War

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete

OPENING

*Centaur Is our scarily intense, morally slippery narrator a man or a beast? J.P. Allen not only wrote and directed Centaur, but also stars in the claustrophobic, beautifully lensed SF-based noir with a contemporary update: Allen’s unnamed, driven protagonist lets you into his mind with a video journal, a document of his revenge on the drunk driver (Chris Pflueger) who caused the death of his true love, Jennifer (Amy Mordecai). Repeated images of the Golden Gate Bridge, and of Jennifer reading love poetry and caressing herself, parallel the obsession of the narrator, who methodically lays out his love, loss, and murderous plan, while the refined look and sensual feel of the images — and the soundtrack by Bad Seeds-like, cacophonous Michael Slattery and Shoulders — make this independent rise above the ordinary. Allen wisely pares his character’s struggle and story down to the bare essentials, in the process crafting a film that draws you in and continues to haunt you after the credits roll. (1:27) Lumiere. (Chun)

Footnote Oscar-nominated Israeli film about the fierce academic competition between a father and son at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (1:45) Clay.

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the annual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) Marina, Presidio. (Rapoport)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

*The Kid with a Bike Slippery as an eel, Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the bane of authorities as he tries to run away at any opportunity from school and a youth home — being convinced that the whole adult world is conspiring to keep his father away from him. During one such chase he literally runs into hair-salon proprietor Samantha (Cécile De France), who proves willing to host him on weekends away from his public facility, and is a patient, steadying influence despite his still somewhat exasperating behavior. It’s she who orchestrates a meeting with his dad (Jerémié Renier, who played the child in the Dardennes’ 1996 breakthrough La Promesse), so Cyril can confront the hard fact that his pa not only can’t take care of him, he doesn’t much want to. Still looking for some kind of older male approval, Cyril falls too easily under the sway of Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a teenage thug whom everyone in Samantha’s neighborhood knows is bad news. This latest neorealist-style drama from Belgium’s Dardenne Brothers treads on very familiar ground for them, both in themes and terse execution. It’s well-acted, potent stuff, if less resonant in sum impact than their best work. (1:27) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Raid: Redemption As rip-roaring as they come, Indonesian import The Raid: Redemption (from, oddly, a Welsh writer-director, Gareth Huw Evans) arrives to reassure genre fans that action films are still being made without CG-embellished stunts, choppy editing, and gratuitous 3D. Fists, feet, and gnarly weapons do the heavy lifting in this otherwise simple tale of a taciturn special-forces cop (Iko Uwais) who’s part of a raid on a run-down, high-rise apartment building where all the tenants are crooks and the landlord is a penthouse-dwelling crime boss (Ray Sahetapy). Naturally, things go awry almost immediately, and floor-to-floor brawls (choreographed by Uwais and co-star Yayan Ruhian, whose character is aptly named “Mad Dog”) comprise nearly the entirety of the film; of particular interest is The Raid‘s focus on pencak silat, an indigenous Indonesian fighting style — though there are also plenty of thrilling gun battles, machete-thwackings, and other dangerous delights. Even better: Redemption is the first in a planned trilogy of films starring Uwais’ badass (yet morally rock-solid) character. Bring it! (1:40) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Sound of Noise The ingenious 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers expands to feature length — and blankets an entire (unnamed) Scandinavian city in anarchic soundscapes — in Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson’s eccentric, engaging comedy. A cop (Bengt Nilsson) on the anti-terrorism squad also happens to be the only tone-deaf member of his musical-genius family; the fact that his name is Amadeus only makes his hatred of music all the more potent. When a mysterious band of percussionists begin holding disruptive performance-art “concerts” in odd places (a hospital, a bank), Amadeus becomes obsessed with the case — though, in a nifty bit of fantasy, once an object has been played on by the group, he can no longer hear the sound it makes. Sound of Noise is worth seeing just for the toe-tapping musical interludes, played on objects both commonplace and ridiculous, but Nilsson and the musicians (especially ringleader and lone female Sanna Persson Halapi) are also deadpan delights. (1:38) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Four Star, Lumiere, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Boy Apparent in his 2007 film Eagle vs. Shark and his brief turns writing and directing The Flight of the Conchords, filmmaker Taika Waititi seems to embody a uniquely Polynesian sensibility, positioned at a crossroads that’s informed by his Te-Whanau-a-Apanui heritage and his background in the Raukokore area of New Zealand, as well as an affection of global pop culture and a kind of keeping-it-real, keeping-it-local, down-home indie sensibility. All of which has fed into Boy, which became the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time when it was released in its homeland in 2010. Its popularity is completely understandable. From the lush green inlands and stunning beaches of Waihau Bay to its intimate, gritty and humorous sketch of its natives, this affectionate, big-hearted bildungsroman is a lot like its 11-year-old eponymous hero — eminently lovable and completely one of a kind. Despite the tragedies and confines of his small-town rural life, Boy has a handle on his world: it’s 1984, and his pals spend their time hanging out at the snack shop and harvesting weed for one deadbeat biker parent. Boy’s brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) believes he has superpowers and is scarred by the fact that his birth was responsible for their mother’s death, and Michael Jackson has just been crowned the king of pop. Then, while his grandma’s away, Boy’s own deadbeat dad, Alamein (Waititi) appears on the scene, turning an extended family of small children on its head — and inspiring many a Thriller dance-slash-dream sequence. Waititi finds his way inside Boy’s head with Crayola-colorful animated children’s drawings, flashbacks, and the kind of dreamy fluidity that comes so naturally during long, hot Polynesian days, all while wonderfully depicting a world that far too few people have glimpsed on screen. (1:30) Bridge, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Casa de mi Padre Will Ferrell’s latest challenge in a long line of actorly exercises and comic gestures — from his long list of comedies probing the last gasps of American masculinity to serious forays like Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Everything Must Go (2010) — is almost entirely Spanish-language telenovela-burrito Western spoof Casa de mi Padre. Here Ferrell tackles an almost entirely Spanish script (with only meager, long-ago high school and college language courses under his belt) alongside Mexican natives Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna and telenovela veteran Genesis Rodriguez. This clever, intriguing, occasionally very funny, yet not altogether successful endeavor, directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, sprang from Ferrell’s noggin. Ferrell is nice guy Armando, content to stay at home at the ranch, hang with his buddies, and be dismissed by his father (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) as a dolt. The arrival of his sleazy bro Raul (Luna) and Raul’s fiancée Sonia (Rodriguez) change everything, bringing killer narco Onza (Bernal) into the family’s life and sparking some hilariously klutzy entanglements between Armando and Sonia. All of this leads to almost zero improvisation on Ferrell’s part and plenty of meta, Machete-like spoofs on low-budget fare, from Sergio Leone to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Casa punctures padre-informed transmissions of Latin machismo, but it equally ridicules the idea of a gringo actor riding in and superimposing himself, badly or otherwise, over another country’s culture. (1:25) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Roxie. (Chun)

Delicacy Without visible effort, Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) charms the hearts of the susceptible males in her vicinity, including François (Pio Marmaï), a young man in a café who is soon proposing marriage, and Charles (Bruno Todeschini), a company director who hires her on the spot, transfixed by her very photograph on a résumé. When François, now her husband, is killed in a car accident, grief overwhelms her and she pours her energies into her professional life — until the day she finds herself unexpectedly making advances toward a frumpy, socially awkward colleague, a Swedish expat named Markus (Belgian comedian François Damiens). Her choice confounds the expectations of coworkers (Charles calls him an “ugly, insignificant guy”) and friends (one tells Nathalie, upon meeting Markus, that she could do better), but while the pairing is rather precipitous, it’s no more difficult to swallow than anything else in a film that feels like a pencil sketch on tracing paper. Events in Delicacy are lightly threaded together, so that a relationship turns into marriage and a three-year emotional tailspin goes by without our sensing the passage of time. We hear Nathalie described as “one of those women who cancels out all others,” but — while Tautou is as lovely as ever — we don’t see this in her. We hear people tell Markus how funny he is, but — though comedy is Damiens’s stock-in-trade — he doesn’t make us laugh. The problem lies largely in the script, even clumsier than Markus; it tells us we’re watching two unlikely people fall in love but doesn’t give us much reason to care. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Fake It So Real It would have been very easy for someone to make a film about an uber-low-budget posse of indie wrestlers and make fun of the entire enterprise. Robert Greene, whose cousin is among Fake It So Real‘s subjects, chooses a different path: his film is almost earnest in its appraisal of these Lincolnton, North Carolina good ol’ boys, who live for their Saturday-night matches under the fluorescent lights of the local Vietnam Veteran’s Center. For these men, wrestling offers an escape from otherwise glamourless lives (filled with boring jobs, heartbreak, health problems, and the like), and they take it very seriously, plotting out character arcs and sweating through training sessions. Comparisons to Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler (2008) are inevitable, but remember, Rourke’s character had once been famous. These guys’ definition of success is being approached by a group of kids in Wal-Mart for an autograph. Note for the easily offended: Fake It So Real‘s fly-on-the-wall filming style doesn’t filter out its subjects’ affection for gay jokes, clearly a deeply-enmeshed part of the small-town culture depicted here. (1:31) Roxie. (Eddy)

*The FP The town is real: east-of-Santa-Barbara, south-of-Bakersfield mountain burg Frazier Park, Calif. But this is no bucolic village; nay, the world portrayed in The FP is a dark one, a place without jobs or fashion sense that evolved beyond the 1980s. It’s a world where disputes between warring gangs are settled via Beat Beat Revelation, a video game that bears absolute resemblance to Dance Dance Revolution. A family affair (brothers Jason and Brandon Trost co-directed; Jason wrote and stars; Brandon was the cinematographer; sister Sarah — from Project Runway, season eight! — designed the costumes; and dad Ron did the special effects) and an obvious labor of love, The FP pays adoring homage to John Carpenter and Walter Hill’s classics of the dystopian-future B-movie genre. Angry loner Jtro (Jason Trost), rocking a Snake Plissken-esque eye patch, leaves the FP after the Beat Beat-related death of his older brother; with the help of friend KC/DC (Art Hsu) and mystical guru BLT (Nick Principe), he trains (via ’80s-style montages, natch) for a match with town bully L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), all the while wooing troubled girl next door Stacey (Caitlyn Folley). Of particular note is The FP‘s riotous dialogue; this is maybe the first (and let’s hope last) film to be written entirely in what sounds like the language of the juggalos. (1:23) Roxie. (Eddy)

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Four Star, Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Jeff, Who Lives at Home The failure-to-launch concept will always thrive whenever and wherever economies flail, kids crumble beneath family trauma, and the seduction of moving back home to live for free with the parental units overcomes the draw of adulthood and individuation. Nevertheless brotherly writing and directing team Jay and Mark Duplass infuse a fresh, generous-minded sweetness in this familiar narrative arc, mainly by empathetically following those surrounding, and maybe enabling, the stay-at-home. Spurred by a deep appreciation of Signs (2002) and plentiful bong hits, Jeff (Jason Segel) decides to go with the signals that the universe throws at him: a mysterious phone call for a Kevin leads him to stalk a kid wearing a jersey with that name and jump a candy delivery truck. This despite the frantic urging of his mother (Susan Sarandon), who has set the bar low and simply wants Jeff to repair a shutter for her birthday, and the bad influence of brother Pat (Ed Helms), a striving jerk who compensates for his insecurities by buying a Porsche and taking business meetings at Hooters. We never quite find out what triggered Jeff’s dormancy and Pat’s prickishness — two opposing responses to some unspecified psychic wound — yet by Jeff, Who Lives at Home‘s close, it doesn’t really matter. The Duplass brothers convince you to go along for the ride, much like Jeff’s blessed fool, and accept the ultimately feel-good, humanist message of this kind-hearted take on human failings. (1:22) California, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Kill List “Oh jeebus,” you say. “Another movie about a hit man lured out of retirement for one last score?” Well, yes — and no. British director and co-writer Ben Wheatley (2009’s Down Terrace) manages to reinvent one of cinema’s most tired clichés by injecting a healthy amount of what-the-fuck-just-happened?-ness, as well as a palpable sense of absolute dread. Without spoiling anything, here’s how the story begins: married with a young son, surly Jay (Neil Maskell) and shrill Shel (MyAnna Buring) are struggling to maintain their wine-drinking, middle-class, Jacuzzi-in-the-backyard lifestyle. Their financial troubles are due to the fact that Jay hasn’t worked in eight months, which is to say he hasn’t offed anyone since his last job, a mysterious assignment in Kiev, went awry. When best friend and partner Gal (Michael Smiley) hears about a new, well-paying gig that involves a “kill list” of U.K.-based victims, Jay figures he might as well sign on, if only to get Shel off his back. But as the pill-popping Jay soon learns, his sinister new employer is no ordinary client, and the murders have a special significance — revealed in a twist I guarantee even seen-it-all horror buffs will neither anticipate nor fully comprehend on first viewing. Ergo: what the fuck just happened? (1:36) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

A Thousand Words (1:31) 1000 Van Ness.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center. (Eddy)

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 21

“An Ancient Path in a Modern World” Dr. Paul R. Fleischman talks about Vipassana meditation Golden Gate Room, Fort Mason Center, SF. (415) 345-7500, www.mahavana.dhamma.org. 7 p.m., free. When spastically squeezing that stress ball isn’t cutting it for you anymore, it might be time to look for alternative forms of meditation. Join Dr. Paul R. Fleischman, psychiatrist and teacher of Vipassana, in his discussion of channeling an ancient approach to cope with 21st century issues. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Experience Your America” San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park open house General’s Residence, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Buchanan, SF. (415) 561-7049, www.nps.gov/safr. 4:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m., free. We are extremely lucky to live in a city full of parks, lagoons, beaches, and gardens. Meet the folks who work to keep our parks beautiful, and for a chance to ask how we can help too.

THURSDAY 22

The 16th Tournee of Animation series of original animated shorts McBean Theatre, Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 561-0360, www.exploratorium.edu. 7:30 p.m., free. This annual touring program went around the world from the 1970s to the late 1980s. The 16th Tournee returns (again) to the local animation community in San Francisco. The night promises 16 animated films from the 1980s, shown in pristine 16mm print.

FRIDAY 23

Wild Ride poetry readings and dancing San Francisco Motorcycle Club, 2194 Folsom, SF. (415) 863-1930, www.sf-mc.org. 7:30 p.m., free. Wild Ride pairs the intense velocity of motorcycles with the serenity of poetry. Writers from San Francisco State and San Bernardino State Universities come together to share their work at the second oldest motorcycle club in the country.

SATURDAY 24

SoMa flea market Tanil Artist Studio, 1108 Howard, SF. (415) 722-7847. 10 a.m.-7 p.m., free. Pop in to this monthly indoor market and get ready to reach your swapmeet nirvana. Local bands and DJs will be whistling some tunes, as backdrop to your life foretold by a psychic. Hopefully the clairvoyant advises to immediately head to the food stand.

Two Cats comic bookstore grand opening Two Cats Comic Book Store, 320 West Portal, SF. (415) 566-8190, www.twocatscomicbookstore.com. 1 p.m.-9 p.m., free. Comic lovers, pick up your weeklies and check out neat collectibles at San Francisco’s newest comic store. The grand opening boast an impressive lineup of creators and artists who will sign new issues and conduct drop-in art classes. The new shop has a knowledgeable staff and additional room reserved for events and yes, gaming.

Retirement Boot Camp Presidio Golf Club, Eight Presidio Terrace, SF. (415) 221-8833, www.presidiogolfclub.com. 8:30 a.m.-2 p.m., free. Whether you like it or not, everyone gets old. Be smart and take some to think about retirement plans so that you can live later with peace of mind. Experts will speak on income planning, how to best protect your assets, and long-term health and wellness issues.

Bonsai repotting party Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt, 666 Bellevue, Oakl. (510) 763-8409, www.gsbf-bonsai.org. 10 a.m. for bonsai seminar; noon-4 p.m. for repotting, free. For the past two years, professional bonsai artist Ryan Neil has been styling a Rocky Mountain juniper tree, defoliating and pruning the miniature plant with utmost care. This little tree will have its grand debut this weekend with a repotting party, docent tours, and morning seminars on the traditional Japanese art form.

“Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step” author reading Downstairs Forum, 2550 Dana, Berk. (510) 981-1858, www.cecilepineda.com. 3 p.m., free. Published on the one-year anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, Cecile Pineda’s memoir blends a mix of personal reflection with investigative journalism. The author not only exposes the nuclear catastrophe through daily reportage, but also communicates the utter terror of local inhabitants through deep song (canto hondo) and meditations.

