty kick with bloodless yet visceral bird battle scenes, and those nuggets of mouse parts that the cute li’l owlets puke up. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Let Me In In 2008, chilly Swedish import Let the Right One In offered an alternative, and an antidote, to the first Twilight movie’s sparkly vampire fantasy. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own book for director Tomas Alfredson, and the tale — about a bullied, neglected 12-year-old boy who befriends the seemingly same-aged, mysterious new girl in his apartment complex, only to discover her monstrous secret — became a favorite among critics and genre fans unafraid of foreign flicks. Just two years later, writer-director Matt Reeves (whose Cloverfield was also a 2008 release) offers his own take on Lindqvist’s story, with Kodi Smit-McPhee (stronger here than he was in last year’s The Road) and tween It Girl Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) taking the leads, and Richard Jenkins, Elias Koteas, and current Mad Men scene-stealer Cara Buono playing the peripheral adults. Reeves’ version is just fine — he shifts the action to the snowy New Mexico mountains, and Americanizes the original’s 80s setting (Reagan clips, new wave radio hits) — but doesn’t bring enough new to the table to justify remaking what was already a pretty fantastic film. Still, horror fans who haven’t seen the original, or who can’t be bothered to read subtitles, will no doubt appreciate this atmospheric spin on the age-old shared belief that growing up really sucks. For my interview with Reeves, including his explanation of why he chose to do a remake of a film he greatly admired, check out www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:55) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Life as We Know It (1:52) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

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

My Soul to Take (1:46) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Never Let Me Go The time is not so long ago, and the atmosphere is of a rural England that resists change. So it takes a while for us to realize that this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed book (by fellow novelist Alex Garland) takes place in an alternative recent past in which society has indeed changed in ways that are few, yet enormous. Raised at what appears to be a familiar if slightly peculiar English boarding school, the students of Hailsham are given limited but highly specific education preparing them for an adulthood of service. A short adulthood, that is, for they are clones grown from “originals,” considered not quite human, their purpose being eventual willing harvest for organs by a populace whom medical science breakthroughs can now allow extraordinarily long lifespans. Placidly preparing for that future sacrifice are best friends Ruth (Keira Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the latter such a born accommodator that she doesn’t utter a peep of protest when Ruth grabs Tommy as her boyfriend — destroying all Kathy’s hopes and probably dimming Tommy’s somewhat as well. Directed by Mark Romanek (2002’s One Hour Photo), Never Let Me Go spans a couple of decades, but its aura of mournful melancholy never wavers. The results are well cast, handsomely outfitted (Rachel Portman contributes a plaintive string score), tasteful, and just a little bit more monotonous and less touching than you might hope. Not particularly plot-driven, this is a good film that’s also another illustration (like such recent examples as 2009’s The Road and 2008’s Revolutionary Road) of how sometimes no amount of intelligent effort can make a movie achieve everything that some literature can. (1:43) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Resident Evil: Afterlife (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Social Network David Fincher’s The Social Network is a gripping and entertaining account of how Facebook came to take over the known social-networking universe. In this version of events — scripted by Aaron Sorkin and based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, in turn based substantially on interviews with FB cofounder Eduardo Saverin, with input from Mark Zuckerberg icily absent — a girlfriend’s dumping of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a crisp evening in 2003 is the impetus in his headlong quest for a “big idea.” The film is structured around the conference-room depositions for two separate lawsuits, brought against Zuckerberg by Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and by fellow Harvard entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) for crimes involving intellectual property and vast scads of retributive money. Unless Zuckerberg decides to post it on Facebook (which he probably shouldn’t, given the nondisclosure vows that capped off the first round of lawsuits), we’ll never know what truly motivated him and how badly he screwed over his friends and fellow students. But Fincher and Sorkin have crafted a compelling, absorbing, and occasionally poignant tale of how it could have happened. (2:00) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Secretariat In this biopic of one of the most-celebrated horses in U.S. history, Denver housewife and mother of four Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) returns to the Kentucky horse-breeding farm where she grew up, drawn to the project of reviving the ailing business. She pins her hopes on an unborn foal of questionable marketability, who she comes to believe is destined for greatness. Secretariat — or Big Red, as he’s known to his friends — is raised in the light of this belief by a small, reverent circle including his trainer (John Malkovich), his jockey (professional rider Otto Thorwarth), his groom (True Blood‘s Nelsan Ellis), and the farm’s longtime secretary (Margo Martindale), and he goes on to attain the status of a national folk hero. Director Randall Wallace has crafted an appropriately epic tale — and heavily salted the film with messages about unswerving faith and determination and hope and glory, mostly delivered in ringing, overwrought tones by Lane (which undercuts the pleasure of seeing her character quietly pursue a larger setting than the domestic scene she inhabits at Secretariat‘s outset). But somehow it’s harder to poke fun when the hero of the story is a horse, especially one of such majestic stature and jaw-dropping prowess. Each time Secretariat goes surging around the oval, in one of the film’s white-knuckle race sequences, the clichés fly and then fall away like dirt on the track. (1:56) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom. (2:10) California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Undertow This sexy and delicate drama is a bisexual triangle that continues beyond the grave. In a Peruvian coastal hamlet, fisherman Miguel (Cristian Mercado) loves his pregnant wife and fellow church leader Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But he’s also having a secret, passionate affair with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urbanite who moved there to paint the land- and seascapes, and who chafes at the restrictions Miguel places on their relationship. At a certain point one character dies, and writer-director Javier Fuentes-León seamlessly handles Undertow‘s transition to magical realism. The leisurely story doesn’t go where one expects, ending on a perfect grace note of bittersweet acceptance. (1:40) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Waiting for “Superman” As was the case with Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, his latest documentary has an active internet campaign: pledge to see Waiting for “Superman.” The films seem like apples and oranges at first glance — Truth warned about the extinction of our species, the end of life as we know it, while “Superman” takes on the public education system. But the picture Guggenheim paints in the latter is a bleak one: our schools are failing America’s youth. In clear, relatable words, he reveals the causes of this national epidemic lack of funding, misguided unions, no accountability. Like Truth, “Superman” is a smart and inspiring call to arms. Guggenheim’s wisest choice was following a group of young schoolchildren who want nothing more than to get a good education. Their struggle provides a necessary contrast to the bureaucracy. In showing the problem’s human face, the film offers further proof — as if we needed more—that something must be done to fix a broken system. For supplemental interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:51) California, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps This seems just the moment for a sequel to Oliver Stone’s indictment-celebration of financial-sector yuppies: one again, all eyes are focused on Wall Street’s fluctuating fortunes and sleazy insider dealings. Oscar winner Michael Douglas reprises his role as the enjoyably sinister Gordon Gekko, but it’s kinda like watching Anthony Hopkins play Hannibal Lecter in anything post-Silence of the Lambs (1991), with a celebrated character floundering amid a script that doesn’t measure up to what came before. Gekko’s not even the main focus here, with Shia LaBeouf stepping up as Jake, a whiz kid who’s already made millions (unlike Charlie Sheen’s character in the first film, whose financial aspirations allowed him to be manipulated by the shellac-haired GG). See, Jake’s engaged to Gekko’s daughter (Carey Mulligan, fretting elegantly); they’ve already got a sweet loft and enough dough to kick hundreds of thousands over to Jake’s real estate-agent mom (a superfluous Susan Sarandon). Anyway, the main conflict involves evil banker Josh Brolin taking down Jake’s firm and driving his boss to suicide; meanwhile, Jake is a pure-hearted idealist lured into wrongdoing only to save his pet cause, alternative energy. Yeah, really. Any time there’s a financial concept to be explained, Stone revs up animated graphs and numbers, vainly attempting to create thrills from the inherently boring. And in case you were wondering, the once and future Bud Fox does indeed make a cameo, his winking, leathery visage a sad reminder that he was once a promising film actor before choosing a path of serial marriage and sitcom megabucks. (2:13) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) A loving, exhaustively fleshed-out tribute to now one of the more neglected stars to emerge from the classic rock firmament, Who Is Harry Nilsson? is lent the weight of the interviewees who knew and-or loved the singer-songwriter (including Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Yoko Ono, Micky Dolenz, Eric Idle, Paul Williams, and Robin Williams) and given much depth, courtesy of its almost two-hour length and its close ties to Nilsson himself: the musician’s attorney and estate representative Lee Blackman secured the funding for The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) co-director Jon Scheinfeld; widow Una and Nilsson’s children opened up on camera; and Sony allowed the remixing of more than two dozen songs. As bittersweet and uniquely shaped as a Nilsson song, this evocative classic-rock-fan must-see comes fully kitted out with charming and revealing rare performance footage of the man who otherwise refused to perform live, and much of the music that made 1971’s Nilsson Schmilsson a rock blockbuster and LP collection essential and transported such songs as Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You into pop vernacular. Anecdotes, testimonials, home movies, and family snapshots fill out the picture of Nilsson, who despite his undeniable brilliance for lyrics and melody, and heaven-sent vocal gifts, seemed often driven to self-destruct as quickly as possible. Scheinfeld stops short of connecting all the dots explicitly. But the music, given its righteous due, goes a long way toward answering those hanging questions in the title and in the heart of Nilsson fans. (1:56) Roxie. (Chun)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen’s latest, once again set in tony London, has all the moving parts for a satisfying farce of self-sabotage, but the writer-director never gets past touching up his character sketches — which are far from interesting in themselves. There is Helena (Gemma Jones), elderly and recently divorced; she wants something stronger than tea and a psychic to rescue her from reality. Her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) either wants a child or her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). She gets migraines and has an eye for art, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, hubby Roy (Josh Brolin) eyes the available young body across the way from his study (Freida Pinto) when he’s not grousing about his fledgling career as a novelist. Helena’s ex Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is off in his own corner of the movie, taking up with a dopey prostitute (Lucy Punch) who, unlike his wife, is not old. There are sparks of life when these fine actors are allowed to play off one another — Jones and Brolin, in particular, work up a nicely caustic repartee — but a chirpy narrator belies the wobbly narrative construct. And unlike 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, the ethnically marked objects of desire don’t get any good lines. Banderas as an art dealer is paint-by-numbers fantasy, while Pinto’s Dia is embarrassingly elaborated: always in red, a musicology PhD student who wants to be someone’s muse, she responds favorably to Roy’s slovenly flirtations, and, the kicker, has a father who translates Eastern European authors. Jones’ spiritualist is the only one who gets a Hollywood ending, and while I suppose that’s meant ironically, there’s plenty of soft-headedness to go around. (1:38) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