SUNDAY 25

“Death Valley Photographer’s Guide” wildlife photography exhibition Sarber’s Cameras, 1958 Mountain, Oakl. (510) 339-8545, www.dansuzio.com. 1 p.m.-2 p.m., free. The endlessly beautiful geographic terrain of Death Valley makes it difficult when choosing which angle or light to capture the salt-coated valley floor with your camera. Wildlife photographer Dan Suzio will share his photos and talk about his new book, which lays down where and how to catch the valley’s best side.

“War, Sanctions, and Regime Change in the Middle East” teach-in featuring Ramsey Clark Unitarian Universalist Society, 1187 Franklin, SF. (415) 821-6545, www.answercoalition.com. 1 p.m., $5–$20 donation. It’s not much for a celebration, but March 2012 marks the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The panel of activists, such as Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, and Dr. Jess Ghannam of Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition, will share their first-hand knowledge of the conflict in the Middle East during this afternoon teach-in.

MONDAY 26

Conversation with Glee executive producer Dante Di Loreto and performance Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1200, www.jccsf.com. 7 p.m., $10 for students; $20 general admission. Gleeks, all your fervent questions will now be answered. After enjoying a mash up number from “Cabaret” performed by the Young People’s Teen Musical Theatre Company, flock to the stage to pick at the brain of the guy responsible for bringing musical theater to prime time television.

TUESDAY 27

EcoTuesday sustainable business networking event CompoClay Showroom, 60 Post, SF. (415) 877-4228, www.compoclay.com. 6:30 p.m.-9 p.m., $10 with online registration; $15 at door. EcoTuesday is a networking event that happens on the fourth Tuesday of every month. Mingle with sustainable business leaders and bounce that innovative green ball around.

“Mission Theatres and the Trolleys That Took Us There” historical presentation St. Philip’s Catholic Church, 725 Diamond, (415) 750-9986, www.sanfranciscohistory.org. 7:30 p.m., $5 general admission. It’s hard to believe that at one time, trolleys were not just a tourist-ridden fiasco but a popular means of transportation for locals. Jack Tillmany, S.F. transit and movie theatre historian, will take you down streetcar lines and to the surviving theatres of San Francisco.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
-
0

THURSDAY 22

The longest war: Afghanistan beyond the Taliban

Two veteran journalists who have covered Afghanistan talk about the war that has surpassed Vietnam as the longest in US history. Masood Farivar, a former fighter in the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance before becoming a newswire in New York, then returning to Afghanistan in his capacity as journalist, and Tim McGirk a former Time magazine bureau chief in the region who has reported from Afghanistan since 1990, will have a conversation hosted by Jason Motlagh, a freelance journalist/filmmaker and former Time magazine correspondent in Kabul. A short documentary, Million Dollar Militia , will also be screened. What does a continued US presence—or, potentially, troops preparing to leave—mean for the country’s future? What political environment exists there?  Oakland-based production company Blackbeard Films launches a series that will highlight reporting on underreported stories with this event. 

7 p.m., free

Arbor Café

4210 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.blackbeardfilms.com 

 

SATURDAY 24

Wilderness first aid for the streets

In the saga of Occupy Oakland clashes with police, perhaps none are more unsung than the medics. These volunteers do everything from flushing eyes of tear gas to being first responders to protesters with broken limbs and gushing wounds. The medics team up for a training to others who want to do what they do. “Developed for wilderness situations, this course is adapted for urban uprisings, and will include care for chemical weapons exposure, herbal first aid, and public health considerations for long-term occupations,” according to the Occupy Oakland medics committee. This course is serious, covering two full days- March 24 and 25, 10am to 8pm. Red Cross certification and Continuing Education Units credits are available for $20, and scholarships are available.

10 a.m., donation suggested

The Holdout

2313 San Pablo, Oakl.

www.occupyoakland.org

WFAforthestreets@gmail.com 

 

St. Patricks Day Ceili

Did you make it through that special day without participating in a ceili, a traditional Irish social dance that is a hallmark of St. Patricks Day? If so, you’re in luck — you will be given a second chance. This dance is easily accessible for newbies and much more fun than cheap plastic green stuff and day-drinking. 

7 p.m., $10 (free for children)

United Irish Cultural Center 

2700 45th Ave., SF

www.irishcentersf.org  

 

MONDAY 26

Speaking youth to power

When it comes to climate change, young people know what’s up. Specifically such acclaimed young people as project coordinator for the urban farming non-profit Urban Tilth and Green For All Fellow Tania Pulido, Adarsha Shivakumar, founder of Project Jathropa, and Abigail Boroh, the student best known for interrupting the Durban, South Africa Climate Conference in December to bring urgency to the less than promising conference proceedings. Join them for a discussion on civic engagement within the climate justice movement. 

Doors 5:30, program 6pm, $20 (free for members and students)

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, SF

www.commonwealthclub.org

 

Black Power and OWS

Andrew Lam
-
2

OPINION Since its inception in September of 2011, The Occupy Wall Street movement has come to mean many things to many people. For some it’s a movement to end skyrocketing tuition at State Colleges and Universities. For others its a platform to stop and bring attention to unfair and illegal foreclosures. Still others see the Occupy as a movement that’s going to bring back unions and level the playing field for workers.

But one of the nagging critiques of OWS has been that it’s a movement for white middle-class youth who were late to the social justice arena — where many who are poorer and darker had been struggling for years. While economic disparities on the surface appear to be universal, the challenge has been recognizing how many who are white and part of the 99 percent have been used strategically by those in power as a sort of buffer to keep black and brown folks at an economic disadvantage. Many have brought into the narrative that underachievement by blacks is the result of individuals not applying themselves hard enough.

The economic downturn in the white communities is now viewed as systemic, with a call to arms and a move to confront the system. What’s been missed is that for decades folks in the hood have been challenging the system, trying to survive and barely holding on. Only now are you starting to see deeper discussions between OWS and black and brown community members about how this economic system has uniquely impacted them.

Because we’ve seen former black panthers and leaders within black liberation struggles like Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Bobby Seal, Mumia and Dave Hilliard work with or show support address OWS, the question of how OWS relates to the Black Power Movement has emerged.

Like OWS, Black Power means many things to many people, from economic empowerment to political empowerment. If we go back to what Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and Willie Ricks (Mukasa Dada) meant when they first coined the phrase in 1966, it was a call for solidarity and challenging racism and the systems giving it light..

Black Power leaders back then weren’t about trying to reform the system and its institutions, but dismantle it and rebuild. That approach, and the militancy that came along with it, caused a split in the Civil Rights Movement. It was break from Dr. King and the nonviolent approach by the so-called Big 5 civil rights organizations.

Today, many of the aforementioned leaders, along with others, have evolved in their definition and understanding of what it means when we say Black Power. Not to short change or misspeak for anyone (keep in mind entire courses are devoted to the topic), today we see that Black Power has expanded on its critique of capitalism. That, of course, has been echoed in many sectors of OWS. In fact, that’s what’s attracted many from the old guard to it.

Today we see many in the Black Power movements dealing with issues like the Prison Industrial Complex, the mass incarceration of black folks, and tactics like stop and frisk, gang injunctions, war on drugs etc. Any conversation about economic disparity inevitably leads back to discussions on the prison system in the black community.

While we hear within OWS calls to rebuild the system and harsh critiques of capitalism, we haven’t always seen an emphatic call to arms to deal with the PIC and issues related to police terror — even as OWS members are frequent victims themselves.

In places like Occupy Oakland, we see those bridges being built in meaningful ways. We’ve seen the forming of Occupy the Hood, which frequently addresses those issues — but talk to OTH organizers in various cities and they’ll tell you it’s still a struggle to get folks on board and make this an intuitive part of their day to day outlook.

The good news is we see conversations taking place and folks trying to work it out..

And while OWS deals with building bridges into communities of color, in our own ranks we have the challenge of class divisions. We have folks who are black, and have means, who won’t even give lip service to these issues.

But then again, mass movements even during the hey day of Dr. King always had those who spoke out, got in the way and took up space for real change. With spring coming, there’s a lot of hope that things will pick up.

The legacy of racism

Andrew Lam
-
5
The legacy of racism

steve@sfbg.com

The legacy of brutal racism in this country, particularly against African Americans, shapes the events of today. That’s a notion that much of white America resists accepting, particularly conservatives. But actions create reactions, hatred begets hatred, and those cycles can roll forward endlessly and manifest in unpredictable ways.

That’s one of the most compelling lessons in local journalist Thomas Peele’s gripping and insightful new book, Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist (2012, Crown), which grew out of covering the aftermath of the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Bailey was killed to prevent him from writing a story in the Oakland Post about the violence and financial crimes perpetrated by followers of the late Yusuf Bey and his sons, including Yusuf Bey IV (aka Fourth). Peele and other local journalists and media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to build on the work Bailey began and investigate his murder, which Fourth was convicted last year of ordering.

“The free press on which the public depends to keep it informed had been attacked,” Peele wrote. While such murders are rare in the U.S. — the last was a Mafia hit on a reporter from Arizona in 1976 — Peele and his brethren considered it important to send the message that, “A story could not be killed by killing a journalist.”

But the story that emerges from Peele’s years-long investigation goes well beyond Bailey’s murder, its flawed investigation by the Oakland Police Department, the violence and hypocrisy of the Your Black Muslim Bakery “cult,” or its long and complex relationship with Oakland’s political and community leaders.

Peele delves deeply into the 80-plus-year history of the Nation of Islam and Black Muslim ideology, dissecting its turbulent evolution and belief system that white people are “devils,” created by a mad scientist named Big-Headed Yakub, who use “tricknology” to hide the truth that African Americans are superior beings who will be spared during a coming Armageddon inflicted by a spaceship that has long circled the earth — a belief system that Malcolm X rejected after taking a hajj to Mecca and shortly before his assassination.

Peele dismisses the entire religion — which has very little in common with true Islam — as a deceptive scam from its inception, devised by the “con man” W.D. Fard and promoted by Elijah Muhammad simply to enrich its leaders by manipulating poor African Americans. Similarly, Yusuf Bey spoke the language of black empowerment in founding his own breakaway Black Muslim sect in North Oakland then used it as cover for criminal enterprises and raping the women under his control over a period of decades.

But to understand the appeal of Black Muslims preaching hatred of white devils, you have to look at the African American experience and horrible racism and violence that black people have endured in this country, as Peele does. He starts in Depression-era Detroit, where Fard and Muhammad met amid the virulent racism against Southern blacks who migrated north to work in Henry Ford’s automobile factories.

“This is the question of the psychology of race,” legendary attorney Clarence Darrow said during the Detroit murder trial of blacks defending their home against an attacking white mob, which Peele uses to great effect. “Of how everything known to a race affects its actions. What we learn as children we remember — it gets fastened to the mind. I would not claim that the people outside the Sweet house were bad. But they would do to Negroes something they would not do to whites. It’s their race psychology.”

We see Joseph Stephens (who would later become Yusuf Bey) growing up with tales of brutal lynchings in his hometown of Greenville, Texas, and later as a Santa Barbara hairdresser who discovered the Nation of Islam in 1962 after the Los Angeles Police Department had shot up its mosque and Stephens found his calling in the resolute words of Malcolm X and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

African American history made Bailey want to become a journalist focused on covering and empowering his community. And this same legacy — mixed with hopelessness, poverty, and broken homes during an upbringing in San Francisco and Richmond — animated Devaughndre Broussard, who fired three shotgun blasts into Bailey on a sunny morning in downtown Oakland.

“His life was no accident. Neither was his faith,” Peele wrote of Fourth in the last chapter. “The society that now worked through its flawed laws and imperfect courts to put him in prison for life had only itself to blame for the terror that Fourth and his fellow believers had inflicted upon it. The backlash against centuries of enslavement of Africans and the subhuman treatment of their descendants had seen to that. The stick figure hanging from a loose that Elijah Muhammad had ordered displayed in all the Nation of Islam mosques, the symbol of the boyhood lynching of his friend Albert Hamilton, showed that some could never forget, or forgive. Neither could Yusef Bey forget the stories of cotton fields his parents brought west from East Texas along with the story of a Negro burned to death as white people gathered in the square of a horrible place called Greenville and cheered. Some wounds are too deep to heal.”

But Americans have short memories for even our recent history, coupled with a growing sense that society’s have-nots somehow deserve to be that way and a lack of understanding of the many ways that racism and its legacy still affects this country.

“I don’t think white America understands it at all. White America has this attitude of: get over it,” Peele told me when I asked about that “racism’s backlash” theme. “How long can you oppress people and treat them like utter garbage before there is a rebellion?”

Gauged by poverty or incarceration rates, or by the poor quality of many of its schools, much of black America still faces tough struggles. It wrestles with a lack of opportunities and an understandable sense of hopelessness that can easily breed resentment or even violence. One example that Peele includes were the Death Angels (aka the “Zebra murders”), in which a small group of militant black ex-convicts randomly shot dozens of white people in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 1970s.

Peele closes the book with a chilling suggestion that Broussard, who is serving a fixed 25-year prison sentence because of his cooperation in the prosecution of Fourth and co-defendant Antoine Mackey, is studying to become a spiritual leader and may follow familiar patterns. “Look at where he came from? Have things changed that much?” Peele said of the lack of opportunities that Broussard faced growing up, and will face again when he gets out of prison in his mid-40s.

Peele has long been an award-winning investigative reporter rooted in deep research, which he combines with a colorful and dramatic narrative style. Yet he sometimes oversimplifies and harshly judges events and people, even Bailey, who Peele deems a lazy journalist and bad writer.

“The truth speaks for itself,” Peele told me. But the truth is often a matter of perspective, and Peele can’t escape the fact that he’s a white guy who has worked out of Contra Costa and Alameda counties since 2000. Perhaps that’s why he’s so quick to label poor urban areas with substantial African American populations as “ghettos.” Or, sometimes even more dramatically, as a “sagging, blood-splattered ghetto,” a phrase that a Los Angeles Times reviewer singled out as an example of how “Peele’s prose occasionally overreaches.”

I was repeatedly struck by the same thought, almost physically cringing when Peele labeled San Francisco’s Western Addition, my old neighborhood, as a violent ghetto. Or when he wrote, “Richmond is one of the most hopeless and violent cities in America, an oil-refinery town of 103,000 people, littered with shanties where shipyard workers lived during World War II ,” as if it were a cross between an Appalachian coal town and Third World hovel rather than a clean, modern Bay Area city well-served by public transit and a Green Party mayor.

Peele got defensive when I asked him about the labels, telling me, ” I stand by characterizations,” although he admitted that maybe Western Addition isn’t really a ghetto. “I think you’re nitpicking,” he told me.

Perhaps, and I do think that Peele’s flair for the dramatic is one of the things that makes Killing the Messenger such a page-turner, in the tradition of great true-crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But in a book that bravely takes on the complexities of racism and its backlash, I think this is more than a trivial “nit.”

It’s tempting for white America to dismiss such details, treat racism is a thing of the past, and malign racial sensitivity as political correctness. But as Peele and his book remind us, the wounds of not-so-distant indignities can run deep. And the collapsing opportunities for social and economic advancement in this country will create a backlash if we try to ignore it.

Teacher’s Union unhappy with SF school chief process

Zelda Bronstein
-
9
Teacher’s Union unhappy with SF school chief process

Key Tray from the United Educators of San Francisco called me to comment on my description of the outgoing and incoming school superintendent, which he found a little too flattering:

I haven’t agreed with him on everything, but overall, he’s done a good job — the schools are better than when he arrived, enrollment is increasing, and there’s no more of the imperious attitude and gag orders of the old Ackerman days. The district is on the right track — although Garcia would be the first to admit that there’s a lot more work to be done. And I have nothing bad to say about his annointed successor, Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza. He’ll probably do a fine job.

Tray’s point: Yes, on a lot of levels Garcia did well, but in the past few weeks he’s created a labor mess. “It’s a big disappointment,” Tray told me. “He’s poisoned the well and now he’s leaving the farm.”

The problem: Garcia decided this year to exempt 14 low-performing schools from the annual round of layoffs. The layoff process is annoying anyway — by state law, teachers have to be warned of layoffs in the spring although the state budget isn’t done until the summer so the schools don’t really know how much money they’ll have. In most cases, the layoffs are later rescinded. Out of the 500-plus layoff notices this year, “most won’t come to fruition,” Tray notes.

But the bigger problem for the union is that Garcia tossed out the seniority process when he made the decision to protect schools in the “Superintendent’s Zone.” And while some people think that’s just dandy, the teacher’s union calls it a disaster: Seniority is one of the most sacred elements of a union contract.

“Now he’s at war with the teacher’s union,” Tray said.

That, he said, won’t be pleasant for the new superintendent, who has been one of Garcia’s top aides: “Carranza’s walking into a toxic mess.”

Garcia, not too surprisingly, sees it very differently. “I’m the most pro-union guy you’ll ever find,” he told me. The 14 schools have a history of high turnover — and in an effort to keep a team of teachers, some of whom don’t have the highest seniority, in place, he exempted them from the layoffs. “We’re talking about 70 people,” he said. “And our figures suggest that this would have an impact on only three tenured teachers” who might face pink slips that they otherwise would have avoided.