Stage listings

David Talbot

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October 12, 2010

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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Habibi Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. $15-25. Previews Thurs/14-Sun/17, 8pm. Opens Mon/18, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sun, 8pm. Through Nov 7. Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo present the world premiere of a play by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh.

Nina and the Monsters Shotwell Studios, 3252A 19th; 509-8656, 509-8656. $10-15. Opens Fri/15, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/17 and Oct 24, 2pm). Ninjaz of Drama with Footloose present a modern-day fairy tale.

Proof Exit Stage Left Theatre, 156 Eddy; www.belljartheatre.com. $20. Opens Fri/15, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 30. Bell Jar Theatre presents David Auburn’s award-winning play.

Susie Butler Sings the Sarah Vaughan Songbook Exit Theater Cafe, 156 Eddy; (510) 860-0997, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Opens Sat/16, 8:30pm. Runs Sat, 8:30pm. Through Nov 20. Local actress and singer Susie Butler takes on the Sassy songbook.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Phoenix Theatre, Stage 2, 414 Mason; 433-1235, www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com. $20-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 23. A one-woman musical starring Karen Hirst, with book and music by Anne Doherty.

Anita Bryant Died For Your Sins New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 24. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a show by Brian Christopher Williams.

*The Brothers Size Magic Theatre, Bldg D, Fort Mason Center; 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Dates and times vary. Through Sun/17. Magic Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, directed by Octavio Solis.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 22. Actors Theatre presents Tennessee Williams’ sultry, sweltering tale of a Mississippi family, directed by Keith Phillips.

Christian Cagigal’s Obscura: A Magic Show EXIT Cafe, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 18. Magician Christian Cagigal presents a mix of magic, fairy tales, and dark fables.

Disoriented Off-Market Theater, 960 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 17. A trio of solo performances by Asian-American women.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm (also Sat/16, 1pm). Through Oct 24. 42nd Street Moon presents the Sondheim musical farce, starring Megan Cavanagh.

Futurestyle ’79 Off-Market Theater, Studio 250, 965 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Wed, 8pm. Through Oct 27. A fully improvised episodic comedy played against the backdrop of SF in 1979.

Hamlet Alcatraz Island; 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. By donation. Sat-Sun, times vary. Through Nov 21. Outside of an actual castle, it would hard to say what could serve as a more appropriate stand-in for Kronborg castle of Helsingør—also known as Elsinore—than the isolated fortress of Alcatraz Island, where WE Players are presenting Hamlet in all its tragic majesty. As audience members tramp along stony paths and through prison corridors from one scene to the next, the brooding tension the site alone creates is palpable, and the very walls impart a sense of character, as opposed to window-dressing. Deftly leaping around rubble and rock, a hardy troupe of thespians and musicians execute the three-hour production with neat precision, guiding the audience to parts of the island and prison edifice that aren’t usually part of the standard Alcatraz tour package. Incorporating movement, mime, live music, and carefully-engineered use of space, the Players turn Alcatraz into Denmark, as their physical bodies meld into Alcatraz. Casting actress Andrus Nichols as the discontent prince of Denmark is an incongruity that works, her passions’ sharp as her swordplay, the close-knit family unit of Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius are emphatically human (Benjamin Stowe, Misti Boettiger, Jack Halton), and Scott D. Phillips plays the appropriately militaristic and ego-driven Claudius with a cold steel edge. (Gluckstern)

IPH… Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, 647-2822, www.brava.org. $15-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/16. Brava Theatre and African-American Shakespeare Company present the US premiere of an adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis.

*Jerry Springer the Opera Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th; www.jerrysf.com. $20-36. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/16. Highbrow meets low in one big, boisterous mono-brow middle as one of the baser of daytime talk-show hosts meets his audience and maker—or anyway Jesus and Satan—in a TV show purgatory that really is purgatory. The form is operatic, the subject matter the stuff of soap, and the resulting tawdry spectacle all but irresistible in Ray of Light Theatre’s production of the 2003 British musical by Richard Thomas (music, book and lyrics) and Stewart Lee (book and lyrics). If the conceit feels a bit one-note, it’s a note taken very cleverly and ably for all its worth. A smart, smarmy and dyspeptic Patrick Michael Dukeman excels in the title role, as the chorus, meanwhile, comprised of Jerry’s rabid studio audience, puts the unbridled hooligan glee in glee club, lending Wagnerian weight to such key phrases as “step-dad” or “chick with a dick.” The grand and just slightly sleazy Victoria Theatre makes the perfect venue for this fine irreverence, filling it charmingly with rafter-shaking vulgarity and mayhem.

Kiss of Blood Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm. Through Nov 19. Thrillpeddlers’ seasonal slice of eyeball is comprised of three playlets variously splattered with platelets, all directed by Russell Blackwood and bridged by a rousing burst of bawdy song from the full cast. Rob Keefe’s Lips of the Damned (after La Veuve by Eugene Heros and Leon Abric) takes place in a rat-infested museum of atrocities just before the fumigating starts, as an adulterous couple—comprised of a kinky married lady (a vivacious Kara Emry) and a naïve hunk from the loading dock (Daniel Bakken)—get their kicks around the guillotine display, and their comeuppance from the jilted proprietor (Flynn DeMarco). Keefe’s delightfully off-the-wall if also somewhat off-kilter Empress of Colma posits three druggy queens in grandma’s basement, where they practice and primp for their chance at drag greatness, and where newly crowned Crystal (a gloriously beaming Blackwood) lords it over resentful and suspicious first-runner-up Patty Himst (Eric Tyson Wertz) and obliviously cheerful, non-sequiturial Sunny (Birdie-Bob Watt). When fag hag Marcie (Emry) arrives with a little sodium pentothal snatched from dental school, the truth will out every tiny closeted secret, and at least one big hairy one. Kiss of Blood, the 1929 Grand Guignol classic, wraps things up with botched brain surgery and a nicely mysterious tale of a haunted and agonized man (Wertz) desperate to have Paris’s preeminent surgeon (DeMarco) cut off the seemingly normal finger driving him into paroxysms of pain and panic. Well-acted in the preposterously melodramatic style of the gory genre, the play (among one or two other things) comes off in a most satisfying fashion. (Avila)

Last Days of Judas Iscariot Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.CustomMade.org. $10-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 30. Custom Made Theatre Company presents the 2005 play by New York’s Stephen Adly Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the A Train), which places purgatorial Judas (Kristoffer Alberto Barrera) on trial to determine his deserved fate for dropping a dime on Jesus and all that jazz. Flamboyant, sycophantic and horny prosecutor El-Fayoumy (Ben Ortega) and defense attorney Loretta (Amelia Avila) call between them a series of brow-raising witnesses—including Mother Teresa (Brandy Leggett), Sigmund Freud (Catz Forsman), and Satan (Richard Wenzel)—as Judas (seated on the upper tier of Sarah Phykitt’s suitably imposing split-level set) stares stoically in relative silence or appears in a series of childhood flashbacks. Characteristically funny and streetwise, as well as versed in the Catholic rigmarole as filtered through a NYC-boroughs sensibility, Guirgis’s play is also unusually tedious in its jokey, poky unfolding since—offering not much more than a cipher in the largely mute Iscariot—the proceedings lack a strong sense of dramatic stakes. It feels more like a revue than a play, or like an unnecessarily long-winded excuse for the final, well-turned concluding monologue by a heretofore marginal character (a speech delivered with admirable understatement by director Brian Katz). (Avila)

Love Song Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Oct 23. An offbeat comedy by John Kolvenbach, directed by Loretta Janca.

Mary Stuart The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $15-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. (also Oct 20, Oct 27, Nov 3; 7pm). Through Nov 7. Shotgun Players presents Friedrich Schiller’s historical drama, directed by Mark Jackson.

*The Real Americans The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 6. The fifth extension of Dan Hoyle’s acclaimed show, directed by Charlie Varon.

*Scapin American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary; 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-90. Tues-Sun, times vary. Through Oct 23. Bill Irwin, the innovative former Pickle Family clown and neo-vaudevillian turned Broadway star, makes a San Francisco return at the helm—and in the title role—of American Conservatory Theater’s production of Moliere’s classic farce. It’s an excuse for some arch meta-theatrical high jinx as well as expert clowning, a love fest really, with many fine moments amid a general font of fun whose heady purity seems like it should fall under some FDA regulation or other—clearly, somebody has paid someone to look the other way, and for once the corruption is unreservedly welcome. Joining the fun is Irwin’s old comrade-in-arms and, here, sacks, Geoff Hoyle, as miserly and dyspeptic daddy Geronte. Other ACT regulars and veterans flesh out a winning cast, among them the ever versatile and inimitable Gregory Wallace as Octave, a flouncing Steven Anthony Jones as put-out patriarch Argante, René Augesen as boisterously unlikely “virgin” Zerbinette, and a wonderfully adept and scene-stealing Judd Williford in the role of Scapin sidekick Sylvestre. As for Irwin, his comedic sensibility shows itself scrupulously apt and timeless at once, and his sure, lithesome performance intoxicating and age-defying. As a director, moreover, he gives as generously to each of his fellow performers as he does to his adoring, lovingly tousled audience. (Avila)

The Shining: Live The Dark Room, 2263 Mission; 401-77891, www.darkroomsf.com. $7-10. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 23. The Dark Room becomes the Overlook Hotel in this stage production of the horror classic.

Sunset Limited SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $40-50. Tues-Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Nov 6. This 2006 play by Cormac McCarthy exhibits some of the best and worst of the celebrated author, but significantly more of the latter. It sets an aging white academic and failed suicide (Charles Dean) in a room with his rescuer and would-be savior, a poor black social worker (Carl Lumbly), who has just snatched him from a railway platform ahead of a tête-à-tête with a train called the Sunset Limited. Both characters remain nameless, emphasizing the abstract pseudo-Socratic dimensions attendant on the dialogue-driven realism here (staged with a knowing wink in director Bill English’s scenic design, a partially walled wood-framed shack with see-through slits between the thin horizontal planking). The black man is a born-again Christian and ex-con convinced Jesus has just given him a major assignment. His dogmatic certainty is matched by the white man’s nihilism and despair. “I believe in the primacy of the intellect,” the miserable prof tells his host, who’s locked the door on his self-destructive guest in an effort to buy time to change his mind. Leaving aside the historically clichéd, problematic and baggage-heavy dynamic of a poor black American devoted to the welfare of a rich white one, neither man moves from his respective position one inch (at least until perhaps and partially at the very end), which constrains the dramatic development. Moreover, both sides argue feebly, mainly by gainsaying whatever it is the other one says, making this not a great intellectual debate either. SF Playhouse’s production sets two fine actors at this heavy-handed twofer, but little can be done to redeem so static and arid an exercise. (Avila)

Superior Donuts TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-67. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Oct 31. TheatreWorks presents Tracy Letts’ tale of friendship and redemption in a Chicago donut dispensary.

Zombie Town Stage Werx Theatre, 533 Sutter; www.stagewerx.org. (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $24. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Oct 31, 5pm). Through Oct 31. Catharsis Theatre Collective presents a documentary play about zombie attacks in Texas.

BAY AREA

Angels in America, Part One Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sat/16. Pear Avenue Theatre kicks off its fall “Americana” program with the Tony Kushner play.

*Compulsion Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-85. Dates and times vary. Through Oct 31. Director Oscar Eustis of New York’s Public Theater marks a Bay Area return with an imaginatively layered staging of Rinne Groff’s stimulating new play. Compulsion locates the momentous yet dauntingly complex cultural-political outcomes of the Holocaust in the career of a provocative Jewish American character, Sid Silver, driven by real horror, sometimes-specious paranoia, and unbounded ego in his battle for control over the staging of Anne Frank’s Diary. A commandingly intense and fascinatingly nuanced Mandy Patinkin plays the brash, litigious Silver, based on real-life writer Meyer Levin, a best-selling author who obsessively pursued rights to stage his own version of Anne Frank’s story. The forces competing for ownership of, and identification with, Anne Frank and her hugely influential diary extend far beyond her father Otto, Silver, or the diary’s publishers at Doubleday (represented here by a smooth Matte Osian in a variety of parts; and a vital Hannah Cabell, who doubles as Silver’s increasingly alarmed and alienated French wife). But the power of Groff’s play lies in grounding the deeply convoluted and compromised history of that text and, by extension, the memory and meanings of the Holocaust itself, in a small set of forceful characters—augmented by astute use of marionettes (designed by Matt Acheson) and the words of Anne Frank herself (partially projected in Jeff Sugg’s impressive video design). The productive dramatic tension doesn’t let up, even after the seeming grace of the last-line, which relieves Silver of worldly burdens but leaves us brooding on their shifting meanings and ends. (Avila)

*East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Dates and times vary. Through Nov 21. Don Reed’s solo play, making its Oakland debut after an acclaimed New York run, is truly a welcome homecoming twice over. (Avila)

*Loveland The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-50. Fri, 7pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 13. Ann Randolph’s acclaimed one-woman comic show about grief returns for its sixth sold-out extension.