As for the toxic labor environment? “It’s too bad they see it that way. We’ve worked together on every issue for five years, and I hope this one area where we disagree doesn’t ruin the entire relationship. This isn’t the only issue that matters in the world; I just wish they wouldn’t be this extreme.”

Good luck, Mr. Carranza — you’ve got some fence-mending to do.

 

 

 

 

Success won’t jinx Sharon Van Etten’s ability to write sad love songs

Tony Robles
-
0

Ed. note – Ahead of Sharon Van Etten’s long-sold out show in SF this week, Ryan Prendiville had the chance to catch up with the rising indie folk singer-songwriter (who recently released critically lauded third album ‘Tramp’) to discuss her songwriting process, lessons of South by Southwest pasts, and the influence of Nick Cave:

SFBG: How many shows are you playing at SXSW?

Sharon Van Etten: Just two. Last year we did eight in three days. It was really stupid. I burnt out and lost my voice for three days when we had just started a tour. I decided this year it just wasn’t worth it.

SFBG: You’re going to be touring nonstop for probably the rest of the year, are you not too worried about burning out?

SVE: I have to worry about burning out. These songs are more intense vocally with more band members, which I’ll still have to sing over. If the drummer loses his voice it’s one thing, but if I lose my voice we can’t really play. Before I just played as many shows as I could whereas now I realize that five in a row is kind of the max before we all start losing our minds.

SFBG: Are you thinking more of the long-term now?

SVE: I’m realizing that if I can learn how to perform in a healthy way, I’ll be able to do this for a long time. I know it sounds kind of adult or something. But for every record, if you really want people to hear it, you have a responsibility to tour at least a year, cover as much ground as you can, and play the best show that you can everyday. So you should take care of yourself. You’ve got to have fun, of course.

SFBG: Since your music is generally pretty sad, is there any danger, with your career going well and having fun, of hurting your ability to make similar music?

SVE: Some people are concerned that I’m going to start writing happy songs now that I’m doing well. The whole joke is, if you’re not miserable you’re not going to write as well. I’m not too worried about that. If I write differently, I write differently. I’m pretty at peace and proud of what I’m writing. I don’t want to jinx myself and say that people will like it just as much, but you don’t have to be miserable or tortured to record or be successful. So far most of my songs have been written in intense periods where I’ve been going through a hard time, but I think I can write songs just as well when I’m happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1OBHLTaHnU

SFBG: There’s a bit of a stereotype that female musicians are often more personal, writing from their own life experience, than their male counterparts. Obviously a great aspect when it’s true, but can downplay a creative aspect.

SVE: Writing more emotional songs doesn’t makes a person less creative. I think a lot of men avoid it while women tackle it, and that’s just a difference in genders. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just how most people are. Men are often more storytellers and detach themselves from an actual event, but I don’t think that makes them not passionate. I’d like to learn to be more of a storyteller, it just doesn’t come naturally to me right now. I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Cave, and he’s really, really good at that. It makes me want to try a different way of writing next time.

SFBG: Are you working on new material while you’re touring, or do you kind of give yourself a mental break?

SVE: I’m always kind of writing, I just don’t know what it will turn into. I have different side projects that I’m working on but who knows if they’ll fuse together into something someday. I have piano music. I have electronic music. I have really minimal stuff but I also want to write more rock songs. Right now i have a lot of ideas, but can’t call them songs yet.

Sharon Van Etten
With the War on Drugs
Weds/21, 8 p.m., sold out
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
(415) 771-1421
www.theindependentsf.com

Louis Dunn: The Republican war on women

-
0

Join vets at City Hall today to mark nine years in Iraq

Andrew Lam
-
13
Join vets at City Hall today to mark nine years in Iraq

Lest we forget, today marks the ninth anniversary of the start of our war in Iraq. If you plan on passing by City Hall today, you’ll have a vivid reminder of today’s important milestone — 481 pairs of combat boots will be lined up on the seat of our city government’s steps, a visual precursor to the afternoon of speeches by vets and their families that has been organized by the Bay Area chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The vets’ message is rendered all the more important now that US conflict in Iraq technically ended last December. A US service member commits suicide once every 36 hours, and 223,609 veterans are struggling with possible signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many battle with the after-effects of head trauma, a poorly-understood injury that can lead to serious psychological problems (the suspect in the massacre that took the lives of 16 Afghanis a few weeks ago was a US soldier who suffered from head trauma and multiple re-deployments.)

President Obama has decided that today will be a “Day of Honor” for our veterans. Now might just be a good time to get down to City Hall and hear what the United States citizens most affected by our engagement in the Middle East and elsewhere have to say. Today’s speakers at the City Hall demonstration will include Scott Olsen (the vet whose skull was fractured by a police-thrown projectile in an October Occupy Oakland demonstration), Ryan Hollerman (an active-duty soldier), and Paula Santos, whose son commited suicide after coming home from war, in addition to others from Swords to Plowshares and Military Families Speak Out. 

Iraq Veterans Against the War press conference and “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit

Press conference: Mon/19 noon, free

Exhibit: Mon/19 9 a.m.-5 p.m., free

City Hall

One Carlton B. Goodlett Plaza, SF

www.ivaw.org

Opinion: SF needs police domestic violence policy

Zelda Bronstein
-
33
Opinion: SF needs police domestic violence policy

EDITORS NOTE: This story includes a correction. The original version misstated the disposition of Judge McBride’s charges.

 

Everything I’ve written on the Mirkarimi case has attracted sizable volumes of comments (see here). Our suggestion that the mayor tread cautiously before seeking his official removal is bound to create controversy, too. Some advocates for victims of domestic violence are satisfied with the outcome of the case, and some are not. Former Sheriff Mike Hennessey told the Chron that Mirkarimi should stay in office:

“My opinion is that he should remain in the job and be given a chance to show what he can do with the office. I think he’s being punished accordingly by the justice system,” said Hennessey, who has been lauded by victims’ advocacy groups over the years for domestic violence services and programs that began under his watch. While admitting guilt to the crime of false imprisonment is serious, he added, it should not automatically disqualify Mirkarimi from holding office. “During my time as sheriff, I hired many people with criminal records who have done outstanding jobs for the department,” Hennessey said. “Oftentimes, you have to look at the whole issue of rehabilitation and redemption.”

If Mirkarimi remains in office, he won’t be the only public official in the law-enforcement business who was charged with domestic violence and pled to a lesser offense but kept his job. In 1999, Superior Court Judge James McBride was charged with slamming his wife’s hand into a door during an argument; represented by Jim Collins, who is also now on the bench, McBride got diversion on a witness intimidation charge (diversion, which leads to dismissal of all charges, is not normally available in DV cases) and stayed on the bench the entire time.

The chair of San Francisco NOW thinks none of that is OK — she thinks the city needs to adopt a zero-tolerance policy for law-enforcement officers who are convicted of a broadly defined set of domestic violence offenses (and Sheriff Mirkarimi, she argues, would fall under those guidelines). I’m posting the opinion piece she sent me below to keep the discussion going.

By Mona Lisa Wallace
chair, San Francisco National Organization for Women (NOW)
vice president, California National Organization for Women.

When the new sheriff in town, Ross Mirkarimi, pled guilty Monday to misdemeanor false imprisonment (in exchange for prosecutors dropping three other charges), it begged a bigger question: Should Mirkarimi keep his office? Mayor Ed Lee has turned to the to the City Charter asking whether there are grounds for dismissal. San Francisco NOW proposes a simpler solution: the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office and Police Department should immediately adopt a model policy on police domestic violence.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police put forth a model policy for domestic violence by police officers in 2003. The policy “recognizes that the profession of law enforcement is not immune from members committing domestic violence against their intimate partners.” The policy defines domestic violence, emphasizes victim safety and prescribes zero tolerance for domestic violence by police officers.

Once adopted, this policy provides very clear definitions of domestic violence and policies for addressing domestic violence committed by police officers. Although Mirkarimi’s plea avoided the domestic violence charges, the videos and photos of the sheriff’s wife’s bruised arm after the December 31st incident confirm physical restraint, which under the model policy is defined as domestic violence. Police officers found guilty of committing domestic violence must be terminated.

San Francisco NOW believes we need to hold ourselves to the highest standards in preventing domestic violence, which affects one in four women in their lifetimes. The number of victims grows exponentially because children who experience the abuse are also traumatized.

Actions have consequences. Rush Limbaugh verbally abused a woman and he lost sponsors. Mirkarimi committed what the model policy defines as domestic violence, so he should lose his job and his pension. That’s what zero tolerance means.  It should not matter that he has friends in high places. It should not matter that he needs the sheriff’s salary and pension. 

People who uphold the law against domestic violence need to be beyond reproach. Mirkarimi is not.

SFNOW is disturbed by the national resurgence of a “war on women” apparent in the current presidential primary elections and congressional hearings working to roll back women’s rights through legislation. We have joined “Unite Against the War on Women,” a movement now 20,000 strong who will march on every state capitol on April 28th to say enough is enough. Join us at: uniteCalifornia@gmail.com 

We sincerely hope that San Francisco rises to take a strong position opposing the war on women. The city’s sheriff’s and police departments should immediately adopt the model policy on domestic violence by police officers, and quickly apply the zero tolerance standards to our top law enforcement officers.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

The 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival runs through Sun/18 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 3 Cinemas, 288 S. Second St, San Jose. For tickets (most shows $12) and complete schedule, visit www.caamedia.org.

OPENING

Apart You’re almost waiting for the chorus to kick in: “With a taste of your lips, I’m on a ride/You’re toxic, I’m slipping under&ldots;” In another world, that might be the theme song for this somber and straight-laced indie horror fantasy-slash-romance by first-time director and writer Aaron Rottinghaus. Josh (Josh Danziger) is trying to piece together a shattered memory — he knows he has a rare form of schizophrenia and must get in touch with Emily (Olesya Rulin), a girl he once shared a scary intense intimacy with. The two are of one delusional, or perhaps oracular, mind: what they picture somehow comes to pass — a state of folie à deux triggered by a childhood school-bus accident. While evoking ’70s psychological horror flicks such as 1978’s The Fury, Apart, said to be based on real case history, takes a much more delicate tact, casting its lot with the fatalistic young romantics who must be together, come what may, and the power of youth scorned and outcast. Frustrating as unconsummated, all-consuming true love: the murkiness at the denouement of this star-crossed romance. (1:25) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Boy Apparent in his 2007 film Eagle vs. Shark and his brief turns writing and directing The Flight of the Conchords, filmmaker Taika Waititi seems to embody a uniquely Polynesian sensibility, positioned at a crossroads that’s informed by his Te-Whanau-a-Apanui heritage and his background in the Raukokore area of New Zealand, as well as an affection of global pop culture and a kind of keeping-it-real, keeping-it-local, down-home indie sensibility. All of which has fed into Boy, which became the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time when it was released in its homeland in 2010. Its popularity is completely understandable. From the lush green inlands and stunning beaches of Waihau Bay to its intimate, gritty and humorous sketch of its natives, this affectionate, big-hearted bildungsroman is a lot like its 11-year-old eponymous hero — eminently lovable and completely one of a kind. Despite the tragedies and confines of his small-town rural life, Boy has a handle on his world: it’s 1984, and his pals spend their time hanging out at the snack shop and harvesting weed for one deadbeat biker parent. Boy’s brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) believes he has superpowers and is scarred by the fact that his birth was responsible for their mother’s death, and Michael Jackson has just been crowned the king of pop. Then, while his grandma’s away, Boy’s own deadbeat dad, Alamein (Waititi) appears on the scene, turning an extended family of small children on its head — and inspiring many a Thriller dance-slash-dream sequence. Waititi finds his way inside Boy’s head with Crayola-colorful animated children’s drawings, flashbacks, and the kind of dreamy fluidity that comes so naturally during long, hot Polynesian days, all while wonderfully depicting a world that far too few people have glimpsed on screen. (1:30) Bridge, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Casa de mi Padre See “Where There’s a Will.” (1:25) Shattuck.

Delicacy Without visible effort, Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) charms the hearts of the susceptible males in her vicinity, including François (Pio Marmaï), a young man in a café who is soon proposing marriage, and Charles (Bruno Todeschini), a company director who hires her on the spot, transfixed by her very photograph on a résumé. When François, now her husband, is killed in a car accident, grief overwhelms her and she pours her energies into her professional life — until the day she finds herself unexpectedly making advances toward a frumpy, socially awkward colleague, a Swedish expat named Markus (Belgian comedian François Damiens). Her choice confounds the expectations of coworkers (Charles calls him an “ugly, insignificant guy”) and friends (one tells Nathalie, upon meeting Markus, that she could do better), but while the pairing is rather precipitous, it’s no more difficult to swallow than anything else in a film that feels like a pencil sketch on tracing paper. Events in Delicacy are lightly threaded together, so that a relationship turns into marriage and a three-year emotional tailspin goes by without our sensing the passage of time. We hear Nathalie described as “one of those women who cancels out all others,” but — while Tautou is as lovely as ever — we don’t see this in her. We hear people tell Markus how funny he is, but — though comedy is Damiens’s stock-in-trade — he doesn’t make us laugh. The problem lies largely in the script, even clumsier than Markus; it tells us we’re watching two unlikely people fall in love but doesn’t give us much reason to care. (1:48) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*Fake It So Real It would have been very easy for someone to make a film about an uber-low-budget posse of indie wrestlers and make fun of the entire enterprise. Robert Greene, whose cousin is among Fake It So Real‘s subjects, chooses a different path: his film is almost earnest in its appraisal of these Lincolnton, North Carolina good ol’ boys, who live for their Saturday-night matches under the fluorescent lights of the local Vietnam Veteran’s Center. For these men, wrestling offers an escape from otherwise glamourless lives (filled with boring jobs, heartbreak, health problems, and the like), and they take it very seriously, plotting out character arcs and sweating through training sessions. Comparisons to Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler (2008) are inevitable, but remember, Rourke’s character had once been famous. These guys’ definition of success is being approached by a group of kids in Wal-Mart for an autograph. Note for the easily offended: Fake It So Real‘s fly-on-the-wall filming style doesn’t filter out its subjects’ affection for gay jokes, clearly a deeply-enmeshed part of the small-town culture depicted here. (1:31) Roxie. (Eddy)

*The FP The town is real: east-of-Santa-Barbara, south-of-Bakersfield mountain burg Frazier Park, Calif. But this is no bucolic village; nay, the world portrayed in The FP is a dark one, a place without jobs or fashion sense that evolved beyond the 1980s. It’s a world where disputes between warring gangs are settled via Beat Beat Revelation, a video game that bears absolute resemblance to Dance Dance Revolution. A family affair (brothers Jason and Brandon Trost co-directed; Jason wrote and stars; Brandon was the cinematographer; sister Sarah — from Project Runway, season eight! — designed the costumes; and dad Ron did the special effects) and an obvious labor of love, The FP pays adoring homage to John Carpenter and Walter Hill’s classics of the dystopian-future B-movie genre. Angry loner Jtro (Jason Trost), rocking a Snake Plissken-esque eye patch, leaves the FP after the Beat Beat-related death of his older brother; with the help of friend KC/DC (Art Hsu) and mystical guru BLT (Nick Principe), he trains (via ’80s-style montages, natch) for a match with town bully L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), all the while wooing troubled girl next door Stacey (Caitlyn Folley). Of particular note is The FP‘s riotous dialogue; this is maybe the first (and let’s hope last) film to be written entirely in what sounds like the language of the juggalos. (1:23) Roxie. (Eddy)

Jeff, Who Lives at Home The latest comedy from mumblecore man-child champions Jay and Mark Duplass stars Jason Segal as a 30-year-old still living in his parents’ basement. (1:22) California.