OFA opens SF office, hosts debate watch party

Sasha Cuttler

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October 12, 2010

12

President Obama’s political operation, Organizing For America, is opening its first San Francisco office today (Tues/12), just in time to hold a watch party for this evening’s final California gubernatorial debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. So stop by 1406 Valencia at 6:30 for the debate, or stop by at 4 pm to watch Obama greet the crowd via video hookup.

Emily Dulcan, OFA’s California communications director, said the office will be focused on get-out-the-vote efforts for the Nov. 2 election, including phone banking and precinct walking for races that include Brown for Governor, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s reelection effort, Congressional races, and even some local measures.

“A lot of our volunteers hover between local races and the big races,” said Dulcan, who said she was starting to feel good about the chances of Democrats doing well at the polls. “People are really starting to see what’s at stake in this election. We can go back to the failed policies of the Republicans and President George W. Bush, or we can move forward under President Obama.”

While history and many pundits predict the Democrats will lose seats in Congress this fall – mostly because of the stubbornly bad economy and the fact that the party in power usually loses ground in the midterm elections – recent computer modeling by the New York Times showed there’s an almost unprecedented amount of uncertainty in forecasting how this election will really go. And that it could largely depend on which party can get out the vote in a fairly lackluster election season.

City bid to bring vendors into Dolores Parks causes an uproar

Sasha Cuttler

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October 7, 2010

12

City bid to bring vendors into Dolores Parks causes an uproar

Officials with the SF Recreation and Parks Department are attempting to quell the mounting frustrations of some Mission District merchants and residents who feel that the city shouldn’t allow private companies to operate in a public park, as the department is seeking to do. Even those who don’t necessarily have a problem with inviting more commerce into Dolores Park say the process should have been more open and transparent.

“I like pushcarts,” said Rachel Herbert, owner of Dolores Park Café. “I think they add flavor to San Francisco.” But Herbert is also allowing opponents of the department’s request for proposals (RFP) to set up shop in her store and gather signatures for a petition to “stop the commercialization of Dolores Park.” Herbert, who lives in the neighborhood, said she is helping the effort because “It’s about the process and Rec and Park not really thinking things through and doing whatever they want.”

Mike McConnell, the man behind the petition, holds a similar viewpoint. “I don’t feel that it was adequate outreach before this.” They’re not alone. McConnell currently has petitions in three stores – including his own store, Fayes Video – each with around 100 signatures, along with 700 online petition signatures.

While the controversy is recent, the RFP for the permits was issued in September last year. The proposal stated: “Before entering into permit agreement for the operation of a pushcart in any neighborhood park, the Department will conduct a community outreach process to determine the appropriateness of such a use in the park.”

It’s unclear how much outreach there was beyond a request for applicants posted in the July 31 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. However, according to Mission Local, department spokesman Elton Pon sent them an email stating that the department mailed out “an announcement of the opportunity to more than 1,000 potential applicants.”

Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the SF Office of Small Business, said much of the demand for the permits has come from small time vendors. “Part of this has been an organic growing up of the vendors themselves,” Dick-Endrizzi said. “The mobile food folks have been coming and working and urging us to open up more space.”

Dick-Endrizzi helped vet the applicants in the panel that included members of department and the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. “I can attest as being part of the committee that they were very careful in making their decision,” she said.

However one recipient of the permits, Oakland-based Blue Bottle Coffee, has received criticisms that it isn’t local enough – city policies encourage contracting with San Francisco small businesses. Blue Bottle is also backed by venture capital firm Kohlberg Ventures.

Its founder recently issued a public letter explaining his position: “I had assumed that since there were published articles in The Chronicle, the Examiner, and the SF Weekly in November of 2009, and January 2010, that the community around Dolores Park was well informed. So it pained me to hear that many of our (hopefully) future neighbors were upset that more outreach had not been done.”

This isn’t the first time a vendor has been allowed to operate in city parks. Nor are they the first merchant with questionable local status. Last August RPD commission voted 6-1 to replace long-time Stow Lake vendor with an out of state suitor. The Chronicle reported “the corporation, which has owned and operated the 1940s-era boathouse for 67 years, couldn’t compete with New Mexico-based Ortega Family Enterprises, which pledged to complete $233,000 worth of improvements to the well-worn building and buy a brand-new fleet of boats.”

Dolores has become a haven for unlicensed vendors selling items such as beer, hot dogs, ice cream, and even pot-laced brownies and truffles. What will become of them? “You pay thousands and thousands for your trailer and for permits and this guy comes around with his little cart and is selling coffee for 50 cents less, what are you going to do? You’re going to call the fucking cops and say get this scumbag out of here,” said local impresario Chicken John.

Dolores Park has traditionally been regarded with a kind of laissez faire attitude by many San Francisco residents. On a warm day it’s not uncommon to see hundreds of chic to cheap layabouts basking on its hills, beer and bowl in hand, without worry in mind. And many-a-cop has seen them too, but rarely do they intervene – and all was well. Maybe that’s another reason why there has been such uproar over the proposed introduction of pushcarts into the park.

Since the uproar, both Blue Bottle Coffee and the other potential vendor nonprofit Cocina have been put in limbo. La Cocina’s executive director, Caleb Zigas, told Mission Local that “he had expected to roll into the park this week and is disappointed by the delay. In the past four months he’s poured $28,000 in grant money into La Cocina’s food trailer, which is now sitting in storage.”

But how long will the pushcarts (they’re actually trailers powered by generators) gather dust in a garage? “For most types of appeals there is a 15-day window after the permit was issued,” said Cynthia Goldstein, executive director of the SF Board of Appeals. However it isn’t a concrete rule. “On rare instances the board will extend the window when there is evidence that the city did something wrong.” In addition, according to Goldstein, there is usually a 15-20 day window between when an appeal is filled and when it is reviewed by the Board. In short, the dilemma may not be quashed by the meeting this evening that the department is holding on the controversy.

The extension would bode well for any NIMBYs since Cocina’s and Blue Bottle’s permits were granted on April 15, 2010 and Sept 2, 2010, respectively.

RecPark was expecting a 12 percent cut on the pushcart profits and hoped to net around $70,000 annually. The pushcarts are just one of the many revenue generating ideas that are currently floating around. RecPark – under its new department head, Phil Ginsburg, who was previously chief of staff to Mayor Gavin Newsom – recently created a partnerships and revenue generating division with the purpose of capitalizing on many of the cities assets.

At the Jan 21, 2010 Recreation and Parks Commission meeting, pushcarts were discussed as a way to ostensibly keep city employees from getting laid off. Other ideas that were tossed out included hosting a production of Peter Pan, renting out parking places for car shares, and an adopt-a-park program; an adopt-a-gardener program was even suggested. The city was broke and was searching for a way to close huge General Fund deficits.

The idea of pushcarts was discussed again at the Feb 18 meeting. Nick Kinsey from the property division of RecPark, told the commission, “We received 18 responses to the RFP and we actually brought six of them in for interviews. As part of the interviews we met with the respondents, we evaluated their qualifications, evaluated their operation plans – in terms of where they wanted to be in each of the parks, in each of the proposed parks, how that would interact with residents and other park users use of the park space and if there would be any conflict there.”

Kinsey continued, “We’re also accepting application on a rolling basis right now. So if anyone is watching and interested in submitting an application for pushcarts, we are accepting pushcarts. Some of our location are maxed out we wouldn’t accept anyone else. But we have plenty of other park spaces where we think this is an appropriate use.”

The meeting of the issue is today (Thurs/7) at 4 p.m. in City Hall Room 416

Now is the time

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

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arts@sfbg.com

STAGE The recent appointment of L. Peter Callender as artistic director of the African-American Shakespeare Company is exciting news, and not only for the San Francisco–based operation founded in 1994 by Sherri Young. With the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre recently rocked (though thankfully not tumbled) by the untimely deaths this year of its founding directors, Stanley E. Williams and Quentin Easter, the revitalization of a serious theater devoted to “coloring the classics” comes as especially welcome and timely. Moreover, the arrival of Callender — who, as a preeminent Bay Area actor for two decades, brings excellent experience and connections — promises a broadening of AASC’s programming as much as an overall increase in proficiency.

Case in point is AASC’s first outing under Callender’s leadership, IPH …, Irish playwright Colin Teevan’s 1999 adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. The U.S. premiere, directed by Dylan Russell, proves an uneven production, but it offers energy, invention, and, not least, Callender himself in a central role. Indeed, whatever its limitations, IPH … has no trouble expanding to fit the cavernous Brava Theater (coproducer for this season opener), which says something about the heft of the company now and going forward.

Callender plays King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces assembled at Aulis, en route to make war on Troy, whose Prince Paris has made off with Greek beauty Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother and Sparta’s king, Menelaus (Dorian Lockett). It’s a family affair, in other words, to which whole nations of people are unfortunately tied. But before the slaughter commences on the battlefield, Agamemnon must sacrifice one of his very own: beloved daughter Iphigenia (a warm and spirited Traci Tolmaire). A soothsayer has told him it is the condition under which the goddess Artemis will release his ships, now stranded in a dead calm.

In Russell’s expansive staging — which includes effective use of Matt McAdon’s gracefully sloping three-level set and Wesley Cabral’s large video backdrop — Callender’s Agamemnon stirs in nightmares at center stage, haunted and agitated like a giant unused to helplessness. Confronted by the bullying of his humiliated brother and facing the wrath of his proud, outraged, and grief-stricken wife, Queen Clytemnestra (an elegant and imposing C. Kelly Wright), Agamemnon musters all his regal strength. Only before his adorable and adoring daughter does he seem barely up to the task at hand. Callender excels as a leader of men brought to the very brink of emotional collapse by this cruel test of allegiance, responsibility, and resolve. (At times, however, disparities in acting ability can make it seem as if the actors onstage are in separate productions, as when Callender and Lockett’s kingly brothers square off.)

Of course, leaders of state rarely sacrifice their own in waging war — very much to the contrary. All too easy to have other, far less powerful people sacrifice theirs, hence the importance of ideas of “sacrifice” on behalf of a “nation,” whatever that is. (Interestingly, Jon Tracy’s In the Wound, currently making its premiere in a production by the Shotgun Players, is an adaptation of the same Greek myth that takes heated exception to this notion of national sacrifice). The drama as adapted by Teevan emphasizes familial conflict and presents us with the ultimately willing figure of Iphigenia, accepting her own death out of paternal love and a sense of civic obligation and a greater destiny. But the play’s very title suggests an underlying ambivalence, and Teevan frames the story from the world- and war-weary perspective of an old servant (Peter Kybart), who gives us the tale as a flashback, seen from the other side of 10 years of bloody and pointless conflict.

The playwright also balances all with a strain of mischievous humor, centered in a chorus of four catty, flirty women (Natalia Duong, Lisa Tarrer Lacy, Marilet Martinez, Sarita Ocon) who sing their narration to familiar melodies from the “classics” of American pop music — for instance, discoursing ravenously on the manly attributes of Achilles (Luke Taylor) to the tune of Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” The gambit has a generally crowd-pleasing effect, though as presented here it goes on a bit long, diluting the central emotional content of the play.

IPH …

Through Oct. 16; $15–$35

Brava Theater Center

2781 York, SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

Fantasy girl

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

2

It was one of those knockout weekends during which rabid electro kids and throbbing bluegrass fans, twirling gay flaggers and hot-pink breast cancer walkers all blurred into, well, a blur. Hell if I remember most of it. But it’s a dazzling blur, a blur you can really take a shine to, kind of Brazil-shaped with opalescent edges, undulating there in the partially cloudy air, a 4G jellyfish lingering on the event horizon.

I.e., a blackout. So anyway, what’s my favorite multi-gifted, ultra-busty local transsexual performer Cassandra Cass (www.cassandracass.com) doing lately? In case you hadn’t heard, her talents are blossoming every Thursday at midnight on the Showtime network, in an outrageously entertaining reality show called “Wild Things.”

“You mean my two biggest talents are blossoming,” Ms. Cass breathes into my ear — and I swear I hear her shake her boobs over the phone. Cassandra’s one of those beautiful SF nightlife unicorns you spot whisking through random parties on the arm of a handsome gentleman, or pay good money well-spent to see lip-synch lustily at Harry Denton’s packed Sunday’s A Drag brunch buffets (Sundays, noon and 2:30 p.m., $39.95. Starlight Room, 450 Powell, SF. www.harrydenton.com). She’s fantastical, and now she’s the world’s.

On “Wild Things,” Cass and two other trans bombshells, Maria Roman and Tiara Russell, hit the road in a Winnebago, traveling through the West working odd jobs to raise money for Maria’s brother’s kidney disease treatment. Hair-flipping bronco busting, slaughterhouse mishaps, sexy hotdog sales, half-naked car washes, cop-attracting catfights, flirty lube jobs, and more ensue.

Notably missing on their trips into backcountry? Rampant transphobia. “Sure, here we come, these transgender Amazons with impossible figures into your tiny town. But once people got to know us, they loved us, laughed along with us” Cassandra dished. “That’s why I think the show’s so important. We’re the only trans reality show that’s reaching the nation, our ratings are through the roof. And we’re real people. We’re not just standing on a corner looking bitter.”

Cassandra just auditioned for ABC’s “Wipeout”(!) and is currently working on a 2011 edition of her infamously smokin’ calendar. “Mama’s off the chain for that one — put me in a bikini and I’ll do anything,” she purrs. “My goal is to be someone that people look at and go crazy for. Men, women, gay, straight, whatever — I want them to see me and question why they put themselves in a niche, why they think they have to be just one thing.”

B.Y.O.F. CINEMA ORGY

A primo opportunity to check out new performance space Ark221 (www.ark221.com), this monthly “bring your own film” fest — nay, orgy — will open your eyes to great local video talent. Moderators J. Douglas Smith and Gregg Golding, a.k.a. transdimensional rapper Odynophagia, reel you in.

Wed/6, 8 p.m., $3. Ark221, 221 11th St., SF. www.cinemaorgy.com

MAURICE FULTON

Eccentric Baltimorean tunesmith has lately specialized in a Chicago-looking brand of burbling, red-lit, obsessively detailed house — so nice. He’ll be headlining the invaluable No Way Back monthly with DJs Conor and Solar.

Sat/9, 9:30, $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

GASLIGHT

Is SF ready for a lounge revival? It is if it’s this aurally sensuous and intellectually stimulating. DJs Delachaux and FACT.50 plumb the depths, from Angelo Badalamenti and Astor Piazzolla to Hooverphonic and Beirut.