*Kill List “Oh jeebus,” you say. “Another movie about a hit man lured out of retirement for one last score?” Well, yes — and no. British director and co-writer Ben Wheatley (2009’s Down Terrace) manages to reinvent one of cinema’s most tired clichés by injecting a healthy amount of what-the-fuck-just-happened?-ness, as well as a palpable sense of absolute dread. Without spoiling anything, here’s how the story begins: married with a young son, surly Jay (Neil Maskell) and shrill Shel (MyAnna Buring) are struggling to maintain their wine-drinking, middle-class, Jacuzzi-in-the-backyard lifestyle. Their financial troubles are due to the fact that Jay hasn’t worked in eight months, which is to say he hasn’t offed anyone since his last job, a mysterious assignment in Kiev, went awry. When best friend and partner Gal (Michael Smiley) hears about a new, well-paying gig that involves a “kill list” of U.K.-based victims, Jay figures he might as well sign on, if only to get Shel off his back. But as the pill-popping Jay soon learns, his sinister new employer is no ordinary client, and the murders have a special significance — revealed in a twist I guarantee even seen-it-all horror buffs will neither anticipate nor fully comprehend on first viewing. Ergo: what the fuck just happened? (1:36) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

*21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Marina, Shattuck. (Chun)

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. (1:12) Embarcadero. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Being Flynn There’s an undeniable frisson in seeing Robert De Niro acting paranoid and abusive behind the wheel of an NYC cab again, but Paul Weitz’s drama isn’t exactly Taxi Driver 2. The actor plays Jonathan Flynn, a bellicose loner who abandoned his wife (Julianne Moore in flashbacks) and son to pursue his destiny as a great writer. Years later, the wife is deceased, the son estranged, but Jonathan remains secure in his delusions of genius — despite the publishing industry’s failure to agree. When an assault on noisy neighbors gets him thrown out of his apartment, his gradual descent into homelessness forces a paths-crossing with now-grown only child Nick (Paul Dano), who has taken a job at a shelter in an attempt to do something useful with his own unsettled life. Adapting the real Nick Flynn’s memoir, Weitz resists the temptation to make Pops a lovable old coot — he’s racist, homophobic, ill-tempered and pathetically arrogant — or to overly sentimentalize a father-son relationship that’s never going to have a happy ending. Nonetheless, this competent exercise too often feels like formulaic fiction, the material perhaps demanding a less slick, starry treatment to ring as true as it ought; the fuzzy warm blanket of a song score by Badly Drawn Boy doesn’t help. Still, intentions are good and the performances strong enough, including those by support players Lili Taylor, Wes Studi, and Olivia Thirlby. (1:42) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much “Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue” — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma (“hubris” is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max “son of John” Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s “self-shot” structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Castro, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Clay. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Let the Bullets Fly A huge blockbuster in China, the latest from director Jiang Wan (1998’s Devils on the Doorstep) has received high praise for the zippy wordplay in its script — not such great news for us non-Mandarin speakers stuck reading the not-especially-zippy English subtitles. What’s left is an overlong tale of a notorious bandit (Jiang) who stumbles upon an opportunity to fake his way into a governorship after a train robbery goes awry. He and his henchmen (who wear masks styled after mahjong tiles) have no sooner arrived in town when it’s made clear that wealth and power will not come easy, since the entire burg is controlled by a gold-toothed gangster (a braying, over-the-top Chow Yun-Fat) who doesn’t like to share. Let the bullets fly, indeed, and let the games begin, with occasionally thrilling but often cartoonish results. Tip: if it’s a red-hot, nerve-jangling, balls-to-the-wall Asian action import you seek, wait a few weeks for Indonesia’s The Raid: Redemption. Yowza. (2:12) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Lou Harrison: A World of Music Doing the late Aptos, Calif. composer justice with its depth and breadth, Lou Harrison: A World of Music is the fortunate product of filmmaker Eva Soltes’s relationship with the underappreciated musical genius. Over the course of two decades, she gathered footage of the visionary experimentalist who freely roved the realms of contemporary music and dance, Asian musical traditions, and instrument-making. Her work has borne fruit — here, you get the full, rich scope of Harrison’s achievements — from his time in the woods with partner and instrument-making cohort William Colvig to his toils alongside choreographer Mark Morris to his struggles to stage Young Caesar, his opera on a Roman ruler’s same-sex revels. What Soltes doesn’t get on camera, she manages to trace through still images and interviews with contemporaries and cohorts such as Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, and Michael Tilson Thomas, filling out Harrison’s beginnings at Mills College, mentored by Henry Cowell and collaborating with John Cage; encapsulating his success as a composer, critic, and arranger in NYC; and touching on his breakdown and retreat to his mountain cabin where he sought to write music in peace, yet nevertheless continued to lend his teeming creativity to points close to home, à la the Cabrillo Music Festival, and abroad. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Salmon Fishing in the Yemen In Lasse Hallström’s latest film, a sheikh named Muhammed (Amr Waked) with a large castle in Scotland, an ardent love of fly-fishing, and unlimited funds envisions turning a dry riverbed in the Yemeni desert into an aquifer-fed salmon-run site and the surrounding lands into an agricultural cornucopia. Tasked with realizing this dream are London marketing consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and government fisheries scientist Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a reluctant participant who refers to the project as “doolally” and signs on under professional duress. Despite numerous feasibility issues (habitat discrepancies, the necessity for a mass exodus of British salmon, two million irate British anglers), Muhammed’s vision is borne forward on a rising swell of cynicism generated within the office of the British prime minister’s press secretary (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose lackeys have been scouring the wires for a shred of U.K.-related good news out of the Middle East. Ecology-minded killjoys may question whether this qualifies. But putting aside, if one can, the possible inadvisability of relocating 10,000 nonnative salmon to a wadi in Yemen — which is to say, putting aside the basic premise — it’s easy and pleasant enough to go with the flow of the film, infected by Jones’s growing enthusiasm for both the project and Ms. Chetwode-Talbot. Adapted from Paul Torday’s novel by Simon Beaufoy (2009’s Slumdog Millionaire), Salmon Fishing is a sweet and funny movie, and while it suffers from the familiar flurried third-act knotting together of loose ends, its storytelling stratagems are entertaining and its characters compellingly textured, and the cast makes the most of the well-polished material. (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 In 2001, filmmaker Kevin Epps turned a camera on his own neighborhood: Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern San Francisco community best-known by outsiders for Candlestick Park, toxic pollution, and gang violence. Straight Outta Hunters Point was an eye-opener not just locally but internationally, as its runaway success opened doors for Epps to travel with the film and establish his career. These days, Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up. Described by Epps as a “continuation of the conversation” launched by the first film, SOHP 2 investigates the community as it stands today, with both external (redevelopment) and internal (violence) pressures shaping the lives of those who live there. It’s a raw, real story that unspools with urgency and the unvarnished perspective of an embedded eyewitness. (1:20) Roxie. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term “romantic comedy” in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of “comedy” are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

A Thousand Words (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Castro, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

“2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated” Smith Rafael.

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
-
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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

Sam Marlowe and the Mean Streets of San Francisco Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; (415) 412-3989, www.catchynametheatre.org. $20. Opens Thurs/15, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through April 7. Catchy Name Theatre presents a world premiere noir play by Jim Strope.

BAY AREA

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Previews Wed/14-Thurs/15, 7pm; Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 5pm. Opens March 23, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through April 29. Shotgun Players present Tom Stoppard’s riff on pre-revolutionary Russia.

Red Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-83. Previews Fri/16-Sat/17 and Tues/20, 8pm; Sun/18, 7pm. Opens March 22, 8pm. Runs Tues and Thurs-Fri, 8pm (also March 29 and April 26, 2pm; no show April 27); Wed, 7pm; Sat-Sun, 2pm (also Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm; no matinees Sat/17-Sun/18 or March 31). Through April 29. Berkeley Rep performs John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play about artist Mark Rothko.

ONGOING

*Blue/Orange Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; (415) 474-8800, www.lhtsf.org. $43-53. Wed/14-Sat/17, 8pm (also Sat/17, 2pm); Sun/18, 2pm. Lorraine Hansberry Theater offers an uneven but worthwhile production of British playwright Joe Penhall’s sardonic comedy of ideas and institutional racism, an intriguingly frustrating three-hander about a young doctor (a bright Dan Clegg) at a psychiatric teaching hospital who begins a battle royal with his suave and pompous supervising physician (a comically nimble Julian Lopez-Morillas) over the release of a questionably-sane black patient. Originally brought in by police for creating a disturbance, Christopher (the excellent Carl Lumbly) still exhibits signs of psychosis and his ability to care for himself seems doubtful to the young doctor treating him. The older physician appeals to the patient’s general competence, hospital procedures, the shortage of beds, and the exigencies of career advancement in countering the younger doctor’s insistence on keeping the patient beyond the mandatory 28-day period required by law. For his part, Christopher, nervous and rather manic, is at first desperately eager to be released back to his poor London neighborhood. Competing interviews with the two doctors complicate his perspective and ours repeatedly, however, as a heated debate about medicine, institutionalization, cultural antecedents to mental "illness," career arcs, and a "cure for black psychosis," leave everyone’s sanity in doubt. Although our attention can be distracted by a too-pervading sound design and less than perfect British accents, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe directs a strong and engaging cast in a politically resonant not to say increasingly maddening play. (Avila)

"Celebration of Women’s History Month:" The Right Thing Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.3girlstheatre.org. $30. Dates and showtimes vary. Through April 1. Over one long day of legal mediation, aggrieved former CEO Zell Gardner (a brash but vulnerable Catherine Castellanos) and attorney Manny Diamond (a sharp, loquacious Louis Parnell) square off against Zell’s former Big Pharma pals headed up by vindictive interim CEO David Heller (a coolly cutting Lol Levy) flanked by Zell’s longtime colleague Chris McKnight (a nicely down-to-earth John Flanagan). Zell’s lawyer becomes increasingly ambivalent, however, as Manny discovers his tough, brassy mess of a pill-popping client has been less than forthcoming about the charge of sexual harassment the other side is using to justify her dismissal and the company’s pocketing of the three million Zell expected as compensation — a charge involving Zell’s 19-year-old goddaughter, Sam (Karina Wolfe). Attempting to reconcile the parties and broker a deal is retired judge Leigh Mansfield (Helen Shumaker), but she has her work cut out for her with this crowd. AJ Baker’s new drama — the inaugural production of newcomers 3Girls Theatre — take issues of sexual politics and power in its high-powered setting and cracks them against the everyday familial and social dynamics that are perhaps a casualty of the corporate ethos, but without opening them up to a satisfactory degree. Director Suze M. Allen assembles a generally strong cast (Castellanos is riveting throughout), and some scenes smolder with just the right teeth-baring tension, but pacing is inconsistent and the script’s own wayward drift — together with an odd, unnecessary video backdrop—distract from the concentrated treatment the story demands. (Avila)

*Fool For Love Boxcar Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Showtimes vary. Through April 14. Another installment of Boxcar Theatre’s epic Sam Shepard repertory project, Fool for Love inaugurates their newest performance space within their Hyde Street Studios location. A depressingly realistic reproduction of a claustrophobic motel room, the tiny jewel-box theatre provides no refuge for the actors, and certainly not for the audience, each trapped beneath the pitiless gaze of the other. And if that too-close-for-comfort intimacy doesn’t get to you, the intentionally difficult subject matter — a "typical" Shepardian foray into alcohol-fueled ranting, violence, incest, and casual cruelty — probably will. Shepard’s strength in monologue shows itself off to meaty effect from May’s (Lauren Doucette) melancholy description of her mother’s love affair with the Old Man (Jeff Garrett) to Eddie’s (Brian Trybom) candid admittance to May’s timid suitor Martin (Geoffrey Nolan) that he and May are not cousins at all but half-siblings who have "fooled around" with each other. In addition to the reliably strong performances from each of the actors, Fool features a notably clever bit of staging involving the Old Man who appears not as a specter wandering the periphery of the stage, but as a recurring figure on the black-and-white television, interrupting the flow of cheesy Westerns with his garrulous trailer park wisdom and an omnipresent Styrofoam cup filled, one suspects, with something stronger than just coffee. (Gluckstern)

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, MainStage, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Thurs/15 and Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 5pm. Geoff Hoyle’s hit solo show returns.

Glengarry Glen Ross Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.brownpapertickets.com. $26-40. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 24. David Mamet’s cutthroat comedy, courtesy of the Actors Theatre of San Francisco.

It’s All the Rage Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm, Sun, 7pm. Through April 15. Longtime comedian and radio host Marilyn Pittman’s solo play wrestles with the legacy of her parents’ violent deaths in a 1997 murder-suicide initiated by her father. It’s disturbing material that Pittman, a stout middle-aged woman with a gregarious and bounding personality, approaches indirectly via a good deal of humor — including recounting the first time she did her growing-up-lesbian bit before her mother in a DC comedy club. But the pain and confusion trailing her for 13 years is never far behind, whether in accounts of her own battle with anger (and the broken relationships it has left in its wake) or in ominous memories of her too complacent mother or her charming but domineering father, whose controlling behavior extended to casually announcing murderous dreams while policing the boundaries of his marriage against family interference. A fine mimic, Pittman deploys a Southern lilt in playing each parent, on a stage decorated with a hint of their Southwestern furnishings and a framed set of parental photographs. In not exactly knowing where to lay blame for, or find meaning in, such a horrifying act, the play itself mimics in subtler form the emotional tumult left behind. There’s a too brief but eerie scene in which her veteran father makes reference to a murder among fellow soldiers en route to war, but while PTSD is mentioned (including as an unwanted patrimony), the 60-minute narrative crafted by Pittman and director David Ford wisely eschews any pat explanation. If transitions are occasionally awkward and the pace a bit loose, the play leaves one with an uncomfortable sense of the darker aspects of love, mingled with vague concentric histories of trauma and dislocation in a weird, sad tale of destruction and staying power. Note: review from the show’s 2009 run at the Marsh. (Avila)

Julius Caesar Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-30. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 4pm. Through April 1. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a version of the Bard’s classic set during the ongoing civil wars of West Africa.

*Maurice New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 25. The eponymous hero of E.M. Forster’s late novel (written early but published only posthumously) wrestles with his love for another man in Edwardian England — oscillating between defiant assertion of feeling and an anguished recoil into desperate treatments like hypnotism — but manages to find happiness as a homosexual by the end of the story. No doubt that would have most appalled the guardians of those extremely homophobic, repressive times. Today there’s still much to recognize in the confused feelings and social censure faced by such a figure, though what helps make the 1998 stage adaptation (by Brits Andy Graham and Roger Parsley) so compelling a story is the not always flattering complexity and honesty with which Forster portrays the (at least partly autobiographical) Maurice Hall — played winningly by an intelligent, agile Soren Santos in New Conservatory Theatre Center’s persuasive U.S. premiere. Maurice’s outré sexuality is one thing; his class position and status as a man are another, affording him certain limited protection and also contributing to certain weaknesses of character, which become most apparent vis-à-vis his mother (a quietly potent Lindsey Murray) and sister (an effervescent Hilary Hyatt) as well as his second love, ambitious young laborer Alec Scudder (a nicely restrained Andrew Nolan). Director George Maguire rightly concentrates on the reciprocal influences between these vital characters and gets fine performances from his entire cast in an uncluttered, sure and measured production, with capable John Hurst in several supporting roles and Alex Kirschner doing excellent work as Clive Durham, Maurice’s Cambridge classmate and mercurial first love. (Avila)

Merchants Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 24. According to playwright Susan Sobeloff, the vision for Merchants, premiering this month at the EXIT Theatre, came to her after watching Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a play at least partially responsible for cementing the caricature of the money-hungry Jew in Western literary tradition for centuries to come. Her intention to write a play featuring a family of more "rounded" Jews doesn’t entirely coalesce once it becomes clear that the bulk of the dramatic tension actually revolves very closely around monetary concerns. As one family business folds, and other members get squeezed out of their jobs by the new economy, a new family business of sorts begins to grow around the quirky, confessional performance art of youngest daughter, Mercedes (Maura Halloran). Emotional blackmail and sheer desperation kickstart their efforts to turn Mercedes into a financially-sustainable "brand," while the all too human costs of burnout, fatigue, and simmering resentments are roundly disregarded, until a crisis point is reached. It’s difficult to connect with this particular set of almost comically self-absorbed characters, despite the desire to root for the underdog, and the play would have benefited from a staging that allowed either more humor or more humanity to creep into the relentless tirades that characterize much of the dialogue. (Gluckstern)

The Real Americans Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun/18, 2pm. Extended through April 14. Dan Hoyle revives his hit solo show about small-town America.

*True West Boxcar Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; (415) 967-2227, www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through April 7. The first installment of Boxcar Theatre’s four-play Sam Shepard repertory project, True West ushers in the ambitious run with a bang. This tale of two brothers who gradually assume the role of the other is one of Shepard’s most enduring plays, rich with humorous interludes, veering sharply into dangerous terrain at the drop of a toaster. In time-honored, True West tradition, the lead roles of Austin, the unassuming younger brother, and Lee, his violent older sibling, are being alternated between Nick A. Olivero and Brian Trybom, and in a new twist, the role of the mother is being played by two different actresses as well (Adrienne Krug and Katya Rivera). The evening I saw it, Olivero was playing Austin, a writer banging away at his first screenplay, and Trybom was Lee, a troubled, alcoholic drifter who usurps his brother’s Hollywood shot, and trashes their mother’s home while trying to honor his as yet unwritten "contract". The chemistry between the two actors was a perfect blend of menace and fraternity, and the extreme wreckage they make of both the set (designed by both actors), and their ever-tenuous relationship, was truly inspired. (Gluckstern)

Waiting for Godot New venue: SF Playhouse Stage Two, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 336-3522, www.tidestheatre.org. $20-32. Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm. Extended through April 14. The fuchsia papier-mâché tree and swirling grey-on-white floor pattern (courtesy of scenic designer Richard Colman) lend a psychedelic accent to the famously barren landscape inhabited by Vladimir (Keith Burkland) and Estragon (Jack Halton) in this production of the Samuel Beckett play by newcomers Tides Theatre. The best moments here broadcast the brooding beauty of the avant-garde classic, with its purposely vague but readily familiar world of viciousness, servility, trauma, want, fear, grudging compassion, and the daring, fragile humor that can look it all squarely in the eye. (Avila)

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through April 27. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar "doood" dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Cabaret Larkspur Café Theater (American Legion Hall Post 313), 500 Magnolia, Larkspur; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-45. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (no show April 8). Through April 15. Independent Cabaret Productions and Shakespeare at Stinson move their production of the Kander and Ebb classic from Fort Mason to the North Bay.