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $5. Medici Lounge, 299 9th St., SF

EL RIO’S 32ND ANNIVERSARY SHINDIG

Hard to believe one of my favorite dives is twice as old as I am! Celebrate all evening with eats, treats, and beats from rockin’ bands Mighty Slim Pickens, The Ex Boyfriends, Bronze, and tons more.

Sat/9, 3 p.m., free. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

Past presence

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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October 5, 2010

0

arts@sfbg.com

LIT/MUSIC/VISUAL ART A present from the past — the paradox within that phrase is as close as one might get to pithily describing hauntology. The term was coined in 1993 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe utopian specters within capitalist society. But more recently, the music writer Simon Reynolds has specifically applied hauntology — literally, ghost logic — to music, using the term to describe the playfully eerie studio-as-séance-site releases on the British label Ghost Box, and similar recordings.

Since his early days as a journalist for Melody Maker, Reynolds has cannily related French theory to musical phenoms in practical and illustrative ways, whether applying the feminism of Hélène Cixous to Throwing Muses, ideas about jouissance to the sonic innovations of My Bloody Valentine, or Deleuze and Guattari to the jones for acceleration in rave culture. With the release of Reynolds’ most recent book, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews (Soft Skull Press, 464 pages, $16.95), I thought the time was right to turn the tables and interview him about hauntology and the related library music genre — especially since the current Berkeley Art Museum exhibition “Hauntology” cites him while putting forth a hauntological theory of visual art.

SFBG What do you think about the current interest in library music as culture grows ever more digitized? To me it seems there’s an intrinsic push-pull between searches for rare objects in far reaches, and then their incorporation into digital or online spheres.

Simon Reynolds Certainly there are some music bloggers who specialize in library [music] and go about it in an extremely systematic manner — they aim to upload or share or post every single Bruton or Peer International Library or Chappell release. They work their way through the entire catalog, number by number. These are super-obscure records, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of discography for a lot of the labels — I guess they weren’t precious about their own output. That must be both attractive and maddening (attractively maddening?) for a certain kind of obsessive-compulsive collector.

People are building a body of knowledge about library music, in the same way that reggae collectors did with the similarly chaotic and massive output of record labels in the ’70s. But it still has the aspect of an unmapped zone, a zone of discovery, which you can’t say about many other areas of music.

SFBG What aspects of library music appeal to you, and what aspects don’t?

SR I like the electronic stuff done by people moonlighting from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, or by oddball figures like Ron Geesin. Or Eric Peters and Frederick G, who did stuff — electronic weirdness, or effects-laden goofy production-type tracks — for Studio G among other library labels. The Studio G stuff on the Trunk compilation G-Spots is just so luxuriant sounding.

In library music, the weird combination of anything-goes experimentation and un-precious functionalism creates good results, especially when you factor in brevity. Most library tunes are really short. So you get the same alien buzz as from experimental music, but without being detained for 20 minutes to an hour.

I also like the whole mythos and vibe around library music, the idea of all these studios in Wardour Street and thereabouts in central London churning stuff out, with top session players or underemployed composers earning a bit of dough on the side. And of course the packaging, with its uniform artwork for different series and wonderfully distilled evocative track descriptions (“pathetic, grotesque”; “relaxed swing-along”).

The downside is that some library music is just anodyne. A large proportion is sub-music, just splinters of mood or feeling that aren’t developed because they’re meant to underscore or mood-tint brief moments in a movie or TV show. I’m also less interested in the breaks end of library music, the “groovy scene in swinging discotheque” redolent tunes favored by some beat headz.

SFBG How would you characterize or define the relationship between library music and hauntology?

SR What people would consider the classic era of library music — the ’60s and ’70s, when there were groups of musicians in the studio, as opposed to the ’80s and thereafter, when it increasingly became one composer using a digital synthesizer to play all the parts — has heavy associations with the popular culture of that period. Especially TV programs and radio, and particularly children’s TV. Library music was used when there wasn’t a budget to get a soundtrack made, so you got this off-the-peg stuff.

If you’re a child of the ’60s or ’70s, this music has a potent memory-stirring effect, but in a nonspecific way. You hear certain kinds of lite-jazz chords, or melancholic orchestrations, or certain analog synth sounds, and it sets off reverberations inside you, but you can’t place them. (A later generation will probably have the same relationship with digital-era music — we’re maybe getting that with the vogue for video game sounds in a lot of dance music now.)

When hauntologist artists use this material, they can trigger all these emotions. They can also mess with the “science of mood” in library music by making emotions clash and mingle in strange combinations.

The formality and institutional vibe of library releases has a similar appeal to the “benevolent state” stuff that the hauntologist artists are into (like polytechnics, new towns, the BBC when it believed in elevating and educating the common man, etc.). Even though the library labels were commercial ventures, the aura of them is oddly similar to government or educational institutions: kind of stuffy and prim. The artwork relates to the way Penguin and Pelican books looked. It has that “lost Britain” quality.

SFBG Have you heard responses from theorists about your application of Derrida’s concept of hauntology to music?

SR No. I really just stole the word off Jacques because I liked the feel of it. It’s Mark Fisher of k-punk who’s done the more serious mapping of hauntology as a theory onto the music. I think there are definitely some parallels and connections, but Derrida’s thing seems very much bound up with Marxism and philosophy.

SFBG What is particularly hauntological about the Ghost Box label’s recordings, and what are some notable hauntological recordings over time?

SR The “haunty” aspect to the Ghost Box stuff relates to the reverberations I just described. They use samples from the era’s library or incidental music and TV or Radiophonic Workshop scores. Or (in the case of more composed-and-played recordings by Belbury Poly or The Advisory Circle) they write new melodies and motifs that are evocative of that era or in the style of that music.

I think there’s an intrinsic musical appeal and value to this stuff that works on people who don’t have the nostalgic connection. For instance, I know some quite young Americans who really like Ghost Box’s stuff. But if you are of the demographic, it has this extra layer of meaning and effect. It can be bound to a generation, and also to nationality. (Interestingly, it appeals to Australians, who get a lot of the TV from the U.K., and thus have a similar pop cultural matrix of memory).

The Ghost Box artists have a “haunty” aspect in the sense that they’re interested — in a simultaneously playful and serious way — in all kinds of pop culture to do with the supernatural and horror, from the Algernon Blackwood/Arthur Machen tales of cosmic horror, to the Hammer House of Horror movies, to Doctor Who, to ghost stories. Again, there’s a nostalgic aspect in the sense that these things, first encountered as a child, have a profound effect. British children’s TV had some really creepy and macabre stuff on it. In retrospect, you wonder, “What were they thinking broadcasting this stuff to under-10-year-olds?”

Ghost Box has fun with the cultural associations of all this stuff. There is a really pleasing clash of the campy and the genuinely disquieting in the way they handle it. It’s not some goth/industrial scary thing, which I think is where people get confused — they put on the Ghost Box records and discover they’re quite pleasant and enjoyable.

I like the main three Ghost Box groups very much — The Focus Group, Belbury Poly, and The Advisory Circle. And Roj made a cool album, The Transactional Dharma of Roj. The label’s most fully realized, brilliant record is Advisory Circle’s Other Channels. But in terms of individual peaks, I’d say certain tracks on Focus Group’s Hey Let Loose Your Love and Belbury Poly’s The Willows are among the most remarkable music of the past decade. For me they find this place between idyllic and eerie that just presses all my buttons, especially when you add the overall framework — the design and the concepts have this dry, poker-faced humor to them.

A similar vibe is going on in the records by Moon Wiring Club and Mordant Music, who are the other two central hauntologists for me. The Caretaker, a.k.a. Leyland James Kirby, has also done some really great stuff, but it’s more amorphous and drone-y.

SFBG Inside and outside of a deployment of library music, does hauntology appeal to you more than “retrofuturism” as an idea and a practice?

SR They are similar, or they overlap. The Ghost Box guys and Mordant Music are into the whole nostalgia for the future trip. Part of the appeal of something like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is the futurism of it, the alien impact it had on impressionable ears, now inevitably filtered through a scrim of bygone charm and quaintness.

SFBG What future forms might hauntology take?

SR It may well be that every generation will come up with some kind of working-through of its recent past, the stuff that affected it most intensely as children. If you look at Ariel Pink and all the people he’s influenced who’ve come through recently, it’s bound up with a different memory-set: ’80s pop, MTV, and radio.

HAUNTOLOGY

Through Dec. 5

(Oct 29, 6-9pm “Hauntology at L@te Event with Interdisciplinary Intro Panel and musical performances Indignant Senility, Barn Owl, and Jim Haynes)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Rep Clock

David Talbot

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October 5, 2010

0

Schedules are for Wed/6–Tues/12 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARK 221 221 11th St, SF; www.cinemaorgy.com. $3. "BYOF Cinema Orgy!," Wed, 8.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. San Francisco Cinematheque presents: "Recent Documentary (Light Captured/Divisions Recorded)," Wed, 7:30. "Other Cinema:" So Wrong They’re Right (Forster and Sutherland), Sat, 8:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. •Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), Wed, 2:45, 7, and Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980), Wed, 4:50, 9:05. Inception (Nolan, 2010), Thurs, 2, 5, 8. •Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008), Fri, 7, and Antichrist (von Trier, 2009), Fri, 9:15. "Out Loud Comedy and Arts Festival," Sat. Visit www.outloudcomedy.com for information and tickets ($25-45). "Scary Cow Indie Film Co-Op’s 12th Film Festival," Sun, 3. Program information at www.scarycow.com.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. Fresh (Joanes, 2010), Wed-Thurs, call for times. Film Portraits By Christopher Felver: Cecil Taylor (Felver, 2006), Wed, 7. "Mill Valley Film Festival," Oct 7-17. Program information at www.mvff.com.

EMBARCADERO One Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF; www.sffs.org. $12.50. Earth Made of Glass (Scranton, 2010), Thurs, 7. Screening followed by a panel discussion about documentary film as a form of investigative journalism.

EXPLORATORIUM McBean Theatre, 3601 Lyon, SF; www.sfcinema.org. Free with admission ($12-15). "Charles and Ray Eames: A Selection of Short Films," Sat, 2. "Charles and Ray Eames: A Powers of Ten Cinema Celebration," Sun, 10am and 4pm.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. The End of the Line, Wed, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. "CinemaLit: Apocalypse Noir:" The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Guest, 1962), Fri, 6.

ODDBALL FILMS 275 Capp, SF; (415) 558-8117, info@oddballfilm.com. $10 (RSVP required as seating is limited). "The Sensitive 70s: Empathetic Self-Help and Social-Problem Films from the Disco Decade," Sat, 8:30.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:" "1953-60," short films, Wed, 7:30. "Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro:" Hovering over Water (1986), Thurs, 7; God’s Wedding (1999), Sat, 8:10; Snow White (2000), Sun, 6:10. "Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism:" Shoeshine (De Sica, 1946), Fri, 7; Days of Glory (Various directors, 1945), Fri, 8:50; Under the Sun of Rome (Castellani, 1947), Sun, 4. "Shakespeare on Screen:" Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957), Sat, 6.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Fresh (Joanes, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9:15 (also Wed, 2). Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001), Fri-Sat, 7, 9:40 (also Sat, 2, 4:30). Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, 2010), Sun-Tues, 7;15, 9:15 (also Sun, 2, 4).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 9:15. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (Scheinfeld, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7, call for times. "Art Institute of California-SF Student Film Festival," Thurs, 6. Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods (Meaney, 2010), Oct 8-14, call for times.

SAN FRANCISCO BUDDHIST CENTER 37 Bartlett, SF; www.sfbuddhistcenter.org. $5. Aparajito (Ray, 1955), Fri, 8:30.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. Free. "City Symphonies," Tues, noon.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. "Bioneers Moving Image Festival," Sat, 11am-5pm.
VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10. Redline (Koike, 2010), Oct 8-14, check website for times.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. "San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Presents: Tough Guys: Images of Jewish Gangsters in Film:" Murder, Inc. (Balaban and Rosenberg, 1960), Sun, 2. Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972), Sun, 4:30.

Music listings

David Talbot

-

October 5, 2010

0

Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Aces Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Caribou, Emeralds Regency Ballroom. 9:30pm, $22.

Child Abuse, Burmese, Death Sentence: Panda Elbo Room. 10pm, $7.

Continues, Felt Drawings, Bloody Snowman, Ssleeping DesiresS DNA Lounge. 9pm, $11.

Fences, Head and the Heart, Winter’s Fall Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Fortune 500, Gem Tops, Barrel Riders Rock-It Room. 9pm, $8.

Lissie, Dylan LeBlanc Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $15.

Plastic Fantastic Lover, Jugtown Pirates, 21st Century Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Raw Power, Irritones, Neon Maniacs, Corruptors Knockout. 9:30pm, $8.

Angus and Julia Stone, Bhi Bhiman Independent. 8pm, $16.

Hawksley Workman, Connie Lim, Sonia Rao Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Moh Alileche Yoshi’s San Francisco. 9pm, $7. With dance artist Rasa Vitalia.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

VG Plus Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, free. With DJ Skips N Pops and DJ Jessica B.

THURSDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Devotionals, Honeycombs Amnesia. 9pm, $3.

Ferocious Few, Oona Café Du Nord. 10pm, $10.

Flood, Cuzo, Glitter Wizard Eagle Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Glass Candy, Chromatics, DJ Mike Simonetti, Soft Metals, DJ Omar Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $15.

Klaxons, Baby Monster Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $18.

Land of Talk, Besnard Lakes, Suuns Independent. 8pm, $15.

Aimee Mann Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $35.

Night Horse, Hot Lunch, Lecherous Gaze Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Curtis Salgado Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $18.

Tera Melos, Skinwalker, Glaciers Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Heather Combs, Ryan Auffenberg, Mike Gibbons, Walty Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Dark Hollow Band Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

*Devotionals, David and Joanna Amnesia. 9pm, $8.

Grupo Fantasma Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $20.

Leni Stern Coda. 10pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $2. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Holy Thursday Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Bay Area electronic hip hop producers showcase their cutting edge styles monthly.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Lacquer Beauty Bar. 10pm-2am, free. DJs Mario Muse and Miss Margo bring the electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Solid Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, free. With DJs Daddy Rolo and Tesfa spinning roots, reggae, dancehall, soca, and mashups.

Studio SF Triple Crown. 9pm, $5. Keeping the Disco vibe alive with authentic 70’s, 80’s, and current disco with DJs White Girl Lust, Ken Vulsion, and Sergio.

FRIDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Abney Park, Vernian Process, Unextraordinary Gentlemen DNA Lounge. 9pm, $23.

Birdmonster, Nervous Wreckords, Kid Mud Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Blank Tapes, Rad Cloud, Tall Tales and the Silver Lining, Ryan Parks Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children McNuggits, Angel and Robot Show, Emily’s Army, Secretions Thee Parkside. 9:30pm, $8.

Dainty, Le Verita, Jon Bennett Brainwash Café, 1122 Folsom, SF; www.brainwash.com. 8pm, free.

Greg Dale, Stefan Grant, These Are Not My Ancestors Hotel Utah. 9pm, $10.

East Bay Grease, Switchbacks Hemlock Tavern. 10pm, $5.

*Fool’s Gold, Bitter Honeys, Soft White Sixties Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $12.