A Doctor in Spite of Himself Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tues and Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show March 23); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through March 25. Berkeley Rep performs a contemporary update of the Molière comedy.

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through May 6. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Mesmeric Revelation Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; (510) 558-1381, www.centralworks.org. Thurs/15-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 5pm. Central Works opens its season of world premieres with Aaron Henne’s Edgar Allen Poe-inspired drama.

Now Circa Then Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 1. TheatreWorks performs Carly Mensch’s comedy about a romance that blooms between two historical re-enactors.

The Pirates of Penzance Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College, Berk; (510) 845-8542, www.juliamorgan.org. $17-35. Fri-Sat, 7pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, noon and 5pm. Through April 1. Berkeley Playhouse performs the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, with the setting shifted to a futuristic city.

Titus Andronicus La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 31. Impact Theatre takes on the Bard’s bloodiest tragedy.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Extended run: Sun/18, March 25, and April 1, 11am. Also May 5-27 (Sat-Sun, 11am); June 3-July 15 (Sun, 11am). Louis "The Amazing Bubble Man" Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

"Arthur in Underland" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri-Sun, 8pm. Through March 24. $15-24. Dandelion Dancetheater performs a new work about a young man whose life is changed when he becomes part of a rock group’s entourage.

"The Big Blow" Ebenezer/Herchurch Lutheran, 678 Portola, SF; www.sflgfb.org. Fri/16, 8pm. Free. In honor of the blustery month of March, the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band performs powerful songs arranged for wind ensembles.

Chitresh Das Dance Company Samsun Hall, Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin, SF; www.kathak.org. Thurs/15-Fri/16, 7pm; Sun/18, 2pm. $35-55. Chitresh Das Dance Company and the Asian Art Museum present Darbar, a new work in conjunction with the exhibition "Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts."

Dance Repertory Fort Mason Center, Cowell Theater, Marina at Buchanan, SF; (415) 225-0934. "Dance Repertory Review," Fri/16, 8pm; "Vision Series Dance Festival," Sat/17, 4pm and Sun/18, 6pm; "Dance Repertory Extravaganza," Sat/17, 8pm. $15-20. A series of showcases highlights emerging artists and college ensembles.

"Elect to Laugh" Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tues, 8pm. Ongoing through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

"Enchantingly Wicked" Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness, SF; www.sfgmc.org. March 20-21, 8pm. $15-75. San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and Stephen Schwartz perform musical theater hits.

"Exit Cuckoo" Women’s Building, 3543 18th St, SF; www.exitcuckoo.com. Sat/17, 8pm. $15. Lisa Ramirez performs her play about working as a nanny in New York City.

"Improvised Shakespeare" Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.improv.org. Sat/17 and March 24, 8pm. $20. Bay Area Theatre Sports (BATS) presents Improvised Shakespeare, a fine troupe (and a slightly different lineup each night, but on March 10 including Kasey Klemm, Rebecca Stockley, Tim Orr, William Hall, Zoe Galvez, and Regina Saisi) with no idea what full length Shakespeare-ish play they will lay on their eager audience until the latter gift them with a title and a key word or two. The rest is remarkably well-tethered mayhem, as cast spontaneously riffs on the audience cue, the conventions of Elizabethan drama, and its own inventions —including the unintentional slip of the tongue, which in this context can prove as productive as anything. March 10 saw the premiere — and simultaneous closing — of an ephemeral little comedy called Two Crows. The players strutted and fretted (or frolicked, really) an hour or so upon the stage.’Twas an idiotic tale, told by some of the sharpest improvisers around, and signifying nothing, save good times. (Avila)

"ODC Dance/Downtown" Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.odcdance.org. March 15-25, programs and showtimes vary. $15-750. ODC/Dance kicks off its 41st annual home season with two programs of new works, plus an opening-night gala.

"Rhythm and Roots" Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 6pm. $25-35. San Francisco World Percussion Arts Festival presents this performance of taiko drumming, tabla, dulcimer, Shakuhachi, and dance traditions from Japan, West Africa, and India.

You need to know about Afghanistan. Here’s how you can start

Andrew Lam
-
0
You need to know about Afghanistan. Here’s how you can start

What fresh hell is this. Last weekend, a US Army staff sergeant who has suffered past traumatic head injury walked off his military base and allegedly shot 16 Afghani men, women, and children.

Sadly, that Wall Street Journal article about the matter that I linked to in the first sentence of this post goes on to state that not only does Hilary Clinton think the incident has no bearing on our country’s “steadfast dedication to protecting the Afghan people,” the Afghan people don’t seem to be all that surprised by the US serial killer in their midst. A tribal elder from the Helmand province was quoted as saying “even if he was a madman, what about all the other times when they’ve killed our innocent women and children? How do you explain those?” Iraq Veterans Against the War has one answer — the group released a statement that says the military’s policy of redeploying mentally unfit troops in the field is to blame. The suspect soldier was on his fourth tour of duty.

The incident only underlines the fact that Afghanistan is no longer on anyone’s mind anymore. What is going on out there? Read on for an upcoming Bay Area event that hopes to provide some answers.

“The Longest War: Afghanistan Beyond the Taliban”

Those flummoxed by the lack of attention being put on Afghanistan in the media could do a lot worse than attend this panel discussion, which is the opener of what is planned to be a bi-monthly event series on under-reported current events. This time around, it’s structured as a casual discussion with two experts: Masood Farivar, a one-time fighter in the country’s anti-Soviet resistance cum newswire journalist who trains other members of the press to cover the region intelligently; and Tim McGirk, who has been reporting in the area since 1990 and has served as a Time Magazine bureau chief. After peppering them with any and all questions that have been pinging around in your brain, you’re invited to take in Million Dollar Militia, a documentary originally shot for Aljazeera on the $1 million the US government gave directly to the Shinwari tribe to fight the Taliban and end poppy (read: drug) production in the area.  

Thu/22 7 p.m.-8:30 p.m., free

Arbor Cafe

4210 Telegraph, Oakl.

(415) 730-4755

www.blackbeardfilms.com

SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

Sasha Cuttler
-
8
SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

If the San Francisco Police Department isn’t working with the FBI to secretly spy on law-abiding local residents – as a secret document released last year indicated they had the authority to do – then why are Police Chief Greg Suhr, Mayor Ed Lee, and others opposing legislation that would ban such surveillance?

That’s the question that longtime police policy expert John Crew of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is asking as he tries to get two more members of the Board of Supervisors to join the six current co-sponsors of the legislation, which the board will consider on Tuesday, in anticipation of having to override a mayoral veto.

“What’s the harm?” Crew told us. “There’s something that doesn’t add up here.”

As we reported at the time, the ACLU last year obtained a 2007 memorandum-of-understanding between the SFPD and the FBI establishing procedures for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, in which SFPD personnel would be under the command of the FBI, circumventing local and state restrictions on domestic surveillance of people who haven’t committed any crimes.

After the ensuring controversy and under pressure from members of the Police Commission, Police Chief Greg Suhr issued Bureau Order #2011-07 to clarify that SFPD personnel are bound by local and state privacy protections. “With this Bureau Order, the language of the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding no longer applies and SFPD personnel are bound by the provisions of the 2011 Order,” SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza told us last month.

Suhr and Lee have each made public statements indicating that the new legislation – developed by the ACLU and carried by Sup. Jane Kim with five progressive supervisors as co-sponsors – is redundant and unnecessary. But Crew and the ACLU made a Sunshine Ordinance request for any modifications to the MOU or communications with the FBI indicating that SFPD’s contractual obligations no longer apply, and there were no such documents.

“When you talk about civil rights, you put it in writing,” Crew said. “This really doesn’t add up. We’re getting conflicting explanations. And the bottom line is this problem has been solved in Portland.”

When a similar issue arose in Portland, Oregon, civil libertarians pressured the city to withdraw from its MOU with the FBI and create a new one that includes restrictions on the surveillance of people who were not suspected of any crimes, but who may have been subjected to FBI attention because they were Muslims or because of their political beliefs. And Crew said it didn’t harm the relationship of the two policing agencies.

At an emotional hearing last week before the Public Safety Committee, a long string of representatives from groups that have been singled out for FBI surveillance that violated protections under the California Constitution – Muslims, anarchists, anti-war activists, Occupy demonstrators, immigrant groups, environmentalists, animal rights activists, etc. – urged supervisors to stand up for them. The legislation has a long and diverse list of organizational supporters.

Sup. Scott Wiener – one of two supervisors that Crew is hoping to win over – told us, “I agree that local surveillance rules should govern. But I’m not convinced that we need this legislation.”

Wiener said he still hasn’t made up his mind, and he plans to speak with Portland’s mayor before Tuesday’s hearing.

So why wouldn’t he support legislation that simply made his position official city policy? Wiener said he’s wary of telling SFPD how to do law enforcement and with “reducing the ability of the department to be flexible in the future.”

Crew said representatives of the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond to our calls for comment, have told him that Lee would defer to the SFPD’s determination of whether to sign the legislation. “That’s a pretty stunning claim,” Crew said, “which does not bode well in terms of reasonable civilian control of the SFPD for the next few years. I sure hope they back off that.”

Kim, who has a good relationship with the Mayor’s Office, also did not return calls for comment. But Crew was incredulous about why anyone who believes in civil liberties would oppose this legislation, telling us, “This is not a radical stand here.”

Here’s lookin’ at you, kids

-
1
Here’s lookin’ at you, kids

arts@sfbg.com

SFIAAFF As the mainstream movie industry undergoes a senior moment and tips toward grandfatherly nostalgia, this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival seems to be in the throes of a youth movement. You can trace the growth spurt from Eduardo W. Roy Jr.’s reproduction production line Baby Factory and the childhood Xmas fantasy of Kim Sung-Hoon’s Ryang-Kang-Do: Merry Christmas, North! to Wang Xiaoshuai’s coming-of-age snapshot 11 Flowers and the teen gang wars of Byron Q’s Bang Bang. A closer look at three — Christopher Woon’s Hmong hip-hopper doc Among B-Boys, Akira Boch’s girl-band indie The Crumbles, and Takashi Miike’s tot action farce Ninja Kids — finds the disparate troika taking aim at shared themes of bonding and identity.

Among B-Boys gives outsiders an hour-long, respectful immersion in the lives of Hmong breakdancers, here “getting lost” in their impressively athletic moves and speaking for themselves, away from the flinty-eyed filter of Gran Torino (2008). In his quest to follow the Velocity/Soul Rivals and Underground Flow crews, Woon takes his camera from Oklahoma to Left Coast exurbia where the kids are attempting to dream with acrobatic handstands, freezes, and crazy-fancy footwork — and finding their efforts rewarded with trophies.

Their triumphs in gritty gyms and community centers are made that much more poignant in the context of their parents’ memories of war, displacement, and poverty. The elders’ stealth contributions to the CIA’s shadowy adventures in Laos casts a pool of lingering darkness on these hip-hoppers, who are striving to carve out a life for themselves while coping with the unique challenges that the Hmong have encountered in the states. As Joua Xiong, the rare B-girl in the Soul Rivals Crew, explains, “Hmong mean ‘the Free,’ and that’s basically what we are: we don’t have a certain country, but we don’t really know our original customs because we’re so mixed up. We have a lot of Thai, Lao, Chinese in us, and we’ve been running away so much from people trying to destroy our customs and make us conform with them.”

Cast away in a semi-rural Merced, Fresno, and Sacto, these kids appear to be finding another kind of freedom. “It’s not just breaking,” says Soul Rivals’ Kyle Vong. “It’s the culture of hip-hop — it’s about teaching yourself to understand life in general and expressing yourself.”

The awkward slackers and damaged hipsters of The Crumbles seem to be worlds away from the humble, proud B-boys of the Central Valley: theirs is a sun-strafed, paved-over Los Angeles habitat of coffee shops, taco trucks, bookstores, budding filmmakers, and living room-bound band practice. Darla (Katie Hipol) is slouching nowhere fast when her zany, charismatic cool-girl chum Elisa (Teresa Michelle Lee) enters the picture, looking for a place to crash.

Elisa’s wacky, erratic, and unreliable, but she’s also capable of generating real excitement — and a mean little keytar hook — and the girls’ band, the Crumbles, gets off the couch and threatens to get all involved to bust out of their shells. Though director Boch never quite dips into the deep background of his characters’ various dysfunctions — the threatened readings of Darla and Elisa’s psychic friend never quite sheds light — the first-time feature filmmaker has a real feel for the drifting, up-for-anything quality of Cali 20-somethings and an appreciation for their highs and lows that makes this familiar, loving, lets-put-on-show-kids update compelling.

With kindred ultraviolence vet Martin Scorsese throwing himself into his own kiddie roller-coaster of a cinematic ride with last year’s Hugo, it makes some sense that Takashi Miike — whose 2010 13 Assassins might have bested both Ichi the Killer (2001) and 1999’s Audition for sheer bloodletting — would enter the children’s field with such gusto. Manga fans will appreciate Miike’s broadly farcical, spoofy élan with comic book touches — down to the freeze-frame mucus drips, the CGI hatched-background stills denoting way-ramped-up action, and fourth-wall-bust-outs/pop-up trivia interludes by your “friendly ninja trivia commentator.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjoh-jG36o

Rantaro — your archetypal geek toddler, complete with thick glasses and bad haircut — has left the family farm and been sent off to ninja nursery school to learn all about deadly boomeranging stars, big-headed villains with testicular chins, and ninja master-slash-hair stylists. Does Rantaro, er, find himself amid the rigors of class, attacks from dastardly ninja outfits, and a final challenge that has him literally biting the dust? And does it matter when Miike digs in with such glee to lampoon the samurai genre, and kick up dust with the ankle-nibblers in this insanely comical alternate universe of ninja mini-mes?

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

March 8-18, various Bay Area venues, most shows $12

www.caamedia.org

DOCS AND SHOCKS: MORE FROM THE SF INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

SFIAAFF Documentary fans, prioritize Give Up Tomorrow, Michael Collins’ probing examination of a high-profile murder case in the Philippines. If the Paradise Lost films got your blood boiling, expect to rage even harder at the unbelievably shifty way the events detailed here unfolded.

As with the West Memphis Three, the crime at Tomorrow‘s heart is horrific: in 1997, two sisters in their early 20s were kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Or were they? Only one body was found, and it was never quite confirmed that the dead woman was actually one of the missing sisters. Of course, that didn’t stop authorities (almost all of whom had ties to a local drug lord, who was also connected to the victims’ family) from fingering a group of local teens, including Paco Larrañaga — who became the case’s main target, despite the fact that dozens of his culinary-school classmates swore he was with them, hundreds of miles from the crime scene, at the time of the alleged murders.

Give Up Tomorrow offers a searing study of a corrupt court system, and the heartbreak that happens when a cause célèbre falls victim to the short attention span of the international activist community. Without spoiling all of its twists and turns, know that this story is better than any fictionalized crime drama, and more powerfully wrenching for being true.

Other docs worth checking out include Mr. Cao Goes to Washington, an insightful look at the American political system via Joseph Cao, who was the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress. But that wasn’t the most unique thing about him: he was a Republican, elected amid post-Katrina disarray in one of New Orleans’ traditionally African American and staunchly Democratic districts. S. Leo Chiang’s film follows Cao as he makes hard choices in the year leading up to his battle for re-election, including voting first for, then against, President Obama’s health care reform bill. (Reason for the switch: he’s passionately anti-abortion.) Even if you don’t agree with his views, Cao puts a human (and surprisingly honest) face on the great divide between the political parties in this country.

More hopeful is No Look Pass, Melissa Johnson’s quite enjoyable documentary about first-generation Burmese American Emily Tay, a basketball superstar who turns pro after graduating Harvard (eat your heart out, Jeremy Lin), and, oh yeah — happens to be a lesbian. No Look Pass also screened at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, and it’s not hard to see why it appeals to a wide range of audiences: Tay is an inspiring figure on the court, and endearingly awkward off it, especially when trying to relate to her deeply traditional parents.