Matt Hires, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Cloud Nothings Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Aimee Mann Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $35.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Bye Bye Blackbirds Make-Out Room. 7:30pm, $7.

Nighthawks Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Sea Wolf, Sera Cahoone, Patrick Park Independent. 9pm, $15.

Tom Tom Club, Paul Ryder, Motion Potion Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $26.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Amick Byram CEBC, 801 Silver, SF; www.eventbee.com/view/amickbyramsf. 8pm, free.

Marcus Shelby Orchestra’s MLK Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $20-30.

Mike Dillon’s Go-Go Jungle, Earl and Mike Duo Coda. 10pm, $12.

Paula West with George Mesterhazy Quartet Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness; www.sfperformances.org. 8pm, $30-50.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Heather Ambler and Jim Goodkind Mercury Café, 201 Octavia, SF; (415) 252-7855. 7:30pm, free.

“Americana Jukebox” Slim’s. 8:30pm, $14. With Misisipi Rider, Whisky Richards, Belle Monroe and Her Brewglass Boys, and Bluegrass Revolution.

Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Grupo Fantasma Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $20.

World Percussion Arts Festival Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF; (415) 826-4441. 8pm, $25.

DANCE CLUBS

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fo’ Sho! Fridays Madrone Art Bar. 10pm, $5. DJs Kung Fu Chris and Makossa spin rare grooves, soul, funk, and hip-hop classics.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Garden Triple Crown. 9pm, $8. With DJs Inland Knights, M3, and Deron Delgado.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Heartical Roots Bollywood Café. 9pm, $5. Recession friendly reggae.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Singapore 60’s The Knockout. 5:30pm, free. DJ Sid Presley spinning rare pop, garage, and freakbeat from Singapore and SE Asia.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strictly Video 111 Minna. 9pm, $10. With VDJs Shortkut, Swift Rock, GoldenChyld, and Satva spinning rap, 80s, R&B, and Dancehall.

Treat Em Right Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop, funk, reggae, and more with DJs B. Cause, Vinnie Esparza, and guest Goldmyne.

SATURDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Awesome Party, Serpent Crown, Evil Survives, Spellcaster Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Cowboy Junkies, Watson Twins Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $35.

Ruth Gerson Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Griffin House, Tyler James Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $15.

Hard Girls, Ivy and Erick Amnesia. 7pm. Part of LitQuake, with readings by Blag Dahlia, Eric Lyle, and more.

Bruce Katz Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

LoCura, Manicato, DJ Funk-C Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Moon Duo, Lilac Amnesia. 10pm, $8.

Particle Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $20.

Proj, Psychology of Genocide, Beet, MC Lynn Breedlove Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6.

Scene of Action, Felsen, Bird By Bird, Kindness and Lies Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.

Bob Schneider, Bascom Hill, Smile Smile Independent. 9pm, $20.

Toro Ramire, Ideomeneo, Flash Bastards Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Wires in the Walls, Tenderloins Hotel Utah. 9:30pm, $8.

Zoo Station Blackthorn Tavern, 834 Irving, SF; www.blackthornsf.com. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Amick Byram CEBC, 801 Silver, SF; www.eventbee.com/view/amickbyramsf. 8pm, free.

Anat Cohen and Avishai Cohen Congregation Sherith Israel, 2266 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-50.

Dead Kenny Gs, Black Frames, Earl and Mike Duo Coda. 10pm, $12.

“On the Edge of Dark” Simm Series, Musicians Union Hall, 116 Ninth St, Sf; www.outsound.org. 8pm, $8-10. With Vinny Golia, Rent Romus, and the Lords of Outland.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15. Performing the music of Duke Ellington.

Nikki Yanofsky Florence Gould Theatre, Legion of Honor, 100 Legion of Honor Dr, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 2pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

World Percussion Arts Festival Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF; (415) 826-4441. 8pm, $25.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx. Bootie vs. Booty Call DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with VJ Brewski, Smash-Up Derby, Adrian and Mysterious D, and Dada.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $5-7. Queer dance party with DJ Nuxx and friends.

Frolic Stud. 9pm, $3-7. DJs Dragn’Fly, NeonBunny, and Ikkuma spin at this celebration of anthropomorphic costume and dance. Animal outfits encouraged.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Industry Mighty. 10pm, $25. With DJ Dave Aude and Jamie J Sanchez celebrating Fleet Week.

Lacquer! Milk Bar. 10pm, $5. With DJ Mario Muse vs. DJs Blondie K and subOctave spinning indie dance, electro, new wave, and disco.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Same Sex Salsa and Swing Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; (415) 305-8242. 7pm, free.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Spotlight Siberia, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 552-2100. 10pm. With DJs Slowpoke, Double Impact, and Moe1.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm, $15. Electro-cumbia with DJs El Guincho, El Hijo de la Cumbia, and DJs Disco Shawn and Oro 11.

SUNDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Anberlin, Crash Kings, Civil Twilight Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $20.

Frightened Rabbit, Plants and Animals, Bad Veins Fillmore. 8pm, $22.50.

Terry Hanck Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Liz Phair Independent. 8pm, $25.

Rangers, Universal Studios Florida, Radiant Husk Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $6.

“SF Bike Coalition Presents: Kestral Sound Review, Volume 2: Battle of the One-Man Bands” Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10. With A Magic Whistle, Mallard, Ricky Lee Robinson, Hanalei.

Slow Motion Cowboys, Virgil Shaw and the New Mid-City Band, Domestic Electrics Make-Out Room. 8pm, $7.

*Mark Sultan, Hunx and His Punx, Shannon and the Clams Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Wannabe Texans, Mae McCoy and the Neon Stars Bottom of the Hill. 3pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Frank Jackson, Larry Vuckovich Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St, SF; (415) 826-6200. 4:30pm, $10.

“3rd Annual San Francisco Filipino American Jazz Festival” Yoshi’s San Francisco. 6pm, $45.

“On the Edge of Dark” Simm Series, Musicians Union Hall, 116 Ninth St, Sf; www.outsound.org. 7:30pm, $8-10. With Vinny Golia, Rent Romus, and the Lords of Outland.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

Garett Brennan Bazaar Café, 5927 California, SF; (415) 831-5620. 6pm.

Calliope Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Quinn Deveaux Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10.

Silver Threads, Merle Jagger Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

World Percussion Arts Festival Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF; (415) 826-4441. 6pm, $25.

DANCE CLUBS

Autobahn Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9pm, free. With DJs Shawn Ryan and Pat Les Stache and host Tristes Tropiques.

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. International dub summit with Subatomic Sound System vs. Dubblestandart, featuring Emch and Paul Zasky, plus Devon D and DJ Sep.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Fresh Ruby Skye. 6pm, $25. A Columbus Day weekend T-dance with DJ Paul Goodyear.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Lowbrow Sunday Delirium. 1pm, free. DJ Roost Uno and guests spinning club hip hop, indie, and top 40s.

Mini Non Stop Bhangra Rickshaw Stop. Noon-3pm, $5-10. Kid-friendly world music dance party.

Out Loud Festival Wrap Party Thee Parkside. 12:30pm, $6. With DJs Brown Amy and Carnita.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa dance party with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio and Orquestra La Moderna Tradición.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Remember the White Party Disco Glas Kat, 520 4th St., SF; (415) 495-6620. 6pm, $25. With DJ Jerry Bonham spinning Trocadero Transfer classics.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Capsula, Blammos Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Corin Tucker Band Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17.

Eels Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

James, Ed Harcourt Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

Remy Zero, Sanders Bohlke Café Du Nord. 8pm, $15.

*Valient Thorr, Red Fang, FlexXBronco Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Brad Wilson and Rhythm Drivers Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $12.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Toshio Hirano Amnesia. 8:30pm, free.