Even more uplifting, and perfectly compressed at 39 minutes, is Lucy Walker’s Oscar-nominated The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, which examines the “beauty and terror” of nature, as perceived by Japanese survivors of the recent earthquake and tsunami — and the spiritual significance of the cherry blossom, which is shown to be a key element in the country’s healing process.

Genre fans! I Am a Ghost, the world-premiere latest from prolific local H.P. Mendoza (2006’s Colma: The Musical), starts slowly but — holy ghost! — stick with it, and you’ll be shriekingly rewarded. And another recent IndieFest selection, Marlon N. Rivera’s satirical The Woman in the Septic Tank, returns to delight another wave of crowds with its tale of three ambitious filmmakers (and a hell of a leading lady) determined to make the most popular Filipino movie of all time. Best line: “Fuck Cannes, bro! We’re talking Oscars!” (Cheryl Eddy)

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

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

THEATER

OPENING

“Celebration of Women’s History Month” Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.3girlstheatre.org. $30. Opens Thurs/8, 7:30pm. Dates and showtimes vary. Through April 1. 3Girls Theatre Company launches its inaugural season with a celebration of new works (in both full-production and staged-reading form) by female Bay Area playwrights.

It’s All the Rage Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Thurs/8, 8pm. Runs Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm, Sun, 7pm. Through April 15. Longtime comedian and radio host Marilyn Pittman’s solo play wrestles with the legacy of her parents’ violent deaths in a 1997 murder-suicide initiated by her father. It’s disturbing material that Pittman, a stout middle-aged woman with a gregarious and bounding personality, approaches indirectly via a good deal of humor — including recounting the first time she did her growing-up-lesbian bit before her mother in a DC comedy club. But the pain and confusion trailing her for 13 years is never far behind, whether in accounts of her own battle with anger (and the broken relationships it has left in its wake) or in ominous memories of her too complaisant mother or her charming but domineering father, whose controlling behavior extended to casually announcing murderous dreams while policing the boundaries of his marriage against family interference. A fine mimic, Pittman deploys a Southern lilt in playing each parent, on a stage decorated with a hint of their Southwestern furnishings and a framed set of parental photographs. In not exactly knowing where to lay blame for, or find meaning in, such a horrifying act, the play itself mimics in subtler form the emotional tumult left behind. There’s a too brief but eerie scene in which her veteran father makes reference to a murder among fellow soldiers en route to war, but while PTSD is mentioned (including as an unwanted patrimony), the 60-minute narrative crafted by Pittman and director David Ford wisely eschews any pat explanation. If transitions are occasionally awkward and the pace a bit loose, the play leaves one with an uncomfortable sense of the darker aspects of love, mingled with vague concentric histories of trauma and dislocation in a weird, sad tale of destruction and staying power. Note: review from the show’s 2009 run at the Marsh. (Avila)

Julius Caesar Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-30. Opens Sat/10, 8pm. Runs Sat, 8pm; Sun, 4pm. Through April 1. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a version of the Bard’s classic set during the ongoing civil wars of West Africa.

BAY AREA

Now Circa Then Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Previews Wed/7-Fri/9, 8pm. Opens Sat/10, 8pm. Runs Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 1. TheatreWorks performs Carly Mensch’s comedy about a romance that blooms between two historical re-enactors.

ONGOING

*Blue/Orange Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; (415) 474-8800, www.lhtsf.org. $43-53. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). Through March 18. Lorraine Hansberry Theater offers an uneven but worthwhile production of British playwright Joe Penhall’s sardonic comedy of ideas and institutional racism, an intriguingly frustrating three-hander about a young doctor (a bright Dan Clegg) at a psychiatric teaching hospital who begins a battle royal with his suave and pompous supervising physician (a comically nimble Julian Lopez-Morillas) over the release of a questionably-sane black patient. Originally brought in by police for creating a disturbance, Christopher (the excellent Carl Lumbly) still exhibits signs of psychosis and his ability to care for himself seems doubtful to the young doctor treating him. The older physician appeals to the patient’s general competence, hospital procedures, the shortage of beds, and the exigencies of career advancement in countering the younger doctor’s insistence on keeping the patient beyond the mandatory 28-day period required by law. For his part, Christopher, nervous and rather manic, is at first desperately eager to be released back to his poor London neighborhood. Competing interviews with the two doctors complicate his perspective and ours repeatedly, however, as a heated debate about medicine, institutionalization, cultural antecedents to mental “illness,” career arcs, and a “cure for black psychosis,” leave everyone’s sanity in doubt. Although our attention can be distracted by a too-pervading sound design and less than perfect British accents, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe directs a strong and engaging cast in a politically resonant not to say increasingly maddening play. (Avila)

*Fool For Love Boxcar Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Showtimes vary. Through April 14. Another installment of Boxcar Theatre’s epic Sam Shepard repertory project, Fool for Love inaugurates their newest performance space within their Hyde Street Studios location. A depressingly realistic reproduction of a claustrophobic motel room, the tiny jewel-box theatre provides no refuge for the actors, and certainly not for the audience, each trapped beneath the pitiless gaze of the other. And if that too-close-for-comfort intimacy doesn’t get to you, the intentionally difficult subject matter — a “typical” Shepardian foray into alcohol-fueled ranting, violence, incest, and casual cruelty — probably will. Shepard’s strength in monologue shows itself off to meaty effect from May’s (Lauren Doucette) melancholy description of her mother’s love affair with the Old Man (Jeff Garrett) to Eddie’s (Brian Trybom) candid admittance to May’s timid suitor Martin (Geoffrey Nolan) that he and May are not cousins at all but half-siblings who have “fooled around” with each other. In addition to the reliably strong performances from each of the actors, Fool features a notably clever bit of staging involving the Old Man who appears not as a specter wandering the periphery of the stage, but as a recurring figure on the black-and-white television, interrupting the flow of cheesy Westerns with his garrulous trailer park wisdom and an omnipresent Styrofoam cup filled, one suspects, with something stronger than just coffee. (Gluckstern)

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, MainStage, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 18. Geoff Hoyle’s hit solo show returns.

Glengarry Glen Ross Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.brownpapertickets.com. $26-40. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 24. David Mamet’s cutthroat comedy, courtesy of the Actors Theatre of San Francisco.

Maurice New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 25. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a play about two young men who fall in love in pre-World War I England, adapted from E.M. Forster’s novel.

Merchants Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 24. No Nude Men Productions performs Susan Sobeloff’s tale of two sisters trying to balance financial stability and career satisfaction.

The Real Americans Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 18. Dan Hoyle revives his hit solo show about small-town America.

Scorched American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-85. Wed/7-Sat/10, 8pm; Wed/7, Sat/10-Sun/11, 2pm. Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad bites off a little more than he can chew, and ACT thus offers a less than satisfying three-hour feast with its stilted production of Mouawad’s 2008 epic about a brother and sister (Babak Tafti and Annie Purcell) sent by their estranged, recently deceased mother’s executor (David Strathairn) on a hunt for her past in her unnamed civil war-torn Middle Eastern homeland. At that point, the story of their mother, Nawal (Marjan Neshat), comes center stage — or rather crisscrosses it with that of her children in a mash-up that only undercuts the potential tension or interest in either plot strand. Director Carey Perloff’s cast also proves unevenly compelling. Strathairn’s Alphonse is a compassionate, slyly wise man who nervously rambles to make up for the extremely laconic and resentful mood of Nawal’s children. But he is of peripheral importance, and his malapropisms are laid on a little thicker than his endearing Quebecois accent, as if betraying the limits of his function onstage. The other characters meanwhile feel too thinly sketched to occupy the middle. As the sad and horrifying details of this Sophocles-inspired tale unfold, there is surprisingly little sense of authentic experience, and much more the feeling of over-indulgence it certain dramatic devices. Between the sententious and ponderous dialogue, strained characterization, and unwieldy storyline is a play flailing away at something beyond its ken or capacity. (Avila)

*Three’s Company Finn’s Funhouse, 814 Grove, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri/9-Sat/10, 9pm (also Sat/10, 7pm). Some flashbacks are better than the original high. And more real. This time, you can literally “knock on their door” — a beautiful old Victorian in the Western Addition, whose dining room is made up to look like the Santa Monica apartment shared by Jack, Crissy, and Janet, the happy-go-lucky trio at the center of the iconic late ’70s, early ’80s sitcom. Giggly, ribald, and pleasingly stupid, to be sure, the evening also delivers first-class showmanship: Mike Finn (as good-natured goof Jack), D’Arcy Drollinger (as a buxom not to say brawny Chrissy), and former Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin (in a spritely turn as Janet) couldn’t be more reminiscent or delightfully arch in their respective roles. Meanwhile, incarnating the Ropers with pitch-perfect inflections, timing, kaftans and sweater vests are the superb duo of Matthew Martin (channeling the frustrated deadpan wit of Mrs. Roper) and Sara Moore (excelling as subdued but occasionally very wacky Mr. Roper). A ticket gets you pilot episode “Man About the House” and “Roper’s Niece” (a suitably randy Laurie Bushman) — plus commercials. Cat Fight and Shoulder Pads’ homey hit, briskly directed by Cindy Goldfield and extended for one more weekend, is must-see reality TV. (Avila)

Tontlawald Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Thurs/8, 7:30pm; Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm (also Sat/10, 2pm); Sun/11, 5pm. Entering the theater space thought the back door, squeezing alongside a giant fishing net motif, which wraps the entire stage in a fabric grid, almost imperceptibly skews one’s perspective in advance of the show, just a brief twist that sets the tone for this abbreviated epic of abuse, friendship, and revenge. The heroine, an earthy yet somehow fragile maid (Marilet Martinez), inadvertently manages to rile her evil stepmother (Madeline H. D. Brown) for what seems to be the umpteenth time before fleeing into the mysterious wooded Tontlawald, inhabited by joyously frolicking beasts (or boys) and a preternaturally beautiful princess (Rebecca Frank) who immediately adopts her as a friend. Told through snatches of repetitive text, solemnly-intoned and ecstatically sung, and moments of engagingly acrobatic, hyper-stylized movement, Cutting Ball’s Tontlawald meanders through an Estonian fairy tale-hero’s quest, as if told from the perspective of the child protagonist — light on detail, heavy on drama. Inspired by TeatrZAR, the resident company of Poland’s Grotowski Centre, co-directors Paige Rogers and Annie Paladino and choreographer Laura Arrington worked to emulate certain characteristics of its style, notably the emphasis on song. But while there are some gorgeously transcendent moments of musical direction courtesy of Rogers, and of choreography courtesy of Arrington, the work plays out mostly as a disjointed series of striking tableaux, which intrigue the intellect, but somehow fail to inflame the soul. (Gluckstern)

*True West Boxcar Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; (415) 967-2227, www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through April 7. The first installment of Boxcar Theatre’s four-play Sam Shepard repertory project, True West ushers in the ambitious run with a bang. This tale of two brothers who gradually assume the role of the other is one of Shepard’s most enduring plays, rich with humorous interludes, veering sharply into dangerous terrain at the drop of a toaster. In time-honored, True West tradition, the lead roles of Austin, the unassuming younger brother, and Lee, his violent older sibling, are being alternated between Nick A. Olivero and Brian Trybom, and in a new twist, the role of the mother is being played by two different actresses as well (Adrienne Krug and Katya Rivera). The evening I saw it, Olivero was playing Austin, a writer banging away at his first screenplay, and Trybom was Lee, a troubled, alcoholic drifter who usurps his brother’s Hollywood shot, and trashes their mother’s home while trying to honor his as yet unwritten “contract”. The chemistry between the two actors was a perfect blend of menace and fraternity, and the extreme wreckage they make of both the set (designed by both actors), and their ever-tenuous relationship, was truly inspired. (Gluckstern)

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 24. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

*Body Awareness Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $30-48. Wed/7-Sat/10, 8pm; Sun/11, 2 and 7pm. In Annie Baker’s new comedy, receiving a top-notch Bay Area premiere at Aurora Theatre, peppy psychology prof Phyllis (Amy Resnick) hosts “Body Awareness Week” at her small Vermont college, while back home partner Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen) talks to her 21-year-old son Jared (Patrick Russell) about the porn pay-per-view bill he’s racked up. Phyllis contends that Joyce’s introverted, somewhat explosive virgin son (who in addition to bouts of violent anger soothes himself compulsively with an electric security toothbrush) has Asperger’s Syndrome — a diagnosis that Jared, a budding not too say obsessive lexicographer, hotly contests. That same week, the couple hosts a guest artist, Frank (Howard Swain), a breezy man’s man whose career stands squarely on a series of photographs of nude women and girls. The young man seeks sexual advice from the older one, much to Phyllis’s disgust and Joyce’s relief, while also tempting Joyce with the notion of posing for a nude portrait and “reclaiming her body image,” in a well-used phrase. An already delicate balance thus goes right off kilter as, between the poles of Phyllis and Frank, Joyce and Jared chase competing notions and definitions of themselves and the world. In the volatile tension between perspectives, power trips, and extreme personalities, playwright Baker initially pushes a comic form toward an unsettling edge, only to retreat in the end for safer ground and a family-friendly resolution. While that feels like a lost opportunity, Body Awareness is still a stimulating and solidly entertaining evening, brought to life by a warm and dexterous ensemble under fine, lively direction by Joy Carlin. (Avila)

Cabaret Larkspur Café Theater (American Legion Hall Post 313), 500 Magnolia, Larkspur; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-45. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (no show April 8). Through April 15. Independent Cabaret Productions and Shakespeare at Stinson move their production of the Kander and Ebb classic from Fort Mason to the North Bay.

A Doctor in Spite of Himself Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tues and Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show March 23); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through March 25. Berkeley Rep performs a contemporary update of the Molière comedy.

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through March 25. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Mesmeric Revelation Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; (510) 558-1381, www.centralworks.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 18. Central Works opens its season of world premieres with Aaron Henne’s Edgar Allen Poe-inspired drama.

The Pirates of Penzance Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College, Berk; (510) 845-8542, www.juliamorgan.org. $17-35. Fri-Sat, 7pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, noon and 5pm. Through April 1. Berkeley Playhouse performs the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, with the setting shifted to a futuristic city.

Titus Andronicus La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 31. Impact Theatre takes on the Bard’s bloodiest tragedy.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Extended run: Sun/11 and March 18, 11am. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“The Abduction from the Seraglio (Yanked from the Harem)” Marines Memorial Theater, 609 Sutter, SF; www.pocketopera.org. Sun/11, 2pm. Also March 18, 2pm, Berkeley Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar, Berk. $15-39. Pocket Opera performs artistic director Donald Pippin’s witty translation of Mozart’s classic work.

“Arthur in Underland” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri-Sun, 8pm. Through March 24. $15-24. Dandelion Dancetheater performs a new work about a young man whose life is changed when he becomes part of a rock group’s entourage.

“A Circus Celebration Honoring Peggy Ford” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Tues/13, 7pm. $20-100. Clowns and other circus performers honor the life and legacy of the late Peggy Ford, a 40-year veteran of the Bay Area and national circus communities.

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tues, 8pm. Ongoing through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

“The Eric Show” Milk Bar, 1840 Haight, SF; www.milksf.com. Tues, 8pm (ongoing). $5. Local comedians perform with host Eric Barry.

“Finding the Michaels” Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm. Footloose presents Cassie Angley’s solo play about her experiences in post-9/11 New York City.

“Funsch Solos: One on One” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Thurs/8-Sat/10, 8:30pm; Sun/11, 7:30pm. $15-20. Christy Funsch presents up-close glimpses of her solo dance works, featuring a variety of performers.

“Waters Rising” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; (415) 273-4633, www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm; Sun/11, 5pm. $15-18. Locals Zell Dance and dance ceres team up with Boston-based Weber Dance for a weekend showcasing new works.

“The Whole Megillah 2: Uncut” Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. Wed/7, 8pm. Also: Thurs/8-Fri/9, 8pm; Sat/10, 7 and 10pm. Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida, SF; www.jccsf.org. $15-20. The Hub and Killing My Lobster present this Purim-themed sketch comedy show.

BAY AREA

Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. Program A: Tues/13 and March 16, 8pm; Program B: March 14, 8pm, March 17, 2pm, and March 18, 3pm; Program C: March 15 and 17, 8pm. $30-80. The veteran company makes its annual visit with three programs incorporating eight separate works, including the Bay Area premiere of Rennie Harris’ Home (2011).

“The Fortune Project Ch. 2: Atomic Intuition” Envision Academy, 1515 Webster, SF; www.raggedwing.org. Fri/9-Sat/10, 8pm; Sun/11, 5pm. $15-30. Ragged Wing Ensemble performs the second installment in its multidisciplinary, interactive performance series.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

The 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival runs March 8-18 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Camera 3 Cinemas, 288 S. Second St, San Jose. For tickets (most shows $12) and complete schedule, visit www.caamedia.org. For commentary, see “Here’s Looking at You, Kids” and “Docs and Shocks.”

OPENING

*The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye See “Together Forever.” (1:12) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Being Flynn There’s an undeniable frisson in seeing Robert De Niro acting paranoid and abusive behind the wheel of an NYC cab again, but Paul Weitz’s drama isn’t exactly Taxi Driver 2. The actor plays Jonathan Flynn, a bellicose loner who abandoned his wife (Julianne Moore in flashbacks) and son to pursue his destiny as a great writer. Years later, the wife is deceased, the son estranged, but Jonathan remains secure in his delusions of genius — despite the publishing industry’s failure to agree. When an assault on noisy neighbors gets him thrown out of his apartment, his gradual descent into homelessness forces a paths-crossing with now-grown only child Nick (Paul Dano), who has taken a job at a shelter in an attempt to do something useful with his own unsettled life. Adapting the real Nick Flynn’s memoir, Weitz resists the temptation to make Pops a lovable old coot — he’s racist, homophobic, ill-tempered and pathetically arrogant — or to overly sentimentalize a father-son relationship that’s never going to have a happy ending. Nonetheless, this competent exercise too often feels like formulaic fiction, the material perhaps demanding a less slick, starry treatment to ring as true as it ought; the fuzzy warm blanket of a song score by Badly Drawn Boy doesn’t help. Still, intentions are good and the performances strong enough, including those by support players Lili Taylor, Wes Studi, and Olivia Thirlby. (1:42) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Forgiveness of Blood Joshua Marston’s follow-up to his 2004 indie hit Maria Full of Grace is a similarly sensitive, heartbreaking look at a culture not often illuminated by the silver screen. Co-written by Marston and Albanian filmmaker Andamion Murataj, The Forgiveness of Blood takes place in an Albanian town caught between traditions of the past — fiercely upheld by the older generation — and youths whose main areas of interest are texting, scooters, and the internet. When a turf war involving whose horse-cart can pass through whose land boils over, the father of teenage siblings Nik (Tristan Halilaj) and Rudina (Sindi Lacej) goes into hiding, intent on evading both the police and the family of the man he’s helped murder. Unfortunately for Nik, the laws of blood feud mean it’s now open season on his head, should he venture from his home; this puts an extreme damper on his wooing of the pretty classmate he’s just exchanged phone numbers with, not to mention his dreams of opening an internet café in the village. Unfortunately for Rudina, her father’s absence means the bright girl must drop out of school and take over his bread-delivery route — a job she excels at, despite her initial reluctance. It’s a no-win situation for everyone (mom’s working double-time at her factory gig; younger siblings are sullen and frightened), and dad’s crime starts to feel more and more like a macho, selfish act as the frustration builds. Though The Forgiveness of Blood was inexplicably passed over for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination (especially considering Marston’s success with Maria), it arrives in local theaters having won the Best Screenplay award at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. Don’t miss it. (1:49) Bridge, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Friends With Kids Jennifer Westfeldt scans Hollywood’s romantic comedy landscape for signs of intelligent life and, finding it to be a barren place possibly recovering from a nuclear holocaust, writes, directs, and stars in this follow-up to 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which she co-wrote and starred in. Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are upper-thirtysomething New Yorkers with two decades of friendship behind them. He calls her “doll.” They have whispered phone conversations at four in the morning while their insignificant others lie slumbering beside them on the verge of getting dumped. And after a night spent witnessing the tragic toll that procreation has taken on the marriages of their four closest friends — Bridesmaids (2011) reunion party Leslie (Maya Rudolph), Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Ben (Jon Hamm), the latter two, surprisingly and less surprisingly, providing some of the film’s darkest moments — Jason proposes that they raise a child together platonically, thereby giving any external romantic relationships a fighting chance of survival. In no time, they’ve worked out the kinks to their satisfaction, insulted and horrified their friends, and awkwardly made a bouncing baby boy. The arrival of significant others (Edward Burns and Megan Fox) signals the second phase of the experiment. Some viewers will be invested in latent sparks of romance between the central pair, others in the success of an alternative family arrangement; one of these demographics is destined for disappointment. Until then, however, both groups and any viewers unwilling to submit to this reductive binary will be treated to a funny, witty, well crafted depiction of two people’s attempts to preserve life as they know it while redrawing the parameters of parenthood. (1:40) California, Piedmont. (Rapoport)

John Carter More or less an adaptation of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 sci-fi classic A Princess of Mars, John Carter is yet another film that lavishes special effects (festooned with CG and 3D) on a rote story filled with characters the viewer couldn’t give two craps about. Angry Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, more muscleman than thespian) mysteriously zips to Mars, a planet not only populated by multiple members of the cast of HBO’s Rome (Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy, and the voice of Polly Walker), but also quite a bit of Red Planet unrest. Against his better judgment, and with the encouragement of a comely princess (tragic spray-tan victim Lynn Collins), Carter joins the fight, as red people battle blue people, green four-armed creatures pitch in when needed, and sinister silver people (led by Mark Strong) use zap-tastic powers to manipulate the action for their amusement. If you’re expecting John Carter to be a step up from Conan the Barbarian (2011), Prince of Persia (2010), etc., because it’s directed by Andrew Stanton (the Pixar superstar who helmed 2008’s Finding Nemo and 2010’s WALL*E), eh, think again. There’s nothing memorable or fun about this would-be adventure; despite its extravagant 3D, it’s flatter than a pancake. (2:17) Four Star, Marina. (Eddy)

Let the Bullets Fly A huge blockbuster in China, the latest from director Jiang Wan (1998’s Devils on the Doorstep) has received high praise for the zippy wordplay in its script — not such great news for us non-Mandarin speakers stuck reading the not-especially-zippy English subtitles. What’s left is an overlong tale of a notorious bandit (Jiang) who stumbles upon an opportunity to fake his way into a governorship after a train robbery goes awry. He and his henchmen (who wear masks styled after mahjong tiles) have no sooner arrived in town when it’s made clear that wealth and power will not come easy, since the entire burg is controlled by a gold-toothed gangster (a braying, over-the-top Chow Yun-Fat) who doesn’t like to share. Let the bullets fly, indeed, and let the games begin, with occasionally thrilling but often cartoonish results. Tip: if it’s a red-hot, nerve-jangling, balls-to-the-wall Asian action import you seek, wait a few weeks for Indonesia’s The Raid: Redemption. Yowza. (2:12) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Lou Harrison: A World of Music Doing the late Aptos, Calif. composer justice with its depth and breadth, Lou Harrison: A World of Music is the fortunate product of filmmaker Eva Soltes’s relationship with the underappreciated musical genius. Over the course of two decades, she gathered footage of the visionary experimentalist who freely roved the realms of contemporary music and dance, Asian musical traditions, and instrument-making. Her work has borne fruit — here, you get the full, rich scope of Harrison’s achievements — from his time in the woods with partner and instrument-making cohort William Colvig to his toils alongside choreographer Mark Morris to his struggles to stage Young Caesar, his opera on a Roman ruler’s same-sex revels. What Soltes doesn’t get on camera, she manages to trace through still images and interviews with contemporaries and cohorts such as Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, and Michael Tilson Thomas, filling out Harrison’s beginnings at Mills College, mentored by Henry Cowell and collaborating with John Cage; encapsulating his success as a composer, critic, and arranger in NYC; and touching on his breakdown and retreat to his mountain cabin where he sought to write music in peace, yet nevertheless continued to lend his teeming creativity to points close to home, à la the Cabrillo Music Festival, and abroad. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen A fisheries expert (Ewan McGregor) is tasked by a sheik with bringing fly fishing to the desert in this adaptation of Paul Torday’s acclaimed comic novel. (1:52) Embarcadero.

*Silent House Yep, it’s another remake of a foreign horror movie — but Uruguay’s La casa muda is obscure enough that Silent House, which recycles its plot and filming style, feels like a brand-new experience. Co-directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, last seen bobbing in shark-infested waves for 2003’s similarly bare-bones Open Water, apply another technical gimmick here: Silent House appears to be shot in one continuous take. Though it’s not actually made this way, each shot is extraordinarily long — way longer than you’d expect in a horror film, since the genre often relies on quick edits to build tension. Instead, the film’s aim is “real fear captured in real time” (per its tag line), and there’s no denying this is one shriek-filled experience. The dwelling in question is an isolated, rambling lake house being fixed up to sell by Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), her father (Adam Trese), and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens). The lights don’t work, the windows are boarded up, most doors are padlocked shut, and there are strange noises coming from rooms that should be empty. Much of the film follows Sarah as she descends into deeper and deeper terror, scrabbling from floor to floor trying to hide from whoever (or whatever) is lurking, while at the same time trying to bust her way out. Though the last-act exposition explosion is a little hard to take, the film’s slow-burn beginning and frantic middle section offer bona fide chills. For an interview with Silent House co-director and writer Lau, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:28) (Eddy)

A Thousand Words Karma proves to be quite the bitch when a literary agent (Eddie Murphy) screws over a spiritual guru. (1:31) Shattuck.

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) Balboa, California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much “Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue” — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma (“hubris” is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max “son of John” Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s “self-shot” structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1:26) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) SF Center.

Gone Still-shaky if now highly self-defensive Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was abducted from her bed a year ago, thrown into a deep hole in a forest outside Portland, Ore., and escaped death only by overcoming her barely-glimpsed captor. Or so she insists — the police never found any corroborating evidence, and given Jill’s history of mental instability, wrote off her whole purported adventure as delusional. When sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) goes inexplicably missing the morning of an important exam, however, Jill is convinced the serial kidnapper-killer has struck again, going off on a frantic manhunt of her own with no help from the authorities. There is nothing spectacularly wrong with Gone, but nothing right, either — to justify the ponying up of cash money at a theater these days you have to offer something a little more than the routine execution of a derivative, uninspired script with little suspense but plenty of plot holes. That sort of thing is best experienced at a sleepless 2 a.m. on cable, for free. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, Opera Plaza, Presidio. (Harvey)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Castro, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Project X Frat boys nostalgic for Girls Gone Wild — and those who continue to have the sneaking suspicion that much better parties are going on wherever they’re not —appear to be the target audiences for Project X (not be confused with the 1987 film starring Matthew Broderick, star of this movie’s tamer ’80s variant, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). It’s tough to figure out who else would enjoy this otherwise-standard teen party-movie exercise, given a small shot of energy from its handheld/DIY video conceit. Here, mild-mannered teen Thomas (Thomas Mann) is celebrating his 17th birthday: his parents have left town, and his obnoxious pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) is itching to throw a memorable rager for him and even-geekier chum J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Multiple text and email blasts, a Craigslist ad, and one viral gossip scene reminiscent of Easy A (2010) later, several thousand party animals are at Thomas’s Pasadena house going nuts, getting nekkid in the pool, gobbling E, doing ollies off the roof, swinging from chandeliers, ad nauseam. The problem is — who cares? The lack of smart writing or even the marginal efforts toward character development makes Ferris Bueller look like outright genius — and this movie about as compelling as your standard-issue party jam clip. Unfortunately it also goes on about 85 minutes longer than the average music video. The blowback the kids experience when they go too far almost inspires you to root for the cops — not the effect first-time feature filmmaker Nima Nourizadeh was going for, I suspect. (1:28) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David “Date Rape” Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Lumiere. (Chun)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — “Bourne” there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from “bad guy” Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the “sou ka” affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D (2:16) SF Center.

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 In 2001, filmmaker Kevin Epps turned a camera on his own neighborhood: Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern San Francisco community best-known by outsiders for Candlestick Park, toxic pollution, and gang violence. Straight Outta Hunters Point was an eye-opener not just locally but internationally, as its runaway success opened doors for Epps to travel with the film and establish his career. These days, Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up. Described by Epps as a “continuation of the conversation” launched by the first film, SOHP 2 investigates the community as it stands today, with both external (redevelopment) and internal (violence) pressures shaping the lives of those who live there. It’s a raw, real story that unspools with urgency and the unvarnished perspective of an embedded eyewitness. (1:20) Roxie. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term “romantic comedy” in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of “comedy” are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

*Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie It’s almost impossible to describe Adult Swim hit Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but “cable access on acid” comes pretty close. It’s awkward, gross, repetitive, and quotable; it features unsettling characters portrayed by famous comedians and unknowns who may not actually be actors. It all springs from the twisted brains of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, now on the big screen with Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. The premise: Tim and Eric (amplified-to-the-extreme versions of Heidecker and Wareheim) get a billion to make a movie, and the end result is a very short film involving a lot of diamonds and a Johnny Depp impersonator. On the run from their angry investors (including a hilariously spitting-mad Robert Loggia), the pair decides to earn back the money managing a run-down mall filled with deserted stores (and weird ones that sell things like used toilet paper) and haunted by a man-eating wolf. Or something. Anyway, the plot is just an excuse to unfurl the Tim and Eric brand of bizarre across the length of a feature film; if you’re already in the cult, you’ve probably already seen the film (it’s been On Demand for weeks). Adventurous newcomers, take note: Tim and Eric’s comedy is the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it experience. There is no middle ground. There are, however, some righteously juicy poop jokes. (1:32) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds (1:51) 1000 Van Ness.

“2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated” Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael.

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the “inspiring sports doc” genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and “weird” hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of “How could this happen?” But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is “How could this not happen?” Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are “real life” or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, “Everyday” Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Cannabis’ unlikely new crusader: Pat Robertson?

Andrew Lam
-
20

File this one under #OKsure: Televangelist and all-around dubious individual Pat Robertson has come out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.

Of course, it’s all the liberals’ fault. Robertson made the following comments on the March 1 episode of the 700 Club. (Many thanks to Tom Angell of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for providing us with the link fest, lookit this hilarious retraction his network posted when Robertson made similar comments in December!)

Even though these prisoners may have been sentenced by some court for some offense, should they be behind bars? Here’s the thing, we have over 3,000 – the number must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal crimes.

And every time the liberals pass a bill, I don’t care what it involves! They stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t feel that there’s any way that people are going to keep a wall unless they can put them in jail. And so we have the jails that are filled with people who are white collar criminals and I’ve became sort of a hero of the hippie culture I guess when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.

I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. I mean, the whole thing is crazy! And we’ve said, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime – that’s baloney! It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars.

Look at California. California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools! I mean there’s something wrong about the equation, there’s something wrong. 

Here’s the video itself (start at 20:40 and go until 29:25) — the comments precede a pretty interesting segment on how the NAACP, the Tea Party, and a group called Prison Fellowship, a faith-based counseling group for prisoners and families founded by a Watergate ex-con and one-time Nixon aide.

Despite his classist assertion that white collar criminals shouldn’t get jail time, we’re with ya, homeslice. Hero of the hippie culture, yes you are. 

And so, our nominally-progressive president now has a less tenable position on the War on Drugs than one of our country’s head crazies (who — let us not forget despite his newfound stoner ways — was the one who announced that Haiti was hit by those earthquakes in 2010 because it was “cursed” by a “pact to the devil.”)

Holler back, President Obama? Personally, we’d be happy if his attorneys would just stop shutting down our local dispensaries. 

 

Mayor Lee praises the importance of nightlife to SF

Sasha Cuttler
-
3
Mayor Lee praises the importance of nightlife to SF

Addressing a gathering of nightlife advocates at a California Music and Culture Association event last night, Mayor Ed Lee praised the economic and cultural role that the entertainment industry plays in San Francisco, announced plans to add a “nightlife unit” in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and even hinted that Halloween in the Castro might be returning after being shut down during the city’s so-called “war on fun.”

“If I’m going to be about jobs,” he said, referring to his near-constant emphasis on economic development, “it should be both for the day and for the night…I do recognize this as a business, as a serious contributor to the economic engine of city.”

Lee referenced the new Controller’s Office report that was requested by Sup. Scott Wiener, which concludes that the nightlife industry generates about $4.2 billion in annual economic activity in the city (that report will be the subject of a rally and hearing on Monday at City Hall starting on the steps at noon). And he said that the benefits of a vibrant nightlife scene also help make San Francisco an appealing city for other businesses, an indirect economic benefit.

“You’re all part of a great part of the city that keeps everyone refreshed,” Lee said, later adding, “I think we can do more at night. The young people who work gobs of hours need to have an entertaining evening.”

As he announced plans to add a nightlife unit to OEWD, the office that works with private companies looking to locate or expand here, he said, “We, as government, need to fast-track things that are successful.” Yet he also said that public safety is still a challenge and called for the industry to work closely with police to keep everyone safe.

Yet Lee spoke positively about Halloween in the Castro, a once-popular event that was canceled because Mayor Gavin Newsom and then-Sup. Bevan Dufty (who Lee recently hired as his new homeless czar) feared the city couldn’t control it, and Lee alluded to plans being developed to revive it in some form. “I hate to see any event that brought so many people to the city gone,” he said.

The event was held at The Grand, a club owned by CMAC board member and new Entertainment Commissioner Steven Lee. CMAC was formed two years ago in response to crackdowns on SF nightlife by city and state officials.

Nathaniel Blumberg: Open to change

-
0

By Wilbur Wood

 (Wilbur Wood was a student of Nathaniel Blumberg in the early 1960s at the University of Montana in Missoula. And he was the leader  of a contingent of Blumberg students that turned up in San Francisco, many dispatched by the  Dean to work on the Guardian during the highly active and newsworthy 1960s.   Wilbur was a poet and a reporter,  with a master’s degree in creative wiriting at San Francisco State, so he fit in well at the Guardian. He had edited his campus paper,  so I made him city editor. He covered the 1967 mayor’s race and operated as if he were directed by Blumberg himself.  Wilbur followed Joe Alioto around, from place to place, and found that Alioto was changing his story depending on the audience.  Wilbur, as a Blumberg mentee, was not shocked. He nailed Alioto and  wrote one of the most amusing and  illuminating stories of the campaign. but it did not deter Alioto from becoming mayor. Wilbur ‘s big triumph as city editor was his work in positioning and editing an investigative story exposing how the members of the  local  San Francisco draft boards were anonymous, establishment types who worked in secrecy at secret meetings to draft a disproportionate number of minorities.  The expose  appeared in Deccember, 1967, in  the red hot middle of the Vietnam War. It was a bombshell, the first such story ever done in the nation, and led to extensive litigation on behalf of draftees in federal court, pioneering reforms in the draft, and inspired a national New York Times investigation.  It was written by Eugene Hunn, the husband of Nancy Engelbach Hunn from Kalispell, Montana, and a classmate of Wilbur’s and a student of Blumberg at the Montana School of Journalism.

(Alas, Wilbur  went back to Montana, as all Montana people seemed to do, and is now a poet, reporter, and philosopher living in his hometown of Roundup, Montana with his wife Elizabeth. She worked as an ad representative at the Guardian. Elizabeth and Wilbur run a a writing, editing, and consulting business called Stone House Productions. The stonehouse was built by Wilbur’s grandfather and is where the two live, work, and play.   Others in this Guardian era also went back to Montana:  Printer Bowler, Troy Holter, Larry Cripe, Nancy Engelbach Hunn, Karen King, Bruce DeRosier, Doug Giebel et al, a talented group of journalists, writers, and political activists bristling with Montana populism. The Blumberg/Montana contributions were enormously valuable in our early days when we had lots of ideas and ambitions but slender resources.   Why they left San Francisco to go back to Montana is still a mystery to me.)

I’m late for class, jogging, short-cutting across a mowed lawn in front of the School of Journalism. A window squeaks open and the unmistakable voice of the Dean, Nathan Blumberg, roars out a second story window: “BARBARIAN!”

Astonished, I plop down on the ground, speechless, chagrined, then leap up and disappear into class. It is the early 1960s. The Dean is, at that time, a man who believes that people should walk on the sidewalks, not upon the carefully tended lawns, at the University of Montana. He sees a reason for rules, even as he openly questions many of them

A scant six or seven years later, this same man is gliding over those same lawns, sailing Frisbees into the sky, chasing the return throws from students, the occasional faculty colleague, and former students back for a visit.

“When did Nathan start calling himself Nathaniel?” asks Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We’re talking on the phone on the day of Nathaniel Blumberg’s death, February 14, 2012. Valentine’s Day. It is fifty-four days before his 90th birthday, on April 8. (April 8, Blumberg was delighted to learn, is Buddha’s birthday.)

“The name change happened in the 1970s or early ‘80s,” I tell Brugmann. Bruce, back in 1953, at the University of Nebraska, was a student of Nathan Blumberg. “We called him by his last name,” Brugmann said, “outside class. We never used his first name.”

Nor did we in the early ‘60s, I reply. He was The Dean, Dean Blumberg — until Printer Bowler (one of his students) began calling him “Coach.” Things were starting to loosen up by then.

“Blumberg is who inspired me,” Brugmann says. “He was highly critical of the mainstream press–and this was back in the ‘50s. He pointed out their faults in class. He advised me to go someplace – he mentioned San Francisco — and start an independent weekly newspaper. When I could do that, I did.”

But why change his name from Nathan? Both Brugmann and I know people who, through the years, met Blumberg and later named their sons Nathan. “It’s about affirming his full identity,” I say to Bruce. “He decided to accept his name as it appears on his birth certificate: Nathaniel Bernard Blumberg.”

NBB arrives at middle age in the 1960s — a man of high principles, acute intelligence, possessing an inquiring mind along with great reservoirs and pride and stubbornness, his career a success. He arrives at middle age but does not come to a stop. He opens up. Opens his heart to an expanding circle of friends. His property on Flathead Lake becomes a destination. Music, talk, good food and drink flow in the clearing under the tall trees.

Not long ago Nathaniel brought up an argument he and I engaged in, more than 40 years ago, driving up the Big Sur Coast on our way back to San Francisco. We’d made a day trip to San Simeon, and toured the hilltop castle of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Our argument was about Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Blumberg thought the two issues were different, and that linking one with the other would damage the prospects for each cause, anti-war and anti-segregation. “You said the two were connected,” Blumberg reminded me, adding that about a year later, Martin Luther King, Jr., made that connection in public, in a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. Nathaniel wanted to tell me that I had been right.

A veteran of World War II, NBB wrote the story of his weaponry unit going up against highly trained Nazi soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge. He honored that moment in history, but he approved of the next generation’s aversion and resistance to the war it had been handed: Vietnam. Although he was part of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” Nathaniel rejected that label. He preferred the Sixties Generation, he told me, more than once, because “you did not accept the word of the government as truth.” Nor did we accept, he said, the word of the big corporations.

Nathaniel supported anyone trying to create a world based on love.

Les Gapay, a forrmer Blumberg student, writes a Blumberg remembrance and Blumberg writes his own obituary.

http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/02/28/nathaniel-blumberg-everyone-needs-mentor

 

 

 

 

Noise Pop Roundup 3: Flaming Lips, Veronica Falls, Matthew Dear, Archers of Loaf

Tony Robles
-
1

MVP for Noise Pop coverage this year goes to Ryan Prendiville. See below to find out why – Ed.

TUESDAY: The Flaming Lips at Bimbo’s

Time, for the Flaming Lips, is important. Because as a band — one that has been through all sorts of well documented shit — the Flaming Lips know the value of time (particularly borrowed) and have made it their work to not just create music but get into the complete manufacture of moments. Which is a tricky business, because moments are bastards.

Take all the pictures you want of the blinding lights, the beautiful costumed kids, the confetti cannons or all the other individual weapons that the Flaming Lips use to wage musical psychedelic war on time, and the moment still might not fit in a shutter, no matter how you slice a second. Full review here.

WEDNESDAY: Grimes, Born Gold, oOoOO, and Yalls at Rickshaw Stop

Cecil Frena described the lineup at Rickshaw Stop last night simply as “weird music.” He should know. Performing with his synth-fueled electronic dance trio, Born Gold (formerly Gobble Gobble,) Frena stood in front of a camera-slash-iPad pulpit, singing and conducting a third of the group’s sound via a motion-captured, clearly homemade, Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation era-esque military jacket. Full review here.

THURSDAY: Surf Club and FIDLAR at Cafe Du Nord, New Diplomat and Big Black Delta at Rickshaw Stop

“This song is called ‘Stoked and Broke,’” the band’s most talkative, spastic member introduced the first song, explaining, “because we’re stoked and broke.” What followed was a frenetic set of punk fueled, stripped down rock. With a rollicking tightness that reminded me of Thee Oh Sees, FIDLAR shot along, keeping the energy up by alternating singers. Full review here.

I left Cafe Du Nord after FIDLAR, hoping to catch at least some of Big Black Delta at the Rickshaw Stop. When I arrived another band was just starting. A local five piece, New Diplomat reminds me of the kind of groups that dominated the alternative rock airwaves in the late ’90s after grunge and pop-punk stopped being exciting. Since it was about the same time period when I stopped listening to the radio, and New Diplomat’s spiky haired singer had that emo/screamo edge that I have a hard time tolerating, it makes sense that the band put me off.

But then when Jonathan Bates, a.k.a. Big Black Delta started to perform, and I felt almost nothing, a more alarming possibility came to mind: maybe I’m burnt out. On record, I’ve liked what I’ve heard of Big Black Delta’s droned, vocally distorted hard electronic tracks. And performance-wise, Bates kept things appropriately dark, moody, and atmospheric, bumping up the sound with two drummers, each banging away on their side of the stage for some heavy hitting percussion. That whole stereo kit thing is usually the easy way to pull me in, but in this case all I could do was recognize it with cheap approval. Between New Diplomat and Big Black Delta the crowd thinned out a bit, and I leave early too, hoping to reset my baseline by the next day.

FRIDAY: Brilliant Colors, Bleached, and Veronica Falls at Rickshaw Stop, Matthew Dear at Public Works

My plan for the night was to see Veronica Falls at Brick and Mortar, and then hopefully run across the street to catch Matthew Dear at Public Works. But when I showed up at Brick and Mortar, the man at the door told me I had the wrong venue, their Noise Pop show was the night before. I apologized and, checking my schedule, saw that I was indeed an idiot. So much for that plan, at least I wore a coat.

The show was underway at Rickshaw. I didn’t know any of the bands opening for Veronica Falls. The androgynous singer onstage had a bowl cut and was wearing a collared button up that was the most over-sized fashion piece since Stop Making Sense. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was a nice voice – a little deep and dreamy – that mixed in with some catchy guitar riffs. The band was playing melodic pop, and having fun by all appearances. I found out later they are SF’s Brilliant Colors.

The next band, Bleached, had a sound that reminded of the Dum Dum Girls with a lo-fi punk edge. Two of the girls are blondes and the other two aren’t even girls. Bleached was more energetic on stage than Brilliant Colors, but I found their songs didn’t really hook me in. (It also didn’t help that there was a camera crew onstage with them.) The group harmonized a lot and decently, but too often spent a lot of time singing vowels (oohs, ahhs, and ohhs), which started to wear on me. They played a Ramones cover. I think it’s “When I Was Young.”

Still, it was good lineup leading into Veronica Falls, a UK band that has a retro pop sound as well. VF’s sound live was as clean and distinctive as it is on record, with nice guitar work over a signature drum sound that has an ever-present jangle that’s accomplished by little more than taping a tambourine to the floor tom. The band’s vocal style has some nice contrast, between Roxanne Clifford’s usual lead with backing from James Hoare and Patrick Doyle, but really I think it’s its structure and a Belle and Sebastian-like sense of lyrical imagery on songs like “Stephen” or “Bad Feeling” that sets the group apart.

So much so that on “Crimson and Clover”-referencing song, “Come on Over” VF can bust out some oohs and ohhs without it seeming like a shortcut. It was a good set, with a lot of new material as well, for the band that canceled its earlier SF debut due to visa issues. If anything, Veronica Falls was overly apologetic, drummer Patrick politely stated before the encore, “I know I keep saying it, and I feel like a bit of a dick saying it, but thanks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6BFAwzwLU

It was before midnight when Veronica Falls finished, so I hurried to Public Works, where they were still setting the stage. While waiting for Matthew Dear to come on, however, I had the misfortune of standing in front of someone explaining to everyone within earshot how terrible the venue was, how it was a warehouse that they just put equipment in but never fixed up, how if she just got a warehouse for a weekend she could fix it up nicer, how there was a bare two-by-four nailed to the beam above the stage for no apparent reason, how they charged club prices but it was “not really a club.” (Sort of the reason I actually like it, that last part).

When Matthew Dear started performing, with a live band – his second night with the lineup – it all sounded more loud and abrasive than I had expected. I think my attitude, and my tired ears had been switched to bitch mode by the girl behind me. The show was sweaty and chaotic, it being a weekend late night at Noise Pop, but I called it a night while it was still going on.

SATURDAY: Noise Pop Culture Club at Public Works, Built Like Alaska, Hospitality, The Big Sleep, and Archers of Loaf at Great American Music Hall

This would be my last day of Noise Pop, I was convinced. As much as I would’ve liked to, I started the day knowing that I would not make it to Sunday’s Dodos show. Between my day job, covering Noise Pop, and pet-sitting three cats (who operate in a binary of meowing or vomiting) back in the East Bay, I may have taken on too much last week. That said, somehow, Saturday at noon I found myself back at Public Works, for the Noise Pop Culture Club, a six-hour-long block of workshops, screenings, interviews, performances, and something called the Seagate Remix Lounge that I didn’t really understand.

When I got to PW they were screening selections of Petites Planètes, another musical documentary series by the guy behind the Take-Away Shows on YouTube. The videos were cool, but the director, Vincent Moon, wasn’t there for the Q&A. Something about being a “nomad.” Dude bailed. Disappointing. Since I was sitting 20 feet from a bartender with nothing to do, I decided to get a drink, but the shaky feeling in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t had the right ratio of solid food to alcohol in my diet last week. Some spicy noodles from the food truck outside created a buffer on which I began to add of few layers of bourbon, while watching the restored, color version of Méliès A Trip to the Moon, with soundtrack by AIR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nx8hVGzSO4

The main plan was to see Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters play the drums. Modeliste was there as part of a Q&A with the makers of Re:Generation Music Project, a documentary-slash-Hyundai promotion in which he appeared. The clips made the recently released film (which apparently no one in the audience had seen) seem interesting, if only for scenes with whipper snapper EDM artists like Skrillex and Pretty Lights attempting to work with established musicians in other genres, awkwardly. At the end Modeliste played the drums for a bit, and the snare was so loud that each time he smacked it everyone in the audience blinked. A walk outside in the sun and a Bloody Mary later, I returned for a how-to session on using Ableton, and realized I am un-Able ton stay awake.

Clearly, when I made it to the Great American Music Hall, I was in bad shape. Nearly asleep on my feet, with quite a bit of time to go, and not thinking clearly, I made a bad strategic move that combines Red Bull and vodka, two things I don’t like anymore together than apart. When the first band, Built Like Alaska went onstage, I was in a fairly vile mood, my head hanging limp over the balcony while I wrote down petty things about the drummer that I didn’t like: his hat (a fedora indoors) his shirt (vintage Mickey Mouse) his facial hair (Tom Selleck meets Mario Brothers). All this, when his consistently irregular drumming was actually my favorite part of the band who I really had no problem with. Clearly, I was hating hard that night.

Until the next band, Hospitality played. I’d never heard Hospitality before – it was the band’s first time playing in San Francisco – but the sound pulled me in almost immediately, led by the charming, identifiable lilt in guitarist and lead singer Amber Papini’s voice. The songs were light and bouncy, and Papini performed with a slight disaffected edge, always looking up and off to something above the crowd, making strange faces and rolling her eyes at no one in particular. When I got home later, I went online almost immediately to listen to its album and find the song “Friends of Friends.”

Likewise, I tried to find music from the final opener, the Big Sleep, but that’s more of a band to see in concert form, as the trio’s main attraction is a Jack White-like guitarist, who has a lively style of playing and a way of alternating his sound between growling and loud to Jesus Christ, where did I put my ear plugs, I can feel my cochlear hair cells dying.

Now I’m not the biggest Archers of Loaf fan – the band’s actually only been on my radar since a number of high profile reissues last year – but other people at the Great American were clearly eager to see the reformed act live. When a few random notes came out of bassist Matt Gentling’s instrument during the band’s set-up a woman above stage in the balcony yelped, jumping to her feet and clapping her hands together excitedly.

Launching into “Harnessed in Slums,” the band played with an easy energy that gave no suggestion of their hiatus or age, and people in the crowd were shouting “I want waste! We want waste!” along with the chorus. Gentling in particular was electric. He leapt around stage and struck every hard rock guitar god stance imaginable but did it with a physicality that actually pulled them off. (Dude is ripped, FYI.)

At one point early on, struggling with some technical issues, Gentling looked at singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann and joked, “It’s just like the old days, everything is breaking.” Not quite getting the kink out of his bass, Gentling asked the crowd if it’d be ok if the band just kept playing through the difficulty, and Archers of Loaf continued on, powering through a long set. The place wasn’t full, but the crowd made up for it, and was still shaking the floorboards fifteen or so songs later when Archers play “Wrong” and shred a version of “Nostalgia”, making an encore completely obvious.

Ten minutes later – when I headed for BART to wait for a train alongside a couple of giggling guys laying on the platform surrounded by what must have been a dozen empty nitrous canisters – I was no longer tired and sent a text that read: “Okay. That was a good show. Worth it.”

1...363738...117Page 37 of 117

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